Ask HN: Any tips on landing sponsorships for a conference? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN!
I'm putting together Byteconf React (byteconf.com) - it's a free, two-day React/JS conference streamed on Twitch.
A lot of the conference planning is going great! We've got a great initial set of speakers, and we received ~70 great talk proposals in our Call for Papers.
The thing that I haven't quite nailed (this is my first conference) is getting sponsors interested in the event. From my point of view, it's pretty compelling - as far as I can tell, it's the first online-only conference for JS/React devs, and it's a great opportunity to reach an audience of devs around the world with a potential product/service.
I've been reaching out to companies at a variety of sizes - from large ones like AWS/MS/Big 4-sized companies, and small ones like React consulting shops, etc. I've gotten a couple responses, but haven't reached the point where a company is REALLY interested and wanting to secure a slot. Generally, people are interested, but by the time I send the prospectus, the conversation slows to a half.
I'm a software engineer, so I definitely have work to do on the marketing side of this conf! Any marketing-inclined people have tips on how to do conference sponsorship outreach well? Here's the sponsorship prospectus, too: I've included prices/perks/etc and am 1000% open to any feedback.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_EiIHX7lB2DQtJp327Ajxgk9ReIVU5Sc/view?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> How many people are going to attend it? The prospect doesn't mention that. Or who the organizer is. What's the track record?

Judging by the prospectus it's the first conference you've ever organized and you cannot make any predictions about the turnout (or know it's going to be lackluster).

If that's not the case then you haven't communicated it[0].

Otherwise 500$ as the cheapest entry point is unreasonable. Quite frankly at this stage, as an unknown brand - they're the ones doing you a favor.

I'd lower the prices AND make it clear they can participate without paying a dime. You can charge $$$ next year/iteration.

[0] you mention some luminaries - well I don't know who these people are. a simple byline like "who created <library x> used by <y> people around the world" would go a long way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thank you for this feedback. I think I'm going to pivot a bit on the structure of the conf due to this comment! It's helped me realize that it might be a bit ambitious for a first conference -- thanks for taking the time to read through everything!</comment></comment>


Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01109 <comment><USER2> Intriguing. The "broadband" assumption made me wonder - maybe it could be due to artificial modulation? Has anyone analyzed the signal this way?</comment>


No, Mr. President, Not Everyone Needs to Learn How to Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/12/no-mr-president-not-everyone-needs-learn-how-code/355939/ <comment><USER4> The article argues that people should not learn to code but should understand "the logical underpinnings to coding, the way conditional clauses work and the cyclical way in which systems are constructed."

That seems to imply that we should teach things like if/while/for constructs , but do so without teaching an actual programming language? This seems like an odd statement.

Not sure I agree with car engine analogy either, it's far easier to outsource all of the mechanical work for your car than it is to outsource all computer maintenance tasks. For example a car user is not expected to be able to install third party parts to their own car and most car owners have no need to do this. However we do expect users to be able to choose and install software on their own computers.

<comment><USER5> Don't we already teach if/then/while/for statements in in high school math?

<comment><USER6> No we definitely don't. (perhaps only in rare cases)

The Math Curriculum at my high school was as follows:

* 9th Grade - <USER2>

* 10th Grade - Geometry and Proofs

* 11th Grade - Pre-Calculus

* 12th Grade - <USER3>

It would have made sense to teach integrals using for loops, and some proofs using if/else statements, but we did not use either of these methods.

<comment><USER7> Mine was algebra for 2 years and then geometry with more algebra (only 3 required, guess how many people elected for more math). I don't remember much but I never saw calculus in HS. I think the advance math classes went to pre- calculus.

<comment><USER8> > I think the advance math classes went to pre-calculus.

Presumably using some ordering where algebra < calculus. I don't know what your high school algebra was like, but mine was certainly much harder than derivatives and integrals :p

<comment><USER7> Mostly it was learning about variables, plotting, some polynomials later. In the end the majority of it was just memorization without a reason for using it. I don't really remember most of the calc stuff I had to learn but I can at least remember why it's useful but after 3 years I barely recall how to get a derivative and would have to look up integrals.

Personally whenever someone can give me a percentage quickly (sometimes at all!) I am impressed. I tend to feel math education is lacking (in America/general). I especially like articles that surface on HN with math and even more when they have illustrations/examples [1]. It's amazing how many times I had read about it before it just clicked.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6683866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6683866)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love how the article mocks the President's suggestion, while offering the lame "learn math" as an alternative.

He didn't say "everyone go out and become a programmer". He's using his bully pulpit to inspire kids to explore the deeper side of computing, beyond video games, etc.

In my personal case, my dad and my uncle both encouraged me to get involved in technology via programming. I learned about data structures and basic programming by inputing BASIC programs when I was 6 or 7 and learned about things like memory management playing games on my aging PC XT in the early 90s.

I ended up a infrastructure guy, not a programmer, but that exposure was personally inspiring to me. The President almost certainly inspired a few thousand kids to take a look at programming.

<comment><USER10> _> The President almost certainly inspired a few thousand kids to take a look at programming._

Which, of course, is the problem. I'm not an American, but when I was younger, there was a big push by my government to inspire kids to look at teaching. And they did. In droves. Out of interest, a quick tally of the high school friends I kept in touch with shows that 60% of them attempted to pursue teaching as a career in some capacity.

Naturally, when you saturate a market, you get all the problems of market saturation. Most of them struggled to find work, often landing only temporary positions, and several gave up on their dream completely after not being able to find any work in the field. Those who did find jobs as teachers have watched their incomes decline.

The fear many have is that coding is just being pushed because programming is currently, like teaching was several years ago in my area, experiencing more jobs than people. By promoting coding as "the future" we are sending the message to kids that if they just learn to program, they too can walk into a $100K per year job like programmers do today. Except it won't play out that way. It never does.

Silently introducing coding as part of the existing math/computer curriculum seems like a pretty good idea. It is a useful device. However, having people like Obama, Gates, Zuckerberg, and other famous people to talk about how important coding abilities are makes it look like a play specifically to increase worker numbers, which will end badly for anyone following that path.

<comment><USER9> Keep in mind that teaching is also a cyclic thing. Schools were built out in waves, so without growth, you're subject to the waves of retirements and the waves of school-age children, which vary dramatically. In my area of the US, people in my age cohort (high school graduation between 94-97 all got teaching gigs, no problem. People in my brothers group (2000-2004) are working in Starbucks.

I think the difference between "You should teach" and "You need to learn to code" is that coding is a practice, not a profession. I apply programming skill to IT infrastructure activity, but I'm not a dev. My wife is a financial analyst/Excel commando, writing all sorts of adhoc code snippets for BI and other purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another way to put it that my friend Ben stated today: "Not like saying everyone should be a neurosurgeon, but that all should learn first aid."

So True.

</comment><comment><USER12> Bravo.

Okay... I got fooled. I clicked on this link bait because I read it quickly and thought, hey it's from Wired and they're somewhat reputable in the topics I follow. Oops, nope, it's the Wire.

Well, you got me "thewire.com." You got my impressions with your poorly written, straw-man argument. You got my attention writing things like "plugging hot career" and "blowing air" to instill some sort of emotional response. You even got me going back to this horrible article so I can accurately quote your hyperbole in this HN comment.

Bravo. Now let's downvote this so we can stop sending them traffic.

</comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of an article I read a few hundred years ago:

"No, Your Highness, Not Everyone Needs to Learn How to Read"

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately those who couldn't were unable to read that article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The reason why people don't understand the value of coding is the fact that they think it's one of the many skills you can learn in life, just as nursing, knowing how to do heart-surgery, playing soccer and so forth.

However, learning how to do code teaches you problem solving and it does so by teaching how to break down things. This is the MOST important skill in life. That's why coding encompasses ALL the other skills, because if you know how to code you can learn anything else, heart surgery, physics, biomedicine, a summer sault, save money etc.

You can also learn how to break down things through studying something technical such as Bio Engineering, Physics or Math, however these academic studies are hard and not for everyone! In turn, coding is simply the best way to learn problem solving, because it shows you results immediately and everyone can learn it.

With everything else you can BS your way through, not with coding.

Now, there is one thing that coding doesn't teach you necessarily. It doesn't teach you is how to connect with people, how to make friends, how to excite people or how to . If you are a really curious person, it also teaches you that, because the study of social dynamics/how people communicate is also all based on logic and breaking down things. However, it takes a while to learn that.

</comment><comment><USER16> Every analogy that I have heard including the car one in the article totally misses the point.

If you know nothing about cars and your mechanic is out to screw you, your losses are pretty limited to the value of your car.

A company that I do side work for is out $250,000 from an IT project gone bad from a previous consultant. If he knew literally anything about coding, he would've spotted the tell-tale signs of a sheister early on and perhaps saved himself a quarter million dollars.

I don't know of a downside to kids learning basic coding. If they don't like it, don't do it anymore. But at least they'll have a baseline knowledge of it. I learned how to cook french toast and sew in home economics in school and I don't recall at the time articles like this saying how it's not necessary.

<comment><USER17> Just to play devil's advocate a bit (I don't necessarily disagree with you), there is a danger in a little bit of knowledge.

Mis-applied knowledge can be a terrible thing. I've worked with people who took one night-class in metal shop, and suddenly were giving tips to the industrial design people. If someone with a little bit of knowledge is in a position of power and decides, "No, we're doing this project in C because I took a class in C and the teacher said it's the most powerful language," then things are going to get ugly, fast.

To use the mechanic example, it'd be similar to someone telling their mechanic to put 10W30 into their car because their cousin swears that it's the best oil around (I know nothing about cars).

<comment><USER18> I swear the same thing happened during one of my projects - someone kept insisting on building a .NET because they heard about it from a buddy. Luckily we were able to convince them otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This sort of article represents the lameness of the 2013/2014 web today.

Step 1: Celebrity/famous person/politician makes a bold statement

Step 2: 50 bloggers simultaneously come up with an article titled "Why x is not true". They then write the content around the headline. First one to publish "wins"

It's predictable, really - and perhaps even more so on HN. HN's is often like this:

Step 1: A post makes a bold statement or question in the headline and gets 100+ upvotes

Step 2: 5 bloggers simultaneously come up with an article titled "Why x is not true". They then write the content around the headline. First one to publish "wins"

Tedium. We've become someone's audience.

</comment><comment><USER20> I read the president's suggestion as "everyone should learn how to think". If he said those exact words, I'm sure someone would still take exception to it.

Personally, I think it's just as effective to buy every child a chess set.

</comment><comment><USER21> Learning to code is the new State standardized testing. A checkbox occupation educators can tick while students mindlessly run through the motions.

Everyone needs to learn to _think_ and _create_. For that coding is a great option, but not necessarily better than any other hands-on art or science. Having fun and being able to express yourself and explore your ideas is the most important part.

</comment><comment><USER22> There's probably a middle way here....How about "Everyone who wants to code should learn how to code?" That sounds about right, and hey, it's exactly how it already is!

I'm kind of torn on this because I know that a lot of people just don't have any interest in coding. Their natural aptitude flows in a completely opposite direction, they enjoy things that I could never enjoy, and I don't see why I should be forcing them to code just as they would never force me to do what they like. On the other hand pretty much everything is going to be software in a very short amount of time, and those people are going to have a hard time of it if they don't learn to code at least a basic level so they know _something_ about what's going on. Does that make coding as fundamental as reading? Possibly.

I think some sort of remedial coding should be a requirement in high school until the student meets a reasonable standard of ability, and then they should be let off the hook to be allowed to do what actually interests them.

</comment><comment><USER23> >I know how to code;

Please elaborate. You can write some html? You've done hello world in JS? Mastered the basic constructs? Or have you worked on teams writing in strongly typed languages developing large OO systems? Somehow I doubt it.

It's important because the phrase is being used to imply a position of authority while telling people they shouldn't learn something.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was getting into a discussion on Twitter about the whole learn to code meme, and then one guy says:

"In the future, I want my mom to tell a robot to get 3 tomatoes, and if they have apples, get 5"

Although, I'm still not 100% convinced that learning to code is of any benefit to someone not working in the technical field, but I have to admit: touché.

</comment><comment><USER25> Just like not everyone needs to learn Math, Biology, Chemistry, and everything else.

But they are important to teach children how the world operates and to make them think.

Computers are becoming more and more ubiquitous. The web is hostile. The best way we can protect people is by educating them.

</comment><comment><USER24> When I'm on my laptop, and in the event when I'm not doing any programming work (e.g. making music, viewing photos etc.), I use the terminal to carry out almost any task. Moving files? `mv <file>`. Deleting one? `rm <file>`. Converting a collection of ogg files to mp3? `for f in *.mp3; do; ffmpeg -i "$f" "$(basename $f`)".mp3; done`. And many, many more possibilities from shell scripting.

So maybe, learn to write shell (or batch scripts). JavaScript and Python--in my experience--doesn't help me handle my day-to-day tasks.

<comment><USER8> Until I started using linux, I never used the terminal to carry out any of the operations you listed above. Why can't most people just use a mouse for these?

<comment><USER24> Well, I didn't imply people can't. But I find it easier to use the terminal than a GUI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let's see Obama hire a programmer for CTO instead of some Harvard economics grad who has only learned: (i) to be the recipient of privilege and (ii) to justify the unfair system that gives him that privilege

</comment><comment><USER27> I agree with the sentiment, but not the reasoning. Comparative advantage is a fantastic economic nugget.

</comment><comment><USER28> Geeks are so ... childish.

Politicians say lots of things. He did not mean it. He must already forgot what he said.

What is more important to him is those things he will never tell you.

Don't waste your time on this.</comment>


There is something wrong with the opening crawl for the Force Awakens - <AUTHOR> http://www.esn.fm/electricshadow/35 <comment><USER2> A 50 min audio blog... Probably keeping the big thing to the very end...</comment>


Uber wants Congress to include protections for drivers in coronavirus stimulus - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/23/21190806/uber-coronavirus-driver-protections-economic-stimulus <comment><AUTHOR> > 'My goal in writing to you is not to ask for a bailout for Uber'

translation for the hard of reading:

'My goal in writing to you is to ask for a bailout for Uber'</comment>


Finding the mystery man behind FunnyJunk - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/finding-the-mystery-man-behind-funnyjunk/ <comment><USER2> A good bit of detective work. This is how you "do" journalism. Compare and contrast with the article about the developers of Flash that basically looked on LinkedIn and Google and called it a wrap.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's more likely?

That Bryan sold a 1-man web operation to a lawyer, or that he's using a lawyer he's paying to try to hide himself behind?

<comment><USER4> He could have simply sold FJ to a better entity, somebody who can keep their shit together and use real lawyers. For better or worse, this whole thing brought a lot of attention to an otherwise-unremarkable content aggregator, and I bet plenty of people would be willing to take a shot at capitalising on such a frenzy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sucks that a facade of a company lets anyone wreak havoc anonymously. Businesses should be tied to real people responsible for their actions.

<comment><USER6> It seems like Carreon was doing most of the havoc-wreaking, and most definitely not anonymously.

<comment><USER5> This case is special. He took it personally and started acting on his own behalf, but in the initial demand for money he was just a proxy, as lawyers usually are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Add this to our list of questions—why a Dutch hosting company for a US > company?

Maybe they offer a better deal?

<comment><USER8> Maybe because a couple of DMCA complaints stacking up in the states would result in the site being taken down with most economy-style hosting, and given the nature of the site they're bound to get a few...

Maybe the Netherlands just offer saner intellectual property laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How much money would a site like FunnyJunk take annually? I mean is this thing a hobby or is it paying the kind of money you could live on in New York (which I assume to be expensive)?

<comment><USER6> New York isn't quite as expensive as people make it out to be. It's not cheap - but you can sacrifice things like square footage, or short commute times to save on rent, which is most of the expense.

<comment><USER9> I take your point, but do we think this bloke is seeing $10k or $100k a year, or just enough to pay for the server/bandwidth?

<comment><USER6> The article seemed to mention him complaining about money, but that could just be an indirect way of asking for donations, or re-inforcing the need for funding drives. (I've done this before, when we were hosting a VBulletin forum when we didn't really have jobs or much spare income in college.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Real-time (at night) bat detection in London park - <AUTHOR> http://www.batslondon.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> The detections are shown at night in London, starting around 8pm GMT.

The press release is at: [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news- articles/0617/290617-Smart-de...](http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news- articles/0617/290617-Smart-detectors-to-monitor-urban-bat-life)</comment>


Creativity is rejected: Teachers and bosses don't value out-of-the-box thinking - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/creativity_is_rejected_teachers_and_bosses_don_t_value_out_of_the_box_thinking.html <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who hears echoes of Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_ in this article? The creative who refuses to conform to "institutionalized mediocrity" and relentlessly pursues his own path - was that not Howard Roark?

Of course most people won't wind up dynamiting a building, but still.

Anyway, it's an interesting article, although I'm not sure what actionable information is there. We all know that creative / OOTB thinkers sometimes have a hard time getting people to take their ideas seriously. And we also know that not all "creative" ideas are actually good ideas. Sometimes your "brilliant" idea is rejected because it's just wrong.

At most, I guess it's a call to be more empathetic; and to be more consciously aware of that sort of bias so we can work to counteract it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the main point is that this is despite how "important" (to the point of fetishization) creativity is officially to most of these institutions and people that don't actually value it.</comment></comment>


A Breakthrough Way to See Distant Planets - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/exoplanet-atmosphere-imaging/564908/ <comment><USER2> Original 2017 paper in A&A:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.01610.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.01610.pdf)

The element they used is sodium:

"During primary transits, the spectral signatures of exoplanet atmospheres can be measured using transmission spectroscopy. We can obtain information on the upper atmosphere of these planets by investigating the exoplanets' excess sodium absorption in the optical region."

</comment><comment><USER3> > This method can only be used if a planet and its star differ in their > chemical compositions

How prevalent is that condition?

<comment><USER4> A lot of stars are too hot to have much in the way of complex molecules.

The article goes into some detail about the significance of this planet having water and carbon monoxide, but not methane or ammonia.</comment></comment>


Ebola Czar Ron Klain Was a Fannie Mae and Cigna Lobbyist - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ebola-czar-ron-klain-was-a-fannie-mae-and-cigna-lobbyist/article/2554953

<comment><USER2> Under what circumstances does a lawyer/lobbyist have domain expertise to manage/advise a government response to global virus outbreak?

Is this an Ebola outbreak or business opportunity?

<comment><USER3> Looking at him as a _zampolit_ rather than _czar_ and his appointment, his qualifications and position (reporting to Rice and I forget who else) makes a lot more sense.

ADDED: that's now crystal clear to me after it turns out he was absent at Friday's Ebola strategy meeting: [http://www.breitbart.com/Big- Government/2014/10/17/Ebola-Cza...](http://www.breitbart.com/Big- Government/2014/10/17/Ebola-Czar-Absent-from-White-House-Ebola-Strategy- Meeting)</comment></comment>


The hippest internet cafe of 1995 [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/8/24/12593214/internet-cafe-history <comment><USER2> [https://vimeo.com/154959544](https://vimeo.com/154959544)

My uncle used to run this back in 1993 in Helsinki. Good times. Love the hair styles and the jungle soundtrack. Coming from BBS's, the web and IRC blew my mind.

I wish I could find my old geocities page now. I'm sure it had a few transparent gif explosions on it.

<comment><USER3> This is wonderful. Thanks so much for sharing this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wanna feel superior about how none of those television people knew how to pronounce @, but to be honest I didn't know that in 1995 either.

To be fair, I was 9 and didn't know any other words in English either.

<comment><USER5> It's a bit like how a lot of people refer to '#' as 'hashtag' these days, without knowing about 'the pound symbol' or 'sharp' (if you are a musician). :)

<comment><USER6> It's a different symbol than the sharp, and I don't blame anyone for not knowing it's rarely used for that purpose these days.

I had a web design professor who said its "true" name was _octothorpe_ , and while various sources confirm that, I've never heard anyone else call it that. Another student in the same class once called it the "tic tac toe symbol."

<comment><USER5> > It's a different symbol than the sharp

Ok, the true pedants can tilt their head a little to see the difference between a # and a [Edit: Hmm it seems HN doesn't support pasting of extended characters such as the musical 'sharp'?!?]...

I will have to change the pronunciation in my C# programming books to 'C-hash' instead of 'C-sharp'... :)

<comment><USER7> Most books I've seen use C rather than C#. Bad editor if they don't.

<comment><USER8> But I'm guessing that you've figured out after reading your own comment that the musical sharp symbol is not rendered in all mediums (including HN). Were I required to search for reference material related to Microsoft's C-like language using proper typography, I'd have to go cut-and-paste the symbol from a WikiPedia page because I don't know how to get it from keyboard to textfield otherwise.

IMO, yeah, maybe not the best choice by MSFT. But pragmatically, we all know what "#" means in that context even if it's not correct. All the Monday- morning-quarterbacking in the world isn't going to change that. So I'm as all for an academic discussion as the next person, but that's all it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember thinking 'how quaint' while watching that, then suddenly realising that it all happened only a year before I started my current software consulting business!

Interesting to see that T1 was quite expensive back then even in NYC. I clearly remember in 1996 getting one of the first ISDN connections in the country - $1000/month for a whopping 128KB connection in the days of 33.6KB dial up. Ah, the memories...

</comment><comment><USER9> _They didn't plan for ventilation for all the hardware, so they cooled the server room with a garbage can full of ice!_

In the video, he said they had no money for it, but that is quite possibly the most expensive way to cool a server.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like they had a restaurant-grade ice maker already, so it may not have been any further sunk cost to get the ice. Probably lost some of that in electricity and water bills!

<comment><USER9> I think you underestimate how much energy it takes to cool down and freeze water and how inefficient it is to simply place that near the server.

<comment><USER11> Second-hand story from 20 years ago man... who cares?

<comment><USER9> Me. Someone is _wrong_ on the internet and I am _right_!

Yes, that was a joke ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My favorite Internet cafe of old was "EasyEverything" (from the EasyJet guy) -- huge cafes and great PXEboot resetting machines, so they were relatively free of malware. Pretty far ahead of its time.

</comment><comment><USER13> The memory this sparked in me was of the great old Speakeasy cafe in Seattle, which opened circa '94/'95:

[http://www.historylink.org/File/3300](http://www.historylink.org/File/3300)

<comment><USER14> I really miss the Speakeasy, I saw some wonderful shows there and made many great friends there.

Some friends and I worked on the original Speakeasy RAIN (Remote Access Internet Node) servers that were essentially a 486 host that booted Linux off of a floppy disk. We installed 4/8 port Cyclades serial cards and attached recycled Wyse dumb terminals to them. The attached modem dialed back to the Speakeasy mothership and allowed users in Seattle to read their email from places like The Alibi Room, the Sit & Spin, and Cafe Allegro. We processed credit cards so non Speakeasy users could use the system, and when their time was up we utilized a hacked up version of GNU Screen to pop open a text window to let them agree to pay for more time or to disconnect.

It was a pretty sweet setup, I remember remotely upgrading the "firmware" on the RAIN nodes by scping the new tomsrtbt disk image to /dev/fd0 and then rebooting. Those were the days. It's hard to imagine Seattle hipsters happily camped out on old dumb terminals in bars and cafes using Lynx to surf the web, and Pine to read their email, but it happened.

<comment><USER13> I remember the RAIN network! I also remember the lovely spray-painted recycled Wyse terminals that were installed locally at the Speakeasy itself. Those were all I used -- I didn't bother with the PCs they had there.

I never lived in Seattle, but every time I visited (from California) I made it a point to stop by the Speakeasy nearly every day... and sometimes in the evening as well to take in a show. It's fun to hear from someone like yourself who was involved in the magic!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The CyberSmith Cafe in Harvard Square was pretty epic! VR rigs, specially designed ceiling mounted downward firing speaker setups so you could hear full stereo for your game while your neighbor heard his and not yours, ordering food/drink from the computer, and so on.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/03/business/waiter-oh- waiter-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/03/business/waiter-oh-waiter- excuuuse-me-but-there-s-a-mouse-in-my-coffee.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Watching this made me nostalgic for world.std.com, in Boston -- that was many folks' first dialup ISP.

</comment><comment><USER17> They paid $9k/month for a T1 in 1995, in NYC? Sounds very high. Either that or my reference point of paying $3k/month for a full T1 in 1994 in a small Wisconsin city is low.

Anybody have more numbers from that era?

</comment><comment><USER18> I thought the hippest spot in '95 was Cyberdelia [http://cyberdelianyc.tumblr.com/](http://cyberdelianyc.tumblr.com/)</comment>


Backblaze's startup hustle (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming-2/

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the best examples of "start up hustle" I have came across. Nothing on the wrong side of law or morally questionable.</comment>


Climate change deniers' new battle front attacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/09/doomism-new-tactic-fossil-fuel-lobby <comment><USER2> I found this to be an interesting point:

> _"We should also be aware how the forces of denial are exploiting the > lifestyle change movement to get their supporters to argue with each other. > It takes pressure off attempts to regulate the fossil fuel industry. This > approach is a softer form of denial and in many ways it is more > pernicious."_

...because yes, that's the conflict I can observe in Germany: the conversation is driven by social psychology, it's all about belonging, about peer confirmation. That's a dangerous path to be on, because professional politicians are playing this very game since democracy is a thing - you can't be pushed to tougher legislation if the conversation is all about individual responsibility. It's only natural for a political party to delegate-away the responsibility/change the tone of the conversation (unless the topic matches their core interests).</comment>


DSL Engineering: Designing, Implementing, Using Domain-Specific Languages (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://voelter.de/data/books/markusvoelter-dslengineering-1.0.pdf <comment><USER2> One of the awesome things about Lisp is how easy it is to build DSLs with. I used to think this wasn't that useful of a feature, but recently I've had an idea for a few web apps and instead of writing all the tedious GUI logic I've written a DSL in Clojure instead. This has allowed me to jump straight into the feature building, and quickly build prototype versions of my ideas. For example, when working with code, switching between a list structure and tree structure is trivial. But in a GUI you need to write a load of boiler plate to change how it displays, how selection works and so on.

Additionally the hotswapping allows me to interact with the application in real time, just like a GUI. Pretty powerful stuff.

<comment><USER3> The question for me, my my day to day use cases, is : can you propose the power to someone who is less proficient in functional programming. That is, a "regular java developer" (I don't say this in a disrespectful way at all, the simple fact is that some people are trained or like to just program and don't always see the advantages of DSL which are, to me at least, outside of the realm of regular software development)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a user of some somehow-DSL (VisualRules), I find the first pages of the book very enlightening as they put my day-to-day tool in perspective.

And what ? 500+ pages donation ware, that's altruism. Thank to the author.

</comment><comment><USER4> The author of this book also runs the Omega Tau podcast [1] that should be of great interest to many HN readers.

[1] [http://omegataupodcast.net](http://omegataupodcast.net)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More info on author: [http://dslbook.org](http://dslbook.org)

His 2010 paper [1], "From Programming To Modeling – and back again", talks about other modeling projects, including the Charles Simonyi (inventor of MS Word and Hungarian notation) company Intentional Software. Microsoft recently bought [2] Intentional (with its DSL workbench) and the technology will continue in the Microsoft Office / Productivity division.

[1] [http://voelter.de/data/articles/FromProgrammingToModeling-1....](http://voelter.de/data/articles/FromProgrammingToModeling-1.2-final.pdf)

[2] [http://www.intentional.com/charles- simonyi/](http://www.intentional.com/charles-simonyi/)

 _" Real surfaces in the world can hold many forms of information, for instance: drawings, memos, messages, stickers, notes, or maps ... Similarly, the surfaces on the new devices should show all kinds of data side-by-side and interwoven as a universal surface ... You would be "interacting with the documents" themselves rather than with apps as such.

Now combine these scenarios with the new capabilities in machine learning and knowledge representation. In the spreadsheet era, we had a very simple ontology, which was really divisions of data into types: numbers, text, and maybe dates. Since then, powerful web services emerged by giving these simple types more precise semantics: the text is a product to buy, the number is its price, or the text is the name of your friend and the number counts the "likes."

Even with just a handful of such "domain specific" terms the value of services to the user has already soared. Imagine then, the power of an ontology consisting of thousands of terms covering most of the common activities that comprise our personal and professional lives ranging from life transitions, education, entertainment, buying and selling. Curating and exploiting such an ontology will be as important as the hardware and software surfaces that activate it.

The Intentional platform can represent domain specific information both at the meta-level (as schemas) and at the content level (as data or rules). It has patterns for distributed interactive documents and for views for a universal surface."_

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this book was put on here a while back, probably wrong about that. Wish the code were in Haskell or Scala</comment>


If Oracle Wins... - <AUTHOR>

What will Google/Android do? Is it too late to switch to a language like C++? Google already has a lot of C++ expertise and since C++ is not owned by anyone (ISO standard) no one like Oracle can come in and immediately have such a strong position on them as they seem to have with Java and their newly acquired patents. Just curious as to what others think. Is it too late to switch? <comment><USER2> It's too late to switch, I think (and the worst case outcome WRT to that is likely to be as the thread started by lukesandberg notes).

C++ is also an awful choice: unsafe, unmanaged (manual memory management) and rather confused compared to Java (a good example of the Worse is Better vs. Right Thing approaches; Java is a remarkable example of a wildly successful language done using the latter philosophy).

C++ has its places (e.g. VLSI design and simulation) but I don't think most of what most people want to do on a smartphone outside of games is in that domain.

</comment><comment><USER3> most patent or IP battles are resolved via licensing. Oracle has no incentive to destroy the android product (they don't compete in the mobile space) so the only outcome i expect is google possibly paying to license the technology.

<comment><USER4> Which is complicated if your product is open source e.g. Firefox and H.264. No matter how low the licence fee, even zero might not be enough depending on the licence terms, open source and royalty payments don't mix.

On the other hand Google, despite already paying H.264 licence fees for itself, has just spent about 200 million dollars on trying to create an open video standard usable by anyone in the form of WebM, so maybe Oracle thinks they can and should pay similar amounts to guarantee an open mobile java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They have Chrome OS in the works and smart phones are getting more powerful, almost comparable to netbooks.

Assuming that this is relying on C++ as Chrome does; might they be able to adapt Chrome OS?</comment>


Two CEOs duke it out over Twitter & YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/03/08/foursquare-vs-unsubscribe-two-ceos-duke-it-out-over-twitter-and-youtube/

<comment><USER2> I think both of these are in good humor, not meant to deride each other.</comment>


The evolutionary role of cooking - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13139619

<comment><USER2> I learned from the article that cooking "denatures proteins." I happen to be very allergic to all raw produce except grapes, apples, onions, lettuce, and spinach. Everything else needs to be cooked. No crudités or fresh orange juice for me. People look at me funny and ask why cooking would make a difference. I say, "I dunno, but it must break down my allergy molecules so that I don't react to them." Then they (idiots all!) say, "No, that doesn't make sense." Now I can confidently snow people with "denatured proteins," whether or not that's the true reason for cooking solving my produce allergy problem. Confidently bowl people over with scientific jargon, and they believe you.

<comment><USER3> So you're allergic to folded proteins? That seems unlikely since even those few raw things you can eat have trace amounts of different proteins in them.

If I were very allergic to so many different foods, I'd want a real explanation for my own sake at least, and not just try to snow people with scientific jargon.

<comment><USER2> I would love a real explanation. But believe you me, allergy science is just getting started. (So is a heck of a lot of other medical knowledge.) "Allergists" didn't even exist until a few decades ago. "Allergy and immunology" is a pretty new specialty.

My pediatrician switched his practice to "allergy and asthma" in 1970. He told my mom he did so because he wanted to try to help whatever the heck is wrong with me. Well, I can't read his mind for motives, but that's what my mom reported.

I astound and baffle allergists when their tests reveal the huge numbers of foods--and varieties of foods--I'm allergic to. (Note to self: I am _not_ going into my other allergy foods here.) Their first reaction is to blurt out, "What do you eat?! How do you live?! It's a wonder you're alive!" After that, their reactions and attempts to help vary considerably. The closest I've gotten to an explanation from a live doctor is hearing one mutter something about "volatile oils" into his Dragon Naturally Speaking before walking off and leaving his nurse distressed for my sake.

I do get strange satisfaction knowing that food allergies have gotten much more prevalent in the past decade or so. This means more researchers take more interest in it, the FDA changes its food labeling laws, the general populace has a little more knowledge, etc. When I'm feeling grandiose, I tell myself that my strange body (and that of a guy I spoke to on the phone who is a guinea pig at the Mayo because he's allergic to _all_ foods) are the vanguard or cassandras or whatever for something new and weird going on in the world. But perhaps I read too many Greg Bear novels. ;-)

I subscribe to an allergy research newsletter from South Africa, which contains a lot of fascinating, nerdly stuff I _never_ hear from live doctors. And when I do try to mention research, I get, "That means you don't need me except to prescribe Epipens." But I got away from reading it a few years ago. I think I'll head back to doing so. Thank you for indirectly putting the bee in my bonnet. <http://www.allallergy.net/abstracts/index.cfm>

Ah! A quick glance reveals an article called "The importance of nasal provocation test in the diagnosis of natural rubber latex allergy." This just might pertain to me even though I have a banana allergy, not a latex allergy... But I think I'll leave it for a few days. This whole topic is getting way too heavy today. Bye, folks. I'm logging out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stating cooking "underpins all other [human evolutionary changes]" sounds interesting if _corroborated_. I perused the web for some more information on Richard Wrangham's research. Wikipedia provided this:

<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains>

[http://artsci.wustl.edu/~hpontzer/Courses/Wrangham&Conkl...](http://artsci.wustl.edu/~hpontzer/Courses/Wrangham&Conklin- Britain2003CBP%20Cooking%20as%20a%20Biological%20Trait.pdf)

...and the evidence points against him. Fire doesn't appear to have been controlled until far after Wangham assests. Not only, but:

 _The mainstream view among anthropologists is that the increase in human brain-size was due to a shift away from the consumption of nuts and berries to the consumption of meat._

makes more sense. The transition from primitive food sources (nuts, berries -- chimp food now) may have catalyzed the transition to a regular high-calorie diet. Take this article with a juicy fliet mignon, topped with a generous helping of salt.

<comment><USER5> Both the linked article and the sci-am article show that this is hardly a settled matter either way, and that Wrangham's thesis isn't unreasonable.

<comment><USER4> Right. I'm of the opinion that human evolution was influenced by a combination of these two factors, in addition to many others. However, given the evidence, I do _not_ think that cooking is the preeminent contributor to cognitive/human/metabolic development.

<comment><USER6> This qualified opinion should have been your original comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >And the consumption of a cooked meal _in the evening_ , usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society.

In Germany peope have their cooked meal _at noon_ (or at least most still have). Until recently (i.e. a few decades ago), this was also the case in Scandinavia.

<comment><USER8> But when people are at work at noon, and their children are at school, it is easier to have the family meal in the evening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity's "killer app"

Am I the only one that thought killer app was only used in reference to web/technology platforms :)

<comment><USER4> This is called an analogy.

<comment><USER9> I know. I just found the analogy interesting, since I didn't think the killer app term was mainstream.</comment></comment></comment>


Uber Investors Clash with Board Over Voting Power - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-investors-clash-with-board-over-voting-power-1506970454 <comment><USER2> Greed is the root of these investors problems. They offered up anything to get a piece of each round - in this case voting power and board seats.

Uber investors are not alone - Facebook and Google investors also have little control.

<comment><USER3> Google explicitly gave little power to common shareholders when at IPO, and the shares continue to willfully trade.

I don't understand your point about greed. Do you propose some alternative structure to corporate ownership? Seems beside the point of negotiating over voting rights.

<comment><USER4> The investors willingly gave away their voting rights in order to get early shares. So really there is nothing wrong except their own greed got the best of them.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand your comment about "greed."

Some people decide to buy, at say $54 in 2004. Others avoided the temptation for "greed," and decided not to buy.

Then the stock went up 18x.

Who's greedy now?

<comment><USER4> Greed means they had a strong desire for something. It has nothing to do with success. It is just that when they fail and ask why, people say their greed was their downfall. In otherwords look within themselves. Their strong desire for something overrode any critical thinking of the other risks involved. And if they succeed they will of course gloat about how great a investor they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> link to letter sent by a law firm representing the shareholders: [http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/UberShareho...](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/UberShareholdersLetter10-02-2017.pdf)

 _Dear Mr. Kalanick, Mr. Graves and Mr. Camp: We represent Shervin Pishevar and Steve Russell, individually, jointly and as putative class representatives on behalf of several hundred Uber employees and other prominent investors who will suffer billions of dollars in damages (exclusive of penalties and punitive damages) if you support the covert effort, apparently led by Benchmark, to strip Class B Common stock holders of their voting rights._

<comment><USER5> I'm completely confused. Why would those three people, who have supervoting rights, vote to take away their own supervoting rights and side with Benchmark the people who tried to remove Travis in the first place? It seems like the sender and recipients of the letter are on the same side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Archived version: [http://archive.is/MiUTK](http://archive.is/MiUTK)

</comment><comment><USER7> Benchmark is getting deservedly fucked in public here for their atrocious behavior.

Wouldn't ever walk into their office as a founder after this. And repeatedly advised other founders against it.

<comment><USER8> I'm not so sure.

Travis did a great job of building Uber, but he's become a massive public liability.

He's getting sued by Google for apparently blatantly stealing billions in IP. Maybe he's innocent, but the optics are bad.

He's going to be the public figure on which we will scorn for all those scandals.

He's tainted pretty badly - rightly or wrongly - and it just will not go away.

He's a little toxic to have around, especially when the company needs to wind up to an IPO - they need the opposite of 'scandals'.

I'm weary that there's really nobody that can ever replace a founder, but hopefully they've found a good CEO.

Travis's dragging out this board fight is just jeopardizing the company. He owns 10%, not 100%.

I don't know if Benchmark are good guys or bad guys in the grand scheme of things, but their position of wanting to Travis to move on is grounded and reasonable I think.</comment></comment>


Open source, privacy-enabled smartphone operating systems - <AUTHOR> https://e.foundation/ <comment><USER2> If anyone from this project is reading this: please just contribute to the upstream projects your are building off of.

> _We build desirable, open source, privacy-enabled smartphone operating > systems._

No, the LineageOS team builds them, then you rebrand them. If you want to actually make a difference, contribute your changes directly to the LineageOS trees. Device support is paramount for custom ROMs and LineageOS already has an amazing amount of devices. All this will do is fragment the ecosystem.

> _default email client (forked from K9-mail)_

Please no. Just contribute to K9 directly. I get that you want to brand it to fit with your whole scheme, but you have the ability to actually improve the open source Android ecosystem.

> _application repository: an independent alternative place where you will be > able to choose from thousands of applications, including all well-known > applications_

FDroid. You're describing FDroid. Again, there is a good application out their already, why would you make your own? Oh, it's so you can add " _an original mechanism for users to score applications_ ". Why can't you add that to FDroid and help everyone out?

My main criticism boils down to this: why reinvent the wheel?

<comment><USER3> > No, the LineageOS team builds them, then you rebrand them. If you want to > actually make a difference, contribute your changes directly to the > LineageOS trees. Device support is paramount for custom ROMs and LineageOS > already has an amazing amount of devices. All this will do is fragment the > ecosystem.

The privacy orientation of LineageOS only goes so far. Yes, you can opt for Opengapps (that name...) or run your Android device without it but then you're stuck with F-Droid. LineageOS does not include microG; if you want LOS+microG you need that fork [1]

> Please no. Just contribute to K9 directly. I get that you want to brand it > to fit with your whole scheme, but you have the ability to actually improve > the open source Android ecosystem.

pEp is also a K-9 fork, with material design and opportunistic encryption.

Not that I disagree w/your points though. This unnecessary fragmentation of forks is harmful. Librem 5 and Sailfish are two interesting ecosystems which are unique though.

[1] [https://lineage.microg.org/](https://lineage.microg.org/)

[2] [https://www.pep.security/](https://www.pep.security/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article has a good summary, [http://techpp.com/2018/06/28/eelo-profile- google-free-androi...](http://techpp.com/2018/06/28/eelo-profile-google-free- android/amp/)

 _" Duval's team made use of LineageOS ... [which] doesn't ship with any Google apps ... To counter that, Eelo will come preloaded with a handful of services you would need out of the box such as an email client, a productivity suite for accessing documents, spreadsheets, a search engine that won't track its users, and more. The one application which is being a bottleneck for Eelo's potential success is navigation ...

Eelo will have a repository of both open-source as well as other Android apps. To ensure users don't install one of the latter and ruin the purpose of using a privacy-focused operating system, each app in Eelo's store will have a security score. Through that users can be more informed about how well a particular app treats personal data and based on that, decide whether they'd want to install it."_

<comment><USER5> Navigation is really a bear... It's easily Google's killer product, and extremely difficult for the open source community to replicate in any meaningful sense just due to the difficulty in acquiring data; we lack the necessary resources. I'm not sure how to solve that properly.

<comment><USER6> Navigation? Really? I don't drive, so maybe I'm somewhat atypical in that sense, but on those rare occasions when I do use my phone to navigate, I find Osmand(+) to be extremely useful.

<comment><USER7> I drive but I never use navigation as the handful of times I have I've found it distracting and it's led me astray a couple of times. I prefer to just look at a map. Often that nap is on the phone, but I don't need it to tell me where I am or where to go

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why did this project choose such an unsearchable name and cripple its own acceptability? Can't search for /e/, can't search for 'e', 'e os' refers to some entirely different OS...

<comment><USER9> /e/ is what happens when you let hackers do the branding.

<comment><USER10> Please don't post duplicate comments to Hacker News. Those are signal-noise- ratio disasters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Site seems down, here's the archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180714103142/https://e.foundat...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180714103142/https://e.foundation/)

And a non-scroll hijack full page screenshot: [https://my.mixtape.moe/nrdfgf.jpg](https://my.mixtape.moe/nrdfgf.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER12> Not trying to be a buzzkill, but how (from what I can see from the Google cache), is this different than LineageOS without Google Apps? Or the recently mentioned CopperheadOS which already has ROMs available and supports commercially available devices..? [https://copperhead.co/android/](https://copperhead.co/android/)

<comment><USER13> Copperhead is dead. See recent drama.

<comment><USER14> For reference: [https://www.reddit.com/r/copperheados](https://www.reddit.com/r/copperheados)

Purism is next in line.

I really hope they succeed but the track record for these things is amazingly bad, the forces they are up against are not small.

<comment><USER15> > I really hope they succeed but the track record for these things is > amazingly bad, the forces they are up against are not small.

\- Linux Fan, 1993

<comment><USER14> Quite a distinction between hardware and software development.

Apart from commercial competitors, I'd imagine a few natsec types would probably try to rustle feathers, they certainly have past form in this field.

<comment><USER16> We need an open, PC-like phone standard? So far we have closed SoCs everywhere that end up as landfill every 1-2 years without any other possible use. With <5nm chips it should be trivial to have open SoCs in phone factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> At first I thought this was a too-subtle satire of other projects that failed to get traction. But I guess this is an actual project with branding that almost feels like satire?

<comment><USER18> At least their mockup of a fantasy smartphone OS looks bright and attractive, if highly derivative of iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How do you pronounce /e/?

"Slashy-slash"?

<comment><USER20> That's the first pronunciation that came to my mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> First thoughts: the branding looks like it came out of a PC Magazine from 1995. Also I'm put off with the constant donation requests and all I've seen thus far is a bad web site. Release something first, anything, then ask for money and fire your graphics designer and whoever is doing ya'll marketing.

</comment><comment><USER22> /e/, the phone for people who want to hide their ecchi, but let people know that they're into 2d.

If you don't know, /e/ is 4chan's ecchi board. Ecchi is softcore japanese cartoon porn.

</comment><comment><USER23> Clarification request: Is this really a new privacy-enabled operating system, or is it yet another attempt to convert Android into a privacy-enabled operating system?

</comment><comment><USER24> How is this better/different from [https://lineage.microg.org/](https://lineage.microg.org/) ?

</comment><comment><USER25> Many have tried and failed. I salute the attempt but I would take a bet against it. I have tried to get access to high end radios that don't have strange carrier modes and haven't found them. A usb modem goes a long way in terms of isolating things but the new tricks are way smarter than the old.

<comment><USER4> Could you recommend a known-good device, USB modem and OS version combo?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So, here's a project that wants to 100% focus on privacy (according to their crowdfunding campaign).

The first task they start with?

Write a new launcher, of course!

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish people stopped messing around with scroll.. This website is a pain to navigate with javascript enabled and cannot be navigated at all with javascript disabled (overflow hidden, need to hack css too to make it bearable).

To see such poor UX on the website of someone developing an OS is a red flag for me.

<comment><USER28> [https://www.linuxfoundation.org](https://www.linuxfoundation.org) is mostly unusable with a touchpad on linux on chromium because they are using one of those smooth scrolling scripts.

<comment><USER29> Works for me in Firefox with a touchpad. Scroll does not seem hijacked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Error establishing a database connection

That sums up the situation pretty well.

<comment><USER31> The penultimate privacy solution.

<comment><USER32> What's the ultimate one...?

<comment><USER33> Not running a site at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Currently displaying "Error establishing a database connection".

<comment><USER12> Frome google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fe.foundation%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fe.foundation%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.944j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Even the database has given up on libre smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER36> > data slavery

Tab closed.

</comment><comment><USER9> /e/ is what happens when you let hackers do the branding.</comment>


One Year of Nushell - <AUTHOR> https://www.nushell.sh/blog/2020/08/23/year_of_nushell.html <comment><USER2> > It also turns out that getting a shell correct is a lot more experimentation > and a lot less following what the textbooks say. In practice, things like > 'stdout' and 'stderr' are used in a variety of ways, as are the exit codes > output by programs. Our initial designs started with a stricter view of > these ideas, and softened over time as we saw that the real world is a much > fuzzier place than we realized.

Good point. Exit codes can be difficult. A non-zero error value may not be an error; it could indicate a type of success or be a warning or a result of a calculation or any number of things depending on the application.

<comment><USER3> In a redesigned shell, ideally there would be a richer way to describe the result of a program. Maybe "return an integer and consult the manual to see what it means" isn't the best way forward.

Personally, I think Result types from Rust/Haskell/Swift make a lot of sense -- a program either succeeds with some output, or fails with an explanation of why. By default, pipes stop piping if one command fails.

<comment><USER4> > Personally, I think Result types make a lot of sense -- a program either > succeeds with some output, or fails with an explanation of why

Usually, this _is_ what happens. Usually, the error-signalling return is accompanied by a message (posted to stderr).

> By default, pipes stop piping if one command fails

      set -o pipefail

<comment><USER5> pipefail is not available to POSIX shells like dash

<comment><USER6> set -o pipefail is now part of POSIX[0] and I believe as soon as someone posts a patch to dash to implement it, it will get included[1].

[0]. [https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789](https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789)

[1]. [https://lore.kernel.org/linux- dash/20200701015226.GA6839@gon...](https://lore.kernel.org/linux- email@example.com/T/#t)

<comment><USER5> This is great! Thanks for posting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Marcel is another pipe-objects-instead-of-strings shell. It takes a different approach to shell/language unification, compared to nushell and other modern shells. Marcel exposes Python on the command line, e.g. to find files that changed in the last day:

        ls -fr | select (f: now() - f.mtime < days(1))

ls pipes File objects to the select, and that's a Python function inside the parens.

Scripting is done in Python, using marcel's shell commands as functions, by importing the module marcel.api. So the examle above in Python would be:

        from marcel.api import *

        for file in (ls(file=True, recursive=True) |
                     select(lambda f: now() - f.mtime < days(1))):

        print(file)

So it's the same shell command (ls ... | select ...), but expressed as Python functions, and the result is an iterator so that the command output can be used inside a for loop.

For more info: [https://www.marceltheshell.org](https://www.marceltheshell.org), [https://github.com/geophile/marcel](https://github.com/geophile/marcel).

<comment><USER8> It's not a different approach though. It works exactly the same way in powershell(just the host language is different).

<comment><USER7> Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. I believe my comment still applies to nushell and a couple of others.

I like bash for simple commands, but hate the requirement to learn so many sublanguages for more sophisticated usage, (as in sed, awk, find, and others). I like Python for scripting, but the integration of shell commands is really not very good. I built marcel to fix both of these problems.

<comment><USER9> Powershell scripting is still done in the powershell language, but you can import all of the .net/c# runtime to use.

I'd like to build the same but using the JVM/groovy as the runtime/scripting language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nushell is the only shell I know of (other than fish) which uses threads. Threads are famously difficult in shells because of the fork/thread interaction.

How is Nushell able to use threads? For example how are subshells implemented?

<comment><USER11> Part of it could be due to using Rust as the implementation language. Rust has good, cross-platform abstractions over things like threads and processes. The language tends to make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot.

Would definitely like to hear from the authors of Nushell on how their language choice has held up over the course of the project.

<comment><USER10> A related issue is leaking fds into child processes. For example, Go locks around fork() to prevent racing with creating new fds (e.g. from pipe) [1]. Rust doesn't have any synchronization between fork and creating fds; I wonder whether/how this is addressed in nushell.

1: [https://golang.org/src/syscall/exec_unix.go?s=7064:7143#L19](https://golang.org/src/syscall/exec_unix.go?s=7064:7143#L19)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of my favorite, unexpected features of nushell so far is `$it` the implicit "iteration" variable. It makes sense to have something like this in conjunction with the 'each' command, which makes it very easy to loop over lists or tables.

But $it is still useful in the absence of 'each'.

For instance:

dirname is a useful tool but you can't pipe to it (at least not the GNU version), it expects a string parameter. We can still easily plug it into nushell pipelines though, thanks to $it, which is this case is basically turning stdin into a string.

Since dirname won't let us do

        which nu | get path | dirname

we can instead do

        which nu | get path | dirname $it

If I wanted to do this in bash, I'd have to go through some annoying (but common) machinations in order to convert stdin into a text string to pass to dirname.

<comment><USER13> Like which nu | xargs dirname

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> reading only this post, is nushell just an implicit awk after each pipe, that already know the output format of a few common programs? or something more than that?

<comment><USER15> Think powershell, but built in rust, posix first and better at processing data(xml, csv, json, ...)

<comment><USER8> I looked at the book, currently it is nowhere close to powershell.

As far as i can tell no way to define any function/commands(you have to write plugins in another language, make an executable??). It supports pipeline, has a large amounts of built-in operators/commands(probably enough to be usable as a shell) and built-in parsers for a few formats(how does one write support for another data format?). Maybe in future it will address these questions.

<comment><USER2> The linked post is explicitly about that:

> Looking at Nu today, you can see some common parts of languages like `if` or > `open`, but it doesn't yet feel like there's enough syntax to build up full > programs. You can't define your own commands, your own variables, and you > can't build out a project across multiple files. We're working to address > all of these limitations so that Nu can function not only for one-liners, > but also for much more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems very interesting. After a quick play I cannot find anything similar to 'less' which I use very frequently. Is there a nushell equivalent?

<comment><USER12> The equivalent is called `textview` which is a built-in which tries to be a bit more intelligent than `less` with regard to file-types.

The default viewer, which sort of runs at the end of every pipeline is called `autoview`.

Now.. autoview _should_ be calling textview in the cases where the pipeline detects a large text value. It is possible that you're not exactly running a pipeline.

For instance: If you run:

        cat big.log

it is not running a pipeline, just an external command.

If you run:

        open big.log

     you're invoking nushell's mechanism for creating a pipeline sourced by the contents of big.log.  You should also notice that textview is invoked, because there should be a pager.

Alternatively, you can choose to create a pipeline by pipe-ing the output of cat big.log into something. If you pipe it to textview you should see the same result:

        cat big.log | textview

Hope that helps!

<comment><USER16> The command that I was trying to use was 'ls', which doesn't seem to play with textview when I try it out 'ls | textview' (just no output at all). textview does work for me with files, as in your example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it just me or does the lack of line continuation (i.e. \\) really ruin all of the beauty the rest of this shell provides?

</comment><comment><USER18> My issue is that NuShell has line hinting, with no way to disable it

<comment><USER16> What is line hinting?

<comment><USER18> if you type a letter, it fills the rest of the line with what it thinks you want to type next</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to know if your Employers are compensating you fairly - <AUTHOR> How do you know if you are being paid fairly? And if you feel like that's not the case(being compensated fairly), how does one go about getting a raise?
What are some of your tips and tricks?
Note: I've been a developer for 2 1/2 years at a ROR/Angular shop in NYC and make just under 80k. <comment><USER2> Look for another job. If you get a better offer, you are not being compensated fairly. If you don't, you are.

This is also a pretty good way of getting a raise - and if you don't get one, you can always take the other job.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've often thought about this but taking time off to interview seems dishonest to the company I currently work for. What you are articulating here though does make a lot of sense.

<comment><USER3> It's not dishonest. Take a vacation day and go on an interview. You can also look at glassdoor, etc to see what people are making.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most likely you are underpaid, especially if you haven't gotten a raise in a year or two. Companies rarely keep up with market rates. Do _not_ expect to be rewarded for working hard.

In the old days, companies would give out raises without the employee asking. Now, it is just easier to get another job at market price. You'll get a nice raise _and_ you'll level up on your skill set.

I've always had jobs I loved and looked forward to going to work so this isn't coming from a place of bitterness. It's just the way the world works.</comment>


Ask HN: How many hours do you sleep? - <AUTHOR> My current schedule is 10pm-5:30/6am, which is approximately 7-8 hours of sleep. By 6:30am I usually do my workouts (@ gym). During the commute time (~45-50 mins) I tend to read. Sometimes I feel a bit tired, so just put the book aside, close my eyes and fall into a semi-sleep mode - 30 mins is enough to fully recover. This tiredness is most likely the result of daily workouts.
I'm trying to reduce the sleep time to 6 hours per night. Has anyone tried to achieve sleep time reduction?
P.S. I'm a smoker. <comment><USER2> I sleep around 10 hours a night.

Over 20 years ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. My psychiatrist at the time recommended that I setup a rigid sleep schedule, to ensure that:

1) I regularly received a sufficient amount of sleep

2) My sleep schedule was consistent

For people with certain conditions (that probably don't apply to most HN readers), ensuring a sufficient but not excessive amount of sleep is very important. For bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder, inconsistent sleep can really throw you off.

I take medication, but I've noticed over the years that my condition is much better when I get a solid 10 hours of sleep.

It seems a bit silly to hipsters in SF that I'm in bed at 8pm, but it keeps me stable and functional.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey! I used to sleep 4/5 hours every 24 hours and then 14/15 hours during weekends back in university time. This was OK for the time being but in longer run I found it quite exhaustive and in the same time I did not like waste of weekend.

When I started working full time I was taking ~7 hours every day (including weekends) but until I gave up drinking coffee I could not do much in the evenings after work. At that time giving up coffee was great thing, I passed some certifications in the evenings and could also catch up with private life. I think also my diet at the time was contributing to this effect (eating a lot of green leafy food, salads, kale etc. and not so much of bread or processed sugars/fats)

Then I joined a startup and in the same time my beloved one gave birth to our beautiful boy - so no continuous sleep (1.5-2 hours straight at max) for more than a year made my head looking a bit grey. In the same time I switched back to drink coffee and had bad diet habits to strike back - so my level of tiredness grown so much I could do nothing productive after work. Then I switched regular coffee to bulletproof coffee and at least coffee crush was gone but generally I find 7 hours in bed is my minimum.

</comment><comment><USER4> I currently sleep 11pm-5am on weekdays, with a further hour or so of broken "sleep" on a train. This leaves me quite seriously sleep deprived by the end of each week, and I do not recommend it if you can possibly avoid it.

</comment><comment><USER5> My schedule:

\- 10pm to 6pm with 2 wakeups, the second one is usually longer

\- so between 7 to 8h

\- during the week less but minimum 6,5 hours and on the weekend longer, ~8h</comment>


Signal Reflection - <AUTHOR> https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SignalReflection.html?th08hn <comment><USER2> This is part of the field of Signal Integrity within EE - a rabbit hole which I decided to base my career on. For anyone desiring more detail (with some minimal EE knowledge as a prerequisite), two of the most popular texts are: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Johnson/Graham and Signal and Power Integrity - Simplified by Eric Bogatin.

[https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design- Handbook/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design- Handbook/dp/0133957241/)

[https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Power-Integrity-Simplified- Pre...](https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Power-Integrity-Simplified- Prentice/dp/013451341X/)

<comment><USER3> Not the same but related, I got started down the road of (RF) DSP a while back and just got to the wtf parts, particularly around handling errors, where it really did kind of feel like magic.

I couldn't hack the deep end of the math pool though and tapped out, but the awe remains. 'The Signal Path' and 'w1aex' are two YouTube channels i still subscribe to for my fix. Watching a waveform on a scope writhe around like a silent theremin when you just move a cable or even wave your hand past it really drives the point home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This YouTube video from "Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky" really game me the "ah-ha" moment understanding reflection and impedance matching [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozeYaikI11g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozeYaikI11g)

</comment><comment><USER5> >"Way back in the 70s when I was building logic circuits, I was warned repeatedly that I'd have to get a few things right, or risk "locking up" or "burning out" the CMOS chips I was using. The bogeyman was "Signal Reflection", but no one could tell me what it was, or why it was so bad."

[...]

>"I remember hooking up a television, again, back in the 70s, and we had to change the cable connecting the aerial, because it was 75-Ohm, and we needed to use 300-Ohm.

I was confused.

It was wire, and certainly if you connected a meter to measure the resistance, you didn't get 75 Ohms, or 300 Ohms. You got effectively 0 Ohms. It was wire, after all, and wire didn't have resistance.

No, but it has _impedance_.

When you have a current flowing down the wire, you have electrons in motion (although not as much as you may think!). And if you have a _moving charge_ , you have a _magnetic field_.

So _when you start the current, it starts to create the [temporarily changing] magnetic field_ , and a _changing magnetic field creates a voltage in the opposite direction_.

So that opposes the current, giving a dynamic [instantaneous] resistance.

So _starting_ the current off down the wire causes a [instantaneous] resistance, and we can then talk about how much resistance we experience. That depends on a lot of things, but it serves to show that

 _even just current on a wire is a complex thing_."

Observation: Changing the current in an existing circuit might not result in an instantaneous change in the current -- that's because an instantaneous change in current results in a instantaneous change in the magnetic field surrounding the current, and an instantaneous change in the magnetic field surrounding a current may in turn act to influence the exact amount of current which can be carried in an infinitesimally short time period...

Over a very short, but not instantaneous amount of time, these forces balance, and the current does indeed flow, _but that does not happen in an instantaneous / infintesimally small - unit of time_...

Fascinating!

</comment><comment><USER6> Other nice example of reflection at impedance boundaries are the rainbow patterns of oil on puddles, or, well, rainbows themselves.

</comment><comment><USER7> Also check out the excellent video from Bell Labs: "Similarities of Wave Behaviour (1959)" [0], which showcases termination, reflection, resonance and impedance using the Shive Wave Machine.

[0] [https://youtu.be/DovunOxlY1k](https://youtu.be/DovunOxlY1k)

</comment><comment><USER8> I learned about termination when I had a 10b2 network.</comment>


Porting rr to x86-64 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/nfroyd/2014/10/30/porting-rr-to-x86-64/

<comment><USER2> Wow, rr's a pretty slick tool. Definitely filed away for future use. Anyone with use experience care to chime in about it?

rr also reminds me of when, ages ago, I first ran into the ocaml debugger's ability to step forward and _step backward_. To borrow the modern cliché: _mind blown_.

<comment><USER3> I haven't used rr, but I have used GDB's built in record and replay ability.

GDB's was quite useful, but painfully slow; I had to do a good amount of bisecting down to a small enough input to reproduce the issue without having to wait ages to execute before it was usable. Once I did that, though, it let me find the issue a lot sooner than I would have been able to otherwise.

rr promises to be substantially faster the GDB's record and replay; if so, I imagine it will be quite useful, though it is only once or twice a year that I actually have to debug a problem that these kinds of tools are relevant for.

<comment><USER4> rr uses/enhances gdb, so I guess you mean faster than gdb alone?

(It wasn't clear to me until I followed a few links - I hadn't heard of rr.)

<comment><USER3> Yes, I meant faster than gdb's native record and replay feature.

The nice thing about rr is that you can still use it with gdb, so you have the full power of gdb along with close to native speed record and reply. Once the x86-64 support is ready, it'll probably be a common tool for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like an incredibly useful tool, I can't believe I haven't heard about it before.

Nevertheless, does anyone know if there's something like this for programs compiled to the JVM? I've never used gdb to debug JVM code, but I expect that it will not work well.

<comment><USER6> As of a few years ago someone was working on such a system for the JVM and had gotten quite some distance. Here it is: [http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/](http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/)

A Google search [https://www.google.com/search?q=java+backwards+debugger](https://www.google.com/search?q=java+backwards+debugger) found some more hits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks very promising. Did a quick set up but unfortunately some counters couldn't be initialized on my VM.</comment>