Friends at Work? Not So Much - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/adam-grant-friends-at-work-not-so-much.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 <comment><USER2> "In 1985, about half of Americans said they had a close friend at work; by 2004, this was true for only 30 percent"

This decline precedes the Uberization of work (where people work more part time gigs with less coworkers around). It even precedes smart phones and being totally mired in watching our social media accounts when we get free time at work, as opposed to interacting with those around us.

I can only speak for myself but at work I feel a little constrained when trying to speak to people in a friendly non-work related manner. Primarily I'm concerned I might offend someone, with an offhand comment or joke. The laws and guidelines in place to protect employees against offensive behavior are a great thing but perhaps I take it too seriously. Perhaps it also affects by ability to make friends and "be myself" at work.

<comment><USER3> I feel similarly, but I also don't _want_ to be friends with my coworkers. I'd rather we keep a friendly, polite distance in our relationships. I love my job, and go to work to actually work: my social interaction comes from elsewhere, on my own terms.

I honestly think this keeps things more productive. There's less room for wasting time socializing, or worrying about people feeling left out, or (like you said) offending people, or anything else that takes time away from work. I've personally seen it happen where relationship concerns ("why won't they talk to me more?") get in the way of people's comfort working together. It's just silly to me. It has no place in the workplace in my mind.

<comment><USER4> _I honestly think this keeps things more productive_

So you're just going to ignore the fact that the article notes studies proving the opposite?

 _or anything else that takes time away from work_

How very Calvinist of you.

You spend one third of your day at work, probably half of your conscious hours.

Maybe your workplace shouldn't be a soulless machine dedicated only to cold efficiency and productivity? Just a thought.

<comment><USER5> >> I honestly think this keeps things more productive > So you're just going to ignore the fact that the article notes studies proving the opposite?

I went back and reread the article. It's just one study as far as I know. This one involving 170 something people in the US: [http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/72/4/775/](http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/72/4/775/)

How was it done ? What was the control group ? How did they choose the members ? Are these some college students as in so many psychological studies ? Does it compare to real world companies hiring people that match the company culture and are professional enough to cooperate in most conditions ?

The more I think about it the more it fels very fluffy and hard to take for granted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing I find a bit weird, and I suspect it started in America (but I'm not sure), is when colleagues pass each other and they say 'how are you?' _and keep walking_ , making it entirely obvious that they're not really interested in how you are. Or maybe they expect some rapid fire response. Not sure. But I think it would be better to just say 'Hi' if you don't intend to stop and actually talk.

<comment><USER7> This is an American thing in general, not just a workplace thing. I know that people in other cultures find it quite strange sometimes, and frankly it is when the actual meaning of the words is considered and what their use implies. But it has somehow just become a kind of standard default greeting.

I think it's probably meant to imply a kind of warmness to the person it is directed to, kind of like, "nice to see you," or "I wish you well."

No one expects it to lead to extended conversation when it is used nonchalantly like this. And you're right, it is frequently encountered in situations where one or both parties are in motion. Often in a form like:

A: Hi

B: Hi, how are you?

or

A:Hi

B:Hi, how are you?

A:Good, thanks!

or

A:Hi

B:Hi, how are you?

A: _smile, nod_

or

A:Hi

B:Hi, how are you?

A:Good, and you?

B:Good, thanks.

I think this is fairly common in languages, that words are used in a way that from their literal meanings you wouldn't expect. Idioms of course, but I think in other ways as well.

<comment><USER8> Yeah a lot of us do it even if we find it awkward, because we feel it's better than seeming cold and smug. It's also kindof an invitation I guess for real talk in case the other party really has something ready to chew on with you.

It reminds me of the Dilbert where he's telling Catbert how he was confronted with passing someone he barely knows for the second time in a hallway, where he already gave the empty "hey how's it going" the first time not long before. Catbert asks what he did, he says he pulled the fire alarm, because he couldn't think of anything else ("I doubt Mrs. Manners will back you up on that one"). I feel that way sometimes too :)

<comment><USER9> > Yeah a lot of us do it even if we find it awkward, because we feel it's > better than seeming cold and smug.

In what universe is a simple greeting _cold and smug_?

<comment><USER8> It seems to me a lot of people are turned off by it. I'd rather just say "hi" myself when I've got nothing, but I notice people stop responding at all (won't even say hi back) when I do that.

So, this universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Technology companies like Google and Facebook provide opportunities for shared games, sports, exercise and meals — and research suggests that playing together and eating together are good ways to foster cooperation."

Does anyone else find this sort of stuff very corporate and off-putting? I'm all for hanging out with some coworkers on occasion. I like quite a few of them. But company-sponsored "hang out with your coworkers to foster friendships!" time just seems fake.

<comment><USER11> No.

For a lot of people who move in from strange places on earth to work at FB/Goog/tech company, making friends is very hard. Hanging out with co-workers has been the primary way for a lot of people I know to have a social life.

I'm a nerdy Asian guy who worked with a predominantly white company and it was very lonely there, because none of the white people want to "hang out with co- workers". However, moving to a larger company really helped me make friends and boost my self esteem. It may be corporatey, but I'm thankful my company atleast cares that much.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I hadn't thought of it from that perspective :) I'm glad you found some friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is just risk and reward at work. People subconsciously fear the consequences of offending someone in the work place, with very little upside most people prefer to just keep it about work and nothing else.

<comment><USER13> It's not even subconscious for me. I have a very small group of friends who know how I feel about most things, and everyone else gets the PC version.

<comment><USER14> Would you mind elaborating? What kind of views are you talking about?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the economic explanation is at the root of this. As they mentioned, long term employment is essentially gone.

In addition, things like pensions are no longer common except in the public sector. Add to that, the rise in cost of living relative to salaries and you end up with a situation where the work place is a very competitive environment.

We are competing with our coworkers for raises and advancement opportunities. Often this competition has an ugly under-belly, as it invariably involves criticism of coworkers' performance and self-promotion of one's own work.

<comment><USER16> I agree. It depends a lot on the industry and size of the company I think, but in some places it is brutally political. I personally don't even mind a critical and self-promotional environment, it's the quiet, behind the scenes long game politics that bother me. I think it's especially depressing because if everyone stopped undermining each other and worked collaboratively, the shared fruits of your labor would probably make most everyone better off. Except then likely 30% of the staff would be cut because high productivity leads to redundancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "It's not that Americans are less concerned with relationships overall. We're social creatures outside work, yet the office interaction norm tends to be polite but impersonal. Some people think pleasantries have no place in professional meetings."

Is this what mean the "keep it professional" clauses in the open source communities code of conducts? Not to "be civil and don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation", but "be impersonal"?

<comment><USER12> It may not be the intent but it is definitely the outcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was partly raised in a culture where it was normal for your colleagues / co- workers to know every aspect of your life. In general everything was more communal, and there wasn't a lot of independent loner, do-your-own-thing, dog- eat-dog mentality that is so pervasive in American culture. I'm not even going to discuss the merits / negatives of each particular worldview, but what I do know is that I find it utterly depressing that I've worked and interacted with my (now former) colleagues for close to 3 years and none of them even care enough to ask me what I'm going to do with my life afterwards and what my next plans are (today was my last day).

</comment><comment><USER19> I know this is just anecdotal, but my experience is quite the opposite. Some of my closest friends are friends I made at work. I was in their weddings.

Sure we drift apart when we no longer work together, because we don't see each other every day, but we're drifting apart from being very close. I'm still just as "in touch" with them as I am with my other friends.

</comment><comment><USER20> Surprisingly, ctrl+f 'cubicle' gives no matches on NYT or here but it seems like an obvious reason. I can't speak for most of the rest of the world but today's Japanese office for rank and file still tends to look something like [1] - desks pointed inward, arranged so that workers are focused on common areas with low or no partitions. OTOH in the US the ubiquitous cubicles have high partitions and are often arranged around the walls of the space so people are pointed away from each other.

Whether this was done intentionally for some productivity benefits or because workers liked the additional privacy or is just some unintended side effect I have no idea.

[1] [https://sociorocketnewsen.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/gj-3.j...](https://sociorocketnewsen.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/gj-3.jpg?w=580&h=435)

<comment><USER21> lol I work in a pretty open "bullpen" as they say. Our desks have glass partitions but they're about 10" tall, and I can totally see the 3 guys I work with all the time. If we're using our standing tables there is no partition lol.

It's kinda distracting, actually. Especially when I've got headphones on and the coworker directly across from me doesn't. When he looks over I cant' tell if he's just looking around the room or giving me the "take your headphones off so I can talk to you" look lol.

Then again he usually tells me this in IM. Gotta love that.

After looking at the japanese floorplan.. I'd actually be totally fine with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I work for the State, in a non-competitive and low turnover environment. A lot of people here make friends with their coworkers, but I do notice that the depth of those friendships seem more significant with the older employees; they speak of road trips together, staying at each others' houses, and hijinks that I don't hear nearly as much of (if at all) from younger coworkers. It could just be the amount of time they've worked together, though, that leads to that impression.

</comment><comment><USER23> I do not relate to this at all. I have a huge network of former coworkers who I keep up with via quick emails and "beers couple times a year" kinds of get togethers. While the work is being done, I'd rather not see them more than I already do, but afterwords, we're like old Army buddies; shared trials and triumphs is a huge thing for normal people. Perhaps Catholic school had some hidden benefits.

</comment><comment><USER24> _Americans have gone on vacation with 6 percent of their closest co-workers, versus 25 percent in Poland and 45 percent in India._

No, the odd ones are the Poles and Indians that are going on vacation with their co-workers....seriously.

<comment><USER25> Are you missing the point of the article? According to the author, Poles and Indians consider their co-workers their friends. Americans in general don't. His other point is that Americans _used_ to think differently, so Americans working today would consider people from 30-40 years ago to be odd ones too.

<comment><USER24> No, you seem to have missed my point. I find it strange that so many percentages of Poles and Indians are going on vacation with their co-workers.

That's a separate thing from "being friends".

<comment><USER18> Not sure why you are making that distinction. The implication is there. You just don't go on "vacation" with anybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Gladiator, make no friends of gladiators." \- from Spartacus.

</comment><comment><USER27> Has the definition of "friends" changed in 60 years?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with email overload? - <AUTHOR>

I found the following mentioned by Harjeet Taggar. "I spend an unfortunate amount of time in email. With a 150+ founders per round and a lot of the general questions coming via email. This is also how we make introductions to investors/companies for the startups.".
Many people must be feeling effect of email overload.
How do you deal with email overload ?
Thanks, Neal (MyDataOrganizer.com) <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Marlon,

It is helpful.

I was thinking of managing todo-list type of emails-data with task management software as todo-list type of emails are actually not meant for emails. Similarly there might be other categories of emails-data (e.g. scheduling time for meetings etc.) which can be processed by data organizer software resulting in fewer emails.

Neal

</comment><comment><USER2> Try this. It might help somebody.

<http://inboxzero.com/>

I found it interesting</comment>


Ask HN: How did you automate your day job? - <AUTHOR> Curious to hear stories of people who automated their 9 to 5 jobs <comment><USER3> I was a high school teacher in a school that worked primarily with underserved students, who often had transcripts with many academic gaps. So we had to spend more time than usual examining transcripts to make sure students were taking the right classes to graduate. It was a small school, with three teachers and a few support staff. We literally spent hundreds of hours each year poring over text-based transcripts with students, parents, and each other.

I spent one staff training day writing a script that parsed the transcripts and generated a visual transcript for each student. It had gray bars showing how much credit was required in each subject area and subdiscipline area, and green bars showing how much credit students had earned. For students close to graduation, it also generated a list of the classes they needed to take. What used to take 10-15 minutes for each student, and was error-prone, now took 30 seconds to 1 minute.

The really interesting and satisfying part wasn't just noticing how much time was saved. We ended up spending just as much time with each student and parent/guardian, but the conversations focused much more on how students could get through to graduation. What used to be a frustrating period of analyzing past failures became a focus on what students could do now that they were focused on graduation.

<comment><USER4> These small, simple things are the reason why I truly love technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once took a temp job to get some quick spare cash after a failed startup attempt that wiped out my savings, when I still wanted a bit more time before getting another coding job. I ended up helping with some general office work in a mortgage bank, in a department where some accountants would look at all the applications that fell in the grey areas where it wasn't automatically accepted or rejected. They entered the data in a spreadsheet, then looked at other pages of the spreadsheet to see if it was OK to approve or not. Ultimately, there was no grey area... just humans in the middle when it was close.

So I wrote a button (VBA, in Excel) for them that would just do the lookups, and send the correct email response back to the original loan officer. It worked well. They sent my button to all the loan officers, and that department was no longer needed, at least not for anything other than some basic communications asking applicants for more info once in a while.

I had a fun conversation with their IT department, too, when they found out that a temp had automated a department.

<comment><USER6> Was there a job offer / spot bonus?

<comment><USER5> Yep. I got a job offer. It was nowhere near competitive with other opportunities, though, so the talks didn't go far.

<comment><USER7> This checks out. Banks have no problem spending millions on poor solutions but zero interest in rewarding optimisations.

<comment><USER8> That's because you are a threat to the manager if you implement something like this without approval.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I worked as a lawyer, one of my tasks as a junior was to check the court lists every day against the spreadsheet of clients we had who were involved in litigation. If their name appeared then I had to send an email to the relevant lawyer containing the information.

This took about 30 - 60 mins each day and was monotonous. Just copying and pasting the client name into the browser search tool.

I automated the process, making a small website which lawyers could add their client and would receive an email if the name appeared in the court lists. I ended up turning it into a small SaaS business for a while and sold a licence to my company.

Not a huge victory but it felt great at the time!

<comment><USER10> There are several businesses that grew out of people that worked in law firms or corporate legal departments and spotted the numerous deficiencies and opportunity for automation. I know this is true for most businesses but having worked in that area for a few years made me think they're specially lacking process automation considering how bug the Legal industry is in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I deal quite a lot with JIRA at my job, as this is a corporate tool.

Often, I get questions about the content of these JIRA issues, by issue key: either orally ("hey, what about PRJ-12345 ?"), or in plain text format in email, i.e. "PRJ-12345" _without_ the hyperlink of course. That could result in going to a [https://jira.domain.tld/browse/PRJ-12345](https://jira.domain.tld/browse/PRJ-12345), or even [https://anotherjira.domain.tld/browse/QSK-54321](https://anotherjira.domain.tld/browse/QSK-54321) (yes we have two, separated, instances running).

Like dozens of time a day.

As the JIRA UI does not make it fast enough for me to lookup for such issues so often (and having two different URLs do not help), I wrote a little Hammerspoon script that listen to a keyboard shortcut key.

When I press it:

\- if a JIRA issue key is currently highlighted on screen: it just points my browser to it \- if no, an interactive auto-suggester appears and I can type in the issue key, so that I can browse to it immediately as well.

Only a very small automation, but I literally save several precious minutes per day. Mentioning here since the idea might be helpful for others...

<comment><USER12> Your method will be faster, but fyi, you can also put the issue key in the search and it will go directly to the issue. We typically configure search shortcuts in the browser so if you type jABC-123 it will auto expand the j to [https://somejira.tld/browse/ABC-123](https://somejira.tld/browse/ABC-123)

<comment><USER10> That's what I do too but I liked the idea of highlighting and hitting a shortcut, from anywhere. I also configured Sourcetree to match Jira IDs and hyperlink them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am a trader. A million different factors drive commodity prices, and their significance ebbs and flows over time in unpredictable ways. So typically you'll have a spreadsheet that monitors one of these occasional factors. You run it 98 days in a row and it's irrelevant. This lulls you into complacency on the 99th day, where you don't look at it, and on the 100th day suddenly it becomes relevant again and you didn't notice it in time because you hadn't checked the spreadsheet.

So my agenda has been to move the analysis corpus into Python, directly talking to Bloomberg and other data sources. Then these things run automatically and can flag me when they're significant. Rather than trusting me to check scores of spreadsheets and wading through endless True Negative results.

When I started working, Excel was the powertool that allowed a junior to outperform dinosaurs using calculators, and make an outsize impact. My feeling now is that Python and similar tools are the equivalent of my Excel 20+ years ago, and Excel is the 'desk calculator'.

<comment><USER14> Would you be open to sharing more? What sort of things are you doing in Python that are new and unique, distinct from capabilities you had in spreadsheets?

<comment><USER15> isn't python used for automating? I guess excel can do autochecking if you really pushed it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I actually got my first dev job by doing exactly that. While I was searching for a new career and vaguely interested in something to do with IT, I was doing short-term temp work as an office admin. One was in a startup - <USER2> tech-related - where I spent most of my day searching for customers' names and addresses in a spreadsheet, then copy-pasting them into a bunch of Word templates and printing them out. I already knew about mail merge, but in this job the particular set of docs to be generated would be different according to the specific circumstances of each individual case, along with one or two customer-specific paragraphs that came in an email and had to be pasted into the document.

Having been a hobby programmer as a teenager, I had a hunch this could be made more efficient. Once I discovered VBA (what? Excel has its very own programming language BUILT IN?!) I quickly threw together some macros and an Excel form that generated the whole personalised document set in a few clicks (what? you can write code in Excel to control Word? This is AWESOME!)

At the time I was sharing a house with a couple of CS students and one of them let me borrow a very academic textbook about this wacky thing called SQL. I fell in love with the idea of tables and joins and stored procs, skipped over all the difficult maths parts, and discovered back at work that the funny icon next to Word and Excel called "Access" was actually a SQL database. Feeling like I had all the power of the universe at my fingertips, I hacked together a custom CRM system which pretty soon the whole office was using, and pretty soon it started grinding to a halt.

Round about then the company hired its first IT Manager, he liked what I had done and said: maybe you should check out this new thing called SQL Server 2000, do you want to be our Database Developer? So I shifted the back end over to SQL then discovered .NET 1.1 and started writing better front ends and hired a small team to take it over.

So yeah, I kind of fell into business app development by accident just by automating my very repetitive office admin job. That was 15 years ago, and I'm still getting paid to automate other people's 9 to 5 jobs.

<comment><USER8> You should thank that IT Manager today. Most of them would just ask you to get approval to use a database on your own PC at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I became a manager and delegated everything.

<comment><USER18> Did you delegate managing too?

<comment><USER17> Yes, but let me elaborate.

I quickly learned the way to get promoted is to be replaceable.

If you're relied upon too much or if you're the guy who always fixes things - it's actually too risky for a business to promote you.

Throughout my career I always made sure I was giving people below me the opportunity to step up, which allowed me to step up too.

I quickly appointed team leaders as soon as a team I managed had more than 4 people for example.

I had to manage the team leaders but they had a lot of freedom.

Some days I had so little to do you wouldn't believe it, but the department was running the best it had in years and everyone was happy.

<comment><USER19> This seems to me like a real failure of late stage capitalism. Similar to how factories in the soviet union were overstaffed with middle managers who barely lifted a finger.

I might be wrong but this just seems almost like a ponzi scheme of some sort - keep moving up the middle management chain and getting somebody else to replace you. No offense to darrenwestall, I'm hating the game not the player.

<comment><USER20> This quote might be relevant: "I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief." — General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

[https://medium.com/@jcmrgo/i-divide-my-officers-into-four- gr...](https://medium.com/@jcmrgo/i-divide-my-officers-into-four- groups-6dc4743078b6)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I work in compliance for a major bank. Our process to investigate odd spending/payment patterns could not have been more manual. Essentially, cases alert according to a variety of rules and you investigate accordingly. Everything starts in Excel and you know what to look for based on why the case alerts. I automated everything (analysis) required in Excel using VBA. Did not know any programming prior to this but I did know this was the point of using computers ("bicycle for the mind"). Learning VBA was a little painful but eventually I figured out how to control a web browser with it so I would pull the required documents from the web. From there, I got Excel and Word to talk and auto-generated our summary memos. So, pretty effectively automated myself out of my position. The lesson is, while I thought it was all pretty straight- forward, many of my colleagues found my new work flow challenging to use and were pretty concerned my path would put us out of work eventually, which was only kind of the goal. Have since rewritten everything in Python, which is a comparative joy, and I'm now working on using machine learning, NLP, NLG to replicate some of the same work to be more intelligently automated.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not a day job, but while looking for a day job, I came across a process, where a state run department has multiple openings; you upload your resume things like name, details, previous jobs, address etc to a standardized form, & then at job search page, just click the listing, review the text, click Apply, attach your standardized auto generated resume by click of a button, agree to their t&c with a checkbox, & click Apply, & note down the information from thank you page about job number, city, position, department, type etc. All of these 6-7 pages had unique URL, & all html was nicely generated with proper css id class names etc.

After spending about 5 Sundays doing this manually, I quickly wrote a JavaScript bookmarklet where it gets the current URL, & switch case calls the required function. Each page had different function to look for element, focus, highlight for me, & click it. The last page all required information was loaded & sent to a Google script for spreadsheet.

</comment><comment><USER23> Last year in school I also worked for a car dealership one day a week. One of their employees transfered a task to me. She showed me a spreadsheet in Lotus 1-2-3, in which they had a list of cars with the day the received the car and they day the sold the car. She was counting the number of days in between and entered that number into the next cell. Took here 2hrs each week. During the explanation by her I already showed here how to do this with a simple formule. She was ecstatic.

Second thing I automated was automating their invoices. There was AS400 system that generated a CSV file which they printed. Then they opened a template Word-document and manualy copied the data from the print into the document, printed that and continued with the next. With some simple marco's I saved them about a days work every week.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't automate my job specifically (I'm a tech trainer, currently) but when I have optimized myself heavily using AutoHotKey. I spend most of my time these days between Slack and a bash prompt, and so I have created macros for myself. I lean on it pretty hard, and have cut down the amount of typing I do simply because I can now type "yyy" to get "Yup." and other silly optimizations that save me time and effort, mostly cumulatively. There are few big optimizations to be gained this way, but they add up. I also have entire phrases and paragraphs macro'd for the same reasons, as well as common typos. It doesn't sound like much but these things save me a lot of time.

</comment><comment><USER25> A major part of my job is to create reports. These are mind numbingly created in Powerpoint / Word with graphs from Excel. I've been told that automating any of the reports I do is basically impossible. I'm expected to do overtime as needed to get reports done on time. This happens most weeks.

Unfortunately scripting and devops aren't a thing where I am even if they could be applied. I'll need to find another corp. The next position I'm going for in is DevOps. But I haven't got enough of the silly certs / experience yet.

If only I had time off to study and wasn't creating reports all day. Then I'd be able to build my project portfolio and do the exam preparation. I've been here 18 months doing nothing but reports and a little system administration. My plan is to be here for no more than 36 months as this level of manually creating reports is too mind numbing.

Also me:

I generate a very important report for presentation each Monday afternoon and it takes around 4-6 hours of data gsthering and preparation. For the first four weeks I did it manually then realised I could automate some parts and then gradually up to all of it. Now it takes 30 minutes of script runtime with no manual intervention.

There's a patchwork of many other 1-2 hour reports I do across other days. They are now all fully automated by me. They take around 5 minutes of script runtime but no interaction.

I have another big report about to be assigned for Fridays. Its expected to take around 5-7 hours of manual collation. My estimation is that I will be able to run this in around 20 minutes.

In all I generate multiple word documents and powerpoint documents using excel spreadsheets with most of the heavy lifting being done using python, powershell, R and an ecosystem of little elixir critters.

As soon as I reach 24 to 36 months I'll have everything lined up and I'm out of here. I've done enough networking with various people to know that my portfolio of experience is relevant and useful. I've gotten my interview skills up. Plenty of my contacts agree.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was a VMware admin primarily for years in engineering shops and everywhere I worked constantly had issues with resource allocation, which team had the most resources deployed, who had the most idle vCPU and memory running...

At one company pretty much my sole job for 2 days a week was to look over utilization by team, shutdown idle VM's and check for any that were provisioned with too many resources. I'd have to e-mail the team, power them down and resize the resources and boot it back up, etc.

I automated all that with scripts, from the team e-mails with a nice HTML table report of the pending changes to actually running the operations to resize and power off the machines. I was pretty proud of all that work.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think, before automation, konmari method is more important. If the job doesn't spark joy, we should get rid of it

</comment><comment><USER28> I had to compile reports from Jira of tickets in a release that weren't "in standard". I wrote some Excel VBA that got the details via the Jira rest interface, formatted a report, and sent it round to the "offenders".

</comment><comment><USER29> Haven't totally automated my entire job but a small portion of what I do is configuring a fresh aws account some core services (SMTP, NTP, LDAP etc etc) and the associated VPC configurations before handing it off to the devs.

Wrote a pretty simple python script that takes some inputs, cidr range, account name, jira ticket etc, and sets up all the terraform, ansible groupvars, ssh key generation, secret storing and a few version control check- ins. Reduced the footprint from a few hours to literally less than one minute.

</comment><comment><USER30> I have been assigned a work in which data is uploaded every month into a web portal for hundreds of items, manually doing so takes 1-1.5 hour. But after automating the uploading task using python beautifulsoup and requests module, it gets done in few minutes.

</comment><comment><USER31> My first job was doing restock for a small independent retailer. The only report we could print showing inventory was inclusive of all the items we had ever carried, regardless of current status. The software was very limited and there was not much in the way of filtering. The best you could do was break the report up into ranges by vendor.

So my job was to go through the alphabet printing reports (e.g. "every item from a vendor that starts with 'A'"). I'd take this report, which for some letters was over a hundred pages long (about 20 items per page) then, using a highlighter and a ballpoint pen I'd go through the report highlighting the items that had stock available in the "backstock" column and had stock in the "sales floor" column that was lesser than the "restock level". I also had to compute the restock amount by subtracting the items on the floor from the restock level and taking the max of that number or the available backstock. I'd write this number in the margin of the report, then I'd travel to the backstock area, pick the highlighted items, and restock them onto the sales floor. After this was done I'd move on to the next letter. The goal was to cycle through the alphabet at least once a week and during the off-peak season this worked fine, but during the busy season, even with extra help, this system was showing signs of stress.

The first thing I did was to write a small perl script which I placed at the path the POS software was expecting to find a line printer. My script took the print-formatted report as input and simply stripped out the lines with no available backstock before forwarding the remaining lines to the printer. This alone reduced the number of pages printed out by an order of magnitude in most cases (from ~100 pages to ~10). At first I would copy this script to the printer path, run the report, then re-link the printer, but later I modified the script to recognize that specific report and pass-through other print jobs unmolested.

Over the next three years or so I added onto the script a lot. First I made it compute the restock amount for me, then I had it start skipping lines where the restock was trivial (e.g. restock amount was 1 and there were still >10 on the floor). Eventually the script was maintaining its own parallel inventory database, tracking rate of sale for each item and only suggesting restock for things that had very low inventory on the floor or were selling very quickly. I got to the point where I could restock the entire alphabet every morning and have time leftover in the afternoons to help with receiving. By the time I left I had a dedicated terminal set up in the back during the busy season that ran my scripts every 10 minutes and displayed in near real-time items that required critical restock throughout the day.

I heard a few years after I left they had switched back to the old methodology because they couldn't get their POS vendor to support my setup.

<comment><USER32> Fascinating that they switched to a worse manual methodology.

I wonder if there is a big difference between: a) an automation system that only the coder understands b) an automation system that is transparent and accessible to managers

Many coders get to point (a) but the system can't actually be trusted or relied on if the original coder moves on.

<comment><USER31> I think they (management) viewed the job as a mostly grunt brute-force sort of problem. By automating parts of it I managed to save myself some time and hassle, but it's not like they told me to start taking half the day off or tried to leverage my talents elsewhere. Other than saving a lot of paper my system didn't really impact their bottom line in a way they could easily see. Even though I trained my successor on using my system neither they nor anyone else in the company was interested enough in computers to take on the ongoing maintenance of the system, despite being just a few hundred lines of perl that an amateur programmer could probably figure out (I was definitely an amateur programmer when I wrote it). When it came time to upgrade their POS software and the vendor refused to copy and reinstall my scripts they had no choice but to return to the vendor-approved process because they had no one technical who could own the system.

At the time I thought they were fools for abandoning such an improved process, but older-me sees the difficulty of the position I left them in. From their perspective they get roughly the same result from having some other cog do the grunt work and hiring a real-deal computer specialist at $$$/hour to be on call to fix problems has the potential to cost much more.

They may have been foolish after all, they ended up going out of business. I think their biggest mistake was allowing their POS vendor to basically lock them in (by being unable to export any of their data in any convenient way) and not demanding/being willing to pay for the sorts of changes I was hacking together to just be incorporated into the official system.</comment></comment></comment>


The Shape of Rome (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.exurbe.com/?p=2219 <comment><USER2> Visiting Rome is one of the most beautiful experiences you can do, it's a time machine back into the past, it's walking through history.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tangentially related since the article describes the underlying Temple of Mithras -- the newly reconstructed London Mithraeum opens free to the public (tickets required) on Nov 14. Check it out if you're in London!

[https://www.londonmithraeum.com](https://www.londonmithraeum.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> Previously discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8679210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8679210)

</comment><comment><USER5>
      The new Mayor... announced his intention to destroy one of the city's central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali,

... which didn't exist before Mussolini anyway. This is a _restorative_ act, not a destructive one.

<comment><USER6> ...did you actually read the article? You're not disagreeing with it.

<comment><USER7> yes true, but I think he is disagreeing with the word choice as it makes it seem like the Mayor was doing a bad thing. It would be more neutral to say he restored it or even removed it but destroyed has a negative connotation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is so well written! Absolutely delightful to read.

<comment><USER9> Ex Urbe's writing is generally pretty great. Do check out her series on Machiavelli, the inventor of Consequentalism: [https://www.exurbe.com/?p=1429](https://www.exurbe.com/?p=1429) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a great post.

I love Rome but I don't feel it's one of the more grueling cities to visit. I guess if you have to fit in _everything_ in a couple of days it can be. We had three, we skipped the Forum and the Vatican Museum but did visit the Galleria Colonna.

<comment><USER11> 3 days does not seem nearly enough to visit Rome, I'm curious, what did you see exactly?

I'd consider 3 days a reasonable time to visit Budapest, Vienna and Barcelona, for comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love history and this article presented the history of Rome in a captivating way. I really like how the author described the layers going down, but then tied all the stories together through time back to the present, including the current issue. I also like how the settlement patterns and succession of religions can explain the current layout of the city.

I know Paris better than Rome, and it is similar, just not as many layers deep. From the castle walls under the Louvre [1] down to the curved walls in downstairs bathrooms (a little restaurant near Notre Dame, likely just an old cellar, and probably only 400 years old, not 2000). And before you dismiss the history as happening only in Europe and only centuries ago, San Francisco once moved its cemeteries along the old main road out of town (Colma along El Camino Real) and Seattle already has a second layer [2]. History repeats itself, or rather humans are the same, with the same habits and patterns (like that other thread about a one star review on a Sumerian clay tablet [3]).

Another interesting story about Rome: because of all the layers of history, and the richness of Ancient Rome, artifacts have been unearthed for years. Imagine living in the 1500's or 1600's and hearing about a great statue that was unearthed, and much finer than most anything existing at the time. This was the case of Laocoön and his Sons (1506) [4] and the Dying Gaul (early 1600's) [5]--their rediscovery is part of our history. Of course, Roman statues are still unearthed all over the old Roman Empire to this day. In an odd twist, so much time has passed that old collections of Roman art have been lost again and then recovered recently [6].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_castle#The_remnants_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_castle#The_remnants_of_the_medieval_Louvre)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669759)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laocoön_and_His_Sons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laocoön_and_His_Sons)

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Gaul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Gaul)

[6] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11285...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11285587/Ancient- Roman-statues-emerge-from-British-ambassadors-garden-in-Rome.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> For our 10th wedding anniversary this past summer we went to Rome and a few other parts of Italy. Our tour guide took us through the Basilica of San Clemente so it was a treat to read this article. This was on our second day of our trip and realizing just how much history is in the city is a paradigm shift from being a 3rd generation immigrant from the states.

What really stuck with me was: "...a slab with a Roman pagan funerary inscription on one side which was re-used and has an early Christian inscription on the other side, in much cruder lettering."

It's about 3 inches thick, 15 inches tall and 3-4 feet long. It is mounted so it can be easily rotated. On one side the letters are chiseled out to perfection. The spacing is perfect, all the edges crisp and the angle of the cuts identical. The flip side looks like a 6 year old with a dull crayon scrawled out the letters on a blank sheet. The first letters are jammed together and then continue to get farther apart to the right and the next line does the same. This side was carved more than 200 years after the flip side.

Civilizations rise and fall and with them knowledge and skills are lost and rediscovered.

When we first entered the church our guide pointed to the uneven floor and later the 2 row of columns are not symmetrical. One sits a few feet farther from the wall than the other side. The reason is the arrangement of the supporting walls underneath. I forget the exact reason the floor is uneven other than something with the archways underneath. The author notes this and how the columns themselves are not identical and were looted from different sources.

The St. Peter's Baldachin is a lot of bronze. Although not confirmed the source may have been the Pantheon which was stripped of it's brass in 1625. The 16 pillars or pronaos of the Pantheon are 60 tons each. They were quarried in egypt ~110AD. Every building has a story behind it.

Visiting Rome:

My wife wanted the tour guide, I was less than excited about the whole idea. My wife was right and I openly admit I was totally wrong. I'm into history and my wife is into art and we're both Catholic so having a tour guide who knew where to go and could tie what we were seeing with our interests, walk us through the history of the city, and point out the idiosyncrasies like the author in this article all combined and added dimension and depth to the experience that was priceless.

If this article is what turns your crank I'd suggest a tour guide.

My wife and I are not the typical tourists as our 3 different tour guides all noted. We didn't take pictures because postcards, shopping was limited to Venezia save holy medals and other items to be blessed, we were filling in our knowledge Roman and Church history with details few would be interested in, and there were parts we'd ask to skip to spend more time in areas of interest to us. For example, we skipped parts of the Vatican Museum to focus on others and didn't need a tour guide inside St. Peter's Basilica so we extended our time in the Vatican Museum.

</comment><comment><USER14> This was a great read - thank you for sharing.</comment>


The Dream of New York's Forgotten Elevated Subway - <AUTHOR> https://jalopnik.com/the-dream-of-new-yorks-forgotten-elevated-subway-1838439070 <comment><USER2> One of my favorite fun facts about this area of Brooklyn, is that there was an elevated train perpendicular to the one described here, that today would cut straight through Pratt's campus, from north to south, and is the reason why there's such a wide space between the boiler building and the engineering building. It connected the G line to EL. It was also surrounded by tenements, which were eminent domain'd (along with the elevated train line), so that Pratt could get a campus. That's why Pratt's campus is still a public park.

It's interesting because it's a perfect counterpoint to what the city planners of the era wanted to do with Washington Square Park (replace an existing green space with a mass transit hub). Here, they did the inverse.

<comment><USER3> > _perpendicular_

Neat trick. I think it was the proximity to _elevated_ that made me do a double-take as to your meaning. I had visions of vertical trains, like those in sci fi (eg. 5th element).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The movie "The French Connection" was partially filmed around 86th Street in Brooklyn and featured an incredible car chase scene around the subway lines. Amazingly, the scene wasn't cleared by the city and there was a close call with at least one other car [1].

[0] [https://youtu.be/IzEloJ5venk](https://youtu.be/IzEloJ5venk)

[1] [https://www.roadandtrack.com/car- culture/entertainment/video...](https://www.roadandtrack.com/car- culture/entertainment/videos/a24683/the-french-connection-chase-was-shot-on- uncleared-public-streets/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The NYC blizzard of 1888 had a large impact on the city's decision to build subways which started construction in 1900.

[https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/The_Blizzard_of_1888;_the_Imp...](https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/The_Blizzard_of_1888;_the_Impact_of_this_Devastating_Storm_on_New_York_Transit)

</comment><comment><USER6> We have elevated subways in Chicago. The red line is elevated and underground, depending on where you are.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I think every line has elements that are elevated over streets as well as underground. And it's working fine, but that's because we fund them properly instead of closing them. ;)

By the way - CTA just released an update of their stunning "ride the rails" time-lapse videos filmed from the driver's seat. Really neat:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/CTAConnections](https://www.youtube.com/user/CTAConnections)

<comment><USER8> Just the red and blue. The others all run elevated or at grade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Berlin still has them! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxYiz4knmkU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxYiz4knmkU)

<comment><USER10> If i understand correctly, one of the distinctive things about New York's elevated railways is that they ran on top of roads:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevated_railway#/media/File:R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevated_railway#/media/File:Roosevelt- avenue-queens-nyc_cars_driving-under-elevated-railway-line_1980s.jpg)

Whereas that line in Berlin looks like it's on a viaduct. Lines on viaducts are all over the place, including in London:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_%E2%80%93_Greenw...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_%E2%80%93_Greenwich_Railway_Viaduct)

As in Berlin, and i'm sure everywhere, the arches get used as commercial or industrial premises. We have a particular fetish for putting craft breweries in them:

[https://www.beervanablog.com/beervana/2019/9/12/Londons- rail...](https://www.beervanablog.com/beervana/2019/9/12/Londons-railway-arch- breweries)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a very interesting elevated transportation network in Xiamen, China (a city in Fujian, not far from Taiwan) which uses long buses with dedicated lanes. It works quite well and merges nicely with other traffic where needed, or during construction or maintenance.

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

<comment><USER12> Big fan of BRT systems, but seems like they're mostly viable in places with low labour. Mexico City Metrobús bus surprisingly competent given it's conditions. Hope they have a future if self driving technology mature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish these were still in vogue. Street running light rail feels pathetic by comparison; stopping at intersections misses the point of a train system.

</comment><comment><USER14> Missing context from this article is that there was a whole trolley network which ran from lower Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge to what is today's Cadman Plaza park. The Myrtle el connected to this (I think the lines ran out along Myrtle and Fulton). Robert Moses "beautified" downtown Brooklyn by leveling much of the neighborhood at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge, including the trolley network. Devoid of the terminal, there was little value to the Myrtle Ave el. And the infrastructure was built to support trolleys, not the subway cars used throughout the rest of the system, so they would have had to rebuild much of the tracks to integrate into the existing network.

</comment><comment><USER15> How fast does an elevated subway go?

China is developing low-speed maglevs.

In a decade or two perhaps the future will arrive and we'll be moving millions of people within cities at the incredible speed of 100-120 km/h.

<comment><USER16> Generally slower than underground ones, because of issues like noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevated_railway#Modern_system...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevated_railway#Modern_systems)

</comment><comment><USER18> Those things must have been noisy. Like bringing the Manhattan bridge to your own neighborhood.

But if they could make them quiet, I bet people would like them.

<comment><USER19> For me quiet would not be enough. Being under the tracks on the road is dark and depressing. I'd prefer the trains/subways underground. No noise and I can see the sky when above.

Think of it this way. Imagine a street with a lot of cafes with outdoor street seating. Now imagine building an elevated train over the street. I believe most people would no longer find the outdoor setting to be pleasant even if the train was quiet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The popular High Line park in Manhattan was an elevated railroad (although freight, not subway).</comment>


Still not the end of food: Results of the 2016 soylent eaters survey - <AUTHOR> https://www.ketosoy.com/blogs/news/results-of-the-2016-soylent-eaters-survey <comment><USER2> _" 71% of respondents report eating 1-2 meals a day from soylent/future food, only 2% completely replace all meals. Market has more than tripled in the past year, now a $80-100mn market serving an estimated 1 million people a year"_

That doesn't add up for me. If 1M people spend $100M a year, that's $100 on average. Even if 29% eat only token amounts, those 71% that can eat the stuff 1-2 times a day apparently do so for around $140 a year, or $0.38 a day. And that while Amazon sells the stuff for about ten times that price.

I guess self-reporting isn't reliable, as the alternatives (the stuff is dirt- cheap elsewhere, lots of people produce it for themselves, or Soylent tries to create a market by giving it away for free) do not seem likely to me.

Edit: I just realized that my logic is broken: those eating it a lot are hugely overreprsented in the 'sample'.

<comment><AUTHOR> The 1,000,000 estimate is of people who've tried it one or more times.

A subset of those, 200,000 would be the ones to apply the 71% metric to.</comment></comment>


Comp. Sci PHD for JD? - <AUTHOR> Considering applying to Computer Science PhD programs and would like input.  Am currently a practicing public interest attorney.  Non-Stem/CS undergrad.  Think humanities.
I would like to transition into AI work and think PhD provides a good route to do so.  I have considered Masters programs, but don't want to take on debt (I get sense that Masters programs are generally unfunded) and I would like the opportunity to do a real niche deep dive/research.
Long term goal would be interesting industry gig w/ decent pay, but could see myself in academia as well.
Please share any advice, thoughts, ideas, suggestions, anecdotes, or warnings.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I do not think you can do a computer science Ph.D. without a strong quantitative undergraduate degree, ie computer science, math, physics. The Ph.D. application is a very clubby process, and it is more or less who you know, who you have worked for, where you interned (that is Google or Facebook). It is not really a five year school so much as a five year employment with minimal rights to the employee, and a lot of risk to the employer since your boss (advisor) has to commit to someone for 5 - 6 years without a prior internship relationship. Framed in this way, you see how difficult it is for you to get in a program now, it is basically impossible. Your best bet is to go through a post-bac computer science program (UPenn and Columbia both offer them), the program themselves are cash grabs for the university, but while in the program you can work for a professor and develop a relationship there, and then he/she will give you pointers. If you're in the program sometimes you can transfer to a related program that offers more math/theoretical comp-sci curriculum as well. You can become a "machine learning" scientist after this program, Ph.D. is not required. Honestly, I would say you're at least three years away from asking if you're qualified for a Ph.D.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


Experimental UK Gov site: alpha.gov.uk - <AUTHOR> http://alpha.gov.uk/

<comment><USER2> Not the kind of error page that I would expect to see for a government website! <http://www.alpha.gov.uk/fail>

<comment><USER3> Exactly! Revolution not evolution.

But in terms of branding, this error page is for when the entire prototype fails. It is not part of the prototype, and therefore doesn't adhere to Gov branding. It's more branded with the team's informal whimsy, and it obviously wouldn't appear in a live site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Incredible rethinking, atypical of big governments.

This, for the US, now. USA.gov works okay. It could really be better.

<comment><USER5> Same thing applies to Canada. It's full of information organized really badly. <http://canada.gc.ca>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like this, and I'm excited about the fact this was apparently developed "in house" rather than by some speculative design firm.

Obviously it needs work, and a few design elements/features need tweaking - but it's a massive step in the right direction. Hopefully someone internally will see and understand how great this is and help it move forward.

</comment><comment><USER7> Holy baloney. I'm just blown away, this is amazing. As a current state employee, I've seen the insane bureaucracy we have to battle just to redesign one internal site.

I would love to know how they did this. Are these contractors? Is it a seperate team? Is the redesign rolling out across all government departments? What is their CMS?

Oh man, I need details. If you were involved with this at all, please contact me...

<comment><AUTHOR> Their blog: <http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/> Twitter: @alphagov Their GetSatisfaction: <http://getsatisfaction.com/alphagov>

This is also interesting read: [http://puffbox.com/2011/05/11/ten-things- alphagov-gets-right...](http://puffbox.com/2011/05/11/ten-things-alphagov- gets-right/)

<comment><USER7> Sweet, thank you. I'm going to be reading for awhile now...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like a great move. Looking forward to see what happens on there.

Again, I must say, this govt seems to actually be moving its ass and doing things (even if they're not always perfect). Impressive and completely unexpected.

<comment><USER9> Especially regarding IT, keeping up with technology is a rare thing; there's no reason we can't have a modern website for all government services. But impressive as this may be, in other areas I'd reserve judgement as to whether it's a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I typed my question into the box, and I had the right information _instantly!_

This is so much more efficient than any other government site I've ever interacted with, by many orders of magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER11> That is absolutely the best government site I've ever seen. It looks like a person designed it, rather than one hundred committees.

<comment><USER12> Site credits: <http://www.alpha.gov.uk/humans.txt>

(also check out their very cool error page: <http://www.alpha.gov.uk/fail>)

<comment><USER13> Typical Scot, blaming the English for the problems! ;-)

[NB I am a Scot]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd be interested to see what this would actually be able to make it from alpha to reality. I get the feeling that the dev team want to build some real use statistics and get as much feedback as possible in order to pressure their higher ups to allow them to do it for real. I hope they succeed.

</comment><comment><USER15> It renders correctly in my customized firefox, unless many sites on the web nowadays. However, Google, WikiPedia and HackerNews render without problems too.

My settings are: Zoom Text Only, do not allow pages to choose their own fonts, Comic Sans MS for all fonts, minimum font size 20pt.

<comment><USER16> "Comic Sans MS for all fonts"

... I don't know what to say. At 20pt, too?

<comment><USER17> Maybe a troll with bad taste perhaps?

<comment><USER18> or dyslectic

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> According to a tweet [1] from their technical lead, they're using Rails, Sinatra, Django and more. He says there should be a blog entry outlining the technologies soon.

[1] <https://twitter.com/#!/jystewart>

</comment><comment><USER20> Coalition governments are _brilliant_.

See also the Open Government License[1] - it might not seem much to Americans, but compared to Crown Copyright it is a revelation.

[1] [http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government- licen...](http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/)

<comment><USER21> I have just finished reading Churchill's description of the WW2 coalition government, frankly, I love how the two parties were able to come together and function well, such that the opposition leader _was in the cabinet_.

It seems like such a fantasy of ever happening in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is actually pretty decent, its clean and usable which is enough of a surprised, but it looks like it might actually be useful as well. Geolocation was broken for me and @alphagov asked me for more information

Something feels strange about the govement asking me on twitter to give feedback on getsatisfaction

</comment><comment><USER23> The X on the popup modal doesn't work when the site first loads.

<comment><USER9> You can use the blue button to close it, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Still, doesn't make up for hushing up the fact that police arrested people at random under Section 60 for things such as wearing zombie paint, protesting against the royalty, filming the police, on the 29th.

</comment><comment><USER25> At first I was a bit meh, so what, especially as the welcome splash screen wouldn't close and required a screen refresh to get rid of it.

However, the blog's an interesting read on what they're trying accomplish. The point is to make the user's journey much better for common tasks (their example is a lost passport):

<http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/>

Check out <http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/alpha-gov-uk-design-rules> for example. They're openly ignoring IE6 and accessibility while they iterate interactivity, fairly brave for a government site.

<comment><USER10> _> Check out <http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/alpha-gov-uk-design-rules> for example_

In the photo, on one of those mission-statement postit notes, next to "no need to understant govt" and "task focus" there's one that says "spin is trust."

This rather sours the milk for me.

<comment><USER26> I imagine that's a joke.

<comment><USER10> Given the resemblance to Newspeak, and the also rather humorous state of their error page, you're probably right.

Although from a government that seriously thought they could sell off all the forests without anyone getting annoyed, I am unwilling to assume anything.

<comment><USER26> Not a joke, a typo - it's "Spin v.s. Trust" - <http://twitter.com/alphagov/status/68322599503011840>

(@alphagov turned round an answer to my question in less than a minute!)

<comment><USER27> Can't help but feel that they opted for spin over trust in that reply, I can't see how they meant that to be a 'v'.

My guess, and obviously I could be wrong, is that it was an internal joke, but not meant to be for public consumption for fear that people wouldn't get it and would criticise them for it.

<comment><USER28> It's clearly a 'v', the marker was just a bit dry. Go do something productive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "You pay. We decide."</comment>


Notionink's Adam (Android tablet) Demo Video  - <AUTHOR> http://notionink.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/eden-and-our-effort/

<comment><USER2> Tapping a panel to gain focus seems like the most asinine UI decision of all time. Even in the video you could see the user trying to use a panel before tapping it. Just a terrible flow-breaker. Otherwise, everything looks ok. Once actual reviews come out, I think they will sell quite a few of these.

</comment><comment><USER3> The "panel" concept reminds me of Twitter for iPad (which I really enjoy), just applied to the entire OS -- a sort of simplified implementation of 10/GUI (<http://10gui.com/>). It could definitely be more polished, but I'm excited for what this will bring in the future.

<comment><USER4> 10/Gui looks awesome. If this is were that polised I'd pre-order in a heart beat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was thinking on buying one of this, but it seems it is not ready yet.

I love tablets because of the portrait mode. It is way easier to read on portrait(the reason newspapers are multicolums). How is that possible that they make a tablet and design the UI to be landscape?

You won't need tap to focus on portrait mode. IMHO a bad idea designing it like a netbook. I can't understand it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is that Android with Hardware Acceleration? It's incredibly smooth animation for an Android.

</comment><comment><USER7> The UI seems .. congested and too busy.

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems unnecessary to me to have all your apps running simultaneously, but it does look nice.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. Right now I only have pidgin, evolution, transmission, two nautilus windows, a telnet client and firefox (with three tabs) running. It's completely unnecessary and I should be forced to never have more than one running at a time.</comment></comment>


French tourists face jail term for stealing sand - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49394828 <comment><USER2> This kind of law should be the norm. We are transitioning into an era where more people have more leisure time and many of these people will choose to travel. Imagine if every tourist decides to take 90 pounds of local resources. In time the area would lose all that makes it attractive to visit.

What irritates me is that all that sand would have eventually ended up in some trash dump doing no good to anyone.</comment>


iPad 2: Thoughts from a first time tablet user - <AUTHOR> http://paulstamatiou.com/apple-ipad-2-tablet-thoughts

<comment><USER2> I just ordered mine. I am not so thrilled about it. I ordered it mainly because I want to develop some apps for it. I did play with it few time at the local BestBuy and at friend's. I don't see anything special in it besides being a newer bigger iPod.

Graphics? Yes it's better (in fact better than all other tablets) but were you really able to see the difference. What about the average folks? Do you think they will be able to see the difference. I am picky but not that picky.

Duo Core? Big deal. Many other tablets are featuring the same. The one I played with at Best Buy had all the popular apps loaded. Angry Bird was not so smooth with swipe action. Home screen swipe was fine. Still not so buttery to me.

Thinner? Yes but it's not as impressive as Kindle or Nook. If it was that thinner I would be like oh yea.

2 cameras? Isn't this about time? Apple is behind on this. Most of the Android tablets had them from day one.

Having said all that, it is still a nice toy. It definitely changed our mobile experience. Netbooks look so dead or even Laptops look so outdated compared to the tablets these days. I don't see it as a game machine. Instead, it will be another entertaining in it's space. We will browse sites, take notes, look up howtos, share stories, photos, videos, listen to audio books and read books to our kids like never before. Android or something similar will lead the market space eventually unless Apple becomes open. However, iPad will still be seen as the trend setter for a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> Speaking of scroll speed, I didn't buy the first iPad because I mostly cared about it as a pdf reader and the resolution sucked too much. w/the ipad 2 the resolution still sucks so I figured it'd be no change. But when I used it in the store yesterday, scroll and zoom were so fast and seamless (even on 70-odd page pdf's in the browser reader) that I had no problem reading. Seriously considering one now.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I've found that the increased speed makes me more likely to [happily, successfully] use it for more "laptop things" than I did the old one. Having a Smart Cover that props it up well for typing sure doesn't hurt any, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty cool to see a screenshot of my app, Zite. Feel free to ask any question or suggest areas to improve!

</comment><comment><USER6> The best way of thinking about it that I've found: Did Flash games kill the PC gaming market? No. Will iOS/Android/etc games kill console games? No. Perhaps they'll encroach on the handheld market (PSP, 3DS), but I don't think they've got the same "depth" that most console and PC games do.

Don't get me wrong, it's a lucrative market to be in, and it seems much easier to break into for most developers (although indie PC gaming is also a good size scene) than traditional console/handheld development. I just really, really am not convinced that they'll kill off console games. I've never heard someone who's actually a more hardcore "gamer" entertain the notion, and that makes me think that most people making these claims don't understand the market for them whatsoever.

<comment><USER7> Personally I think historically one of the problems with Flash games was getting paid. Most people would love the revenue stream from an ad supported version of Bejeweled... but what else in Flash games is there that makes money?

There's farming games on Facebook I guess, but to read the devs blogs you'd think it was a never ending series of the playing field being moved all the time, and dodgy APIs.

To monetize their skills most of the Flash devs I know went to work for ad agencies, or switched to a different language and Flash became a hobby.

I think this is one of the "eleven secret herbs and spices" of iOS development, why they had an absolutely massive number of devs and apps, because there was this pent up demand from the indie devs, and no really good or easy way to fulfill it.

\--

You say "perhaps they (the iOS and Android games) will encroach on the handheld market (PSP, 3DS)"

I'm confused, didn't that already happen? Haven't the handhelds been in a death spiral since the iPod Touch took off big time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I fully agree that the iPad will increasingly encroach on the console games market. That may sound crazy but hear me out.

1\. Already the graphics on the iPad 2 are pretty good. I would argue they're _sufficiently_ good and only getting better (with better software and successive generations of hardware);

2\. 3D realism has I think overshot the mark. Nintendo has proven--and continues to proven--that you don't need the latest and greatest 3D engine to sell consoles and games. Remember too that many people are nostalgic about arcade games and systems from the 80s and 90s;

3\. Increased realism in games has really blown out art costs. I would argue that art now constitutes the majority of even big budget titles. The more realistic games get the higher this cost. Improved tooling has mitigated this somewhat but the cost continues to rise.

There is significant economic incentive for game producers to curtail art costs by developing on lower-spec platforms.

3\. The iPad is a multi-purpose device so, ultimately, more people are likely to buy it or devices like it than consoles (IMHO). Console makers continue to stretch the capabilities of consoles (adding VoD services like Netflix, etc) but ultimately it's still a TV. The iPad is a computer (albeit one with limitations). This will however take time.

I've been saying for the last year--and I continue to say--Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft should all be scared about the iPad.

<comment><USER9> You missed the biggest reason... cost of games is much cheaper. Even the Wii, with lower end titles, still cost much more than iPad games.

The big problem with the iPad is that it is not an enjoyable multiuser experience yet. Nothing beats having friends over and playing Madden on a big TV. This is one reason why I think PC gaming never really took off in a big way. Playing a game on a PC is basically an isolated experience (mitigated by online play).

<comment><USER8> You raise two good points.

As for the cost, they are cheaper but I don't necessarily see that as being structural. What I mean is that that there is that as capabilities expand, so will what producers can do with that platform. The cost will go up with this. This will, in part, be mitigated by increasing market size.

Or possibly publishers will finally learn that if games are cheap people will buy more of them, a lesson that has been consistently proven true from Steam price cuts (where selling a game for $5 made more than the original IIRC).

The second good point you make, which I missed, is the multi-user aspect of games like Madden. This is mainly because I've never been this way inclined. I haven't been much of a console gamer at all really. I'm more of a PC gamer that likes turn-based strategy games.

But I have bought and played a plethora of "casual" games on my iPad (and now iPad 2).

I see tablets as being fundamentally personal devices, not really something you play a game on with multiple people (unless they each have their own).

Still I see a huge potential market for games like Madden where each person has their own tablet as a control.

What about where the Apple TV (a future iteration) plays one view and each player has their own control so it looks like a real football game?

<comment><USER10> I know of several startups working on ipad 2 games that uses the ipod touch or iphone as the other controller. Or even THE controller. It's actually pretty cool.

The one I played made me think ... WOW ... goodbye console wars.

<comment><USER11> I was at an airport a few years ago and the plane was delayed. A mother pulled out her iphone, gave it to her kid and said he if he wanted another game he could only spend $1. The kid was entertained for the next hour while we all waited for the plane. I knew then that dedicated portable consoles were dead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This site forces my browser (Opera) into a (roughly) 1Hz reload loop. Nasty. No wonder I normally surf with javascript off!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hrm, any debug info would be helpful. I'm only running Disqus, analytics, cabel's fancyzoom.js and typekit.

<comment><USER13> What more info do you need? If it wasn't obvious, you are supposed to open your site in the Opera browser, making sure Javascript is turned on. You'll see how it just can't load.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was asking for additional info because I can't reproduce the problem in Opera (11/OS X).

<comment><USER13> Sitting in Europe (ping time 107 ms to your site), using Opera 11.01 on Windows XP I see the behavior joe_bleau described -- in the URL bar there's constant reloading visible when Javascript is turned on.

<comment><AUTHOR> is it disqus polling?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Replacement for consoles ? Come on...maybe only if you're a Sunday gamer.

<comment><USER15> Potential market for people willing to shell over $40 for a game?

Potential market for people willing to try on a whim that bird game the whole office has been talking about?

Serious gamers will probably always stick with the most advanced gameplay and technology. But there is a _huge_ market for people who have a few minutes to kill on trips, during commute, in front of the tv etc. As games are increasingly made with cognitive reward cycles in mind, one could argue, that the percentage of people who never play will shrink ever more.

<comment><USER16> But that (quite rightly) speaks of a new market for people willing to try some bird game on a whim: not a replacement for other gaming experiences that mobile is a long way from challenging.

It's Nintendo's hold of the portable market with this week's 3DS that seems most tenable and vulnerable to the proliferation of gaming on phones and tablets; I think we're a long way off of MSFT being worried about the 360.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Those big budget games also cost a gagillion dollars to _make_. My buddy worked at EA for a year. He would tell me stories of how they can spend over $50 million on a game and it makes $52 million worldwide. And EA is a billion dollar company. They consider that at best a break-even game and possibly a loser.

That same buddy now works at Microsoft. Do you realize that MS doesn't make money on hardware, on the xbox units themselves? I think they just started breaking even on the hardware in the last few months with that. That's _6 years_ of a top-selling product that they have lost money on. Meanwhile, they make something like $1.5 billion a year just on Xbox Live subscriptions, and more money on the licensing fees for games. I don't have any numbers for that.

Now also consider, as of April 2010 MS had sold 40 million Xbox 360's (<http://kotaku.com/#!5522559/xbox-360-40-million-sold>). That's over the course of 5 years. Meanwhile, Apple has sold at least 50 million iPhones in 2010 ([http://www.macstories.net/news/47-million-iphones-sold- in-20...](http://www.macstories.net/news/47-million-iphones-sold- in-2010-first-2011-shipments-to-include-cdma-iphone/)), 15 million iPads in its first year (<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/07/20results.html>) and another 1 million iPad 2s in its first week.

There have been 47.9 million Playstation 3's sold since November 2006 (<http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps3_sale_e.html>). Taken separately, the 2 popular consoles have taken 5-6 years to rival the number of units sold by Apple in a little over a year. If we take into account the number of iPhones and iPod Touches sold in previous years, its a safe comparison to say that Apple alone has an equal or larger number of units sold compared to consoles, at least in shear numbers. To top that off, estimates are that iPads alone will push 50 million by the end of the year, and who knows how many iPhone 5's will sell when it launches.

So the market almost always wins. Developers go where the money is. On the one hand you have the existing console market that has, for the sake of argument, 100 million units worldwide. On the other, you have the iOS combined platform of roughly the same or more number of shear units.

Consoles:

1) Expensive games ~$60 USD

2) Locked into your house. e.g. You can only play in front of your tv.

3) Limited utility, games, movies 4) Better controls for first person shooters. Crappy controls for Angry birds.

5) Amazing, if expensive, graphics. Sometimes. In fact, lots of $60 games kind of look like crap.

iOS (iPhones, iPads, iPod touches):

1) Inexpensive games $0.99-$10 (averages)

2) Portable. Can take it anywhere

3) Lots of utility. Phone calls, text messages, games, camera, video, GPS, shopping, movies, music, etc.

4) Crappy controls for first person shooters. Perfect controls for Angry Birds.

5) Median graphics. Not Crysis or Farcry level. But high-level of quality control and the best games look pretty good.

There's a lot of other reasons I can go into, but basically I'm trying to demonstrate that "better controls" have _nothing_ to do with it. Better graphics have little to do with it. You can buy like 10-20 games on your iPhone and/or iPad instead of 1 game on your xbox or playstation. And you can take them with you anywhere. And the market is a hell of a lot bigger, so you can sell more $5 games than you can $50 games.

1) Its cheaper to develop for iPhones/iPads/Android devices than consoles

2) There's more iPhones/iPads/Androids out there to sell to. Lots of people that aren't interested in consoles buy smart phones and tablets. Everyone loves to play games.

3) MUCH lower barrier to entry to make apps and games for iOS and Android then Xbox or Playstation.

<comment><USER18> I though hardcore FPS players mostly uses high-end PCs rather than consoles.

<comment><USER19> I think that supports his point. PCs have better controls and (high end ones have) better graphics than consoles. Despite this, more games are sold for consoles, and developers target them.

The same effect can occur for iOS devices - and their graphics will get better each year (9 times faster this year...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the moral of the story is that there is no point in going gaga over the numbers that hardware manufacturers serve up unless and until you can get your hands on the actual device (whether that be phone, netbook, CPU, GPU or plain old desktop) and try it out for yourself.

I think this is a problem that has long been embedded in tech journalism. We go all breathless over an extra 10% mega this or giga that, but 99% of the time that extra 10% doesn't matter.

But if they weren't getting excited over the latest fraction of an increment, what would they report on?</comment>


Will a Colony on Mars Save Us Humans from Extinction? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2008/04/will-a-colony-on-mars-save-us-humans-from-extinction.html

<comment><USER2> Us trying to colonize Mars now would be like the British trying to colonize the Americas with nothing but canoes. It's impractical with our current technology; too long and too risky.

<comment><USER3> That is the understatement of the millennium. The Polynesians actually _did_ colonize the remote islands of the Pacific with nothing but canoes. No problem.

The difference is that they found fresh water and air on, e.g., Easter Island. To say nothing of the edible plants and the fish. And it took them at least several hundred years to cut down all the trees. By contrast, I estimate that the Martian forests will take approximately 0 years to be totally harvested -- which is just as well, because the Martian lumberjacks will be scared to take out an axe lest they accidentally slice open their pressurized suits.

<comment><USER2> I read National Geographic this month, too. Which is why I chose the Atlantic, because island-hopping is not possible.

<comment><USER3> Now is when I wish that the real Vikings wore those cool horned helmets. Because I just had this awesome vision of Leif Ericsson, horns and all, glowering at you with the entire population of Iceland, Norse Greenland, the Faeroes, and the Shetlands arrayed behind him and Led Zeppelin's _Immigrant Song_ playing in the background. [1]

In other words: I'm guessing that the Atlantic is still five or six orders of magnitude more navigable than outer space. ;)

I haven't read _National Geographic_ in years, actually, although I might go check it out just to read about the Polynesians.

[1] If you find yourself wondering what I'm talking about, be sure to google "Immigrant Song Kittens".

<comment><USER2> Note that I deliberately said "canoes."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Terra-forming Mars would be pretty hard.

According to Dan Simmons in the novel Hyperion, we will need to develop artificial intelligence to the point of singularity. Their gift to us from the AI's evolved beyind singularity will be space/time singularities which will allow us to travel and prosper in other worlds.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Pick your poison. Nuclear holocaust. Disease. The death of our Sun. It doesn't matter. "

I would suggest it does matter. The death of our Sun could not be avoided by living on Mars.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I was suggesting a colony on Mars would "start the process..." I think it would be wise to colonize Mars before going extra-solar.

<comment><USER5> Okay fair enough, I'll agree to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of Google on April Fools' Day, creating a project willing to do exactly that.

<http://www.google.com/virgle/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's funny, but it is also a shame Mars colonization has become a butt of jokes instead of a reality. Or perhaps it means it is getting closer to reality in peoples' minds if it is an April Fools Joke (in the sense those jokes are often supposed to trick people)?

<comment><USER6> _Or perhaps it means it is getting closer to reality in peoples' minds if it is an April Fools Joke_

I think that's true, but I don't see it as a shame to be a joke in any way. I mean, in Google case, the joke is more in the application form and other subtle things, like the last FAQ question (<http://www.google.com/virgle/faq.html#11>) and the error page (<http://www.google.com/virgle/error.html>), which says, amongst other things:

      "... Virgle isn't real.

      Yet."</comment></comment></comment>


Why does the universe appear fine-tuned for life? - <AUTHOR> http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/why-does-the-universe-appear-fine-tuned-for-life/ <comment><USER2> Lets suppose that i take a step in a random direction each time. And if is some moment i end in a city, I say that the path was predestined from the beginning to end in that particular city. It could ended in another city (and the same conclusion, with that different city, would had been reached) or never end in any city (and noone will ask that question). But the path taken was random, is the observer the one that put the meaning on it at the end of the path.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because we're the flavor of life that is suited to this universe. If the universe were different, life would be different (but they'd eventually ask the same question). The question gets it backwards.

Wasn't it Voltaire who remarked about how amazing it is that the nose is just the right shape to hold up one's glasses?</comment>


Fable: F# to JavaScript compiler - <AUTHOR> http://fable.io/ <comment><USER2> Why not show a code sample on the homepage? None of Home, Docs, or Samples have a single code snippet on the entire page, you have to click through.

Crystal and Rust are good examples of language homepages that give you an idea of what you're getting into up front. Or for a transpiled language, PureScript.

<comment><USER3> you can go to the samples... but you will quickly notice a lot of the samples are canvas orineted things, because Fable gets to be in control to do things F# like. There's a vue and react example, but the code doesn't show any real advantage. Very little examples of typical web pages.... just a link to fable- elmish..... so... you may as well use elm. This is a common problem for F# in general, it hasn't really carved a slice of a world where it dominates. It's a nice language, but hard to make it a first choice.

Though one area I think it's quite nice is parsing, I like FParsec

<comment><USER4> Hi, fable-elmish author here. Elm is great if you don't care about investing into two ecosystems or don't have a backend, or don't have a Native client in addition to Web, or don't care about what JS ecosystem has to offer.

Fable lets one use F# for both frontend and backend, and being able to share the code (models in particular, but really anything) while maintaining clear separation of tiers reduces your code base and dramatically improves quality w/o the need for elaborate tests.

Fable-elmish lets one use the same frontend code and architecture to write Native and Web apps. Again, YMMV, but at our company being able to transition an entire team between completely different types of projects avoids expertise silos and makes truly cross-functional teams possible.

We have OSSed a lot of our backend tech that helps building event-driven system in F# as well, in case anyone's interested: [https://prolucid.github.io](https://prolucid.github.io).

As Tomas said, just like Lisp in Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages" has been his secret weapon, F# is ours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first thing I worry about reading something like this is how leaky the abstraction will be. I would love to ditch JavaScript for pretty much anything else but if I need to think about the JavaScript part anyway because of certain things that I can or cannot do I prefer to think in JavaScript from the get go.

<comment><USER6> This is a tricky one. If the abstractions were not leaky, you would not be able to interoperate with JavaScript libraries and you'd have to reimplement everything that powers the modern JS ecosystem. On the other hand, if the abstractions were too leaky, you'd lose all benefits of a nice language like F#.

I think Fable strikes the right balance. There are some leaky aspects of how it compiles to JS, but this means that you can quite well use it with existing JS libraries and for things like parsing JSON (you can just cast JSON object to F# records and it'll work).

So, you need to think about something about the JS part when you want to do JavaScript-y things, but you still get plenty of nice help from the F# compiler when writing the logic that the functional-first style makes so much easier.

In my experience with Fable, this pragmatic approach is what makes it great.

<comment><USER7> > _you can just cast JSON object to F# records and it 'll work_

Isn't a "JSON object" just a string?

<comment><USER8> He probably wanted to say "plain JS object", which is denoted in JSON. You can put JSON in a string, but the syntax is called JSON as well.

<comment><USER6> Yes, that's what I meant, thanks :-). The idea is that you can just write `unbox<MyType>(jsonParse("{whatever:42}"))`.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been watching and trying Fable for two months after I wrote a demo in ReasonML/BuckleScript, because I need a full-stack language for my side projects and Fable is much complete and stable, and the backend story is also much better than OCaml or BS bindings for Nodejs.

<comment><USER9> Here are some real-world examples:

A Server-Client full-stack scaffold: [https://github.com/SAFE-Stack/SAFE- BookStore](https://github.com/SAFE-Stack/SAFE-BookStore)

A React-Native scaffold: [https://github.com/SAFE-Stack/SAFE- Nightwatch](https://github.com/SAFE-Stack/SAFE-Nightwatch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone point to a resource for learning F# from scratch?

I have tried a few tutorials but the syntax is so foreign to me that I've found it hard to grasp.

What would be awesome with a project like Fable would be to have a tutorial for existing JavaScript devs to learn F#. For example, have JavaScript and F# code side-by-side.

<comment><USER11> Try this course from FSharpTV: [https://fsharp.tv/courses/fsharp-programming- intro/](https://fsharp.tv/courses/fsharp-programming-intro/). They have a lot of other content too but this is the introductory course that's aimed towards beginners. It might be helpful.

And try the [https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/](https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/) site too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > export { _ as $2665$ };

Why significance does that have in javascript?

[http://fable.io/repl/](http://fable.io/repl/)

<comment><USER13> It's exporting the function with the name unicode name "(heart character here)"

       let (heart) x y = x + " loves " + y

EDIT: I guess Hacker News doesn't support unicode characters. (Not a bad thing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> great! now we just need more than two people that know f#. i keed...kinda ;)

<comment><USER15> That would require Microsoft, the F# team, and the vocal F# community members to actually want F# to be a proper first-class .NET citizen, which sadly isn't the case.

[https://np.reddit.com/r/fsharp/comments/6tdrwq/after_so_many...](https://np.reddit.com/r/fsharp/comments/6tdrwq/after_so_many_years_still_no_net_native_nor/)

<comment><USER16> As a sometimes-user of F#, I'm quite happy not caring about a dead-end technology like UWP and .NET Native, thank you very much. I'm glad everyone else seems to agree about that, too.

<comment><USER17> How things are going, I bet those dead-end technologies have a brighter future than F#, specially when I see those Microsoft bashing comments.

If it comes to be, lets see how long F# survives without Microsoft support.

<comment><USER16> Microsoft bashing? Where did I do that?

I run a few things on .NET Core today and it's great. I'll probably runs some things in Azure soon enough. I just think UWP has no future because its primary device type (Windows phone) is dead, and it hasn't seen any uptake in the enterprise to replace Winforms and WPF. F# seems just fine to me, and it's supported for my app type. Perhaps you need to rethink your choices in development technologies.

<comment><USER17> I am speaking about the tone on F# tweets and on Github coments regarding Windows, UWP and .NET Native.

I did rethink my choices in technology, F# is not worth my time for production code anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> also FunScript "F# to JavaScript with type providers"

[http://funscript.info/](http://funscript.info/)

<comment><USER6> Fable pretty much replaced FunScript - all the activity around F# to JavaScript translation moved from FunScript to Fable nowadays!

<comment><USER18> What's the licensing?

 _" you only pay for what you get"_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Aren't languages described as 'functional' a little too often...

<comment><USER20> They frequently are, but F# definitely falls into the functional category, unless you only consider pure functional languages like Haskell.</comment></comment>


GMail attachment hint with misleading message - <AUTHOR> http://user.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/gmail/

<comment><USER2> I wonder why it's not done like the "undo send" feature (I'm aware that it just delays the sending, so that it could be "undone"): "it seems that you wanted to send this e-mail with attachments; do you want to go back and add them?"

<comment><USER3> I assume because the concept of those messages and the 'undo' action they contain match. The message is a confirmation of sending and the action is to undo sending. Having read the message once and learn about it allows you to dismiss it in future interactions.

Moving this message of 'did you forget an attachment?' to that same message would result in a mixed and unpredictable result -- unpredictable because you didn't know you forgot about the attachment. You expect a confirmation message, dismiss it (meaning you don't even look at it), but instead the attachment message might have been shown there. You wouldn't have known.

<comment><USER2> That does sound confusing, yes. Perhaps what Thunderbird does, then: shows such information bar as soon as one of the "attachment-related" words is found in the message or subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> GMail is smart really. :-)</comment>


Nginx resolver security advisories - <AUTHOR> http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2016-January/049700.html <comment><USER2> Related, can anyone explain why nginx uses its own resolver instead of the system one?

<comment><USER3> I have no idea if it's substantiated but I've read accusations that it's so you'll pay for the commercial version. Apparently the open source version ignores the TTL and just caches it until you restart the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After an upgrade to 1.8.1 our rewrites (alias+regexp+try_files) stopped working.

<comment><USER5> Related to this?

*) Bugfix: the "try_files" directive inside a nested location given by a regular expression worked incorrectly if the "alias" directive was used in the outer location. from: [http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES-1.8](http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES-1.8)

<comment><USER4> Yes, probably related. I reported it here: [https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?11,264181](https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?11,264181)

<comment><USER6> From my read of the docs, try_files expands aliases, so the alias directives in your location blocks are unnecessary, causing nginx to look for /home/mysite/www/js/js/whatever.js

<comment><USER4> You're right, thank you. The aliases are completely useless. It's just strange to introduce such a change in a "stable" release.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


10.8k+ archived NIST documents w/ gov. shutdown - <AUTHOR> https://csrc.nist.rip/library <comment><AUTHOR> In short:

\- [https://csrc.nist.gov](https://csrc.nist.gov) doesn't serve its content anymore due to the US government shutdown.

\- [https://csrc.nist.rip](https://csrc.nist.rip) is a mirror pulled from archive.org and [https://csrc.nist.rip/library](https://csrc.nist.rip/library) its searchable index.

Intended use case is to restore access to reference documents by replacing .gov by .rip.

I added the index for batch access and easy retrieval: for example, searching crystals gives the candidate implementations used during the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization process.</comment>