How the Recession Reshaped the Economy, in 255 Charts (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/05/upshot/how-the-recession-reshaped-the-economy-in-255-charts.html <comment><USER2> A very interesting set of graphs but it takes quite a bit of time to digest the information presented. The most interesting part, which is not immediately obvious until you start checking the graphs individually is how little wages have grown over the past 10 years. Even in booming sectors such as pet grooming, etc. today will will be earning essentially the same wage as you were 9 years ago.

The growth in (mostly) all-things related to software is not much of a surprise, though that old gas related activity was the only other bright spot in the economy (more jobs, higher wages) was. However, even in software, average wages are increasing, but not by a lot. Obviously the average wage is probably not that informative but perhaps it does point to a fundamental limit in human productivity that will only be overcome with better tools and techniques.

<comment><USER3> Wage stagnation isn't just the last decade, it stretches back 40 years, and it has nothing to do with limits in productivity.

In inflation adjusted terms, worker productivity has increased almost 75% between 1973 and 2013, while compensation for production workers has increased less than 10%. Wages at the top 1% have grown 138% since 1979 compared to 15% for the bottom 90%, and it gets direr if you start looking at the bottom 50% (stagnant) or bottom 10% (5% decrease) instead.

Our economy is producing more and more, we are far from hitting any kind of limits on productivity, but it's only enriching a select few while the vast majority deal with flat income and ever-rising cost of living.

[http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage- stagnation/](http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)

<comment><USER4> Just gonna rip this straight from an /r/Economics comment yesterday:

>Using wages as a picture welfare is unproductively restrictive. Using total compensation yields a very different picture.([http://i.imgur.com/nCCCuSC.png](http://i.imgur.com/nCCCuSC.png)) Real compensation accounts for all forms of income paid to employees, including health care costs and defined contribution plans. Additionally, the CPI overstates inflation, and changing household dynamics/other forms of income ([https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the- region/where...](https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/where- has-all-the-income-gone)) have substantive implications for any picture of overall income growth. Context matters for how we should view these trends.([http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll- re...](http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll- results?SurveyID=SV_dbvXvc4ED41vtv7))

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/3by8tb/elizabeth...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/3by8tb/elizabeth_warren_the_average_family_in_the_bottom/csqnpop)

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately that's clearly sophistry. The money is being spent involuntarily, for benefits the recipients has no control over, with little or no market leverage, priced in ways that aren't genuinely open to competition.

It shouldn't take much thought to realise that's exactly how taxation works.

So effectively that argument simply treats benefits that would be funded from taxation in more rationally managed countries as somehow _magically equivalent to private income._

Clearly, that's not even _good_ sophistry - although it's about par for the course for a modern orthodox economic argument, so I suppose no one is going to be surprised by the low quality.

<comment><USER6> Those benefits aren't funded from taxation, they are funded by your employer. And they most certainly count as compensation. If your employer promised you a full pension, wouldn't you consider that a part of compensation?

<comment><USER7> Parent's argument was that it's disingenuous to count e.g. health insurance as part of compensation when it's required by the State. That's not private compensation, it's a tax on corporations.

Post-ACA, a company calling health insurance part of your compensation package is like them calling payroll tax part of your compensation. Which almost no one does historically, because that's stupid.

It's not reasonable to argue that "real compensation" has increased between year X and year Y by counting tax burdens in year Y but not in year X. The reason that such a comparison is stupid and wrong should be obvious. It's slightly more reasonable to argue that additional taxes have eaten up projected wage increases. (But that argument is wrong.)

 _> If your employer promised you a full pension, wouldn't you consider that a part of compensation?_

The difference here is that the Government more or less never requires a private company to provide a full pension.

<comment><USER8> So if the government taxed each corporation $1000 per employee, then gave you that $1000 back at the end of the year, that would mean your wages were less by $1000 a year?

 _it 's not reasonable to argue that "real compensation" has increased between year X and year Y by counting tax burdens in year Y but not in year X._

It is when the government introduces new "taxes" in year Y, which would have been equivalent to salary in year X.

<comment><USER7> _> It is when the government introduces new "taxes" in year Y, which would have been equivalent to salary in year X. _

This is a different argument and I've already addressed it in my post above:

 _It 's slightly more reasonable to argue that additional taxes have eaten up projected wage increases. (But that argument is wrong.)_

Again, the argument you are making is that taxes offset increases in income that would have increased otherwise, _NOT_ that income has actually increased.

But, as I stated above, this argument is clearly and obviously wrong -- a conclusion that is unambiguously supported by the data. Tax increases cannot explain a multi-decade stagnation in income, _ESPECIALLY_ because _NET_ corporate taxes have net decreased in that period of time [1].

(As a complete aside, when every corporate tax break is passed on to either the customer or the employee, I'll be ready to entertain even the criteria I established above. But while companies pocket the difference and perform stock buy backs [2], economists who argue tax increases count as increases in income are being disingenuous (edit: changed wording).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Effective_Corporate_Tax_Rate_1947-2011_v2.jpg)

[2] Clinton mentioned that H.W. Bush warned him not to provide a no-strings- attached tax holiday for this exact reason; see his latest interview on the Daily Show.

<comment><USER8> Please be civil, I'm not going to "fuck off" just because you argue in an aggressive manner.

All your verbal arguments are obfuscation. This is simple arithmetic.

What we would _like_ to measure is the total post-tax and post-govt spending utility of a person:

total utility = post-tax compensation + govt spending per person.

That is what should be going up. But it's hard to measure all these things, so instead we can try to measure total compensation. When you redefine health care to be a tax, you are moving health care from the "post-tax compensation" category, to the "govt spending per person" category. Then you are arguing that post-tax compensation is going down, but that is just because of your accounting choice.

Your logic would only apply if the government was initially providing free healthcare, and then moved to a regime where healthcare was provided by employers, which is not what happened. The problem with your reasoning is that it deals with everything _except_ economic fundamentals, i.e. total consumption per person.

<comment><USER7> _> Please be civil, I'm not going to "fuck off"_

Sorry, I didn't mean you specifically (unless you're an economist, I guess). You're right though, I've changed the wording.

 _> Your logic would only apply if the government was initially providing free healthcare, and then moved to a regime where healthcare was provided by employers, which is not what happened._

The government shifted the responsibility for insurance from individuals to corporations. Fact: if a company does not provide insurance, then they pay a tax. Fact: SCOTUS called this requirement a tax.

 _> The problem with your reasoning is that it deals with everything except economic fundamentals, i.e. total consumption per person._

The problem with your argument is that you assume that taxes attached to empoyment are somehow different from other taxes, and ignore the fact that businesses have benefited from decreased taxes for decades and yet wages have stagnated. (Edit: Concretely, if I impose a new flat tax on corporate profits, does that count as "compensation"? No, it doesn't. The issue of how it effects compensation is separate. Just because a tax is attached to employment doesn't make that tax part of compensation.)

Again, the issue is dead simple: do increased corporate taxes explain income stagnation? Given that corporate taxes have in fact _decreased_ over the time period we are talking about, the causation you're proposed is literally vacuous ("vacuous" here is a technical description of the problem with your argument, not an insult).

In general, think of taxes attached to income "use taxes" on the country's human capital, rather than "mandatory employee compensation". Because historically we have _never_ included taxes as part of "compensation", and starting that practice now is uninformative unless we take into account the global perspective on corporate taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting. It seems recessions always accelerate economic shifts. Any similar articles about Europe?

<comment><USER10> I can not see much economic shift - in the majority of the cases the trends pre and post crisis are pretty much the same, they just experienced a dent. A few show trend changes but this is of course expected when you look at that many time series.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What happened to HR professionals? That was a devastating decline in an otherwise stable sector.

<comment><USER7> If you're looking to shed weight ASAP without undercutting the future of the organization, HR is an easy target. Maybe not wise, but you can understand how executives could come to the decision to cut HR before Engineering, for example.

Also, I'd imagine at least some of the decline is for the same reason we've seen decline in lots of other sectors -- HR processes are some of the easier ones to automate (no robotics, often tasks are fairly well defined)</comment></comment>


Intel details Thunderbolt as exclusive to Apple until 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/24/intel_details_thunderbolt_as_exclusive_to_apple_until_2012.html

<comment><USER2> Am I missing something, or is this as idiotic as it sounds? Seems like a great way to guarantee that hardly any device manufacturers will bother with it.

<comment><USER3> Apple's pride is really swollen these days. The downfall will be as fun to watch the second time as it was the first.</comment></comment>


50 Best Websites for Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/drew-hendricks/50-best-websites-for-entrepreneurs.html

<comment><USER2> I noticed they link to 'hackernews.com' which hijacks the hits to a domain called 'spacerogue.net'. If anybody knows how to reach the authors could you please ask them to fix that?</comment>


Celebrate GAAD – Review the accessibility of your website - <AUTHOR> https://ckeditor.com/blog/Practical-web-accessibility-guide/ <comment><AUTHOR> There is also a very handy checklist if anyone's interested. [https://ckeditor.com/blog/Web-accessibility-testing- DIY/](https://ckeditor.com/blog/Web-accessibility-testing-DIY/) Here is to keeping web accessible :)</comment>


On To Google Ventures - <AUTHOR> http://parislemon.com/post/49782762413/on-to-google-ventures

<comment><USER2> That people have these sorts of ties/influences seems challenging at best and unprofessional at least.

I do not believe you can make a product successful by driving rage views to the sign-up page. I do not believe you can make a product successful, _as an investor_ , when you have such a polarizing influence on people. I don't know what that means for Google Ventures and I don't know what that means for MG Siegler. So that leaves me perplexed on this move in general.

That leaves me wondering what the angle is.

Crunchfund breakup? Propaganda piece muzzled? Impact mitigation? Arrington payback? Lots of questions and no answers.

And why does the tech industry tolerate reporters as investors? Do Hollywood Agents write for the Hollywood Reporter? Do wall street bankers report on news on CNBC? Do FDA administrators write articles about the biotech companies?

<comment><USER3> MG Siegler is quite clearly not a reporter anymore. He's a venture capitalist and he writes infrequent opinion pieces on Apple and Google products for TechCrunch.

<comment><USER2> From his posting: _"As for my writing… I wouldn't expect much to change. I'll still be writing columns for TechCrunch and I'll still be writing here and elsewhere as time permits."_

Now its one thing for someone like Fred Wilson to have a blog [1] where he opines about technology as Fred Wilson, VC. Its something different to have Techcrunch opining about the tech industry as seen by their reporter MG Siegler[2].

[1] <http://www.avc.com/>

[2] <http://techcrunch.com/author/mg-siegler/> (presumably being updated as we type)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At the risk of sounding jealous, I can't quite see how MG could be that helpful to startup tech companies. I would think partners at funds like Google Ventures should have experience building things (e.g. Kevin Rose), or at least being part of a management team that facilitates the building of things.

That said, I enjoy(ed) MG's Apple coverage at TechCrunch, and wish him the best at GV. I just hope he stays long enough to make a meaningful impact on the companies he's writing checks to.

<comment><USER5> Maybe he's there to hype the crap out of the companies they invest in? Hyping and writing is all he does.

<comment><USER6> And shit talking Android and reluctantly admitting in each review that it's basically perfect but then stilling digging at it and boasting about how iOS can cure cancer.

<comment><USER5> I expect he will learn "to love" Android, like another recent Google employee did <http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226164>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This kinda makes me want to puke.

<comment><USER8> Couldn't have said it better myself. There hasn't been a more unashamedly biased "reporter" than MG Siegler in recent memory. At least Gruber never tried to be anything approaching legitimate.

I don't understand how he could be expected to be even-handed as you would hope a VC managing a large cash pool would be.

<comment><USER9> Just some feedback. When I read the first part of your comment, my brain was engaged with what you're saying. "How do we feel about MG Siegler's overlapping careers as investor and writer, and about that trend, and about the TechCrunch legacy, and" _thud_ a Gruber comparison.

Then I stopped thinking, because I don't think I can learn anything from someone who thinks John Gruber and MG Siegler are comparable; the only thing they seem to have in common is an appreciation for Apple products. So... your issue is, you don't like Apple fanatics. Got it.

<comment><USER10> apple fans who are biased against anything non-apple who both act as journalists (to a differing degree). There are similarities.

<comment><USER11> I don't think Gruber makes any pretense of acting as an objective journalist at all, he's just a guy that writes about things that interest him. It's true that the things he chooses to write about frequently fall into the "Apple gets this right, everyone else is on crack" category, but (usually) he's got a valid observation to make. If there's any pro-Apple bias, it's in the specific topics that he chooses to write about (things that make Apple look good) as opposed to bias in the content itself.

There's a difference between being selective when you choose what to write about and actually being biased in how you present a topic once you've committed to write about it. I think he's guilty of the former but (usually not) the latter.

The fact that he spends so much time countering what he sees as invalid criticisms of Apple by market analysts ends up making a huge difference in the mix of topics he covers. I totally think DF would be a lot more interesting if he actually tried to cover a much wider swath of topics and perspectives though. There are weeks on end that are nothing but "claim chowder" articles and harrumphing about dumb analysis by other people, which can be justified sometimes but it seems like he could be doing so much more.

<comment><USER10> I dont find _the pretense of acting as an object journalist_ particularly relevant. Actions speak louder than words. (my point being that MG is less of a journalist than people think, thus making him a fan-blogger like Gruber which is the comparison that this thread originally was about)

There is a fine line between blogger and journalist nowadays. In fact its closer to overlapping circles than a hard line. So while you made a good case that DF is more of a blog than a journalism site, I dont think its 100%.

If you were to ask me if MG is a blogger or journalist, I would scratch my head and probably answer that he is a blogger who works (worked?) for an opinion-dominated news site.

Its hard to separate bloggers from journalists. I dont think Gruber is to blame for that. MG and techcrunch have no qualms about it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guess deal flow trumps everything else. MG Siegler can almost certainly generate significant deal flow (I assume this was the same thesis behind getting Kevin Rose on board). Yeah, he's seen as a goofball of the internet, but I guess all that really matters here is finding the interesting deals and getting them through the door. I have no problem believing that MG can do that. As they'd say, "MG has substantial visibility."

<comment><USER13> In addition to visibility, I can imagine having an advisor that worked in and is well connected in the tech press world would be beneficial to many startups. I think he can offer some insight into a blindspot for many startups. While his reporting was too biased and too often linkbait for my taste, his writing never led me to believe he is stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't wait to read more unbiased "news" from MG and the team at TechCrunch.

<comment><USER15> How is that comment relevant to this article?

<comment><USER16> "As for my writing… I wouldn't expect much to change. I'll still be writing columns for TechCrunch and I'll still be writing here and elsewhere as time permits.

Obviously, there will be some knowledge that I become privy to that I won't be able to share — but that's not any different than it has been with many of the startups I've worked with over the past 19 months. The difference now is that some of that knowledge will be about one of the most successul startups of all time: Google.

Yes, they're letting an Apple fanatic into the building — wild, I know. But as I said, I left the reporting path long ago. I'm on a new path now. Don't worry, I'm bringing my iPhone with me."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ahh, now it makes sense why he's able to trash a product like the Surface while praising (with a straight face) a product like the Chrome Pixel.

</comment><comment><USER18> I see there are a lot of comments here doubting what MG can add to a venture fund or to Google. I think this comment from Sarah Lacy speaks volumes about MG's helpfulness to startups and entrepreneurs: <http://youtu.be/v-0wEMr- hlA?t=50m58s>

Keep in mind that Sarah and the Crunchfund had a falling out in the early days of PandoDaily. She had no problem ragging on Arrington, but felt compelled to praise MG and specifically cite how he is helpful to entrepreneurs and startups.

I am curious to see how the next step in his career goes and how this affects his writing and how he reviews products and teams.

</comment><comment><USER19> And credibility of Google Ventures went down today.

His posts were filled with clueless rants with a side of his small minded ego. The guy is full of him self without accomplishing anything that would warrant that.

It actually annoyed me so much I wrote a grease monkey script years ago to block his garbage from TechCrunch (before they redesigned):

<https://github.com/AlekseyKorzun/TechCrunch-Douchebag>

<comment><USER20> "The guy is full of him self without accomplishing anything that would warrant that."

This would unfortunately describe alot of the VCs out there very well indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Gruber took ad money from Microsoft. This is just Siegler's one-up.

<comment> brown9-2 What problem do you have with that?

<comment><USER21> I wondered if I should have noted that it was meant purely as joke.</comment></comment></comment>


Know More, Sell More with Gumroad + Google Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gumroad.com/post/51090589438/know-more-sell-more-gumroad-google-analytics

<comment><USER2> Are you adding event tracking to help with funnels and conversion optimisation?</comment>


Cloudflare generating Pseudo-random numbers from 100 lava lamps - <AUTHOR> https://sploid.gizmodo.com/one-of-the-secrets-guarding-the-secure-internet-is-a-wa-1820188866 <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand)

(CF also mentions it in their blog post: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the- nitty...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty-gritty- technical-details/))

</comment><comment><USER3> What would better generate visual randomness for cryptography than lava lamps? I find this solution interesting as there are patterns to other seemingly random things in nature. For example, no ocean wave is ever going to be exactly the same, but they do follow a pattern of the tides. From a crytography perspective, how would a high resolution video of something like a beach compare as a solution?

<comment><USER4> Tenish years ago I wrote a pseudorandom number generator from webcam stills. Since I wrote the code in the middle of a midwestern winter, my first solution was a shot of the outside; falling snow. When the snow started to slow down, I moved to using a lava lamp. So to answer your question...falling snow works really well juxtaposed against clouds.</comment></comment>


Melbourne earthquake - social media analysis: G+ fails - <AUTHOR> http://blog.justin.kelly.org.au/melbquake/

<comment><USER3> The results from Facebook would depend on who your Facebook friends are, while searching for twitter hash tags shows results from all users.

To say "facebook was full of junk" when comparing to twitter is a bit unfair.

<comment><AUTHOR> re facebook - fair comment

re twitter - most comments came through via people im following - didnt search the hastag till later

mainly trying to understand why g+ didnt do as good as i expected it to do

i rally like g+ and was hoping the good info would be there right away - <USER2> twitter won the race

<comment><USER3> I guess it really highlights just how good twitter is. It will be interesting to see if g+ catch up by the next melbourne earthquake (2013?).

<comment><AUTHOR> agreed - at the moment twitter is better for real time location specific news - than g+, fb, or newspapers

i like g+ alot so hopefully it catches up - just not hoping for any more earthquakes any time soon :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AI winter is coming - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-winter-coming-sandro-skansi <comment><AUTHOR> The author of the above has another article "Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Consumer-end Technology and Science"

at

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/natural-language- processing-m...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/natural-language-processing- machine-learning-science-skansi-phd?trk=mp-reader-card)

My favorite excerpt from that article:

"... just one final thought: when computers came in our lives, there was a lot of unstructured data, and then we taught people to use business applications. We did not cater to them, we educated them. Today's emphasizing unstructured data as a possibility is a slap in the face to the generation (Gene Rodenberry pops to my mind right away) who thought humans could see how technology helps them, and that educated us to be machine friendly and understending (e.g. by using only alpha numeric ASCII (it includes the underscore) in filenames). The "rise" of unstructured data is first and forememost a failure in education. It is not an open future opportunity, but a missed past opportunity.

There is a story in financial markets: when there was the great gold rush only a few became rich from digging up gold, but many fortunes were made from selling shovels."[ a few misspellings corrected]

</comment><comment><USER2> Might not be such a bad thing. Get all of the money out of GP AI and maybe let the hackers take this one.</comment>


CIA controlled global encryption company for decades, says report - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-cia-bnd-germany-intelligence-report <comment><USER2> I thought this was common knowledge, it's not like there are too many choices on who's doing the compromising once you know they are indeed compromised...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG#Compromised_machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG#Compromised_machines)</comment>


Lixil AI-Based Toilet Analyzes Shape and Size of Feces with Camera and LEDs - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/10/29/lixil-ai-based-toilet-analyzes-shape-size-of-feces-with-camera-leds/ <comment><USER2> Hardly the first incarnation of this... and 80% accuracy doesn't sound very good. That's wrong more than once a week!

So why haven't these kinds of toilets taken off? Too hard to modify existing toilets? People don't care? Technology isn't there?

Seems like for those that are really interested, it isn't _too_ hard to just manually keep a log (pun intended).

<comment> awinter-py 80% accuracy is potentially fine for a time series, assuming the errors are random rather than specific to a user. You can denoise this stuff, and the recognizer should get better as the sample size grows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I already monitor methane, humidity, and CO2 levels in the bathroom and log them, this looks like a great addition to my system. No doubt as always I'll be accused of criminal behavior at this point, especially with the whole "camera in the bathroom where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy" legal issue. I contend that is _not_ an issue for "safety" monitoring such as gas levels. If I do implement an AI toilet cam, be assured it will point downwards not upwards. I agree an upwards pointing camera would be an extreme and egregious violation of privacy and rightly should be illegal and prosecutable. I contend though that photographing waste materials after they are disposed of is legal without consent or notification. And the company manufacturing the toilet cam product OP linked to obviously agrees completely with me and has a team of lawyers backing it up otherwise they wouldn't have spent a fortune developing this commercial toilet cam. (They say they are not commercializing the prototype in its current state, but they indicate the tech will be incorporated into future commercial products.) Also worth noting that my system and this system do not identify people using the toilet, unlike the legal and commercial "Therapy Bidet" which connects to the toilet user's Bluetooth to provide control at which point it obtains personally identifiable information. Amazing that that one is considered legal.

<comment><USER4> I think if you can monitor your gas levels with a regular camera then those levels are much much too high.

<comment><USER3> Why would you say something like that? Gas levels are monitored using gas sensors and an R-Pi custom monitoring station. There's no camera. I pointed this out. Reasonable expectations of privacy prohibit cameras in the bathroom. I contend though they don't prohibit diagnostic fecal cameras. Up cameras bad, down cameras not only good, but excellent and helpful. Safety gas sensors and logging are not illegal under any interpretation of privacy laws. I have every right to monitor dangerous gas levels, humidity and temperature in every room of my house without obtaining consent or notifying any visitor. The people here that have in the past claimed I am a criminal for doing monitoring have yet to make their legal case or as I have asked them to, to file a criminal complaint against me and my system. This is because they are armchair lawyers who have no case and little understanding of the law. They just like to badger innocent people who are not committing any crimes on the internet because that's what these sorts of armchair lawyers and busybodies do.

<comment><USER5> Running with the argument for a bit, I'd point out that such analysis reveals considerable biomedical data. Along with timing data on who uses the restroom, invasion of medical privacy would not be very hard.

<comment><USER3> An old friend and myself have had some extremely heated debates about whether the genomic sequence data his company collects from people and sells to everyone is biomedical data. I say that it is and is covered under HIPAA. He claims that is absurd and unreasonable and that genome sequences are simply not personal private medical data regulated under HIPAA. Many others in these debates have also disagreed with me and rebuked me claiming that even complete genomic data is not covered under HIPAA and is simply not personal medical information. I don't recall ever having a single supporter in my claim that a person's genome is private medical data.

Yet perhaps some of these happy to hate on me in the past and denounce my unreasonable opinion that genomes are medical data would now criticize me for monitoring conditions and levels of gases in my own private home as well as that of waste disposed of. Courts have repeatedly ruled that in disposing of cellular materials such as blood and sperm one gives up any rights to privacy. These materials can be collected from trash without a warrant. The reasonable expectation of privacy simply does not apply to things one has thrown away.

<comment><USER5> > I don't recall ever having a single supporter in my claim that a person's > genome is private medical data.

Huh. In Canada, that's a settled question. It is, at least with regard to e.g. a medical record that contains genetic information. We're also looking at laws which prohibit discrimination on the basis of genetic information.

Though more directly to what you're talking about, I think it is in fact legal for a private citizen to collect discarded biological material from a person and sequence it. A company would be prohibited, however. I am not a lawyer, though.

> The reasonable expectation of privacy simply does not apply to things one > has thrown away.

That can be fixed by statute. While the law is similar here in that items discarded are no longer protected by the constitution regarding search and seizure, statute prohibits a company, for example, from collecting banking information from discarded paperwork in the recycling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You gotta be shitting me...

<comment><USER7> It had to be said.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py this is the most important timeseries in health and we are literally flushing it down the toilet

changes in stool can tell you if your diet is right, if you're drinking too much, and are predictive for some specific diseases

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting factoid, I saw at a science museum that the Germans were really interested in stool shape and color as a sign of health and designed a toilet with a shelf for viewing the stool before flushing.

<comment><USER9> You know... I grew up with them, they are called 'Flachspüler' vs. the now common 'Tiefspüler'. From personal experience they were common up to 1990 or 2000. After this not so much anymore. Anyways, it had pros and cons, as everything. Pro: \- no splashing up to your behind from stuff dropping down into your piss. \- acessability for getting samples for medical 'shitworks' (not much of a factor, i had that maybe 5 times in my life?) Cons: Stinky, because 'open air', could be compensated by flushing early, multiple times.

Just for reasons of anti-stinkiness i prefer the 'modern' ones, and where i once placed a leaf of toilet paper into the bowl before using it to avoid too much cleaning, i now place a leaf of toilet paper into it to avoid 'upsplashing'.

Regarding cleaning, they usually were connected directly to high pressure piping, which roared liked the Niagara Falls trough it. Solutions with some tank up the ceiling with gravity assist were seen as inferior, and i may have seen them only a few times?

Never mind, back to topic:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If someone poops on the camera I guess it's all over

</comment><comment><USER11> i think rule 34 may rear its head and howl soon.

</comment><comment><USER12> Frankly who gives a s--t?

More seriously: it is a serious idea. Easy to spot first signs of a diarrhea outbreak on a cruise ship, refugee camp, etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> Memes become reality.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ)

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel sorry for those who did labeling for this company's AI algorithm.

<comment><USER15> Maybe they used Amazon's Mechanical Turd offering!</comment></comment>


How this optical illusion made me question my reality – The Verge - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/9/17217660/optical-visual-illusion-troxler-fading-neural-adaptation <comment><USER2> Other animals have even more movement-based vision than we do. I had a cat who honestly believed that as long as he remained motionless, he was completely invisible -- because that's how his vision worked and that's how the vision of anything he stalked worked. So when he would sneak into a room where he wasn't supposed to be, as soon as he felt a human gaze upon him, he would freeze in place, secure in the knowledge that his camouflage was perfect when of course it wasn't.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't talk at all about how it affects his perception of his reality.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's cute. Someone needs to try psychedelics</comment>


SEC Approves Plan to Issue Overstock.com Stock via Blockchain - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/12/sec-approves-plan-to-issue-company-stock-via-the-bitcoin-blockchain/ <comment><USER3> The Wired.com headline (but not the headline here at HN) is misleading. Per an Overstock SEC filing, any securities they (or t0.com) issue "will not be issued on the Bitcoin blockchain ... the ownership and transfer of such digital securities will be recorded on a proprietary ledger that will be publicly distributed."

<comment><USER4> It's only misleading if you thing "blockchain" is not generic but means "The Bitcoin Blockchain". Is this a common understanding?

<comment><USER5> How is this any better than a database?

<comment><USER6> Decentralized store and decentralized trust. The latter is hard with a publically accessible & editable mysql.

<comment><USER5> Except that this isn't decentralized - its a controlled blockchain that's only available for public download (which http does just fine) As does archive.org

<comment><USER6> I think you incorrectly understand how the blockchain can be updated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the biggest advantages of blockchains is that you can create your own private blockchain, and then hash the state of it every X interval and then put the hash on the Bitcoin blockchain.

You get all the the security of a 6.6 billion network without the costs.

<comment><USER5> Can't you just hash your mysql database instead of a blockchain? Where's the efficiency in using a private blockchain?

<comment><USER8> You can have a shared log between multiple parties where no one entity controls new entries with immutability and known entry ordering.

Private blockchains don't need to be as inefficient as cryptocurrencies either because they can have a very small, specific use case and feature set.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't http do this just fine? If you trust each other - there's no need for a blockchain.

<comment><USER8> How does http do this at all? Unless you're talking about each company running an API? But then you run into difficulty with actually trading debt. Say you owe me $10 and I owe Bank B $10 and they owe you $10. With a blockchain situations like that are easy to spot and automatically resolve saving the number of required settlements.

The point is that you don't have to trust each other since everything is in the open and shared between participants.

<comment><USER5> > Ok and what does the html page do to solve the problem?

You should check out archive.org. You'd be amazed how much better a job it does at retaining records than blockchain.

> You seem to be a pretty big fan of bitcoin. I've noticed a huge blindspot in > bitcoin proponents when it comes to private chains almost like they are > threatened by them.

Because blockchains are bad at this, and most of us are in a position to know that.

> Bitcoin was never going to win the markets/use cases

Agreed

> private chains make sense in

Not compared to databases. Do you know when NYSE and Nasdaq will switch to a blockchain? The answer is 'never'

> Bitcoin went the way of ultra generalisation which has resulted in it being > pretty much worse than everything else for everything else.

Agreed.

<comment><USER8> Heads up but if you click on the timestamp you can reply before the button appears.

I understand what archive.org can do I'm asking how it can help solve the situation I described? You have your web page with what on it exactly? How does that help cut down settlement requirements?

Also archive.org is centralized so all the participants would have to trust them. The people investigating blockchain alternatives are looking for ways around that.

>Because blockchains are bad at this, and most of us are in a position to know that.

But they aren't. Bitcoin is bad at it but that doesn't mean blockchains have to be it just means they will be if you go into the problem with bitcoin as your only toolset. One you remove the need for PoW they are barely any more inefficient than a master-master DB with the combination of immutability and known entry ordering.

>Not compared to databases. Do you know when NYSE and Nasdaq will switch to a blockchain? The answer is 'never'

Did I say it was better than databases for every usecase? The NYSE and Nasdaq are already centally trusted figures. There is little benefit they would get from a blockchain.

I gave you a use case a few posts ago.

<comment><USER5> > One you remove the need for PoW they are barely any more inefficient than a > master-master DB with the combination of immutability and known entry > ordering.

Once you remove the PoW - it's no longer a blockchain. That is what a blockchain is. If you believe that blockchain's don't require PoW - then off the bat you have major security problems. But in addition to that - <USER2> definition of blockchains would mean that we've been using blockchains since the 80's

<comment><USER8> So you don't consider PoS systems blockchains?

PoW literally has nothing to do with what the blockchain is only in deciding who can add the next block and there are a lot of ways to do that when you know all the participants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Though it will surely be a (very) long process, I'm excited about the ways in which blockchain technology can improve the efficiency of the financial system. There's an amazing disconnect between the speeds with which we can execute and settle trades. The former is on the time scale of milliseconds, while the latter is on the time scale of days.

Even if we disagree on the merits of HFT, we can surely agree that settlement is an unnecessarily slow and unreliable process. In September, 2011 (the most recent date for which I could easily find data), there was a failure to deliver $200M worth of stock per day! [1] In the Treasury market, the daily average is currently $50B! [2] Blockchain technology has the potential to solve this problem.

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

[2] [http://www.dtcc.com/charts/daily-total-us-treasury-trade- fai...](http://www.dtcc.com/charts/daily-total-us-treasury-trade-fails)

<comment><USER10> Failure to deliver is mostly due to naked shorts and can be easily solved by a corresponding regulation. It is completely orthogonal to the Blockchain concept: one can implement settlement rules which require locating shares prior to shorting them, another implementation wouldn't care about locating shares as long as there is an obligation to cover naked short at the end of the trading day.

Patrick Byrne from t0 will agree with you, but that's b/c he's against naked shorts.

[1] [https://t0.com/](https://t0.com/)

<comment><USER11> Patrick is well known to be the CEO of Overstock, son of John Byrne (Geico fame), and enemy #1 of the Naked Short sellers. What may be less known is his unbelievable fight against cancer.

I read his speech from a charity event back several years back, periodically, to keep perspective.

[http://www.pmc.org/blog/2015/9/17/pmc-threshold-moment- billy...](http://www.pmc.org/blog/2015/9/17/pmc-threshold-moment-billy-starr) (scroll down)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What happens if a malicious forks is introduced in the blockchain? I see two possible outcomes, with the latter much more likely than the former:

a) The blockchain protocol is the final arbiter of ownership, and those who purchased the stock in the other branch of the chain no longer own the stock. Caveat emptor.

b) Courts rule in favor of the people who actually bought the stocks and marks the attack branch as invalid. This is possible because the attack was witnessed by so many people.

It's unlikely that a fork would be resolved with (a), but if it does, there would be a lot of very pissed of investors and lawsuits. All it takes for such a fork to happen is someone with the motive to do it and the means to lean on a few mining pool operators.

It's more likely that we would see outcome (b), in which case, the courts are the final authority and then what the heck is the point of using an expensive, slow, poorly scalable, decentralized consensus system?

I totally see the value of a decentralized system despite the shortcomings, but if you're coming to do away with that aspect, what on earth is the point?

</comment><comment><USER13> I work for Overstock. Take a look at the company's stock trends over the last year to see the affect this has on them.

<comment><USER8> How do the employees feel about the CEO constantly chasing one cryptocurrency project to the next? From what I've seen it's just costing them a lot of money with almost no success in any of the ventures but is the response positive from inside?

<comment><USER13> The response is not positive, to say the least.

<comment><USER14> How much longer do you think he's got?

<comment><USER13> If he's smart he'll sell the company within the next 2 years and retire pretty nice on the exit. If that doesn't happen, I'd be shocked if they make it another 5 before total collapse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this is a really interesting idea. If you could issue stock as a million "units" on a block chain, then you could transact fractional units easily. Assuming you trust the ledger it would mean you really wouldn't ever have to split the stock. More units, more ownership, minimal brokerage fees/control.

Of course stealing the private key of the hot wallet representing 10% of Overstock.com, well that would be a very juicy target indeed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is notarizing your database state on the blockchain noteworthy? Were there many people censoring the database checksums of the NYSE or NASDAQ?

<comment><USER16> Normally I'd agree with this, but in this case one may suspect that Overstock's interest in blockchain technology is rooted in their war on naked shorting, which I guess is not possible if shares are tracked on a blockchain.

<comment><USER5> That's also not possible if Overstock itself managed it's issuance on a centralized database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does this mean that everyone using desktop wallets like Bitcoin Core will now be downloading a slightly more bloated blockchain?</comment>


Learning to Dress: Synthesizing Human Dressing Motion via Reinforcement Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aclegg3/projects/LearningToDress.html <comment><USER2> I was hoping DeepRL would come up with a more efficient way to dress that we could use :D</comment>


How Harvey Mudd College increased the ratio of women in CS - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/at-harvey-mudd-college-the-ratio-of-women-in-cs-increased-from-10-to-40-in-5-years-4bb72e909fbd#.yqq538plu <comment><USER2> This has been discussed in the past on HN ([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvey%20mudd&sort=byPopularit...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvey%20mudd&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)). The real howto is simple: take a tiny elite college; spend a _staggering_ amount of money poaching the few women interested in CS to your college and loosening admission rates; proceed to talk only about percentages when boasting about your success.

<comment><USER3> First, you present this statement as though all the other conversations on HN about Harvey Mudd have come to the same conclusion. This is demonstrably not true.

Second, I'd like to encourage you to not describe recruiting and admitting women as "lossening admission rates". That's the kind underhanded, unconscious sexism that we're trying to avoid here. Even if I accept as true that a higher percentage of men are qualified to be admitted to HMC's CS program (which I don't, but for the sake of argument...) the _absolute_ number of people -- men, women, and otherwise -- who qualify is so much larger than what HMC can support that it could admit a class of _0_ men and not have to worry about "lowering its standards".

It sounds like you've lost sight of the forest for the trees. Sure, a larger school might be able to have a larger impact. Sure, maybe Mudd isn't doing as much as it could, or is spending more money than it should. But it is still doing something demonstrably effective, which is more than most places can say.

<comment><USER4> > _That 's the kind underhanded, unconscious sexism that we're trying to avoid > here_

I'm interested in facts, not political correctness. Were admission rates loosened to accomplish the goals, or were they not?

> _It sounds like you 've lost sight of the forest for the trees._

Or have you? To me, the forest is graduating the best CS students, regardless of colour, race or gender.

<comment><USER3> > Were admission rates loosened to accomplish the goals, or were they not?

They were not. The class of 2014 (admitted in 2010) consisted of 101 women and 95 men, having more women than men for the first time in the college's history. The following year it swung back the other way, with only 42% of the incoming class being female. In both years, the same percent of admitted students were valedictorians or salutatorians at their high schools. In both years, the 75%ile SAT and ACT scores remained the same. Admittedly, I don't have access to all of the data, but the numbers I have show that there was no loosening of admission rates.

> graduating the best CS students, regardless of colour, race or gender.

I maintain two counterpoints to this argument:

* Especially when you're talking on the scale of admitting 200 students a year (only ~40 of whom will be CS majors) the difference between the best 200 men in the country and the best 200 women in the country is exceedingly small, if it exists at all. So given that the school is going to admit 200 _equally qualified_ people no matter what, it might as well admit them in the ratio that it chooses.

* That statement has an implicit assumption that _individuals_ are the best CS students. With a few notable exceptions, this is not true in the wider worlds of academia or professional industry. Teams with diverse skill sets, view points, knowledge, and experience perform the best in both academia and industry. So rather than trying to produce the 40 best individual computer scientists every year, Mudd tries to produce the 40 best team players who will succeed and make their chosen teams better by a multiplicative factor, rather than just an additive one.

EDIT: s/colleges/highschools/ when speaking of valedictorians

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I serve on the CS advisory board at another college that competes head to head with Harvey Mudd for students. Generally, when one of these schools celebrates having more women or a higher ratio than the others, it means they've managed to _recruit_ more of a static pool rather than growing the pool.

The college that I advise at took another approach to grow the pool while also recruiting better from the pool. They encourage profs to work with Girl Scout troops on science projects, to get students to tutor junior high and high school kids in general, and build relationships long before the normal "I have to think about college" thoughts begin.

<comment><USER6> It's not like recruiting more from a static pool is a bad thing either.

But it's commendable your place is actually trying to grow the pool, I have a feeling you should start 10 years earlier. Help children feel CS is a natural place for women to be, you'll be getting somewhere. This sounds like the correct approach.

<comment><USER5> This is less about CS specifically and more about STEM in general.. critical thinking, problem solving, and asking for help when you need it are things that _everyone_ can benefit from more of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What can I do to increase the ratio of women in CS/Engineering?

As the parent of a teenage boy and pre-teen girls here is what I do/can do.

Start/Coach/Mentor a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Team for your teenager. I coach an FTC team.

Start/Coach/Mentor a FIRST Lego League (FLL) Team for your pre-teen kids. I am in the process of forming an FLL team.

Have them recruit their friends/classmates into the team.

It can be a mixed gender team or all girls team.

Training to compete in these events force you into being part of a team, apply STEM principles learned in school into actual practical engineering applications. Build Robots and have fun doing so.

The FLL teams eventually feed into FTC or FRC teams.

I think this will give them very early experiences into what engineering is all about and give them the confidence to take up these streams in later life.

What is important is that at the earlier ages they are not yet peer pressured into gender specific expectations and is exposed to these topics in a positive way.

<comment><USER8> > What can I do to increase the ratio of women in CS/Engineering?

The question is, why do you want to increase the ratio of women? Is it just for the sake of increasing the ratio? That's not the way to go then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that splitting intro classes by experience is really important. In intro classes a lot of the more experienced (and thus less socially able) students are actively intimidating. I was helping out with a 100 level project and on the class forum people were "helping" by suggesting the use of regex and bit shifting. Intro students don't have to know about that yet, but seeing it in those settings makes them feel like they are behind everyone else.

<comment><USER10> > In intro classes a lot of the more experienced (and thus less socially able) > students are actively intimidating.

I think the developer community should try to not perpetuate the stereotype that those with experience programming necessarily don't have social skills. This type of thing is what pigeonholes us as "nerds" who are incapable of being involved in the business side of projects.

<comment><USER11> Not sure why this is getting downvoted.

I would add that in my own experience (took CS61a at Berkeley with no prior programming and little math) those guys who already had a lot of knowledge were inspiring and a great asset. Working with more knowledgable people is a fundamental feature of industry and academia, and if you view it from the right perspective, it doesn't have to be intimidating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what fraction of male Computer Science majors also come into their first semester with no programming experience. When I was a freshman, it seemed like absolutely everyone in my CS classes had been programming for years, but surely that's not the case for everyone?

Anyway, the bit about (comparatively) experienced programmers intimidating the other students in freshman classes is a real and terrible thing. I thoroughly support shoving all those students into a different class; it is disruptive to have them in an intro course.

<comment><USER13> I can't speak about today, but when I started college (1995), it was common for students in the intro CS course to have zero experience coding. Some had built basic web pages, some had used *nix machines, but not many with actual coding.

But, this course was also required for ALL engineers, so there were many separate sections/classes, and probably 80% or greater weren't interested in CS as a degree/career.

<comment><USER14> I suspect, although I don't have the numbers, that there is a huge difference between 1995 and today. Open source was barely on most people's radar screens in 1995 and you're talking about the very early days of widespread Internet access.

<comment><USER13> Absolutely, that's why I included the year.

I think '95 was the first or second year for campus-wide high-speed internet at UVA. VT was a year ahead and one of the first in the nation, if I remember correctly.

All that said, the approach of splitting the introductory class up by previous experience makes some sense. I can't think of too many other subjects where the experience level would differ by so much at such an entry-level stage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > They redesigned the intro computer science course to focus more on creative > problem solving. Instead of traditional homework, the faculty assigned team- > based projects so that students coded together. And, most important, they > made the courses fun and emphasized ways in which CS can benefit society.

What exactly does the first sentence mean? What is an example of an increased focus on problem solving, and on what was focus decreased?

Are team assignments really just a way for weak performers to glide? I know in my own college career that was my experience.

Is computer science about fun and benefiting society, or is it, y'know, the science of computation? Is it better to build a population of computer scientists who find the science of computation fun and self-evidently beneficial, or one of computer scientists who don't?

<comment><USER3> Ugh yeah that sentence made me cringe. It doesn't do the intro courses justice at all. As someone who has both taken and graded those courses, I'll try to clarify.

The intro courses don't consist of homework like "write a function which does X", and they aren't graded like "your function produced the correct output".

Instead, the homework consists of week- to two-week-long projects in which the student produces a moderately complex piece of code. Depending on the point in the semester, this could be anything from a collection of pure mutually- recursive functions, a self-contained class with a nice api boundary, a collection of classes to draw some graphics format, or something else entirely.

The homework is always done in pairs, and you're not allowed to work on it unless your partner is present for pair programming. During official lab timeslots, students are told to trade off "driving" (using the keyboard) every 15 minutes to half hour.

Finally, the assignments are graded both on whether they produce the correct output and the clarity and efficiency of the code.

Student pairs are switched up multiple times throughout the semester, and the graders/tutors ("grutors") spend significant amounts of time working with each pair and making sure that _both_ members understand what's going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is shifting people from one major into another on face desirable? We should be glad there are less, eg, female biology majors and future doctors?

<comment><USER17> If a young woman has equal potential as a future doctor or computer scientist, then sure, it's zero-sum whether she picks one versus the other.

The problem is, there are undoubtedly a large number of young women out there who have the potential to become great programmers and love their careers, but for whatever reason, they're ending up becoming average doctors instead and feeling just so-so about their career choice.

In the latter case, it's better for both the women in question, and society in general, to support their becoming computer scientists.

<comment><USER18> My SO is one of the women who are better off because they got through a CS degree instead of an alternate. She could have been a good molecular biologist or teacher, but she's a _spectacular_ software engineer, especially for those high-level business-use/architectural tasks that a lot of devs can't handle. She'd be a lot less happy right now if her dad had managed to succeed in convincing her that girls can't program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I find most interesting about this is that most of the changes they implemented weren't necessarily targeted towards women and benefited everyone (emphasis on group work, research projects, splitting the into classes by experience).

<comment><USER20>
        emphasis on group work,

It's very questionable that this is a positiv change. While it is important (and difficult) to acquire teamwork skills, in practise, most groups gravitate towards one might call "Pareto Groups" where 20% of the participants do 80% of the work. Usually the strong programmers in the group do all the programming, thus getting all the learning experience.

<comment><USER3> With the exception of two classes (Clinic and Large Software Development, which are both explicitly about learning to work in large teams), all the group work you do in the Mudd CS program is pair programming. The groups are 2 people, and you're required to take turns "driving".

While I definitely experienced an unfortunate amount of "Pareto Groups" throughout my schooling, none of them were in the CS department at HMC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I still don't understand why a low ratio of women is considered a problem to be solved. Let people do what they want. Other majors have less men - so what? I loathe this retarded rhetoric. Has our society ran out of real problems?

<comment><USER22> It depends upon why there is a low ratio. For example, if less men are being grade school teachers due to sexist double standards on judgments of teacher/student interactions, then that is an issue that needs to be fixed. The low ratio is a symptom, not the problem itself, but it helps indicate a problem that needs to be fixed.

My issue is that sometimes instead of fixing the underlying problem(s), some people want to apply a patch that ends up not helping (or maybe making things worse).

<comment><USER21> I don't think a low ration of women indicates a problem that needs to be fixed. I think this is a complete fallacy. I'd like to hear proof of why that is, then we can start fixing it.

<comment><USER23> Maybe not a complete fallacy. Some likely reasons: men hire more men. Women are hired but pushed out by stress. Women don't get promoted (or tenure or whatever) so leave. Women have heard its a terrible place for women and don't apply.

All of these things should be fixed, if applicable. Because they are patently unfair to half the talented pool of candidates. Any school that pretends to understand mathematics would understand that puts the school at a disadvantage.

<comment><USER21> >Maybe not a complete fallacy.

Maybe it isn't. But we should approach this maturely. Often, there is no evidence for systemic discrimination and the stories are anecdotal and vague feelings of oppression. For example, it is often said that women are pushed out of CS courses because they are hostile environments to women, but when I attend uni I see that everything is completely technical and gender just doesn't play a role. You sit in the same lectures, do the same exercises, the same exams. Absolutely fair. When I ask women why they don't study CS, pretty much nobody says "Well, I tried uni but I was discriminated against", no, they say "Oh. It just doesn't interest me." The biggest issue, however, is when force enters the picture. Women quotas, affirmative actions, and the like. This is the true face of discrimination, and what an ugly face it is. I am in strict opposition of such actions because they distort the market and harm the freedom of choice and the development of talents.

<comment><USER23> If those experiences were universal, then what a wonderful world. If they are not, then something should be done. It seems to be a harmful approach, to campaign against attempts to restore fairness and equity, because "I don't see the problem"

<comment><USER21> I don't "campaign against attempts to restore fairness". I don't care about subjective experiences of people. I doubt that there is actually systemic discrimination or unfairness and demand proof for such a thing. And, I doubt the measures that are taken to fight this supposed unfairness are helpful, in fact, those measures themselves are a gross discrimination. I think I clearly made my point in my previous messages. I am all for equal opportunity. That is _precisely_ why I am against affirmative action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They could have called this program "Mudd's Women", but Paramount might have sued.

</comment><comment><USER25> Did they also increase the number of men in social work majors?

<comment><USER3> The school primarily offers only STEM majors: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, Computer Science, Math, and combinations of the above. It is associated with 4 other neighboring schools (Scripps, Pitzer, Pomona, and Claremont-McKenna), and so some students end up doing off-campus majors in History, Dance, Linguistics, or other fields, but that is comparatively rare (1 or 2 off-campus majors per graduating class, I think).

<comment><USER26> You are fighting the good fight. I'm curious what kind of people think really think gender equality for social workers is a more pressing issue.</comment></comment></comment>


Three Meanings of E=mc² - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-three-meanings-of-e-mc%C2%B2-einsteins-most-famous-equation-a0ec1549b4cd <comment><USER2> One corollary of E=mc^2 is that the rest mass of a bound state of fundamental particles will not equal the sum of the rest masses of the individual constituents. For example, the rest mass of a Helium-4 nucleus turns out to be less than the sum of the rest masses of the four nucleons of which it is composed. The difference is only about 0.7% but is famously quite a lot of energy when interpreted using E=mc^2.

It's a lot more fun if we go one level down though: protons are far HEAVIER than the sum of their constituents. Apparently almost 99% of the rest mass of a proton is the binding energy of the zero-rest-mass gluons that hold their three quarks together.

I think it's fun that the vast majority of the mass of ordinary matter, of which we are all constituted, is best explained as gluon binding energy via E=mc^2.

<comment><USER3> I think you've got that last part backwards. When you have constituents with binding energy, that reduces the total energy of the system and reduces the mass. So it seems that the mass of the proton is quark mass + gluon kinetic energy - bonding energy, and most of the mass comes from gluon kinetic energy.

<comment><USER4> Thank you.

Would like to understand that why does having constituents with binding energy reduce the total energy of the system instead of adding to it?

<comment><USER5> You have to think about it the other way around: The constituents don't have binding energy. That energy becomes available when you let them bind, and you have to pay it back if you want to unbind them.

Example: If you have a proton and an electron, making a hydrogen atom will release about 13.6 eV (if it goes to the lowest energy state). You have to spend that 13.6eV to ionize the hydrogen, i.e. to get the electron far away from the proton again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As I explained in an other article here on HN, another meaning (and the most important one imo) is the one Einstein actually wrote about: the inertia of a particle depends on its energy.

The thing is, you don't read E = mc² but rather (as Einstein wrote in his surprisingly easy to understand 2-pages paper [0]), m = E / c². The direct interpretation of this formulation is that inertial mass is actually just a side effect of the energy of a particle. Put into a catchy phrase, _mass is energy at rest_.

Edit :

[0]: [https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/e_mc2.pdf](https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/e_mc2.pdf), translated in english. Note the understatement of the sentence before the last one: "It is not impossible that with bodies whose energy-content is variable to a high degree (e.g. with radium salts) the theory may be successfully put to the test."

<comment><USER7> The problem is that the "mass" in the direction of the movement is different than the "mass" in the perpendicular direction. So most modern books try to avoid the relativistic mass "m" and use only the rest mass of the particle "m0".

(Still, the "relativistic mass" can be useful to make a few back of the envelope calculations, but you must be careful.)

More details: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_special_relativity#The...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_special_relativity#The_relativistic_mass_concept)

<comment><USER6> I did not know about this relativistic mass, but doesn't wikipedia says it is only true if you consider the mass as m = F/a rather than m = p/v?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What isnt usually mentioned is that this equation is a special case valid in some circumstances. The more general relation is E^2=(mc^2)^2+(pc)^2 which includes momentum term, and applies to photons which dont have a mass. Here's a simple video about this from Fermi Lab, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCKNH0zaho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCKNH0zaho)

Also interesting is how conservation laws for collisions are handled much better in relativistic setting.

</comment><comment><USER9> E=mc^2 is surely one of the most misunderstood equations in physics.

The best interpretation is as part of the full momentum-energy equation (letting c=1): E^2 = p^2 + m^2. This simply says that the energy E of a system is a combination of energy due to movement (p) and energy due to mass (m). At rest (p=0) this reduces to E=m, or E=mc^2 if you kept track of units.

> Even masses at rest have an energy inherent to them.

This is a real insight.

> Mass can be converted into pure energy. This is the second meaning of the > equation, where E = mc² tells us exactly how much energy you get from > converting mass

This is a pop-sci explanation, but it falls apart when you dig a bit. Does F=ma tell you that "force can be converted into acceleration?" Of course not; it tells you that force implies acceleration, and vice versa.

Or: if mass can be converted into energy, then you would have more energy and less mass, so E=mc^2 would no longer hold. It can't be both an equivalence and an exchange ratio.

> If you take a photon and and electron and smash them together, you get a > photon and an electron out. But if you smash them together with enough > energy, you'll get a photon, and electron, and a new matter-antimatter pair > of particles out. In other words, you will have created two new massive > particles.

Later we learn that mass is determined by energy and momentum, both of which are conserved, so mass must be conserved too.

<comment><USER10> > Does F=ma tell you that "force can be converted into acceleration?" Of > course not; it tells you that force implies acceleration, and vice versa.

I thought that F=ma is actually a definition of the concept of force. I mean, I may be wrong but it seems to me that before Newton, people only had a vague notion of what a force is. I suppose people considered it to be, in modern terms, a vector with a magnitude, and the direction of the vector was obvious, but I doubt they had any meaningful idea of what the magnitude was. When Newton stated that F=ma, he defined the concept of force precisely.

Honestly, I suspect something similar is true about E=mc^2, except Einstein discovered that formula instead of positing it. After all, we know what Energy is, at least from quantum mechanics (E=ihd/dt), but do we know what mass is? We can't say it's the ratio between force and acceleration, since that would be circular.

I suspect one can say mass is just a very dense form of energy. So dense that its different order of magnitude makes it look like it's a different thing.

As for the distinction between impulsion and mass, well can't it be said that Energy (or mass, since I'm arguing it's the same thing) is actually a four- vector, and as such it has different projections on time and space depending on the frame of reference?

<comment><USER9> Yes, it is not immediately obvious how mass ought to be undershood in the context of relativity. First attempts treated mass as a directed vector, with transverse and longitudinal components for an accelerated particle (now we would say that the mass is fixed, it is the momentum that changes non-linearly and just use F=dp/dt).

Mass should rightly be considered more inherent in SR that energy. Energy in relativity is coordinate dependent, but mass is not: all observers agree on a system's mass, because it is invariant.

Re: the last paragraph, yes you can project the four vector onto time and space, and you get energy and momentum respectively. So energy is not the four vector itself but its projection onto the time axis (and mass is of course its magnitude).

<comment><USER11> This. The quantity that "truly" exists is the energy-momentum 4-vector P. A vector exists independently of any particular reference frame. Its components, on the other hand, depend on such a reference frame.

Seen from a given reference frame, the temporal component of P is the energy E, its spatial components are the momentum 3-vector p, and its magnitude is the rest mass |P| = sqrt(E^2 - p^2) = m. The minus sign rather than plus sign is due to the Lorentzian signature. It is very helpful to visualize these quantities _geometrically_ as 4-vectors in 4-dimensional space.

<comment><USER11> Also, the magnitude of the momentum 4-vector is a Lorentz scalar, meaning it is invariant. Hence the rest mass m = |P| is invariant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The use of the term "pure energy" always grates me; it gives the impression that energy is an entity unto itself, which is not the case. I realize that it's used as a proxy for photons most of the time, but I still always think it's misleading.

<comment><USER13> Oh, this is a pet peeve of mine. Jim Butcher does this constantly in the Dresden Files series. I keep coming up with lampoons like "the witch countered with a blast of pure angular momentum that sent him spinning" or "after a visit to the bank, my wallet was bursting with pure price".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >But under the laws of special relativity, mass simply couldn't be the ultimate conserved quantity, since different observers would disagree about what the energy of a system was.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but not only does classical mechanics already tell us that the energy of a system different for different for observers, but this by itself doesn't mean it's not conserved, merely that it's not a universal quantity.

Furthermore E = mc^2 doesn't break conservation of mass in any way, it's more accurate to say that it _equates_ energy with mass, meaning conservation of energy and conservation of mass are one and the same. And in fact both still hold, when the energy and mass are replaced with their relativistic counterparts (E = mc^2 is obviously false using the classical notions of mass and energy).

</comment><comment><USER15> The YouTube channel PBS SpaceTime gives an excellent overview of these same ideas. The presenter is great at making things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKzgpt4HBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKzgpt4HBU)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHRqibyNMpw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHRqibyNMpw)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kixAljyfdqU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kixAljyfdqU)

</comment><comment><USER16> " But even plain, old, regular mass at rest has energy inherent to it..."

This sentence is so typical of sloppy so-called science writing in the US. What is "plain mass?" What is "old mass?" Or maybe he put the comma in the wrong place and he meant "plain old regular mass?" If so what is "plain old regular mass?" There is no such thing.

But more importantly, nothing is ever at rest in the known world. It is absurd to discuss the properties of something when it is at rest. It will never be at rest. There is no absolute rest.

<comment><USER17> This comment reads like the ravings of a pedant who is unable to relate to the layman.

<comment><USER16> You may be right about my comment about his positioning of the comma but my statement that all is motion and nothing but motion is not pedantic or trivial.

<comment><USER18> Motion is relative, no? I see things at rest from where I'm standing.

<comment><USER16> No. Motion is absolute. Rest is relative. That is, rest is only an appearance. Since you are observing from earth everything you see is in motion since the earth is moving. So there is no absolute rest. And relative rest is just another name for motion.

Therefore, no object can have a property that exists only when the object is at rest. Because there is no absolute rest.

<comment><USER11> > Motion is absolute.

What are you talking about? Motion is definitely _not_ absolute, and only Galilean invariance is needed to see that.

<comment><USER16> What is Galilean invariance? You are below deck in a ship moving uniformly on a smooth sea. No experiment can tell you if the ship is docked or if it has motion relative to the see. Assume that the ship is docked. In that case you say that the ship is at rest. And you attribute to the ship some properties because it is at rest. But is the ship at rest absolutely? Not at all. The ship is moving with the earth. So do you deny that the earth is moving? I assume not. If so how can you claim that the ship is at rest?

Motion is absolute means that all is in motion. This is an axiom. When you say motion is not absolute, can you give an example of an object which is at rest, which does not move with the earth and does not move with the galaxy? There is no such object.

<comment><USER19> > Motion is absolute means that all is in motion

That's not a usual use of "absolute"; "motion is universal" would be the normal way of expressing that idea.

> This is an axiom.

Well, you could have an axiomatic system in which that was an axiom, but I don't see why you would want to.

<comment><USER16> Can you give an example of a system which is not based on axioms? There is none. There may be hidden assumptions but there will always be axioms. Axioms are simply definitions that are kept constant. In your case you make the assumption that absolute rest exists. The axiom of the universality of motion is a good one because it agrees with the observations.

<comment><USER11> > In your case you make the assumption that absolute rest exists.

This is a straw man. No one is making that assumption. Something is in motion or at rest _with respect to a reference frame_. For some reason, you keep misinterpreting this statement and ranting about "absolute motion" and "absolute rest".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "E = mc^2 is Wrong" (Actually, just incomplete.)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCKNH0zaho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCKNH0zaho)

</comment><comment><USER17> If mass created from "pure energy" is always in matter/antimatter pairs, why is the ratio of matter/antimatter so skewed in favor of matter?

<comment><USER5> That is indeed the one million dollar question. Physicist search for a reaction which breaks this balance to explain the matter/anti-matter imbalance of the observed universe.

<comment><USER21> Most of the antimatter ended up as early supermassive black holes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fascinating. After first taking a crack at learning about this stuff decades ago, I still have trouble retaining it to the degree that I can succinctly explain its profoundness. This article does a great job at doing just that, and reigniting the sense of wonder and amazement at Einstein's achievements!

</comment><comment><USER23> > one of the simplest but most powerful equations ever to be written down

I always felt that E=mc² is essentially the Euler's identity of physics: a basic, simple, beautiful equation relating some core components of the entire field.

</comment><comment><USER24> The most important part is the conversion of a vector quantity into a scalar. Energy packets, photons, always have a prescribed velocity or direction. When mass is created, this direction is lost. It shows us a fundamental anisotropy of our universe. Total momentum is conserved..but since 0 momentum is degenerate and has no direction, we get the mixing of isotropic emissions, that should in theory, cancel out any biases that may have once existed.

Our universe cares about conservation globally - but as scattering shows, at the quantum scale, our universe could care less about you switching a left and a right for an up and a down.

<comment><USER9> Huh? If you have a system with nonzero momentum, it can't later have zero momentum. The "prescribed velocity" can't be lost, it must be conserved.

<comment><USER24> We are talking about a net momentum of zero. It can be in all kinds of different forms without violating conservation. Exchanging a left and right moving particle for up and down ones, changes the system but retains global conservation</comment></comment></comment>


The Unfamiliar (Objective-C & Cocoa) - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/09/19/the-unfamiliar

<comment><USER2> I recently started coding Obj-C in XCode and was very surprised that it's far less polished than what you expect from an Apple experience. That is mostly because an Apple experience is consumer-facing and much more time goes into making that a better experience.

XCode feels like a GUI for GCC, which it is. It's a whole pile of flags that you can set, tweak, etc. If you don't have some GCC experience, this is a bit of a hurdle. Project settings sometimes break (especially around code- signing), so keep your text editor handy. When things break the error messages can be cryptic and there's usually no 'double-click to get to the error in the IDE'. Obj-C is obviously C, but it's also obviously not and also not syntactically similar to, say, C# or Java (or Ruby, JavaScript, Python, etc). I found the step to Obj-C to be fairly trivial, but I thank time spent with C, GCC and Makefiles for that.

After this it's mostly the same as anything else - which is diving into massive amounts of APIs and best-practices.

iphoneos-simulator is brilliant. Much, much better to work with than Android simulators (mostly because of the insanely faster startup time and the ability to change hardware on the fly). Another brilliant piece to find was Instruments, which is an Apple GUI for DTrace. Profiling and tracing execution on simulators and devices is a breeze.

I think memory management is a bit of a non-issue and I'm surprised that's even being brought up. That many programmers only know one language / IDE and judge everything else as inferior/bad/etc is a reasonable observation (if not a totally obvious one), but that's not going to change anytime soon.

TL;DR

        - XCode has warts
        - Obj-C is different than Java/C#
        - Errors can be a pain
        - iphoneos-simulator is brilliant
        - Instruments is fantastic
        - Easy to pick up if you're familiar with GCC

<comment><USER3> In response to your TL;DR :)

        - XCode has warts: Yes, it does. Still, it is phenomenally better than other environments for efficiency now and is truly a joy to use. And we have few, if any, crashes.
        - Obj-C is different than Java/C#: If you're familiar with one language, I can understand disliking that. I went from Java -> C# -> PHP -> Ruby -> Objective-C. That is quite a change! But still, I absolutely love Objective-C. It has everything I could ask for, including my favorite syntax ever created. Nothing is ambiguous to me and our team is able to crank from concept to MVP faster than any other platform by far. Better yet, the speed we can squeeze out of our code blows all other platforms away.
        - Errors can be a pain: they can be. We ended up setting a standard syntax for logging actions so we could quickly drill down to errors. Wish it was easier and they can definitely improve here.
        - iphoneos-simulator is brilliant: completely agreed.
        - Instruments is fantastic: damn skippy.
        - Easy to pick up if you're familiar with GCC: true.

<comment><USER4> I disagree with your first point. The editing features like finding files, key bindings, navigating methods within a class etc. are pretty clunky.If they gave us a vim plugin I would be happy.

<comment><USER3> Ah, ok. We both have a fundamental difference in terms of code editing preferences then. I hate vim with a passion, but that is also because I'm a very visual user. To each their own and what works best then :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm largely in agreement with Gruber insofar as development environments are largely a matter of taste.

On the other hand, I'm rather surprised that Gruber is looking to defend reference counting, especially in light of how well it went for legacy programming languages like VB Classic.

John Siracusa is by far the more well-reasoned Apple advocate in terms of programming language design and his Copland 2010 articles are definitely worth checking out if you want to read a cogent argument as to why Cocoa is NOT the way of the future. [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/copland-2010-revis...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/copland-2010-revisited.ars)

<comment><USER6> _On the other hand, I'm rather surprised that Gruber is looking to defend reference counting_

I suspect that you're not up to speed on some things that were revealed at WWDC this year, because "reference counting" and "automated reference counting" are not the same things.

The latter is in the spirit of the last few paragraphs by Linus Torvalds in his famous 2002 discussion of Garbage Collection, when he says

 _Does it take more effort? Yes. The advantage of GC is that it is automatic. But CG apologists should just admit that it causes bad problems and often _encourages_ people to write code that performs badly.

I really think it's the mindset that is the biggest problem. A GC system with explicitly visible reference counts (and immediate freeing) with language support to make it easier to get the refcounts right (things like automatically incrementing the refcounts when passing the object off to others) wouldn't necessarily be painful to use, and would clearly offer all the advantages of just doing it all by hand._

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2473932>

...except ARC is better than Linus was imagining in the above, because it manages to do it without the "explicitly visible" part.

<http://clang.llvm.org/docs/AutomaticReferenceCounting.html>

Since you're a Siracusa fan...

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac- os-x-10-7.a...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac- os-x-10-7.ars/11)

<comment><USER7> _except ARC is better than Linus was imagining in the above, because it manages to do it without the "explicitly visible" part_

I haven't read the article you're linking, but how does ARC manage to keep this invisible?

The usual trouble is supporting legacy code. Even with C++/Boost, where there's a variety of _ptr templates each promising either automatic deletion or automatic reference count decrement at an appropriate time, you can find yourself in a situation where there's a legacy C function accepting and returning, say, wchar_t*. You simply cannnot avoid doing malloc/free or retain/release in this situation.

<comment><USER6> ARC handles this by being something you can choose in a per-compilation-unit basis, and by providing functions/macros for working with these legacy libraries. You still have to say what to do at such boundaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Java might've had a lot of FOSS love put into, but the Android toolset...

Well, let's just say that I would be a very, very happy man if the Android emulator could run even 50% as fast as the iOS Simulator.

<comment><USER9> Use an actual device. You don't develop for Xbox 360's or PS3's in an emulator, why would you for mobiles?

<comment><USER10> Depends on what you're developing. Frequently you develop in parallel for the desktop and your console of choice, when you're doing non-performance- intensive stuff. This is especially true of XNA and the like, where your code is identical.

<comment><USER9> What I mean is you don't compile and run it on your PC, then run it in a PS3 emulator. You run it on a PS3 dev machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't agree here.

Yes, there are a lot of people who turn their nose up at the OS X/iOS development toolchain simply because it is unfamiliar. They see the square brackets and write it off immediately.

But the argument that the toolchain is not polished is dead on. If you look at the work Apple are doing under the hood with LLVM etc., then yes, they are doing some very smart things. But everything on top of that is pretty damn dismal. Xcode is incredibly buggy. iTunes Connect is hell. There is functionality that is just plain wrong. There are features that are inexplicably missing. Version control integration is so poor everybody I know uses external tools instead. Code-signing is held together with bits of string. Functional regressions from earlier versions mystify me. Xcode build configuration is so much of a hassle that it's easier to avoid it altogether by putting everything into xcconfigs. The code quality in the templates is awful.

If this kind of quality were foisted on end-users, there would be uproar. It's the opposite of Apple's "just works" philosophy. It seems the application- level dev tools team is where they stick all the students and new hires who don't know what they are doing.

I think the fundamental design of Objective C is a little old in places but has held up remarkably well over the years. Cocoa has a fantastic design. But christ, the development tools at the application level are a fucking embarrassment.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's all about the unfamiliar. I've spend countless hours in Xcode, and firing up Eclipse is a nightmare. Same with switching from Xcode 3 to Xcode 4... the unfamiliar seems "wrong"

Until you get beyond the unfamiliarity, you're not qualified to judge if it's wrong or right.

(That said, the 2 hours I've spent in Visual Studio was remarkably pleasant, considering)

<comment><USER13> I've written 2 iPhone apps in Xcode and am now working on my second Android app in Eclipse. Words cannot describe how much I prefer Eclipse over Xcode. I should note that my background is Java. There's just something about Xcode that I cannot get used to, even after writing 2 apps in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Focusing just on Xcode for a second, the spirit of the rant is not totally off the mark. The latest version 4, has been, _on the whole_ , a step back. If you were used to Xcode 3, suddenly a lot of functionality is no longer there, or moved, or replaced, or hidden away in a deep recess. To make things worse, a lot of documentation is now hilariously out of date. For example, just about any Core Data guide/sample code/tutorial is not applicable to the brave new world of Xcode 4 (or iOS 4 or OS X 10.7). And there's no indication that any of them will be updated anytime soon -- I speak mostly of Apple's own docs.

In other words, there's a lot of pain, currently, surrounding the de facto tool for iOS development, even for seasoned Cocoa programmers. It's too bad the original story (the one Gruber's responding to) got so off track talking about other nonsense (reference counting?! Does that objectively really matter?) when there are so many real problems that actually exist with iOS development.

Thankfully, these problems aren't necessarily permanent -- just as long as Xcode 4 continues to get refined/fixed, and documentation is brought up-to- date (i.e. no more Core Data how-to videos that use Xcode 3 on OS X 10.4!).

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the Cocoa API and can cope with a C-based language, but I'd have to agree that Visual Studio and Eclipse offer more IDE features for their respective environments.

Having said that, they all have pretty crappy editors.

</comment><comment><USER16> > [...] when you fire up Apple's Xcode and start building CocoaTouch > applications in Objective-C you're going to come face-to-face with a toolset > that has not had the sort of love put into it that the open source community > has put into the Java toolset and associate platforms, or that Microsoft has > put into VS and .NET over the past 10 years

I think I'd have to agree with this statement. As someone who's recently started developing in Objective C and coming from a Java / Eclipse background, the toolset provided in Xcode seems to fall short of what Eclipse has to offer (I can't speak for Visual studio).

For instance I don't think Xcode does proper static analysis. I.e. it doesn't allow me to produce a proper class hierarchy for a class I'm using, nor can I run a command to see a call hierarchy on a method. And refactoring isn't 100% accurate either, and also very limited, i.e. I can't extract methods from a code fragment, and also once extracted, move that method into another class without issue (typical workflow for extracting helper methods).

It's not to say I can't do good work in Xcode. I just have to be aware of it's limitations and keep accurate documentation as I code, instead of relying on the IDE for a lot of the heavy lifting.

</comment><comment><USER17> I agree with Gruber here, which may times I do not. In this case the original article is way off base and he did a good job at pointing it out. In any case though, I don't look up to Gruber as some great technical expert as an engineer though.

</comment><comment><USER18> GC is inevitable, but so is no GC. In the 80s people wanted to write software on platforms where GC was not practical. Having a GC when you have 640 K of ram is silly. So people used languages that didn't have GC. But then the platforms grew exponentionally, and people started wanting to do more complex things, and they say "all this manual memory management is crazy... lets use GC", just like the previous generation of computer scientists did before them.

Then the iPhone came out...

ARC isn't a revolution, it's just a stage in a cycle....

In 10 years your 20 core smartphone will have a GC running in it.

<comment><USER19> "In 10 years your 20 core smartphone will have a GC running in it."

Quite possibly. But it's also quite conceivable that Objective-C will still be in use by then, and still not have the what a Java programmer would think of as garbage collection. When iPhone hardware is ready for it, we'll probably see Python or MacRuby or JavaScript become the most common way of interacting with a Cocoa system that is still implemented in Objective-C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What is interesting to me is that I could replace "Objective-C" with "liberal" and "Java" with "conservative"; or "Eclipse" with "Democrat" and "Xcode" with "Republican" - and this article and all articles like it will fly just fine on CNN, Fox News, etc.

It is amazing how predictable humans are, and how far people will go to exploit that predictability:

1\. Draw line in sand. 2\. Throw rocks at both sides. 3\. Profit.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The enormousness of the developer base for Windows and Java is such that > many developers feel that those environments are "normal", and anything > different is by nature inferior simply because it's unfamiliar. They're > offended by Xcode/Cocoa/Objective-C, in some way, because they feel entitled > to their familiar languages and tools.

Gah - I was with you through the article, maybe not agreeing with _everything_ he said, but did he have to come off like such a jerk in the last sentence? You're painting with pretty broad strokes to call people who aren't very enamored w/ XCode "offended" and "entitled."

<comment><USER19> Gruber did say _many_ , not _all_. And when comments like this [<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3015433>] are so common in discussions about Apple's development environment, it's hard to argue that people who feel offended and entitled are uncommon.</comment></comment>