22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2017-january-22years-delphi.html <comment><USER3> I remember using Delphi 2 when I was younger, that's how I learned programming. If you don't mind hearing my personal story, keep reading, otherwise move on to another comment.

By an interesting coincidence I was given a CD with tons of software on it, including Delphi 2. I started playing with it and quickly realised I could create my own programs using that tool.

Later I went to the book store and found a book about it that I couldn't afford. So I came back every week to read as much as I could, then heading back home to try it on my illegal copy of Delphi. (I was 11)

Then I realised there was a help manual embedded in the distribution, so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual.

Little by little I learned about conditions, loops, object programming and made a bunch of terribly crappy yet working games.

No amount of studies could have taught me as much as I learned through using that software. No manual work could have given me the fun I had when programming my very own games. Reading "Delphi" as a headline on hacker news made me feel nostalgic and I figured I'd share my story here.

So thanks Borland, the 11 year old me may not have paid to use that software, but it was enough of a revelation to make me the programmer I am today.

<comment><USER4> > so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual.

:)

I started learning English as a kid to understand what was happening on the MS BASIC programs I could get on my computer by the time.

<comment><USER5> I remember the penny dropping when I learned what "if" meant in English (I already knew what it did in BASIC).

<comment><USER6> Same here

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies.

I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

<comment><USER8> IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported _Windows_. At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time that Borland CEO was the only person whom Bill Gates feared as a competitor.

That said, it was 20 years ago. Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age (no Linux targets?). Unless I _have_ to live in a Pascal world there are much better tools today. My 2c.

<comment><USER9> > no Linux targets?

Linux is coming in the next release - there will be a blog on that soon. It already has Mac, iOS, and Android on top of its Windows support.

Honestly, I do not believe that Python or Tcl/Tk count as "good" RAD cross- platform tools. Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. We regularly have customers give feedback about their productivity with Delphi/C++Builder, versus Python, C#, etc, and they say they get apps completed and released twice as fast or often more. "5x" is quoted often in our marketing material, and that number is not marketing, it's based on numbers people tell us.

\- David (one of the PMs at Embarcadero; I work with the blog author Marco.)

<comment><USER10> They had a Linux port at one time. It was called Kylix [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix)

Developing on Linux desktop at that time probably wasn't ready for this.

<comment><USER11> There were some other issues then (I worked for Borland at the time, QAing Kylix) including not really understanding the FOSS community and GPL-the- social-movement part very well.

There was a particularly big flap over them not stripping the corporate audit clause from the free Kylix Open Edition version targeted at OSS dev; and another regarding enforcing the mandatory "Made with Kylix Open Edition" splash screen that was linked into your app at the compiler level, since all the library code was technically modifiable per licensing.

I also seem to recall that they managed to standardize on Red Hat 7.2, which I think had the much maligned gcc 2.96 fork in it and possibly an older glibc, and then had problems with later kernel/glibc/something along those lines versions such that you were locked into the "bad" version of Red Hat using it.

I probably have some of the tech details jumbled 16 years later, but the TL;DR was that the development community for Linux is nothing like the development community for Windows, especially back then. There were simply different cultural expectations and a hugely diverse set of environments to target, along with a swiftly moving ecosystem to link against.

Upshot, Kylix more or less flopped and Borland switched gears to Java/JBuilder-based IDEs for C++ compilation (C++BuilderX), then back around full circle later focusing on single-platform IDEs for .NET/native Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shout-out to Lazarus/FreePascal. It is like all the best parts of Delphi 5-7, and it is open source, free, and you can make commercial applications in it!

I have started using it in earnest and it is wonderful - and a company can never take it away from you; there's no "we're shifting focus..." announcements. No paid support for broken updates.

I honestly can't recommend it enough.

<comment><USER13> I can confirm this. I have used it a couple of years ago for a GUI app I needed at work (1): Lazarus was a real time saver! When a colleague asked me if he could use my app under Windows, the porting process was 100% painless: all the code (~1000 lines of code) recompiled in an instant and the application worked like a charm.

(1) [https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm moderator in one of the oldest/largest delphi forum in latin-america:

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

Ironically, I don't use Delphi anymore. Yet, I still help people with it and defend it when is possible.

Delphi is _amazing_. It only have a HUGE problem: His owners.

You can re4ad why Delphi fade away here: [https://www.quora.com/Why-did- Borland-fail?share=1](https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1)

"Borland lost its way when executive management decided to change the company to pursue a different market. ... ... In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."

<comment><USER15> > In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of > many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million > loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied > without hesitation "Absolutely."

And he is 100% correct. It's way easier to double the profit from 100 customers than it is 1 million.

<comment><USER14> Correct only for money. But a language MUST go for reach.

Is no that is bad to try to catch the fat-money, is that them forget the rest.

This make Delphi fade. And impossible to some of us to even continue using it.

\---

The current free version is something new, however this have been try before but never consistently, so is unsure if I get Delphi free now it will continue.

This make risky to get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've mentioned it before, but I'll repeat it. ;-)

At work, I inherited maintenance of an in-house application a coworker that left the company wrote for our accounting department. In Delphi.

When people speak highly of Delphi, they always mention how great the IDE is. Personally, I am not a big fan of IDEs. I was not disappointed, but my mainly, what I do is read and edit the source code.

And I have to admit, that part was a pleasant surprise! I had never looked at or touched Pascal code before, but I was able to make a change to the source - and it worked, the very first time! - within a few days. And the majority of that time was spent figuring out how the code was structured[1] and what the accountants wanted me to do (they always talk to me as if I knew the first thing about accounting).

But after that, it was smooth sailing. It sure helped that my predecessor wrote very readable code, but it seems that ObjectPascal made it very easy to write it that way.

Or, more briefly: Happy Birthday!

[1] The application is about a 10 KLOC in total, which is not small in my book, but not "very large", either. Also, I was both a developer and a sysadmin and a helpdesk monkey, so the phone was ringing about every fifteen minutes.

</comment><comment><USER17> As a pascal user since the early 80's, then an Object Pascal user, then a Delphi user since the first version, I love Delphi but to be honest I cannot afford the yearly updates.

For someone that uses it for home projects, $916 for an upgrade is out of the question.

Rambling here, but... Delphi 3/5/7 were incredible design packages. I feel they lost focus when they jumped on the .NET bandwagon - maybe it is just my perception, but maybe some of their internal developers were less focused on native code. Anders leaving was also a big hit. Kylix was yet another distraction.

<comment><USER18> For home projects, the Starter edition is free.

<comment><USER19> Sure, if you don't want to build UWP apps, or 64 bit apps(!), or OSX apps... the list[1] goes on.

[1]: [https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin- feature-m...](https://www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-berlin-feature- matrix.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The documentation and help pages that came with Delphi were absolutely the best documentation I ever had. Every topic came with examples that you could copy and reuse. Not just snippets but fully functional blocks of code. It was brilliant.

<comment><USER21> You've reminded me of the reason I loved Delphi's help. I think what I found most helpful (and most unusual for the "state of the art") was that most help pages had "see also" links. This allowed me to look up something similar to what I needed and just follow the links to what I really wanted.

I was able to use the Help pages as (almost?) my sole reference for the API. Something that just wasn't happening with Delphi's big competitor, VB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was a Delphi Developer when I started developing software professionally. I loved programming in it. I jumped ship when Anders Hejlsberg, the Chief Architect of Delphi moved to Microsoft to be a lead architect of C#.NET. I used Delphi 6 and 7. When it was time to move to Delphi 8, Borland decided to target .NET.

The choice was between learning Delphi 8 for .NET or learn Visual Studio .NET. I chose MS.NET because MS is the custodian of the .NET Framework. They are the ones on the driving seat, not Borland.

Looking back, I don't regret the move because Delphi is dying. Posts requiring Delphi are nowhere to be seen on job sites in South Africa.

<comment><USER23> Same except after D7 I veered into web development with Coldfusion (I know how to pick a winner!) and then PHP. Ruby & Python much later. I didn't realize how good I had it with Delphi's IDE and interactive debugger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth.

Hello World ran to about 100 kB.

Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?

<comment><USER25> There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large.

You can use Electron (and basically bundle Chrome), or JavaFX (and bundle a Java runtime), and they're about the same size. But even if you ship all of the Qt dynamic libs, or all of the GTK dependencies, or even wxWidgets... it's still a far cry from "light".

It just takes tens of megs to make a window appear.

<comment><USER26> It shouldn't ever take that much. This is an example of what a 64kB executable could accomplish in 2016:

Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me - Conspiracy - Revision 2016 64k

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEGm2lUSY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEGm2lUSY0)

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106)

After watching a few 64k demoscene demos, a 380MB Electron-based minimalist text editor just seems horribly bloated. (I'm currently writing a cross- platform Windows/Linux/Mac GUI app in Xojo, and the macOS version is 11.6MB at the moment.)

<comment><USER27> The demoscene relies heavily on procedural generation to cram a lot into a little tiny executable.

GUI toolkits aren't comparable in this regard.

<comment><USER28> Yes, they are. There are small, concise GUI toolkits that go a long way in a small volume. I am very fond of FLTK, which IIRC produced standalone (depending only on system libraries) fast, tens-of-widget-types featured executables at ~200k on each of Win, Linux and Mac.

Adding Unicode support (independent of the Platform) probably bloats every executable an additional 100k. The horror.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > I'll start blogging on the Delphi language coming back to Linux tomorrow!

To taste the cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development today:

[http://www.lazarus-ide.org/](http://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

[http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse](http://www.lazarus- ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse)

"Why use Lazarus?

 _No dependencies!_

With Lazarus you can create programs which do not require any platform dependencies [1]. The result of it is the user of your program does not need to install any further packages, libraries or frameworks to run your software.

[1] Linux/BSD applications may depend on GTK2 or alternatively QT. Some add-on packages may also add dependencies of their own

 _Can be used in commercial projects_

Some IDEs restrict their license to only non-commercial development. Lazarus is GPL/LGPL [2][3] which permits using it in building commercial projects.

[2] LGPL with additional permission to link libraries into your binaries. [3] Some additional packages come with various licenses such as GPL, MPL, ... "

<comment><USER30> Lazarus and Free Pascal has made me return to the wonderful world of RAD and Object Pascal. :)

I was a Delphi addict in the 90's. After Borland screwed up Delphi - <USER2> the Kylix disaster - and since I am now a full time Linux user - Lazarus is the only option.

I have been following the Lazarus / Free Pascal project for years, and I think now is a good time to pick it up.

I wish that it had more traction, though.

<comment><USER31> No traction because it's a mess. No git, no markdown, no clear organization, dated look in almost everything. Very unuserfriedly to just 'hop in'. No money unfortunately and most (all?) devs do it in their sparetime. Splitted between different attempts, FreePascal, MSE, Oxygene, Smartpascal, Newpascal, maybe more?

Nevertheless, Lazarus and Free Pascal is very good and important work. Wish they would modernize to the 21 century though (but whatever works for them is fine - only it's difficult regarding the traction then).

<comment><USER30> I am actively using Lazarus. It is not split into anything other than Free Pascal (the language) and Lazarus (IDE and visual component library).

Don't blame the forks, mods and spin offs on Lazarus / Free Pascal. It is a sign that the project is alive and doing well, IMO.

The looks? It looks like any other Qt / GTK 2/3 application. Fairly modern.

But I agree with you on some of the points - but the part that I like the best is the fact that it's fully open source. It's really nice to be able to look at the source to everything when developing your own applications.

Yes, the site itself, including the docs, looks dated and does a poor job of selling it. That's Open Source, the good and the bad.

Edit: The project does have a (mandatory these days, I reckon) Github mirror, if that would make you more happy. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 12 years ago I did a rude system, part of it using Delphi 7.

They still need, once every 6 months, to compile the EXE file with a small change.

I get paid monthly just to press CTRL+F9 (generate new .EXE file) every 6 months, basically.

I liiiike it :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I attended a Clipper user group in Atlanta in the mid 1990's, with my dad. He was into Clipper, was trying to get me interested. The Clipper folks were also into Turbo Pascal. A Borland rep was there to give out swag and talk up the imminent release of Borland Delphi. The Clipper crowd was divided--some excited, some not so much. The older guys, like my dad, had come up programming with punched cards and tape drives. For them, a PC with Clipper and Turbo Pascal was plenty advanced enough for small business apps. Dad never did go for Delphi. 20+ years later, I'm doing a quick study of Object Pascal to prep for working on a legacy application at my work, in Delphi.

<comment><USER34> Hah, that's how I started programming too. A bit of BASIC. Then I graduated to Clipper and Turbo Pascal because that's what my dad used. Then to Delphi 1.0, then 2.0, I think we skipped 3. Delphi 4 was a mess. Quality got pretty variable in the later releases.

Imagine being 14 and trying to understand CORBA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I started with QuickBasic/QBasic and Pascal. Though I went with VB4-6 instead of Delphi.

It's sad that RAD isn't popular anymore. 1995 - 1999 was great with Win95 era, everything was so consistent, good documentation. Then Microsoft realised their "The Microsoft Network" lost against the open free WWW and then the announced dotNet (which took until 2003 for them to release v1) - that was the beginning of the end of the great Win32 platform and RAD. HTML with Frontpage and Dreamweaver was just an okay RAD andbthe situation got worse with "no tables, use div" and XHTML 1/2 movements.

<comment><USER36> RAD with WinForms was alive and well for many years after in the .Net era.

<comment><USER37> Very true, even now. The professional market for WinForms is probably dead, though.

Yet ironically, I use Winforms in personal code way more today than any of Microsoft's other GUI technologies. Winforms is a great way to get a Windows app up extremely quickly that needed a simple GUI. There are plenty of ways to get a quick command line style app up, but I really don't know too many solutions that allow you to drag and drop functional GUIs as quickly as Winforms (other than VB and Delphi).

For a fully fledged app, Winforms makes no sense to me these days. But Microsoft specific syntax like WPF or UWP no longer makes that much sense to me either. Might as well spend the time on HTML+CSS+Javascript and get cross- platform support...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Delphi was a great environment, but Anders and other key persons leaving Borland, while the company lost track which customers they should target, besides the "clever" idea to change the company's name, killed it.

I know of a few companies in Germany and Netherlands that still use it, but it is hard to get offers.

And we had to wait 15 years until .NET started to offer a compilation model similar to Delphi (only for UWP apps).

While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first steps towards support it.

<comment><USER39> > While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's > attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the > first steps towards support it.

I'm just curious. How would AOT improve Java's ability to have better RAD. I guess I'm just missing the association. Is it bundling/distribution? Startup time? Integration with native libraries?

I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so that would hurt RAD.

<comment><USER38> Java has worse RAD support than Delphi, yet Delphi AOT compiles to native code.

AOT compiling to native code, as standard option, would have improved Java's acceptance as safe language for desktop applications, due to better bundling, distribution and startup time.

To the point that even Oracle does reckonize this, and is delivering an initial way of partially AOT compiling on GNU/Linux x64, with support for other platforms planned for Java 10.

> I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so > that would hurt RAD.

Sure it does, that can be done with dynamic libraries. Many game engines make use of this approach.

Other environments like Eiffel and Lisp, have a set of JIT/AOT compilers, JIT during development and AOT for deployment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> One of the first environments I ever programmed was Delphi. Had lots of fun with it, and it had a special place in my heart...

Fast forward 20 years, and I'm a hardware developer using Altium a lot. As some here may be aware, Altium is a multi-gigabit piece of CAD/EDA behemoth written - and still maintained - in Delphi. 3D, DirectX, everything in Delphi.

Just yesterday and today I had easily reproducible BSODs by using a very basic feature (routing nets). Memory leaks galore - most people I know have the habit of shutting Altium down now and then just to avoid a crash. Success is low - it crashes a lot, I'm getting tired of unhandled exceptions windows.

And this way, I realize even great development tools age badly. Of course this is not all Delphi's fault, but it shows how tech is a Red Queen's race: you must run faster and faster to keep in the same place.

<comment><USER41> I don't think that really says anything about Delphi and everything about the massive complexity of large software.

I get regular crashes with a bunch of stuff (everything from Thunar (don't think that shows C has aged badly), Chrome (C++) and Intellij (Java).

<comment><USER42> Some languages make it harder than others, there is a whole class of bugs that just disappear when you have garbage collection for instance.

<comment><USER41> I agree but a large program in one of those languages will still have more bugs than a small one, that's just the nature of things and the increase in bugs isn't linear either in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I got my start programming with Delphi 5. It was an excellent environment to learn in, since I could always see something happening based on what I had done.

Better: the Delphi component libraries made writing a GUI application _easy_. I've never seen anything of their quality and ease up through today, and I still miss being able to get an application running by just subclassing some standard components and writing the core logic I needed.

</comment><comment><USER44> Sometimes I kind of miss Delphi 7. The way it makes it easy to create apps made programming so fun.

Such a shame it went downhill after the .NET stuff.

<comment><USER45> Oh yes, I absolutely loved the tinkering with Delphi and Kylix before I was a professional programmer. I remember Borland distributed Delphi6 for free for personal use and I had a lot of fun with it.

In the end I landed a job as a web developer, worked in PSPad and left Delphi forgotten until the day — a decade or so later after I used Delphi the last time — I opened Eclipse the first time in my life. Never hated a tool, my profession and the IT industry more than at that moment… Why take the compilation so much time? Why are the fonts so ugly? Why does this tool needs more time at startup than the good old Delphi 6 on my 800 Mhz PC ten years ago? And why nobody seems to care about it?

<comment><USER46> Yep. I don't use Eclipse for these same reasons. It really seems someone hates IDE and we arrived on hell for paying back something we did in a past life.

I switched to Netbeans. Slightly better: bigger icons, better looking UI. I like the key combinations there. Still nowhere good compared to Delphi IDE with useful code snippets built-in and easy-to-use creation of UI apps.

<comment><USER45> Netbeans is indeed better. Used it on some mid-size PHP projects and liked its neat UI and responsiveness. Nowadays I'm a happy IntelliJ user, but hope Netbeans will stay alive. It's definitely one of the better tools around and deserves a place under the shiny sun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> After the death of Python, Oracle and Delphi go really well together... give it a shot if you want to see the future.

Edit: this is a historical reference... search for "Oracle Delphi Python"

<comment><USER48> Missing /s tag? Im not sure if the comment is serious.

<comment><USER49> I think the comment is referring to Pythia, aka "the Oracle of Delphi", who could supposedly see the future:

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

<comment><USER48> Ah I see. Its strange to see the word oracle here used in a positive way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I am bit older than average so I used Delphi in its golden days. Even today few of the old customers need old apps maintained so I keep Delphi 7 ready.

It _is_ great IDE/language.

<comment><USER41> When it comes to quickly developing native line of business applications (the niche between excel spreadsheets and commercial off the shelf) I've still not seen anything that can beat Delphi, the .Net stuff has gotten very good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Verity Stob has chronicled the tribulations of Delphi enthusiasts in a series of commentaries:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_del...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/07/borland_ditches_delphi/) ... [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/20/verity_sons_of_khan...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/20/verity_sons_of_khan_witch_of_wookey/)

</comment><comment><USER52> I learned VB3 at 13, and moved to delphi at 14. It was amazing. As easy as VB, but all the power of C++. I made my own DLL's to use in VB, just because I could. It was the coolest thing ever.

Fast forward years later, and plenty of intermediate languages (C, C++, Java, ...) I got hired into my first professional software developer job ... as a delphi developer in a company with a big multi-million line delphi codebase they wanted to migrate to the web. I had done some web development, so I ended up writing features on both the delphi and web teams, often the same feature. So I became intimately familiar with the trade-offs of delphi vs web development.

The thing about delphi: it was/is insanely productive. In the beginning it took about 3 to 5 times as long to write a comparable feature on the web side. It ended up driving me to research cutting edge web dev techniques to find some way to approach the productivity levels that delphi gave. In the end we almost got there, using rich frameworks and a component-driven UI. But to this day the delphi team can still get a feature done faster than the web team, and that's despite an IDE which is much weaker than webstorm/intellij. Object Pascal and the VCL are just that good.

However, I wouldn't do a new project in Delphi. You're locked into an ever more expensive product with an uncertain future, and the productivity advantages just aren't worth it anymore. You can get close enough using an open source dev stack, and the value of having all your tools be open and free is significant.

</comment><comment><USER53> Delphi is still popular in the south of Brazil. It's dying, but slowly.

There's a lot a legacy application written in Delphi here. Some old programmers, that only know to program in Delphi, may even build new apps with it.

It may not be that modern today, but there's the "pay the bills" mindset.

I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.

<comment><USER54> Just so no one else has to try to find the price (you have to search for it a little). The cheapest new user price for Delphi is USD $1,405.

<comment><USER9> Or $0, if you use the Starter edition. It's free for hobbyists, students, startups etc, with the clause that if you start making over a certain amount of revenue you're asked to buy it.

<comment><USER55> but it seems and correct me if i am wrong you cannot use the starter edition to create an application that connects to a database

which in my opinion makes it useless, RAD tools are mostly used to create line of business applications

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> My first gig was writing telecoms software using Delphi 3. Good times! Then Inprise bought Borland and shipped a buggy version of Delphi 4 which was a pain. Like many others I jumped ship when I heard what Anders was doing with C#. I don't regret the move but I thought Delphi was great.

</comment><comment><USER57> I never used Delphi, but I have a couple of friends that were die hard Delphi fanatics. Eventually they moved on to C# as all of the Delphi jobs dried up with Delphi's continually decreasing use. They still swore how they thought it was the best thing they ever worked with, but at the end of the day you have to pay the bills.

Maybe it really is great, I don't know. I was a bit surprised looking at Tiobe ([http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/](http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/)) that they rank it as the 9th most popular language right now. Where is this actually being used? And the price tag is incredible!

<comment><USER58> When you're making half a million or more each year writing vertical market software, the price tag for a Delphi/RAD Studio license each year is irrelevant. This is especially true when Delphi was the reason why you're making all that money in the first place.

It's kind of a "you had to have been there..." type of story, but if you get a chance, talk to a developer that was trying to create Windows applications for businesses back in the 90's and you will know what I mean. The really sad part is that while .NET and C# have done an okay job of providing a replacement (I think that MS has a hard time staying on-point when it comes to dev tools and make their tools too much of a moving target), you really cannot find anything exactly like Delphi/RAD Studio today. The primary reason why it's so sad is that Delphi created millions upon millions of dollars of revenue for independent software vendors all over the world, and you would think that companies would be trying to replicate that success. Alas, it's hard to contemplate even attempting such an endeavor when developer tools are not valued properly according to the money that they make the developer. If the software world finds a way to start making money from developer tools again, then you'll see another Delphi and it will be a _lot_ cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Somewhat long and interesting thread about Delphi from a while ago, on HN:

Delphi – why won't it die? (2013) (stevepeacocke.blogspot.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543)

Did a search in hn.algolia.com just now to find the thread, and it was the top result when the setting was "By popularity":

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=delphi&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER60> I was just having this conversation with an acquaintance about the software glut. When you do something well, you don't have to do it again, just enough to keep it compatible with the other things it needs to work with. So it takes a team of 50 people to make a product and then 10 people to maintain it forever. So where do those 40 people go?

The latest answer has been annual licenses.

</comment><comment><USER61> Free Pascal/Lazarus is great. Glad they finally have Delphi Starter free but still it's not enough and the limits suck.

</comment><comment><USER62> Hey Marco, I still have your Delphi 5 book :-)

FWIIW, where I work, I started using Delphi 5 when it came out. As of now we have about a dozen D5 desktop applications all essential for the core business that are in active use and supported as necessary, running happily on Windows 10. I don't see why it won't continue like this for another 15 years... The bosses (who are non-programmers) don't really care that D5 is out of fashion - because it all just works (and rocks).

The only reason I couldn't upgrade to a later version (Unicode is one thing that would be useful) is I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component.

Looking back I am not sure how we could have lived w/o Delphi. Well maybe it's an exaggeration, but certainly life would have been more difficult. Everything else from before .NET/C#/Windows Forms looks like a nightmare.

<comment><USER63> > I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component

Try to replace it with Virtual TreeView: [http://www.jam-software.com/virtual- treeview/](http://www.jam-software.com/virtual-treeview/) [https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual- TreeView/](https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual-TreeView/)

<comment><USER62> I know about this one and others, thanks. The problem is TopGrid, it is further customized, so flexible and so entrenched in my code that it would be an enormous undertaking to replace it. Even if UI was perfectly separated from the business logic, which it isn't :-)

<comment><USER52> We ended up switching to cxGrid to move away from delphi 5. It does absolutely everything, but it can be hard to figure out how to configure it so it does exactly what you need it to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why?

Has there ever stopped being a need for this?

<comment><USER65> Half in jest and half seriousness... Excel fill this void for many many things corporate. Two decades later it is almost as good as Delphi was, just no .exe.

<comment><USER66> Mind elaborating on this?

I used Delphi for years, now I'm working in Excel all day and I can't quite see the parallel you're describing?

<comment><USER65> Sure.

What my former company called 'End User Computing'. This meant developing small or not-so-small programs in the only tool capable in a corporate environment: Excel (often linked to SharePoint as a data store). Otherwise lots of forms and procedures would have to be gone through making it a tech project.

Background: Operations (not tech) mega-corporate bureaucracy where these apps were helpers.

Solution: Open up Excel, and start to code and design GUIs on the worksheet via VBA built in to Excel (and all of Office). It was a stunningly similar experience to hazy memories of Delphi in terms of GUI and code, but ultimately was using a spanner to do a screwdriver's job. Memories of Delphi were certainly hazy at this point, but it was more similar than any other tools I'd used the the decade+ since that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I too often see a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Delphi so great. Yes, you can drag and drop controls onto a form in a lot of tools. It can compile native code. And yes, Object Pascal was nice to read and maintain.

But the real issue is rapid database applications. Being able to create business apps very rapidly was always Delphi's thing. It was a really fantastic replacement for Paradox and brought Turbo Pascal and Paradox together to create something amazing.

For that there still isn't anything. There are a lot of things that are close, but nothing with the same level of power and speed. The closest thing I've found is Django. Hopefully that clarifies: it's not about GUI anything.

</comment><comment><USER68> I remember Borland vs Ms

        Delphi vs VB
        TASM vs MASM
        Borland C++ OWL vs Microsfot C++/MFC
        Philippe Khan vs Gates

Delphi was the raddest RAD tool. The free VCL components for it were often better than commercial VB ActiveX components. Delphi executables were faster. Delphi could statically link everything.

I eventually had to move to VB when my Delphi job dried up. VB felt like a downgrade. I remember constantly referring to Dan Appleman's book so I could use Win32 APIs to work around the limitations of VB. I'm not knocking VB as it's one of my favorite tools too, but Delphi was the cream of the crop.

</comment><comment><USER69> "Fastest compiler -- 85,000 lines per minute"

What do you get 22 years later on an Intel i7?

<comment><USER66> No idea but it was always stupidly fast.

First time I used a C++ compiler I thought it had frozen because the hello world took so long to compile. The notion that something could compile for longer than a split second (for trivial things) didn't occur to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Thanks for making me feel so old... we had a programming lecture twice a week and I was carrying one of those 10 kg "Delphi The Bible" book in my backpacks... that made me feel like a programmer somehow.

</comment><comment><USER71> I guess I should have started on a greenfield project.

For me it was less rosy.

I remember my boss trying to get me started on Delphi.

We basically had two or three Delphi developer workstations available because setting up one that could compile the projects we had in our vcs was a three day task - and it was only possible with the help of our resident Delphi consultant.

Stuff like that has made me love Maven and Java.

Same goes for Visual Basic that I once used to love.

Still I feel I could have loved it if I didn't start with 10 years of accumulated references to unsupported packages. :-/

<comment><USER52> The way delphi finds its units is similar to how java finds its classes, so it can be smooth sailing or an absolute nightmare depending on how the project is laid out.

<comment><USER71> Unlike how Java finds it classes I have clear memories about installing things that would update stuff in the registry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I learned UCSD Pascal on an Apple 2e, and then Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC XT in high school. 1984 to 1986. It helped me learn more languages like Ada, we had Janus Ada for DOS.

Delphi 1.02 I got from some CD in a UK magazine sold in the USA. They gave away free copies of commerical software for buying the magazine for $10 or so.

I did better in Visual Basic because I got jobs that required it.

</comment><comment><USER73> I've written tons and tons of code in Delphi and remember it fondly. A few issues I had with it toward the end included Hjelsberg turning it into a kitchen sink, me too language, much like IMO the direction C# has gone in, and walking into projects with tons of business logic right behind the forms, empty except blocks, and codebase full of warnings when compiled. Fix your warnings people.

</comment><comment><USER66> It's good for teaching purposes because it forces a very structured clear line of thinking.

Not convinced it's still best as a practical language though.

<comment><USER74> I don't think many ever thought the language itself was ever "the best". It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed, and the way things worked within the IDE, that many thought made Delphi the best. The Delphi/ObjectPascal language on its own, however, was pretty good.

<comment><USER66> >It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed

Agreed. One thing that prevented me from loving python. The language was great...but how the fk do I get a clickable button without some mish-mash of half developed 3rd party libraries?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Delphi was much more better choice than many others in 90's and early 2000. Fast compiler and quite optimised binaries also.

</comment><comment><USER76> It rocks to the point of server unavailability.

<comment><USER18> Sorry about that, my blog is self-hosted and never gets much traffic -- roughly 100x general volume

<comment><USER77> Might be worth considering fronting it with something like Cloudflare. I pay them about £20/month and reckon I could handle 10k hits a day on a t2.micro instance in AWS (in reality I'm actually only getting about 10 - 20 _visitors_ a day myself on the site in question, which I'm quite happy with at the moment due to reasons).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> adam-falafel My first job out of college was as a tech support intern for Delphi, first answering pre-sales and installation calls, and eventually moving up to answering paid support calls. From there, I joined a consulting company and wrote and maintained LOB applications written in Delphi. Good times. Jumped ship to .NET in 2003.

</comment><comment><USER78> Back then there was no internet and I knew no programmers. I remember seeing the yellow borland boxes at PC World and not really understanding what borland were. Afterwards I bought my first copy of vb secondhand (lots of manuals came with it), from someone who was getting into Delphi instead.

</comment><comment><USER79> I can't help but notice that all the article talks about is Delphi versions up to 6... which is where it started to go downhill.

Are recent versions of Delphi actually usable? I haven't tried anything beyond 8, and from my (admittedly rusty) experience the best version was 6.

<comment><USER74> Back in early 2000's when I used it a lot, the word was that the even numbered versions of Delphi (2, 4, 6) were all poor efforts, and the odd numbered (3,5,7) were all good. I used 6 and didn't think it was bad, but 7 was better. Many Delphi users had remained at version 5.

<comment><USER63> 6 and 7 were both great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Admittedly I haven't used Delphi but his reminds me of learning to program with realBASIC (Xojo).

The book with the IDE was free and easy enough to comprehend and it introduced all the basics of OOP.

Great times. I wonder if lots of people have had this same experience with VB .NET

</comment><comment><USER81> People seem to forget that some Delphi libraries are intertwined with assembly and work around Delphi inefficiencies. This made some libraries very hard to port to FreePascal. A typical example is DevC++ and its dependencies.

</comment><comment><USER82> If I had to write a native COM application in Windows, I'd still use Delphi.

</comment><comment><USER83> I remember a tool called "Dirty Little Helper" (if I am not mistaken), which had all the Delphi answers, I would ask SO nowadays (eg. how to make a windows tray icon?) But it was an offline application.

</comment><comment><USER84> Delphi 6 was my first one :)

</comment><comment><USER85> I used to code in Clipper in a past life. Many ex-Clipper devs became Delphi devs when the Great Fragmentation happened (multiple competing OO frameworks for Clipper).

</comment><comment><USER86> The best environment I've used to build software.

</comment><comment><USER87> After several years programming and using Borland, finally, I got to know what "Turbo" meaning (I am Chinese for not good in English)

</comment><comment><USER88> I love the magazine scans. They're almost always a good reminder of how much things have changed, and how cheap things have become.

</comment><comment><USER89> I've used Lazarus and it's amazing, however I'm hoping Red lang becomes the new Delphi in a way.

</comment><comment><USER90> Delphi 6 "Personal Edition" was my intro into Pascal. I absolutely loved it.

</comment><comment><USER91> my favorite color is better than yours.

Would someone please point to his/her blog saying that Tcl/tk being the universal scripting language?

<comment><USER30> Do you know who Marco Cantu is? Apparently not. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.

</comment><comment><USER93> ah, Delphi...</comment>


Maker of dangerous pain pills is 'ghost' that can't be found [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/25/who-is-riger-natural-maker-of-dietary-supplement-reumofan/2843161/ <comment><USER2> It feels like better linking of data would help a lot here. It's weird that wide scale web scraping isn't used as an intelligence source for things like this. (It can be done in a way that weakly preserves anonymity of innocent victims; and the data should be destroyed after prosecution).

> _They are running a high risk: Dozens of Reumofan users have suffered > serious and sometimes life-threatening health effects after taking the > pills, including liver injury, strokes and severe episodes of bleeding, > according to federal records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act._

On first reading it's easy to say these people are stupid, taking this ridiculous medication when there are proper meds around.

Pain control and pain medication is weird. People sometimes overdose with proper meds, leaving themselves open to similar very dangerous side effects.

Some of the meds are old, from a time when testing wasn't as good and understanding of pain was poor. See coproxamol as an example - this med contains 325 mg of paracetamol (therapeutic dose is 1000 mg per dose) and the weak opioid dextropropoxyphene. Coproxamol was widely used in the UK by people completing suicide. The dextropropoxyphene is very toxic, especially if combined with alcohol. And people taking the med long term would increase the dose because of tolerance to the opioid, thus risking liver toxicity from paracetamol overdosing.

But, despite clear evidence that this med is dangerous, and no more effective than a normal dose of paracetamol alone, there was a lot of campaigning around its withdrawal, with people worried that they would not find a suitable replacement.

We have better pain management now, but it's still tricky to get people the right pain relief.

<comment><USER3> My favorite pet peeve when it comes to paracetmol (note to Americans: that's acetaminophen to you) is the mixed paracetamol/codeine pills.

Here we have a highly addictive drug (codeine) that is otherwise _reasonably_ safe in quite high doses, and that is regularly prescribed in substantially higher doses. E.g. prescription co-codamol is usually sold with 30mg codeine per 500mg paracetamol vs. 8 or 12.5 mg codein in over the counter, and you can get prescriptions for "neat" codeine at higher doses as well.

And we have a drug that causes liver failure in quite small doses, to the extent that the UK government put in place restrictions on it sale intended to reduce its use in suicides (you can only buy 16 pills at a time outside of pharmacies, and 32 pills at a time in a pharmacy). It's been widely reported to have cut suicide deaths using paracetamol by hundreds (total, not per year) since the restriction was put in place as just that slight little barrier of having to go to multiple places is apparently enough to make some people think twice.

So what do they do? Of course, since we all know addiction is bad (and we're talking religious/morally/tabloid style righteous "bad" here), why, when they decide to allow sales of tablets with codeine over the counter, they decide it should be mixed with paracetamol or ibuprofen, with the codeine content low enough that anyone left addicted after failing to get prescriptions renewed etc. faces the choice of suffering it out, or risking their liver.

Cue a couple of years, and the warnings about the danger of these pills are starting to emerge: Surprise, surprise, people with severe opiate addictions are sufficiently often not in a place where you should expect them to make rational decisions about whether or not taking products containing too much paracetamol is a good idea...

I get migraines sometimes, and the codeine/paracetamol pills are a great help, but I can't help but think that allowing the over-the-counter sale of them without a "safe" alternative for those addicted to codeine is tantamount to murder - the government knew all the risks, and in fact there'd be little reason to require those mixes over allowing plain codeine if it wasn't as a way of making the pills more dangerous to abuse. Yet they did it anyway.

<comment><USER4> Codeine isn't OTC in the US, even when mixed with acetaminophen. Though, from what I understand, a pharmacist technically has the ability to dispense codeine-containing cough syrup without prescription.

Also, Hydrocodone (derived from codeine) is a Schedule 2 drug in the US. But, when combined with another substance (most often with acetaminophen, like Percocet) the drug is reduced to Schedule 3. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocodone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocodone)

As far as addicts misusing OTC codeine/acetaminophen, it's apparently pretty easy to filter most of the adulterant in a basic kitchen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I haven't seen anyone mention here that the pills _actually_ contained steroids and muscle relaxants, and all of the fatalities involved issues with long-term steroid use and/or withdrawal.

Doctors and the FDA began to get suspicious because the pills worked so _well_.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wait so these "all natural" pills contain a cocktail of drugs that are actually approved by the FDA but require a doctor's close motoring sold at a fraction of the price you would pay for them if you went through approved channels.

You know the risk just may be worth it if you can get the same drug at a fraction of the price. Some people can't afford the real thing.

<comment><USER7> I think the point of the article is more that it's a problem when something that contains these drugs lables itself as a "natural supplement" when in fact it is not. The issue is not so much const control as it is deceptive marketing.

<comment><USER6> True. Though if they ever marketed it as what it actually contains they would get considerably more heat.

Hacker instinct took over :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The scene in the vid where the guy says "I don't care..." with the framed "Faith" sitting besides him, it really pulls that documentary together.

</comment><comment><USER9> Allegedly the same is true for the "sexual enhancement" supplements sold at gas stations. Many contain drugs like Viagra even though it's sold as a natural supplement.

</comment><comment><USER10> Labratory</comment>


Show HN: Keyword-based search for "Who's Hiring?" posts - <AUTHOR> http://hnhiring.evgg.cc <comment><AUTHOR> After getting a little frustrated trying to Ctrl-F my way through the "Who's Hiring?" posts, I decided to build an interface that would make searching by keywords less of hassle.

Examples of the two currently supported query formats are:

1) "python London intern" -> simple matching (equivalent to ANDing the words)

2) "(haskell | golang) & Berlin" -> with groupings and logical operators

The backend is built in Go with Postgres for full-text search. The source is available at [https://github.com/evgorchakov/hnwh](https://github.com/evgorchakov/hnwh) .

Please let me know what you think!

</comment><comment><USER2> Good job! I made something similar in Haskell as a CLI application... Yours is much more complete and featureful though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'd love to see the source of your cli app!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SEEIICCKK</comment>


Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They're the Good Guys. They're Not - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/the-other-tech-bubble/?mbid=social_tw_backchannel <comment><USER2> Previous discussion 5 days ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944084)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've worked in Silicon Valley for the last 10 years, both as entrepreneur and investor, and I have rarely encountered the bad behavior described in this article. In my experience, the success stories are primarily by hardworking, modest, highly intelligent people who see an opportunity and just go to work on it for a long time.

That said, I'd imagine that a reporter is constantly exposed to the bad apple "bros" who view Silicon Valley as a get-rich-quick, fake it til you make it process. And by extension, this is what most of the outside world sees. After all, what's interesting or noteworthy about a bunch of people just working hard for a long time?

To bring it full circle: I've had a slightly (but not overly) negative view of Wall Street to date, but now I'm curious as to whether it was a similar story there. I feel like there is inherently more value in people building technology and companies than in buying and selling financial products, but I'm obviously biased.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had the same impression, very common at least in Brazil, of civil servants. You always read about incompetence and corruption, so, it's natural to assume all civil servants are either corrupt, or incompetent, or both.

It was not until I started giving courses (Zope, Plone) to the IT staff of government agencies that I realized how dedicated, competent, principled, and, many times, idealistic (making much less money than they'd do in the general market takes a lot of determination) they are.

Of course, there are bad apples. It's just so good apples are far less interesting than the really rotten ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Evidence is mounting that that the world is no longer fascinated with > Silicon Valley

That would be absolutely great. I'm rather tired of the excessive media focus.

</comment><comment><USER5> Omg, who cares if wired writes a story about your startup?!? No story has ever made a company...</comment>


Coda vs. notion vs. airtable - <AUTHOR> Have any of you guys used one of these products? Wondering what the relative benefits of each are / whether some are better for certain use cases than others. <comment><USER2> I use Notion for everything. I even made part of my notes public: [https://www.notion.so/Public-Space-for-Krzysztof- Kowalczyk-5...](https://www.notion.so/Public-Space-for-Krzysztof- Kowalczyk-568ac4c064c34ef6a6ad0b8d77230681)

I love it.

Coda is still in closed beta. I requested an invite months ago and still didn't get it. It also seems like their focus is on companies/teams. Notion also supports teams but works just as well for an individual (that's how I use it).

Notion is only superficially similar to AirTable in that Notion is a mostly a note-taker with additional capabilities, including some that can do some of the things that AirTable does (i.e. building mini-spreadsheets/databases).

AirTable is mostly for creating database/spreadsheet applications. It's great for that but not at all suitable for things that Notion is great at i.e. note taking.

I wouldn't even consider them competing. Maybe at some point Notion's tables will have as many features as AirTable but that's not today. You can use them both.</comment>


Ask HN: How you got your first funding? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Bootstraped until we had traction: proof-of-concept, small proof-of-market and users.

Make sure you did your networking all the way through.

</comment><comment><USER3> A local accelerator funded my company called Koalah. They gave us $25,000 for 8%. We applied via their online application and knew the founder of the firm.

<comment><USER4> Did it help?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Customers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Grant from a college followed by acceptance into accelerator fund

</comment><comment><USER7> I know some folks here probably lead you to YC. But I am currently building something with my saving as a developer. If I got my prototype right, I will call my richest auntie.</comment>


Why Apple doesn't do "Concept Products" - <AUTHOR> http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/ <comment><USER2> I contend that concept products correlate highly with companies that have a high cash/agility ratio.

GM and Ford, despite their dire financial situation, have such low agility that they pass this test. Toyota had some Scion car at the last Seattle auto show that was shaped like a bank vault. WTF. Attaboy guys -- you just let your guard down and gave the signal that the Koreans (Kia and Hyundai) have an entry into that segment.

Microsoft is flush with cash but won't make the hard choice -- cut the anchor to the desktop OS and productivity software business to transition into whatever their next fortune would be. Windows Mobile exists to sell Windows NT licenses. MS Surface is a UI device for some corporate middleware thing that is currently shown on 15" CRTs in cubicles across the world? This must be what it's like to paint yourself into a corner.

I can't say too much about Nokia because I don't think I even know one person who owns a Nokia phone anymore, and I certainly can't think of anyone who owns a Nokia Smartphone. My perception is that they basically make trusty but crusty candybar phones for people who learned a phone UI in 1997 and don't want to change.

Ultimately I think it's inevitable. GM, Ford, MS, Nokia and now Toyota are all huge behemoths in their markets. They have the blessings of huge volumes, but the curse of not having a focused market direction (other than "yes").

Apple has the luxury of a small enough and well enough tended market definition (premium phones + audio players + consumer PCs) that they can tell a story with the release of each product. The sheer volume of MS or GM products makes that impossible. Perhaps concept products are (an impotent) attempt to simulate the same thing for companies that can't.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the author still has a lot of work to do to defend his case. BMW doesn't hesitate to make concept cars (see, e.g., <http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1890/69/>), but it has brisk sales and an enviable brand cachet. It's tempting to find some one variable which differs between successful companies and unsuccessful ones, and then spin it, but I think that, in reality, no one variable explains things so neatly.

<comment><USER4> It's not about _successful_ vs _unsuccessful_ \-- obviously nobody can argue that Microsoft is unsuccessful. It's about _innovative_ and _non-innovative_.

Relative to Apple, BMW is a terrible example of an innovative company, nor do they need to be innovative to succeed: The automotive industry hasn't seen a dramatically different product design, comparable to the difference between an iPhone and a flip phone, since well before World War II [1]. Progress in automobiles has been all about slow, gradual evolution for fifty or sixty years. Even the new hybrid cars are incredibly conventional (they're designed to be nigh-indistinguishable from other cars) and are based on incremental improvements to technologies that are decades old (electric cars, for example, date back to the mid-to-late 1800s).

The most interesting recent BMW product (that I know of, anyway) has been the Mini Cooper, a vehicle whose major selling point is that it closely resembles a famous design _from 1959_. The equivalent Apple product would be the "iENIAC".

[1] That is, there hasn't been a dramatically different design that _went anywhere_. Even if you discount all the wacky concept cars that can't actually be manufactured, plenty of folks have tried to change the industry with real products: the Segway, the Corbin Sparrow, etc, etc.

<comment><USER5> Mercedes Benz SLK revived the concept of the hardtop convertible, and now almost every convertible make is shifting to a hardtop. The difference between a hardtop convertible and a soft top is basically the difference between a iPhone and a Nokia N95 (comparison to a regular phone is a strawman).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree. I'm getting tired of Nokia's concept phones, while their real phones haven't changed a bit in 10years. Probably the hype is even worse here in Finland.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it just me or did the G4 cube seem like a "concept" product? Or perhaps even the Anniversary Mac...?</comment>


Designing the Uber Cash Experience - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@matthewcmoore/designing-the-uber-cash-experience-649a2749b324 <comment><USER2> This, like most of Uber's posts I've seen, feels like hollow marketing/recruiting. A design post without a discernable screenshot, diagram, or mock - or diagram just a bunch of pictures of the team having a great time? How many times did we hear how data-driven and great Uber is; were "magical experiences" and "paradigm-shifting" really necessary?

Maybe I'm just being a grumpus, and I do know that many company blogs and such are thinly veiled marketing, but I always find myself hoping to see something genuine and down-to-earth from Uber...

<comment><USER3> Not a great recruiting tool. Why do people in SF think they know better than those in India? And the broader story is that this Uber blind spot possibly caused its inability to compete effectively in India.

<comment><USER4> Wasn't the entire point of the story that they went to India multiple times to figure out how to do it right?

<comment><USER3> Yes, but first, they apparently did not do that. And second, they didn't appear to rely much on their in-country team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is thinly disguised marketing, spinning a huge negative for Uber in India into a positive.

The situation in India is that Ola (Indian Uber clone) is by far and away the leader. The cool thing about Ola is that you can pay by cash. Indians prefer cash and dislike credit cards, and so Ola rode that desire to huge success ([http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/india-ola-unicorn- funding/](http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/india-ola-unicorn-funding/)), while Uber held tight to their cashless utopia, receding away in Ola's rear view mirror.

This then is nothing more than Uber finally admitting that their pristine model was wrong for India. So instead of a mea culpa, they turn it into a fantasy design trip and journey.

I do admire the chutzpah though. Hustle hustle hustle.

<comment><USER6> > The situation in India is that Ola (Indian Uber clone) is by far and away > the leader.

Do you have any source for this?

Personally, I have stopped using Ola due to its shoddy app and "service". I find UberGo more reliable and cheaper. Uber hit a bump last November where Reserve Bank of India mandated 2FA for credit card transactions. However, Uber has come up with a nice hack to get around this - direct to credit card payment gateway after the ride. That has enabled them to use debit cards (which is common in India) for payments as well. They already had tie ups with virtual wallet services like PayTM after the credit card directive.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.techinasia.com/india-uber-vs-ola- infographic/](https://www.techinasia.com/india-uber-vs-ola-infographic/)

750k rides/day for Ola 200k riders/day for Uber

Uber is in more cities, and in more modes of transport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The blog post doesn't even acknowledge that a local competitor, Ola, has had cash payments since its inception. Uber also complains about the 'regulations' Well, Uber, ask your engineers and they would tell you those 'regulations' are in place to prevent credit-card fraud.

The design process they spoke about... They just ended up postponing their launch. Ola might have an inferior experience compared to the classy uber but it just works. It's like hackernews... It isn't mobile friendly, nor is it real-time or shiny, but ever so popular because its a fantastic product.

Like someone else mentioned, this looks like PR. Uber isn't even ack that they were considerably late to market with cash payments in India. They don't mention their competition (which they could have, since it has an inferior UX, and the blog post supposedly talks about 'design').

They were on their high horses when they entered India, thinking people would choose Uber because of superior payments experience (credit card), and a very well polished UX... They were wrong. Here's a series of things which I think they ripped from their competition here in India:

1\. Cash payments

2\. Switching to generic Android phones from iPhones

3\. Electronic cash wallets

4\. SOS feature

There are other features that Uber still lacks, like:

1\. Free calls between driver and customer

2\. SMS notifications

3\. Guaranteed cab allotment

4\. Short distance but cheaper cabs

5\. Tuk-tuks for hire (Auto Rickshaws)

6\. Call centre customer service

7\. Call-based booking

8\. Advance booking (cab after 2hrs and so on...)

Watch them write blog posts like they invented these other features too because they flew in with smart people and connected with the locals and gathered data to prove their intuitions when in reality they just imitated a local competition.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm less curios about the rider->driver transaction, and more curious about the driver<->Uber transaction. It seems this creates a liability where drivers now owe Uber for their part of cash fares. Are they expected to mail a stack of paper rupees to Uber each week?

<comment><USER9> Yeah this is the burning question thats completely unanswered by the article :-/

<comment><USER10> It seems like if 95% of rides are cash, then there may not be enough to deduct...

<comment><USER8> Anything over 50% of rides being cash causes this to become an issue. Assuming everyone who can use credit always does, since there's about 20 cash users for every one of them the uptake of Uber among cash users only has to be 1/20th of the uptake among credit users to get to 50% cash rides. If anyone who could use credit chooses to use cash instead this number could be much lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wait, so how does the driver pay Uber their cut? They have to deliver the cash to the Uber depot? And what happens if they get robbed on the way? (Or say they did?)

<comment><USER12> My guess is that Uber subtracts it from the amount that Uber would pay the drivers for the credit card transactions. They still support and encourage use of credit cards.

If a driver didn't deliver cash to Uber they would probably be deactivated. If they had an excuse for it they could try customer service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was worried this was about them rolling this out in North America, which would be absolutely terrible. Part of the safety tradeoff of Uber is that it's considerably more safe to be an uber driver than a cabbie because you don't have to carry large quantities of cash. I'd really rather not see that change.

<comment><USER10> Clearly India is a culture where it's acceptable and not awkward to pay in cash. In North America people don't like handling cash, so it will probably stay the way it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _...the new learnings_

Picked up a little Indian English along the way, I see. :)

I liked the attention to UX. Deliberately breaking the user's normal workflow in order to emphasize that something vital is different is a pattern I'll need to remember.

</comment><comment><USER15> So how much cash do Uber drivers actually make? I can't believe they don't disclose this data openly. And until they do, they don't have my sympathy. The same holds for the App/Play stores, by the way. People have the right to know what they sign up for, especially if they are putting lots of upfront effort into it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Umm....regular cab drivers have been taking cash for years. Why is it so amazing when a product team goes and does the obvious?

What would be more interesting is understanding how this has impacted Uber's business model.

The article was very light on details and high on itself. Blah.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can anyone in India take a screenshot and show us how this transaction looks? taking pictures of drivers, but not showing how the interface looks is not super useful.

</comment><comment><USER18> Bitcoin question; if cash and digital don't exist in India, does this make for a better bit coin atm scenario?

Then you could link your uber account with your btc wallet.

<comment><USER19> Both cash and digital exists in india. Bitcoin will find it even harder to grow in india than in first world countries because a large part of the population are not comfortable with using technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They sure like saying "driver-partner" a lot

</comment><comment><USER18> I find it amazing that India doesn't have a more digitized form of payment available. I wonder when they will be able to have mobile pay available on their phones.

<comment><USER19> India already does. For that fact mobile and card payment is a lot better executed than in USA. The difference is that it's a more recent happening and that is why they could learn from the mistakes of others and improve things. The problem is that a large part of the population grew up using cash and are more comfortable with it than with any form of mobile/card payment. The younger generation will prefer cashless transactions but being cashless only will leave a large part of the market alienated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are a lot of Uber-skeptics here. Say what you want, but for a company that's thrived on mobile payments to redesign their product experience to accept cash payments is a huge deal. It speaks to the company's (and the design team's) ability to question fundamental assumptions about their product as they enter new markets. Many a large tech company has failed when it has tried to enter a new market coasting on its successes in other markets. Uber succeeds because it doesn't fall into the tarpit of technology-driven innovation.

Way to go Matt! Awesome post!

</comment><comment><USER22> What a step backwards... but money trumps idealism every day.</comment>


I tried to buy an actual barrel of crude oil (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/that-time-i-tried-to-buy-some-crude-oil <comment><USER2> NPR's Planet Money also bought some oil: [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/planet- money-buys-oil)

<comment><USER3> I think Planet Money also bought a mortgage backed security a while back when things had already gone south.

They tracked the houses involved and their history.

It was interesting to see the investment tied to specific homes, and etc.

<comment><USER4> Also a junk/high-yield bond [https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/807544557/meet- our-junk-bond](https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/807544557/meet-our-junk-bond)

<comment><USER5> Schwab allows retail investors to buy junk bonds. I bought one a few weeks ago.

<comment><USER6> Really? Care to share your experience/details?

<comment><USER5> Sure, I bought a Delta Airlines bond with a 3.4% coupon for 93 cents on the dollar due in a year from now. Provided Delta doesn't go bankrupt in a year I will make 10%.

They have a pretty healthy balance sheet compared to their peers and I don't expect the government to let the sector fail in such a way that bondholders get wiped out.

<comment><USER7> I would of thought holding Delta stock would have more than 10% upside if they don't go bankrupt

<comment><USER8> He's not talking about stock, and you're right - their stock would have a far greater return. Potentially over 100% within a year.

<comment><USER9> But also far more likely to go to zero.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, this aged well:

"The story of how I came to own physical oil begins in late 2008, when fallout from the financial crisis spurred the crude market into severe contango—meaning the price of oil for future delivery was higher than the expected price of immediate "spot" delivery. While contango is the usual and persistent state of the oil futures curve, this particular "super" version helped create the perfect conditions for an almighty oil storage trade as the price of crude for future delivery vastly eclipsed the cost-of-carry and storage expenses of petroleum bought in the spot market."

This is exactly where we are now, only the prices are much lower and the demand even weaker?

I remember reading this the first time it came out. Only better the second time.

<comment><USER11> More or less, though it should be pointed out that the negative prices yesterday were for futures contracts that trade in 1000 barrel increments (roughly a railroad tank car) and not some tiny amount (like a blue barrel).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Back in school (around 2006) I asked the PR department of German BP for a small sample of crude oil, that I need for my final assignment. A few weeks later I've got large glass bottle (I think maybe over a liter) of crude oil. The package needed the signature of my mom because it was a dangerous goods transport. I think the shipment was for BP more expensive than the Russian oil itself...

</comment><comment><USER13> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10499297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10499297)

Edit: Such links are simply for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

<comment><USER14> have you considered some kind of presubmission check for this? even just to inform users without actually screening, and then auto appending previous discussions if submitted?

<comment><USER13> Yes but it's not clear how to get it right.

<comment><USER15> If you auto merged the comments from the last time, in theory they would quickly fall to the bottom because their time based value would be so much lower than the new stuff.

Maybe also disable replies to old comments and make them a different color?

To be fair, we could never figure out how to get this right on reddit either, but HN has a better comment sorting algorithm than reddit so it might actually work here.

<comment><USER16> Why do you want to discourage replies to old comments?

<comment><USER15> Because the people who made the comments won't know that someone replied since HN doesn't have a notification system.

<comment><USER17> Not a Hacker News feature, and probably not new to many here, but some might find it useful: [http://www.hnreplies.com](http://www.hnreplies.com)

<comment><USER15> That was new to me, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I actually love buying stuff which is not easily available, this has given me many ideas of starting new business of which a few are successful now.

Sometimes it's hard for someone within a system to conceive an idea which is obvious to the outsider and yes there will be many naysayers but if you know your idea can create value, you'll profit.

<comment><USER19> Could you give an example? I understand if you don't want to though.

<comment><USER20> construction comes to mind, equipment, materials, things usually sold only to companies. that would be interesting...a small crane shipped to your cottage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Considering that the front-month oil contracts went negative today (paid to buy a barrel of oil), I think more (well funded and adept) players will try to hastily arrange more storage facilities. There's just no place to put the stuff right now.

It's quite difficult to turn-off an active well. Deep-water wells are all but impossible to stop.

<comment><USER22> Actually, deep water wells are usually quite easy to shut in by design. They frequently need to be shut in due to hurricanes or infrastructure maintenance. You don't drill a $100 million deepwater well without all the bells and whistles.

Very cheap wells with low production (onshore, say ~10 barrel per day) are the ones that tend to be difficult to shut in, as they're not designed for easy temporary shut-ins.

That having been said, most of the "must produce" issues are contractual. There are plenty of contracts with production quotas/etc. Similarly, pipelines need a minimum volume to keep flowing, and once they're stopped, they can be difficult to start again (inspections/etc, as well as physically starting things flowing).

<comment><USER23> ALL wells, including the "very cheap wells" are easy to shut in, by design. It is an essential safety feature, mandated by all relevant codes, rules and regulations.

SOME wells can be a little difficult to _restart after a shut-in_. This includes, for example, offshore wells which extract waxy crude - the crude can simply solidify in the pipe if allowed to cool down to ambient temperature. See link below. This is usually not a big problem for a planned shutdown, as the facility will take measures to prevent such a situation (eg flush the pipes with diesel right after shutdown).

I suspect the problem might be more difficult with some pipelines, as these may be impractical to flush.

[https://www.khavaranparaffin.com/articles/161-wax- problems-i...](https://www.khavaranparaffin.com/articles/161-wax-problems-in- production-of-oil-and-gas.html)

<comment><USER22> Yes, any well must be able to be shut in. I phrased that poorly. What I meant was that not all wells respond to a shut in in the same way. It's not uncommon for things to take months to recover to the same production levels after a shut in. (At least for conventional wells -- unconventionals are significantly different.)

(Major caveat here: I'm an exploration geologist who later went into remote sensing, so my knowledge of actual operations is pretty spotty. Feel free to ignore me on this, but I'm going to keep rambling anyway.)

I was referring to a lot of onshore wells in declining or very small conventional fields. In many cases, a shut in that lasts for more than a few weeks basically leads to a P&A, as production won't recover without a workover, and a workover isn't worth it. That's what I meant by "not designed for it" \-- production is expected to be sub-par after a shut in and a workover was never in the plans. A shut in means a death sentence for some wells, so operators prefer to keep them trickling along when possible, as it leads to a higher EUR. (Also most of these are hooked up to stock tanks, not production gathering pipelines, so it's a bit of a different world.)

However, I'm extrapolating from the very little experience I've had with that. Literally one tiny onshore field in TN (yes, Tennessee) that I worked in/with 15 years ago a summer after undergrad (I was actually mostly collecting seismic with a tiny source and a short string of geophones from the back of a pickup truck, so not terribly closely related). I may very well be way off base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminded me of the opposite story: [https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special- Delivery](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery)

Tldr- commodities trader accidentally specified physical delivery for several thousand tons of coal; very surprised when the barges show up at their waterfront office.

<comment><USER25> I think the story is fiction. I don't think commodities are sent wherever your office is. Isn't the location of delivery set as a part of the futures contract?

<comment><USER26> Yes (e.g., if you buy CL futures, delivery is in Oklahoma).

QL coal doesn't trade anymore (all the active coal futures I can find now are cash-settled) but delivery seems to have historically been at the discretion of the parties, so the story is at least plausible.

<comment><USER27> Everything I've read seems to say it's very, very difficult to accidentally take delivery, but it's not quite impossible.

In related news, there is a Planet Money Podcast (episode called the Eddie Murphy Rule) where they interview the trader who took possession of a bunch of cattle by mistake IIRC.

<comment><USER26> If you're a normal retail trader, your broker will probably intervene before then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Thanks for sharing. That was a fun read from an unexpected source.

<comment><USER29> Not so unexpected: Tracy Alloway is one of the hosts of a jointly very- entertaining and highly-informative podcast by Bloomberg, Odd Lots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> [https://archive.md/BEiM0](https://archive.md/BEiM0)

</comment><comment><USER31> The barrel may be worth more than the oil!

<comment><USER11> In a sense, yes, that is what a negative price for oil means: the barrel is more valuable as a place to store oil than the oil being stored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> the fun part of the story is he was paid three quarter of dollar in bitcoin so he should now be a millionaire

</comment><comment><USER33> [https://outline.com/meyY6X](https://outline.com/meyY6X)

<comment><USER34> Outline.com is intellectual theft of someone else's IP and their right to monetise it. Would we accept this in any other domain than content?

<comment><USER35> I don't think there's any opportunity cost to Bloomberg here, nobody freeloading on this site would otherwise be buying a subscription, I shouldn't have thought.</comment></comment></comment>


Marc Andreessen:  Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html <comment><USER2> His fourth point, that any good Facebook apps will be killed by the traffic, is a pretty interesting one. In one sense, Facebook Platform lowers the barrier to entry for developers by making it insanely easy to spread the word about a new application, but it's so successful at doing so that you have to have enough physical infrastructure to handle that load. This seems like a perfect use case for Amazon's EC2 and S3, but as he notes, iLike wasn't able to use them to solve all of their traffic problems. Does anyone know of any particular problems inherent in the way Facebook Platform and Amazon's services are set up that makes it difficult to use them together?

<comment><USER3> Most people don't build their apps to work with an infrastructure like EC2. Or. Their apps can't easily fit into the EC2 model.

In essence, how is EC2 different?

1- Each EC2 instance is essentially 1/4th of a typical server (w/ 4 cores, 16GB ram, 1GB net, ~500G local disk).

2- once an EC2 instance fails, it's gone forever - there is no way to recover local data, you'll never get the same IP addr, etc.

Given these two constraints, EC2 isn't really a viable platform for running services backed by an typical RDBMS (though, I'm sure it can be pulled off, it would be quite a bit of work).

EC2 is _really_ good for apps that "pull" work from a queue - i.e. operate asynchronously.

There are several companies using EC2 with this asnyc idiom, Powerset being the most notable.

<comment><USER4> Would immediately storing data and sessions to S3 be problematic?

Is it a better idea to use an external machine as a load balancer and an automatic EC2 instance manager?

Is it reasonable to try to build a traditional functional web application in this asynchronous paradigm?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _FBML strips out some features of HTML, such as Javascript_

What exactly can it do, then?

I'm just completely baffled by facebook. Can somebody explain the appeal of it to me? Now, myspace I always considered lamentable crap, but the _appeal_ was fairly straightforward...it gave people an easy way to build their own websites (which tended to be wildly, err, creative) and a way to connect them to those of their friends. Myspace had a zany, fun, creative...howsoever crappy...appeal to it.

But facebook pages have this sedative-like uniformity that I just can't wrap my head around. Why are the kids going to this? The whole thing feels dull.

The facebook api--can anybody link to a good example of how this works? I'm not sure what kind of 'applications' you can make with stripped-down javascript-free html, but what do I know?

Well, what I know is this: The whole appeal for _developers_ is mathematical. It's just a goldrush--and like any goldrush the profits GO TO THE FIRST ONES WHO ARRIVE. The demand/supply curve is all on the demand side because there are so few facebook "apps" at the moment. Once saturation hits, the old web with its old freedoms will be the only real player again.

<comment><USER6> """Now, myspace I always considered lamentable crap, but the appeal was fairly straightforward"""

Wrong. It had superior, free picture galleries and allowed you to quickly find people in your area (via the "browse") _so you can get laid_. Those were THE killer features.

Roughly the same for facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is any YC-funded company built specifically for such a platform?

Pmarca skips over the danger of being copied by Facebook, which is even easier for them than it was for MS in the Windows era.

</comment><comment><USER8> FaceBook guys really know some top-notch PR folks. I have never seen a web site API being launched with so much drama.

A platform? Can I build an application on this platform that runs on it's own domain name and takes over 100% of browser real estate? (I am not being sarcastic, I am asking since I haven't spent much time drilling into it)

<comment><USER6> yes, all of this fb drooling is making me sick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The implication is, in my view, quite clear -- the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways."

I wonder if anyone hosting providers will step up and offer a Facebook level service to budding application developers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "...the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways."

</comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone explain why I can't register as Ludwig van Beethoven on Facebook? Who decides that John Smith is more "legitimate" than LvanB?

<comment><USER9> I decided. Since you're not LvanB on here I assumed that your were faking.</comment></comment>


GoSpeccy: A concurrent ZX Spectrum Emulator Written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/remogatto/gospeccy

<comment><USER2> Every month or so, somebody drops by the bsnes[3] forums asking why bsnes pegs one CPU core and leaves the others idle, instead of using each core equally. The answer, of course, is that a SNES has a number of different processing units all running at different speeds, and it's much more efficient to design the emulation core with coöperative multi-tasking[4] than with OS threads. Since bsnes is implemented in C++, I've wondered whether a language more focussed on concurrency could make a multi-threaded emulator possible, but it looks like GoSpeccy isn't a particularly useful example of it.

From the "Architecture" page[5]: _In consequence, the whole emulation core is basically just one goroutine_

[3]: <http://byuu.org/bsnes/>

[4]: Like, ridiculously more efficient, making it possible to sync millions of times per second. The system bsnes uses is called "libco", and although it doesn't have its own web-site, you can browse the code here: <http://gitorious.org/bsnes/bsnes/blobs/master/bsnes/libco/>

[5]: <https://github.com/remogatto/gospeccy/wiki/Architecture>

<comment><USER3> One OS thread per task is not the only way to parallelize a program. If you have a runtime system that allows the creation of light-weight tasks that can be executed by pre-existing OS threads, you can exploit very fine grain task parallelism. See The Implementation of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language: <http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/cilk5.pdf>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right. In Go such light-weight tasks are called goroutines.

Quoting from Effective Go[1]:

A goroutine has a simple model: it is a function executing in parallel with other goroutines in the same address space. It is lightweight, costing little more than the allocation of stack space. And the stacks start small, so they are cheap, and grow by allocating (and freeing) heap storage as required.

Goroutines are multiplexed onto multiple OS threads so if one should block, such as while waiting for I/O, others continue to run. Their design hides many of the complexities of thread creation and management.

[1] - <http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#goroutines>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the real speccy, you could double the horizontal resolution from 192 lines to 384 lines, and also get different colors for each 8x1 (or 8x0.5 if extending to 384) by changing the screen bitmap while the scanline is being generated.

Pixel timing accurate emulators exist -- in fact, C64 games written after ~1990 are useless without it.

<comment> 0xe2-0x9a-0x9b The "8x1 mode" and border effects do work in GoSpeccy. You can try the Overscan demo (<http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0007636>).

GoSpeccy does not support any 384 line mode. As far as I know, the _horizontal_ resolution is 256 pixels, so doubling that would yield 512 horizontal pixels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you explain were the concurrency is used?

<comment><USER6> Here's a link to the GoSpeccy architecture: <https://github.com/remogatto/gospeccy/wiki/Architecture> each of the modules communicate via Go channels</comment></comment>


Apple Tried to Silence Exploding iPod Victim with Gagging Order - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/21937/Apple_Tried_to_Silence_Exploding_iPod_Victim_with_Gagging_Order

<comment><USER2> Insanity.

Proper response: Refund their money _and_ send them _several_ of the best and newest iPods on the market as a replacement. Also, send them a sincere apology, hand-written (in pen ink on paper, not printed) by someone at Apple in the top 1% of all employees, including an offer to pay for any damages caused by the exploding device. Then, work as hard as possible coming up with the reason why it happened, and as soon as you know, issue a public statement detailing which iPods are at risk (if the incident wasn't a fluke) and how customers can send them in for replacements. Finally, make sure the problem never, ever happens again in any product your company makes. Write a unit test, as it were, for the cause of the explosion and test all future devices for the same problem.

Yes, I know I'm living in a dream world, but it's nice here.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. That would have been all in all much nicer.

But a bit of clarification; it was _not_ a gagging order — which are handed out by courts — but a confidentiality agreement, which they were not obligated to sign.

A less than sterling response on Apple's part, but this has been blown out of proportion.</comment></comment>


In Defense of Distraction - <AUTHOR> http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=In+Defense+of+Distraction&expire=&urlID=35262779&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fnews%2Ffeatures%2F56793%2F&partnerID=73272

<comment><USER2> This article was an attention torture. The author tricks you in the beginning to grab your full attention to just go on and blah-blah-chat about things he learned or heard about attention, bottom line being that we can only hope neuroplasticity will save us.

What seemed like the most sensible thing in the article was that inability to focus is a result of depression or lost interest in the job. Good news indeed.

<comment><USER3> I found it quite a nice read. It's long, but well written. Certainly better than your average blog post.

Then again, I'm obsessed with productivity and focus (because I'm neither productive nor focused).

EDIT: typo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Highlight of the article for me: "This is what the web-threatened punditry often fails to recognize: Focus is a paradox—it has distraction built into it. The two are symbiotic; they're the systole and diastole of consciousness." I recall an article describing research done, in response to driving with cellphone in use that claimed that essentially people could not multi task. My take on the topic is at <http://www.ciexinc.com/blogs/daily/080601.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> Source: <http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Kinda ironic, a 6000 word essay entitled, "The Poverty of Attention." By OP's definition, no one will ever be able to finish it. Please tweet me a summary.

<comment><USER7> Seriously. I read about 10 words and then gave up.</comment></comment>


Footprint webapps - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for (carbon) footprint webapps. Anybody seen some inspiring my-carbon-footprint calculating webapps? <comment><USER2> The YC startup CO2Stats charges a fee to analyze the energy footprint of your site and purchase an equivalent amount of wind/solar energy, offsetting your usage. You can then advertise your carbon neutrality with a "green certified site" logo like the one on the bottom of this page.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a beginning for sure. I was/am actually looking for applications with which consumers can calculate their personal footprint. A consumer enters his stuff + habits: palm pre, macbook, etc. other data is gathered through scrapping or from other providers (e.g. dopplr). There is a calculation...and voila a user see's his total footprint visually. Based on this information plus additional information a consumer can -- if he desires to -- change his products/habits.</comment></comment>


Young Blood Reverses Signs of Aging in Old Mice - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24421/

<comment><USER2> This is nothing new. Vampires established long ago that you can survive off of the blood and life force of other creatures indefinitely.

<comment><USER3> Here's an upvote, cause you made me laugh.</comment></comment>