VPS Comparison between Slicehost and Prgmr: is an $8 instance as good as a $20 one? - <AUTHOR> http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-comparison-between-slicehost-and-prgmr

<comment><USER2> Linode seems to occupy a good middle-ground. You get much more for your money than Slicehost and it's a fairly large, well-established host with multiple locations. A $20 Linode for instance gives you 360mb of of RAM, 16gb storage and 200gb transfer. They also use more powerful CPUs than the Athlon's listed for Slicehost/prgmr - my Linode is on a quad-core Xeon L5420 (2.5ghz, 6mb cache).

Just guessing, but I'd expect disk access is a bigger bottleneck on highly loaded VPS servers than the CPU, so the worst and average case disk performance are probably what would concern me the most. I think prgmr is a fantastic deal - I certainly haven't seen anybody else offering so much RAM at that price point. I'd be a customer if they were located on the east coast.

Finally, for those who don't know, prgmr is owned and run by lsc who's a member here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc>

<comment><USER3> <http://www.fsckvps.com/> has similar pricing for OpenVZ based virtual servers.

<comment><USER4> If you like OpenVZ, I would recommend

<http://www.johncompanies.com/>

Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly. The Johncompanies people, last time I tried them, were excellent.

<comment><USER5> "Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly."

This is really interesting, I'm wondering if you can elaborate a bit?

<comment><USER4> OpenVZ is a thinner virtualization layer. everyone shares the same kernel. It's resource separation isn't nearly as strong. On the other hand, it is also more efficient. you can reasonably expect to get more total performance out of a OpenVZ system than the same system running xen, but the problem is with OpenVZ, if one user is hogging resources, that user is much more likely to effect other customers than they would be under Xen, with it's non-shared ram and stronger CPU scheduling.

<comment><USER5> Also, thanks in general for your HN participation and frank and open discussion of your hosting business. I find it really interesting and also helpful the way you classify different types of hosting needs and potential good hosting fits, ( that are not always your own company ;D ). Very cool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I do feel like slicehost "must" be overpriced these days, just based on the fact that their prices haven't decreased that I can remember. (At least ~2 years, maybe more?)

Not sure if prgmr is where I'd end up, but can't be all bad when "figlet prgmr.com" was all the time they spent on logo design. ;)

<comment><USER2> In that time, Linode have consistently increased their offerings at the same price-point and they deploy newer hardware. It seems a little odd to me that Slicehost seem to get so much more love in the hacker community and Linode remains the underdog. Perhaps Slicehost tends to attract more passionate users who market it more effectively to others? If Linode would get their backup service out of beta and clone the Slicehost API I would see little reason to prefer Slicehost.

<comment><USER7> I'm a long-time Linode customer, and I recently had to make the choice between Linode and Slicehost. I was extremely unimpressed by Slicehost's offerings compared to Linode - with Linode you get _so_ much more bang for the buck, and they even upgraded harddisk space 3 weeks after I signed up for a new server. I can absolutely not understand why Slicehost gets more buzz than Linode.

<comment><USER8> Their beautiful copy/paste ready articles and fantastic support in their Campfire chat room is what sold me when I started with them. Recently, I moved over to Mosso.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is worth noting:

> Much of what's automated over at Slicehost (like provisioning a new > instance) is handled manually at Prgmr.

(Which is also true for Linode). That might potentially be a big difference - I found it very quick to bring up new Linodes or Slices, and it's nice to know that that's a quick and easy possibility if you start generating more traffic.

Also... Calexico? Seems an odd place to be running a hosting business. It appears their actual servers are in San Jose... so where did he get Calexico from?

[http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/About_prgmr.co...](http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/About_prgmr.com)

(Which is what their 'about' link takes you to) Looks like a smaller operation than Linode or Slicehost, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I found the location by using a Geo IP lookup. It could therefore be inaccurate.

<comment><USER10> It is inaccurate. The servers are located at the svtix data center [1] in San Jose, CA [2]. That seems like a perfectly sensible place to operate a business to me.

[1] <http://prgmr.com/san-jose-co-location.html> [2] <http://www.svtix.com/locationmap.html>

<comment><USER4> this is correct for all new customers. I have a really old location at herculies data in sacramento, and another old location at he.net in Fremont.

<comment><USER10> Just out of curiosity: are you planning to centralize your operation?

<comment><USER4> I am planning on spreading even more. I'd like a rack in the UK or eastern europe. I do plan on getting rid of some of my current locations once I move the customers, though. but it would be nice to offer some low-latency options to our friends on the other side of the globe.

My next rack will probably be around here, though. Some place that I can get a cheap dark-fiber connection to from svtix, or maybe even within svtix, but I'd like to offer my customers the option of buying VPSs in different locations.

<comment><USER11> > I'd like a rack in the UK or eastern europe.

And they will be welcome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am a slicehost customer, and a programmer without much sysadmin experience. To me, the documentation and support community at slicehost is invaluable - something this article touches on but doesn't put as much importance into as raw performance. Of course, depending on your level of Linux admin experience, saving $12/mo. may be worth it to you.

<comment><USER13> Its always worth it to pay more for quality. Especially when the difference is only $12.

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference is $12 for a 256MB slice. What if you start to grow and need 5 1GB slices? That is a $250/month difference.

<comment><USER13> as your traffic grows, so should your revenue.

<comment><USER14> I've observed hosting costs to grow faster than revenue :-(

<comment><USER15> You may be in the wrong business :)

<comment><USER4> really? i think with today's hardware/bandwidth prices, it's perfectly reasonable to setup a fairly busy site and not worry about revenue at all. If it only sets you back a few dollars a month, it might make sense for you to build something popular for the experience and the social capital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Two things to consider:

A) Slicehost isn't an overnite operation. Not saying I don't wish Prgmr all the luck in the world, but still ...

B) vCPUs don't matter as much as the guest/host contention ratio does. If I gave you 4 VCPU's and stuck you on a host with 128 other VMs .... you performance is going to suck no matter what. The fewer the number of guests, the better the performance of the guests.

Now only if Slicehost would stop sending me email I've got credit with them even if I have used 'em for over a year ...

<comment><USER4> heh. I've been selling Xen VPSs since 2005, and I sold FreeBSD jail based VPSs for a while before that. you can call me small, understaffed and cheap, but I've been in the market for longer than many of my competitors.

<comment><USER16> I used Caker's Linode back when he was a startup with only 4 nodes circa: 2002 :)

Good luck to you!

<comment><USER4> Heh. Nice. I remember when ec2 came into public beta I thought it was going to wipe the floor with us VPS providers. Their prices looked good at that point in time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FTA: _"Community ... If you want to use Prgmr you are pretty much on your own."_

That alone is reason enough for me to stay with Slicehost.

This article is weighted towards performance aspects. When judging any service provider, I'd hope people here are wise enough to consider other factors as well.

I've heard great things about Linode and may try them if I ever get a chance–but between Slicehost and Prgmr, nothing I see would make me consider switching (I have 9 slices with SH).

I may be off base, but even though Slicehost is more expensive, that doesn't mean they aren't _a better value_.

1\. Slicehost's support is great. Quick responses to tickets and very helpful people in the chatroom

2\. Slicehost's articles–while free to anyone–make me want to support them for the willingness to contribute knowledge.

3\. Their DNS tool is very handy

4\. I'm sure the prgmr.com team is very competent and I hope they do well. But their site does little to instill confidence in me.

<comment><USER4> I agree that for some people, linode and slicehost are a better value. (btw, I've heard nothing but good things about either one, I mean, aside from the pricing. Both, as far as I can tell, provide excellent service, and both are easier to use for non-sysadmins than I am.)

My core audience is SysAdmins who need off-site servers and hobbyists, and I think I serve those markets better than my competitors. I am trying to build systems that will allow me to better serve people who are not as familiar with Linux (or bsd)

The website still needs a lot of work. But that is consistent with my goal of serving existing customers before new customers, if there is not enough time to do both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> VPSFarm, unlimited bandwidth and awesome staff. I called them from Cambodia and told them I wasn't be able to pay this month since Paypal locked me out of my account (I logged into paypal from 3 different countries in less than 48 hours, and they didn't like it.) I didn't get around to paying them for another month and a half. My service was never interrupted.

I love a business with a human face :-)

[Currently on linode, for the easier resource upgrades since I'm getting steady increase in users. Also amazing service.]

</comment><comment><USER19> As a longtime slicehost customer, thank god for competition. Slice has been slightly overcharging for memory (my current bottleneck). I also don't use any of slicehost's (admittedly great) tools.

I'll probably think about reevaluating my server costs (about 300 mo) if slicehost doesn't boost their memory offering in the next few months. Especially using chef for scripted infrastructure, all I'd have to do is change my ip list and rerun.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks, I was keeping an eye out for a way to cut costs for some non-mission- critical stuff - this looks very interesting (that's a BIG price difference for the larger plans). Will give it a try.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. Ram, disk and CPU are cheap. Now, dealing with abuse, etc... is expensive, but most of the per-customer costs are the same no matter how much ram they order, so I think it makes sense to drop the cost per gigabyte as you order more ram.

the formula I use to calculate the 1 month pricing is this: $1 for every 64M ram plus $4 per account. I think it works out reasonable; I was figuring $512/month for each 32GB / 8 core hardware, which is maybe a little high, but it is within reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> <http://prgmr.com/status.html> doesn't inspire confidence. Sample quote:

> The cutover from Cogent to Rippleweb was messy, and resulted in nearly a > full day's down time This was completely my fault, (That is, Luke > Crawford's) as I set the cut off date for the old service to early. > Rippleweb moved quickly to help me recover; the rest of the down time was > due to a faulty cross-connect. All customers get one month of credit for > this, as this has been a rough month (and we are not entirely out of the > woods yet.) On the upside, we have avoided renumbering. Neal has survived > the baptism by fire, and we can expect prgmr.com services to improve in > reliability now that I have help again.

<comment><USER4> that page was last updated in 2007. granted, we still have problems, but we are much better than we were.

<http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/>

is our current blog and the place we report mistakes and outages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why not compare slicehost with a real provider?

Take the servers at hetzner.de, they don't charge much more than a VPS but you et much more power. The only real advantage of a VPS when you grow is when they offer you tools to automatically deploy new instances (like amazon ec2). Otherwise you should be switching to dedicated servers.

<comment><USER4> If you need more than 4gb ram, buying your own server is usually a better deal than anything else. parts for a core2quad with 8gb unbuffered ecc and 2 hard drives usually set me back around $700-$800. 1u co-lo runs from $50-$100 a month.

<comment><USER23> so why do they charge $199 per month for core2duo with 2 gb ram and 250 gb sata? i really dont get it. server prices are this low but cost for dedicated servers are very high.

lsc, can you say a bit more about your # of VPSs per box, average cpu usage by user and disk contention. in your system if there is available extra cpu and one user wants that he cant, can he? your prices seem to be too good to be true comparing to others. is there any drawback?

<comment><USER4> EC2 kicked my ass when they started their public beta. that's right, something like $70 a month for 1.7GiB was cheaper than I was. I upgraded to new hardware and lowered prices.

Under Xen if there is available CPU, any user can burst to it. I use the credit scheduler, which means you spend scheduler credits to get that CPU. You gain scheduler credits by not using as much CPU. Your weight determines how fast your credits accumulate, so a domain with twice as much weight, assuming contention, gets twice as much cpu as another domain. I weight my domains based on the amount of ram they have, so a 64Mb domain has 1/4th the weight of a 256MiB domain.

The ceiling on how much CPU you can use when nobody else wants it is set by the number of vcpus you have. I give you one, and in this example, slicehost gives you 4. this is in an effort to make the jokers who run mprime all day (I'm looking at you) from dragging down the service for everyone else. And they don't. I see some users who regularly use as much cpu as they are allowed, and it doesn't cause problems for my more restraned users.

my standard system has 32GiB ram and 2 quad-core 1.9Ghz opterons. (I have one with 64GiB and 2 2.1Ghz shanghais, but most of that ram is being used as cache for my experimental ZFS domain, so it shouldn't have more contention than the 32GiB servers)

As for the number of domains, depends on how many users sign up for what plan. 62 domains are on the system that the user who ran this test is on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think it's a fair comparison. Slicehost grew very quickly then got acquired. Prgmr seems to be the smaller guy growing slowly, getting rack space [http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2009/03/colocation- in-s...](http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2009/03/colocation-in-san-jose- my-plan.html) and trying to grow to a full rack. The automation is a huge plus especially if you are in the hosting business. The pricing model and the added features are what sets the competition apart from EC2. I think many of these VPS providers have to catch up and come up with some of their own "Why choose me" features, services if competing with EC2 is their focus.

<comment><USER4> I think comparing me to slicehost or linode is completely fair... they are my direct competition. I think ec2 is in a different market. there is some overlap, but really if you want to leave your instance on all the time, a vps such as I sell (or linode or slicehost) is vastly superior to the instance with unmirrored disk ec2 provides you.

the opposite is true as well; if you need instant provisioning... if you need 50 servers during the day and 20 at night, I simply can't do that for you. (I hope to be able to at some point, but I can't yet.) Ec2 has been doing that for some time, and I think slicehost and linode both have similar functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do the prgmr.com guys support payment by Paypal?

<comment><USER26> Yes, looks like thats the main payment option

<comment><USER25> Ya. Just checked that. They support Paypal.

It's very nice to see one nice VPS host that supports Paypal and appreciated by HN. Slicehost and Linode don't support Paypal.

Coming from a geographical region where credit cards are rarely used, this matters too me.

@Isc: you should probably have an FAQ page about the payment methods and other common questions. People usually don't check the signup page to know the payment methods.

<comment><USER4> yeah. I need to do that. The billing system badly needs work. We improved the provisioning system a bit yesterday, but we still have a backlog from this attention. Fortunately, I've got plenty of capacity, so the only problem is the setup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just wish that there was an easy way to switch... are there any tools to help automate the process?

<comment><USER2> This depends on the availability of a suitable API. Unfortunately, providers haven't decided on a common one yet. Sun were working on one (<http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud>), although perhaps other providers will end up just cloning Amazon or Slicehost's.

Check out Cloudkick (A YC company) for migration between Amazon and Slicehost.

<comment><USER4> I think something that is more simple than the ec2 api and the sun api will win. Yeah, I think cloudkick has some good ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Useful comparison</comment>


In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (2005) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/dark-hero-of-the-information-age-the-original-computer-geek.html <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR; He was Jewish, his wife was a nazi, told him that his colleagues slept with their daughter, he cut off communication with them without explanation. And Cybernetics died.

Also, he introduced the idea of information as a "thing" and contributed to the foundation of AI.</comment>


How to Kill a Great Idea - <AUTHOR> http://beyondfreelancing.com/2009/09/how-to-kill-a-great-idea/

<comment><USER2> I remember fondly an article that made it to the front page, once, that said you specifically _shouldn't_ tell people about your ideas. It purported that, chemically, the pleasure of explaining your great idea to someone is similar to the pleasure of actually accomplishing it. So, it claimed that for every person you tell about your idea, you're less likely to actually _do_ it, since you have already enjoyed the pleasure of telling someone about it. Just thought it was an interesting note that flies in the face of the first point made by the blogger, via Seth Godin. No idea if it's true.

<comment><USER3> Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them - <http://sivers.org/zipit>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another way to kill a great idea is to fail to implement it.

This post brought to mind an old ze frank video: <http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071106.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> Huh. I thought this was actually going to be an article on how to stop your mind from obsessing over "great ideas", or tell when a "great idea" is bogus. I was disappointed to find it was just more cheerleading.

<comment><USER6> Maybe we still don't large enough concentration of any kind of ideas, let alone great ones. Cheerleading is useful, and you have the basic dos and donts in the article to stop it from becoming a bogus idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _But where will you find such a vast supply of discouragement? Pretty much everywhere. Closed-minded bosses, government bureaucrats, lazy college friends, disillusioned businesspeople, jaded teachers_

Programmers

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of ideas people have are like wishbones - <http://www.nilkanth.com/2009/07/09/selling-fake-wishbones/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> why people let their ideas to go waste? why don't they think that their ideas may lead to good startups?

excellent post about Ideas for Startups <http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html>

<comment><USER8> I get many cool ideas, that I all shoot down because I can't think of a business model for them.

<comment><USER9> That's why you need a business-minded partner. :)

<comment><USER10> ...or you need to move on to other ideas.

Not everything is worth monetizing.

<comment><USER9> I'm actually a fan of deploying ideas for free, assuming one can afford the luxury of giving a potentially money-making idea away.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you train your developers? - <AUTHOR> I'm a CTO of a funded startup and we've managed to hire 10 or so developers by now. We've had to make some compromises when hiring because we have trouble attracting top talent because of salary issues.
While I'm happy with the amount of effort my team is putting in, I have a feeling we're losing a lot of opportunities by our slow progress. I feel there's a lot of new technologies we can leverage, especially in the cloud, but when I make a push for them I feel there's often a misunderstanding in my team of what certain technologies actually do and how they're meant to be used. We're having problems even with older technologies like postgres, especially with sharding, indexing etc.
I'm happy to lend a hand and fix problems as they arise but I'm being stretched very thin by now. I'd like to invest some time in educating my team, so I'm wondering if you have any recommendations on how you handled the issue. <comment><USER2> Are they specialized or they all general devs ? Could you take a lead-dev (or specialized lead devs) and he makes the choices ?</comment>


The Airdrop - <AUTHOR> http://niran.org/bitcoin-fiction/the-airdrop.html

<comment><USER2> In case you didn't get it, it's fiction.

<comment><USER3> I was wondering why I missed the facebook takeover..</comment></comment>


Fired Yahoo exec gets $58M for 15 months of work - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/fired-yahoo-exec-gets-58m-232546738.html

<comment><USER2> And yet Kevin Rose has to deal with the hobos protesting at his front door?</comment>


Automated LTC mining on EC2 GPU instances using Ansible - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adammeghji/ansible-ltc-mining-on-ec2

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on AWS spot instance pricing, LTC mining difficulty, and the present value of LTC, it can be profitable to mine for LTC on EC2 g2.2xlarge instances.

This project was inspired by Bob Feldbauer's post on Profitable LiteCoin Mining on EC2, and a desire to practice my Ansible chops.

As of right now, the spot instance price is approx $0.30/hr, so it's no longer immediately profitable, so I wouldn't recommend this if you're looking to flip a quick buck (before yesterday would have been a different story). Nevertheless, a fun weekend hack project if anyone's curious to give it a try!

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice. Even if it isn't immediately profitable, it's a nice pet project to practice Ansible for almost break-even.

Provided that the LTC price doesn't crash overnight, obviously.</comment>


When Philosophy Lost Its Way - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/11/when-philosophy-lost-its-way/?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0 <comment><USER2> With the rise of scientific thinking, we're seeing a rapid increase in the number of folks who identify as agnostic or athiest [1]. This is natural given that the tenets of most major religions can't be tested or validated via experimental methods.

The problem though is that absent these religious ideologies, we're left with a number of core questions that secular philosophy has been unable to answer convincingly. Namely:

\- Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad? \- What is the meaning or purpose of life? \- Why is there something instead of nothing? What was the original cause? Was there one? \- What happens after we die?

This dovetails with a number of practical issues in today's world. (1) Lots of suicide and depression. There are 30 million prescriptions of Zoloft written in the United States. Many of these folks (I assume) aren't suffering some sort of pathological illness but find themselves looking at a world that appears to be devoid of meaning when these religious frameworks break down for them (i.e. nihilism) (2) Religious extremism that manifests in sectarian violence and war.

Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.

Relevant point: I'd love to see academic philosophy working to shore up these areas and provide folks a better, clearer framework in which they can live meaningful, enjoyable lives that doesn't require a religious framework.

[http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing- religio...](http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious- landscape/)

<comment> vezzy-fnord You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.

The idea that religion provides some sort of certainty is a complete falsehood trivially debunked by a cursory glance of theological discourse. It provides certainty only to those ignorant of it, just as those ignorant of secular philosophy who never deliberate any of these questions have quite likely settled on some ad-hoc worldview that works for them.

In practice, most of value theory is secular. The laws that underpin most contemporary states are secular. The meaning of life is an unanswered question, quite likely even an ironically meaningless question itself. The afterlife if any is also an unanswered question. Christians disagree between universalism, annihilationism, eternal torment and other dogmas on hell alone.

There are no out-of-the-box answers provided by anyone. Many religions actually conveniently avoid pondering them in any detail.

<comment><USER3> >You're ignoring the fact that religions haven't been able to convincingly answer any of these questions, either. Else there wouldn't be so many of them and they wouldn't be having highly intricate theological debates about the half-dozen types of millennialism and interpretations of whether and to what extent Mosaic law is still relevant, among many other things.

The mere presence of debate does not preclude certainty about overarching principles. Various denominations might disagree about what's moral in a situation, but they can at least agree about why this specific kind of morality is important, and what reasoning and evidence should be relevant in the discussion, and how this morality plays into a larger conception of the Christian life. Elements like the Gospel, the Apostle's Creed, and the metaphysics of traditional deism can all be harnessed to conduct and resolve debate. There are more certainties than there are the opposite. And perfect certainty will never be achieved, even on a theological level. Since one of the charges of theology is to adapt and present Christianity to a changing world.

Unlike, say, secular moral discourse, especially manifest in political speech, which makes no effort whatsoever to establish shared principles. There are few, if any, first premises which can initiate debate. There are few agreed- upon standards for what counts as relevant evidence, or how certain values outweigh others.

Wading in secular moral philosophy, the situation becomes even more dire. No one could ever hope to walk into a secular philosophy class with modern material and achieve any guidance about how to conduct their life.

The ability to debate and resolve issues is the marker of a healthy tradition. Not all issues can be resolved. But there should at least be a vehicle to coming to the best available answer. Studying, say, the progression of Catholic theological doctrine is a good example of this. But in our post- Reformation era, in which every theological debate ends up spawning a new Protestant denomination, your lack of confidence is understandable.

I do, of course, agree with you that our broader cultural approach to such issues is entirely arbitrary and resistant to intellectual progress.

Edit: Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice, Which Rationality is a stellar treatment of this problem you're noticing:

[http://www.amazon.com/Whose-Justice-Rationality-Alasdair- Mac...](http://www.amazon.com/Whose-Justice-Rationality-Alasdair- Macintyre/dp/0268019444)

<comment><USER4> Morality from religion? Please. Who practices what Jesus personally told his believers to do?

"anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery." Matthew 5:32

Combine that with God's official "Thou shalt not commit adultery"

And especially for the protestants, directly by Jesus again:

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." Matthew 6:19 "But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal."

And of course, who does this, as Jesus says:

"And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire." Matthew 18:9

Now explain why you don't do what Jesus and God personally, according to the holy books, tell you to do if you get the morality from the religion.

Even if you are a believer you have to see that it's a human consensus that decides what's moral at any particular point in time. That consensus was historically at some times at some places more influenced by some holy books, therefore the witch hunt ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.") and luckily it's not that much anymore, at least in Europe.

Have even more fun trying to accept the morality from Islam holy books. Note the whole Quran is claimed to be the actual "words of God.": "Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward." Quran (4:74)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Paul Graham's essay "How to do philosophy" complements this piece well: [http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html](http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html).

This:

 _The second event was the placing of philosophy as one more discipline alongside these sciences within the modern research university. A result was that philosophy, previously the queen of the disciplines, was displaced, as the natural and social sciences divided the world between them._

may also be a problem because the healthier parts of philosophy, concerning "Why?" or "How?", got turned into science. The less healthy parts got turned into philosophy.

<comment><USER6> This is a big factor IMHO. Philosophy is trying to live somewhere between science and theology and there just isn't much room there anymore. Worse, a lot of that space is filled with dubious areas of study or rat holes (example: Bertrand Russel's Principia Mathematica) so philosophers find themselves hemmed in at both sides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author's conception of philosophy seems to be heavily biased towards Western analytic philosophy whose pretension towards logically underpinning sciences and reliance on formal methods means that is more of a theoretical computer science or physics. Plenty of Continental philosophy: post- structuralism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, and non-Western philosophy (such as decolonial thought) speaks to and about daily life.

<comment><USER8> Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I don't see post-structuralism or deconstruction as having all that much to say about daily life. (Almost) nobody actually _lives_ that way. That is, when you go out for a beer with your friends, you talk to them as if humans can actually communicate, and as if the message sent will be (approximately) the message received.

<comment><USER9> I go out for a beer with my friends and talk to them about post-structuralism. ;)

<comment><USER8> Sure. But you probably don't deconstruct what they say during the conversation (except for example or for entertainment).

<comment><USER9> That's true. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have an _impact_ on daily life. In other words, descontruction, specifically, is an analysis technique. The outcome of doing said analysis is separate from doing the analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a philosophy major turned engineer turned CEO, I agree with the article about the fall of philosophy in academia. As my concentration advisor half- joked in one of our first courses, "you are majoring in mental ma __ __bation. " However, I do not agree that philosophy has been entirely relegated to universities. Thought many of those who self-identify as philosophers reside in academia, not everyone who _behaves_ as a philosopher resides there. Philosophy literally translates from the Greek to lover of wisdom. Those who pursue knowledge and understanding, regardless of title, are philosophers. In fact, many of the non-technical articles on HN are philosophical. Asking how to build a company culture or what it means to be successful in the context of a startup are both philosophical inquiries. Balancing the tradeoff between competing interests (e.g. financial vs. mission-driven, personal gain versus organizational gain) come down to questions your values, questioning "what is good". There are few questions as emblematic of philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER11> So rather than working at the edges of social and natural sciences, looking at the unknown and feeding back (perhaps not as much as it could), as western analytic philosophy does now, they seek a return to a time when a philosopher was prized for obscurantism and bon mots rather than an increase in clarity?

So... they haven't heard of people like Slavoj Žižek? Is that what they want all of philosophy to be like?

<comment><USER12> Zizek is to Nietzsche as Dan Brown is to Shakespeare.

<comment><USER9> Zizek has published a large amount of works that are taken very seriously. I don't like a lot of the things he says either, but calling him Dan Brown would only be true if Dan Brown was accepted as a serious scholar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a broad strand of discourse within philosophy on exactly the topic of its incorporation into the academy. Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, et al come immediately to mind.

Quite a lack of research on the author's part to come to such a conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Before its migration to the university, philosophy had never had a central > home. Philosophers could be found anywhere — serving as diplomats, living > off pensions, grinding lenses, as well as within a university.

I think we've come back to this. While philosophy in the academy might be navel-gazing and disconnected, blogs and regular people talk about philosophy all the time. Philosophy is something we engage in before we've fully wrapped our heads around a problem, or know how to test it or formalize it. It's all the gaps between formal logical reasoning and science, and there are a lot of those gaps.

Read something like [1], written by someone who's a doctor by trade, and you can see the hands-dirty philosopher is still out there.

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The article is rubbish. Philosophy has answered many questions. Natural Philosophy (science) has now taken over the position of prime means of inquisition into the truth. There is still space left for Philosophy just less of it than there used to be, and don't forget than many people in Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience are effectively doing Philosophy inside their disciplines.

This isn't "the death of philosophy", this is philosophy having succeeded brilliantly. The sciences are offspring that any parent should be eminently proud of.

</comment><comment><USER16> I actually thing we're in a philosophy boom, with recent developments in quantum mechanics and the synthesis between the two subjects. There is a lot of research in this area, about quantum mechanics, thought experiments (Chinese room), turing tests, complexity/computational theory of mind (Bostrom simulation argument, singularity) and connection to free will and other philosophical concepts. Philosophy becoming more STEM-like.

<comment><USER17> A lot of cutting-edge computer science and math is intimately connected with the more abstract reaches of philosophy (category theory, etc).

<comment><USER8> You classify category theory as philosophy rather than math? Can you explain why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The best available evidence we (humans) have suggests that we're finite beings...and we don't much like the idea of that...

The angst that accompanies knowing that what you were conscious of before your birth likely approximates what you will be conscious of following your death has driven thinkers to posit myriad explanations...none are completely testable, but the scientific postulates are at least open to the rigors of the scientific method, most notably peer review...

If either science or philosophy must be subsumed, I'd rather it be philosophy...

Personally, I prefer a life containing both...

</comment><comment><USER19> The purpose of philosophy is to ask questions not provide answers. And so as long as there are phenomena to observe there are questions to ask and thus philosophy apply.

I think a lot of the confusion about the need for philosophy stems from academia thinking about philosophy the way it does. Here you usually will critique some existing philosophers to provide a more concise thesis. However life does not happen in academia and so a lot gets lost when it's confined to the university world

There is a world of difference between studying philosophy and then philosophizing. Just because you know the ins and outs of Kant, Nietzsche doe not mean you are a good philosophical thinker.

The best thing that can happen for philosophy is to remove it from academia and put it back into it's rightful context. To question, ponder, explore phenomena and provide perspective no matter the subject.

</comment><comment><USER20> WRT becoming smart as per the article rather than good, one point missed in the article is living in the university system means devotion and belief in the class pyramid at the predefined authoritarian apex angle and all that. You can be whatever you want when you're an individual, but when your identity as a philosopher is as a cog in the hierarchical machine, you and your ideas must be strictly limited to fit a cog shaped hole at a precise level, not too high so as to threaten those in positions above you, not too low as to be inadequate.

</comment><comment><USER21> Philosophy is simply irrelevant.

Discoveries in physical sciences lead to new technology or just to a better understanding of how the world works and how we fit in it.

Research in social sciences, when the political courage exists to pursue it, can lead to better policy, and better lives for everyone.

Philosophy just seems to be a bunch of circle jerking around esoteric terms and concepts with no trickle down benefits. If Philosophy departments around the world simply shutdown over night, would anyone notice? Would anyone be the worse of? Even in the long term? Probably not. Well maybe would be philosophy students would pursue more employable fields for their undergraduate study, increasing the labor pool and competition for jobs.

<comment><USER22> Philosophy is irrelevant? That's really quite a bizarre statement to make.

Philosophy is quite useful in defining AI (philosophy of mind) and quantum physics (philosophy of physics) to name a few. Your comment is beyond narrow minded and ignorant; I should seriously hope you don't hold such views.

<comment><USER21> I most certainly do hold this as my view, and it's had zero negative impact. In fact only positive impact as I'm not spending time wasting on thinking for the sake of thinking. Philosophy is a mental trap that produces no value.

One of my favorite books is Candide. The book ends with Candide tending to his garden. This is how I live my life. It works pretty well.

How many modern philosophers use their knowledge to live good lives and improve the lives of others?

<comment><USER15> "Philosophy is a mental trap that produces no value." Then you find no value in the past 1000 years of Western thought?

Philosophy helps me live a good life - I have a pretty good bullshit detector. Your post set it off quite well.

<comment><USER21> It think it was instrumental in helping us get to where we are. My comment is more around modern philosophy. Now we understand the importance of empirical observation and the benefits of liberty and fair laws we've probably maximized the value we get out of talking about how to think. Like I asked before, do you think that there would be a negative impact if philosophy departments disappeared overnight? What would they be?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Edwin Brady – Idris 2: Type-Driven Development of Idris – Code Mesh LDN 18 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOtKD7ml0NU <comment><AUTHOR> I'm really a fan of the type-driven development process Edwin shows of here.

Especially the part where it can generate the correct matrix transposition logic as soon as it's been told that 'matrix' can only be used once. Very impressive.

I really hope at least some of that catches the interest of mainstream language designers/communities.</comment>


Yale study finds self-isolation would dramatically reduce ICU bed demand - <AUTHOR> https://news.yale.edu/2020/04/03/yale-study-finds-self-isolation-would-dramatically-reduce-icu-bed-demand <comment><USER2> Duh...?</comment>


Y Combinator's WriteWith Launches - Collaborative Blogging - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/12/writewith-launches-makes-shared-blogging-easier/ <comment><USER2> Interesting to see that WriteWith seems to take GoogleDocs head on! There seems to be a few parallels between what Kiko attempted and how they were hosed by Google Calender and what WriteWith is attempting.

The difference here being WriteWith launching after GoogleDocs and it being marketed differently. Looks like WriteWith is creating a niche within collaborative doc editing, by catering to and marketing as a collaborative blogging platform. Brilliant concept! Truly catering to the long tail of bloggers!!

<comment><USER3> But it can't be for google to do the exact same thing with blogs. The ebay auction countdown begins...what will they come up with next?

<comment><USER2> Well, I definitely feel its not hard to picture Google looking at WriteWith and realizing that there is an opportunity there for them to leverage from their existing systems and just establish a connection between GoogleDocs and Blogger.

The incremental effort required to bridge the gap, seems minuscule, especially on the Google scale. One of the possible Google efforts would be, WriteWith getting an irresistible offer from Google. I am sure the founders won't be complaining then!

<comment><USER4> I totally agree. This is a classic example of an Innovator's Dilemma incremental improvement (i.e. what big slow companies are really good at)

[http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business- Essentials/dp/0060521996/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-9893482-5829762?ie=UTF8&s;=books&qid;=1176413849&sr;=8-1](http://www.amazon.com/Innovators- Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business- Essentials/dp/0060521996/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-9893482-5829762?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176413849&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER5> Nice!! The book looks interesting! Thanks for the recommendation!!

<comment><USER6> Oh, that's a great book. Listen to a lecture he gave here:

<http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail135.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm playing around with it. It saves every 20 seconds. Great for forgetful people.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like how you can start using it right away and save your work later.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this done with Ruby On Rails? It looks like it, very 37signals-ish.</comment>


Writing Rust NIFs for Elixir with Rustler - <AUTHOR> https://simplabs.com/blog/2020/06/25/writing-rust-nifs-for-elixir-with-rustler/ <comment><AUTHOR> Niklas Long describes the upcoming changes to Rustler and how it simplifies implementing Rust NIFs for Elixir.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best stack to build a marketplace/ecommerce website? - zap-hod Hi everyone,
I have to build a new website (a marketplace) and I am wondering which stack i should use :
 - I need it to be server side rendered (for SEO)
 - this is more like a MVP, so I need to be able to build it quickly
This what I came with :
  For backend / static HTML page :
    - Java / Scala with Playframework (this is the one I really master)
    - Python / Django
    - Php Symphony or Laravel
    - Kotlin / Spring

  For frontend animation :
   - <AUTHOR>
   - Vue.js
 Does anyone have any experience with one of those ?
Thanks for your help :) <comment><USER2> You should use the one you know best so you can get it built sooner.

Play framework you mentioned is a fine choice because it's somewhat of a rapid development framework and there's a big community around it.

I would skip the frontend animations for the MVP as they don't bring anything unique to the table, which is what you need to focus on if you are bringing yet another marketplace to the world.

It's actually possible you can get the MVP features you need by using something like WooCommerce, but it would only be a speed increase if you or your developer(s) know the framework better than something else.

<comment> zap-hod Thanks for your advices. I think I'll focus on the product rather than learning a new web framework.

<comment><USER3> Yes that is the right approach. Focus on the market and validation and get it out there asap using whatever framework you know best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am one of the core contributors of the Playframework. If you need any help just ask here: [https://discuss.lightbend.com/c/play/](https://discuss.lightbend.com/c/play/)

Also if you find bugs please let us know: [https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues](https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues)

I am available if there is a need for training, consulting, coding,... Just let me know.</comment>


Facebook Shares Are Worth Almost Three Times More Than Tweets For E-Commerce - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/18/facebook-shares-are-worth-almost-three-times-more-than-tweets-for-e-commerce/

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was very interesting, but it left me wanting to know a lot more about ChompOn's methodology (I looked briefly on ChompOn's blog for a more detailed post, but couldn't find anything).

There's a lot of obvious potential confounding variables such as number of average Twitter friends vs. Facebook followers, and the number of times a user tweeted about a deal. For deals for which there's some incentive for a user to tweet, such as a deal that has not reached the tipping point or a referral fee, a user may have sent multiple tweets for a single deal.

In any case, this provides an interesting counterpoint to yesterday's article about how "Facebook Pages are Worthless for your Startup" (compared to Twitter). I think there's no question that Twitter is a network more oriented towards your weak ties and sources of information you think are just interesting, whereas Facebook is more oriented toward strong ties (especially given the way the News Feed ranking works). The way you utilize both social networks should take this into account. Twitter is probably more effective at getting the word out to many people quickly, whereas Facebook may be more useful at actually getting your users to convince their friends to take an action.</comment>


Python Wrapper for Yipit API - my first big open source project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wesleyzhao/python-yipit-wrapper

<comment><USER3> Another couple of recommendations (sorry I think about this stuff way too much):

1\. GitHub SEO is your friend. For this reason, better to name your GitHub repo something like "yipit-python-client" because that's what people will search for. And maybe change your one-line description to "A Python client library for the Yipit API"

2\. On licensing - you really just want as many people to use your library as possible (it doesn't really represent intellectual property that you could one day profit from). For this reason, steer clear of (A)GPL and go with a MIT/Apache2/BSD-style license. For the exact one to choose - I normally go with either a) the same license as that used in my component libraries (e.g. DictShield is BSD), or b) the same license as the API author (in your case Yipit) uses for their own client libraries (I checked and they don't seem to have released any)

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Good point. But is 'client' more searched/common than 'wrapper'?

2\. Yup, they didn't have any libraries. Thus, the wrapper I created :). You're right, may go with MIT/Apache/BSD.

<comment><USER3> 1\. Yeah I'd say so. "Wrapper" describes how it works (it wraps naked HTTP calls) but not what it is (a client library for the Yipit API / web service) 2\. Cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! I'm writing a Python API client at the moment - a couple of suggestions:

1\. It's worth taking a look at DictShield <https://github.com/j2labs/dictshield> or Colander (<https://pylonsproject.org/projects/colander/dev/>) as a way to formalise your API definition and minimize the amount of boilerplate you have to write. I'd recommend DictShield - the author j2labs is very active on HN and is a really approachable guy.

2\. Related to 1 - the Requests library (<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests>) is higher level than urllib* - <USER2> using this should help you to reduce boilerplate...

Happy coding!

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Just followed on github :) looking forward to using in the future.

2\. Nice! Did not realize it could be that easy. Though I do wonder, does it hurt code efficiency at all? Not that it matters much to me at this point.

<comment><USER3> 2\. I don't think it impacts on performance - because it's basically just a user-friendly wrapper around urllib2

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In fact one can earn revenue from the sites using your work if you have released under GPL, but they must licence their work in GPL. If you release your work in MIT Licence the developer need not licence his work in MIT he may keep it has closed source. Does Yipit allows commericial usage????

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe Yipit does allow commercial usage. Since they allow you to save your affiliate-id's for many of the deals sites they aggregate and they build those into the links their API returns to you. The python-twitter uses the Apache license I believe. Where does that lay in the spectrum?

<comment><USER4> Where does that lay in the spectrum? wt do u mean by this????

<comment><AUTHOR> By that I mean GPL seems to be very open-source and MIT seems to allow people to close up the code.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Developers cannot change the licence of your original work. You would be credited by developer even if u choose MIT licence. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Just added Apache2 license. Approve?

<comment><USER4> Yup its good :), Helps developer who are working on MIT, BSD and GPL projects. Hey you can also dual licence your project :)just like jQuery!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> good Work :) All The Best. In which licence are yo releasing this??

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks :)! I was pretty happy with the result. Felt like a bau5 :) but the most nooby kind.

I actually don't know how that license-y thing works... I guess the most open one?

<comment><USER4> I guess u can choose MIT Licence, if u want allow developers to include your work in their commercial software. You can choose GPL if you want developers to include work only if they are building open source software.:)??

<comment><AUTHOR> I think GPL sounds good... but at the same time... people who use Yipit's API may be trying to create cool sites that generate a bit of revenue. Does that mean MIT is the way to go? Or is there some middle grounds...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NSA Closely Involved in Guantánamo Interrogations, Documents Show - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/05/16/nsa-closely-involved-in-guantanamo-interrogations-documents-show/ <comment><USER2> Please don't submit from just one site, and please don't delete and repost. We remove story submission privileges from accounts that do these things.

Please also don't create masses of obscure throwaway accounts. This forum is a community. Anonymity is fine here, but users should have some kind of consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no community at all, and that would be an entirely different forum.

Please also don't create multiple accounts to vote stories up with. That's a serious violation of HN's rules and we ban accounts that do it.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm a whistleblower fired from a FANG and I want to go public - <AUTHOR> I'm a whistleblower fired from a FANG and I'm considering going public. What are the current draw backs and perceptions of whistleblowers in tech?
The issues involved are serious to the corp, to the degree they might have been existential earlier in its life.
I joined the company and started in a team that was, in retrospect, designed to conceal and maintain the related issues. I was naive and I raised concerns, and subsequently I received and ignored various coded warnings. I then tried to move teams, but by then the company was well into a process that effectively involved rotating in a small HR department to support management's efforts to "paper me up". I was then fired.
In a perfect would, I would go public. My motivations are as follows:
* It's cowardly and unsatisfying to be unable to tell the truth of what happened. I am forced to conceal it during interviews and often get explicit questions relating to how it looks on my resume. These are VPs and presidents doing the asking and it's hard to blow these people off.
* I can provide aid and comfort to others. I have an enormous amount of information to say about the company's practices in dealing with whistleblowers, which can help others in similar situations.
Other considerations: I am "good", by which I mean I think you would like me and think I am a good worker. I have alot of stuff going on, for example, I am involved in a major role in a startup.
I know the generic reputation and consequences of whistleblowing in general. I have a low opinion of ethics in SV or tech in general.
I'm looking for advice: How would a truthful, sane, likable, and reasonable narrative play out? How would I appear to you and your management? Would you hire me? Would you fund my company? <comment><USER2> Dissent is in. The old guard is being slowly boiled alive, but they're blind to it.

You'll have lots of opportunities for jobs, because lots of employers will want to look morally self-righteous.</comment>


The Deep Insights of Alan Kay - <AUTHOR> http://mythz.servicestack.net/blog/2013/02/27/the-deep-insights-of-alan-kay/ <comment><USER3> Thanks for this post; the importance of Alan Kay's work can hardly be overstated. Here's another quote by him that I find interesting:

 _I invented the term Object-Oriented and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind._

Whether or not you share the disdain for C++ that is implicit in this quote, I believe it is important to understand the difference between the way OO was originally conceived of and the way C++ interprets it. I believe the best way to understand the difference is to look at object-variable binding. Smalltalk and almost every other OO language that followed it uses _reference semantics_ : the assignment

x = y

causes the variable x to release its binding to whatever object it is currently referring to, and to refer to the object that y is referring to instead. C++, on the other hand, is pretty much the only OO language that uses _value semantics_ : the intended meaning of the assignment

x = y

is to copy the state of the object to which y is referring over to the object to which x is referring. The older and wiser I get the more I am inclined to believe that this attempt to marry OO and value semantics was an experiment that has failed. Even if you do not believe this, you'd have to admit that the collective amount of time and effort that the C++ community has spent on dealing with the assignment operator is simply staggering. (I would have made that last statement even two years ago, and now we have rvalue refereces.)

<comment><USER4> The object model of C++ is almost entirely from Simula rather than from smalltalk. The object model of Simula is less dynamic and the language itself is based on Algol rather than being built from scratch like Smalltalk. In many ways, Simulas rather than Smalltalks object model has been the most influential, through C++ and later Java and C#.

<comment><USER5> Can't be. Simula wasn't invented by Alan Kay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've admired Alan Kay's work for years, but I wish he had another Jobs/Apple to turn his ideas into products. His work on the GUI was put into the Mac, Smalltalk directly influenced Objective-C, and the Dynabook is clearly a predecessor to the iPad. I don't think VPRI is a similar vehicle for new work.

It's a really tough dichotomy: people who invent world-changing things very rarely have the skills (or desire) to spend years polishing and shipping. I think almost all of academia is great example of this, where invention is praised over innovation.

I'm not saying this is bad. Researchers excel at doing research, and should focus in that domain. But papers and conference talks don't change the world. It takes _real_ products, which are the result of substantial non-idea work. Even Doug Engelbart's famous demo took decades to actually build at scale.

One of the most important things about PARC may have been that it was a pairing of research-like projects with real world engineering accomplishments. For several years, I've felt like Google is on the verge of this as well. Glass may be their first shipping experimental product, so we'll see.

It'd be interesting if Alan took a research position at Google. Hal Abelson (inventor of Scheme, founder of Creative Commons, prof at MIT, etc.) spent a sabbatical there and shipped App Inventor for Android, which essentially took ideas from the Scratch programming environment and made them work for Android. Something like Smalltalk on top of App Engine could be really awesome.

        When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought]
        of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth
        criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up
        to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said:
        Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world.

        -- Alan Kay

<comment><USER7> Why would it help to have Smalltalk on an opaque, proprietary server platform which absolutely locks in every project that is coded for it?

<comment><USER6> Where on the web can you run Smalltalk right now? Where is the Heroku/Rails for Squeak?

And before you write it, I'll save you the time. Here's the typical HN response to this question:

        Just go get an EC2 instance and apt-get a bunch of shit and
        then figure out how to use a CLI to push your code there and
        add framework dependencies and learn Postgres and and configure it
        for DNS and oh and you probably need a credit card. Not that
        hard, srsly guys. Also, Dropbox is just git with a shiny frontend.

There is an unfathomably _monumental_ difference between not being able to do something at all, and doing it in a way that is constricted and limited from the perspective of an expert. It's the most dramatic in terms of learning, exploration, experimentation, and imagination.

Lego Mindstorms was proprietary and I loved the shit out of that-- probably was the primary reason I dove into science and engineering. And to your point, everything I built with Lego was (literally) locked into the Lego world. But by the time it actually mattered, I had moved to a legit machine shop. But those plastic blocks laid the foundation for construction. That's what I really want Alan Kay's work to do: lay a new foundation for teaching people how to think about computation and symbolic manipulation with computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science, showing us -loudly- the way forward, and he's largely ignored. I don't know of a more damning indictment than that.

<comment><USER9> I agree that Alan Kay is brilliant, but to be completely fair, if Squeak is the way forward, I think I'm happy where I am. It's not _bad_ , but the tradeoffs are such that it's hard to imagine ever using it for production software.

<comment><USER6> Every use Objective-C? It's pretty much Smalltalk with C backwards compatibility.

<comment><USER9> I've been using Objective-C for about 12 years now. It is similar to Smalltalk in its message system and naming conventions — which, to be fair, were at the core of Kay's Smalltalk vision — but otherwise the experience of programming in Objective-C is not much like programming in Squeak.

<comment><USER10> That is no bad thing, because programming in Squeak absolutely blows programming in Xcode away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I admire Alan Kay as much as the next guy and a lot of this stuff in this article looks great, but he doesn't need his lily gilded:

* Laser Printers

Yes -- invented at Xerox PARC.

* Object Orientated Programming / Smalltalk

No. OOP was invented in Norway (Simula) / Yes

* Personal Computers

Um... really? No.

* Ethernet / Distributed Computing

Yes Xerox PARC. / Not really

* GUI / Mouse / WYSIWYG

No (Englebart et al) / No (Englebart et al) / Yes

See: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface)

<comment><AUTHOR> See: <http://www.parc.com/about/> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)>

There is no question that Alan did invent the term "Object Oriented Programming" (and was rewarded with a Turing award for his work) and also invented Smalltalk which was well known to be inspired by Lisp, Simula, Logo, Sketchpad.

The GUI, overlapping windows on a bitmap screen, WYSIWIG editor, etc i.e. the personal computer as we know it today was first created at PARC that later influenced and was commercialized by Apple.

<comment><USER11> Naming something isn't inventing it.

Kay's Turing award was "For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages" which might or might not include _inventing_ "Object Oriented Programming..." and as it happens turns out not to.

See: <http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm>

Key quote from the article:

"While working on FLEX, Kay witnessed Douglas Engelbart's demonstration of interactive computing designed to support collaborative work groups. Engelbart's vision influenced Kay to adopt graphical interfaces, hypertext, and the mouse."

Incidentally, Doug Engelbart is still alive and a Turing award winner:

<http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/engelbart_7929781.cfm>

"Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976 due to various misfortunes and misunderstandings. Several of Engelbart's best researchers had become alienated from him and left his organization when Xerox PARC was created in 1970."

History of OOP including Simula 67: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object- oriented_programming>

Go look at the "Mother of All Demos" -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos> \-- which introduces the mouse, a macdraw-like drawing program, and a mouse-driven word processor. This is the invention of the GUI that not only predates Xerox PARC but students from the lab that did this work went on to work at Xerox PARC. (And the Xerox PARC mouse was a clumsy, expensive, and unreliable device very similar to the crude device from the older demo -- the modern mouse was actually invented by an engineer contracted by Steve Jobs).

"the personal computer as we know it today was first created at PARC"

The personal computer as we know it today was invented by a lot of people over a period of time, although it is usually ascribed to Apple, Altair, IMSAI, etc. -- not Xerox. Xerox added a GUI to their $10,000 "personal computer" and that is a feature of today's personal computer, but so are scalable fonts (btw: that's Donald Knuth who deserves as much fanboi love as Alan Kay) and web browsers, neither of which were created by Xerox.

<comment><USER12> At MIT we had perfectly usable and reliable mice on Lisp Machines long before the Mac or Lisa existed. It is true that they were not mass-produced, however.

<comment><USER11> Interesting: when did the Lisp Machine actually ship as a product? And did it have a mouse from day one? According to the Wikipedia article it looks like something may have shipped in 1980 for $70,000 per unit...

<comment><USER11> @nessus42: Thanks for the info. Another question is how intrinsic the mouse was to use of the machine and did it have more than one button? Part of the genius of the Mac design was doing with one button what Xerox did (badly) with three. (Yes, other companies later added more buttons all over again, but the Xerox UI, which I used briefly, required using different buttons for distinct operations in a way that, once you'd used a Mac mouse, made no sense at all.)

<comment><USER12> The mouse was completely intrinsic to the Lisp Machine. Though I'm sure that most people would consider the GUI rather ugly and primitive by today's standards. Think Emacs for X11.

The mouse was a three button mouse. The way it worked certainly made sense to me at the time, but it was made for nerds. Apple certainly did a ton of great work to make personal computers usable (and affordable) by normal people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _To me, one of the nice things about the semantics of real objects is that they are "real computers all the way down (RCATWD)" – this always retains the full ability to represent anything._

I remember 15 years ago when Philip Greenspun (<http://philip.greenspun.com>) first introduced me to the idea that a Web service is like an object -- it may seem obvious today, but at the time it completely changed my Web view:

 _The challenge is in realizing that the Web service itself is an object. The object has state, typically stored in a relational database management system. The object has methods (the URLs) and arguments to those methods (the inputs of the forms that target the URLs). The engineering challenges of Web development are (a) coming up with the correct data model for the object state, (b) coming up with a correct and maintainable organization of URLs, and (c) defining the semantics of each URL. By the time an individual page is constructed, the engineering challenge is over and it doesn't really matter whether you build that script in a simple language (e.g., Perl or Tcl) or a complex powerful language (e.g., Common Lisp or Java)._

[http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.htm...](http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.html)

Philip also discusses this idea in chapter 13 of his classic book, "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" (<http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/>).

But as Alan Kay points out, this RPC-type model still hasn't evolved to a point where you can pass around self-contained objects that are RCATWD.

</comment><comment><USER14> There's really no way to adequately summarize such a varied and content-rich article. You should really read it in full for yourself. But here are the section headings:

* On Software Engineering

* On Object Orientated Programming

* Tear it down and build something better

* On Messaging

* On LISP

* The Unknown side of Alan Kay

</comment><comment><USER15> Anything I've ever read that Alan Kay has written, either inspires me greatly, or depresses me deeply. His POV is worth 80 IQ quote is something I live by. It applies to _every_ aspect of life. Then you listen to him talk about computer science, computing in general, and what the future might hold, and you end up wondering why we're using languages today that are essentially prettied up versions of languages 40 and 50 years old (sweeping generalisation!)

<comment><USER15> reading that back, damn, the "depresses me deeply" is a terrible exaggeration, making light of anyone who actually suffers from genuine depression.

<comment><USER16> come now... not all depression is clinical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If "message passing between objects" is so great, then why do those distributed object frameworks (CORBA,(D)COM) not rule the world? Bad execution?

<comment><AUTHOR> CORBA/DCOM/SOAP-RPC are examples of RPC-based services, i.e. exactly what Alan is advocating against.

Here's my definition of a message-based service: [https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/What- is-a-...](https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/What-is-a-message- based-web-service%3F)

Here are some of the advantages: [https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages...](https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages- of-message-based-web-services)

Here is the difference between WCF RPC methods and a message-based ServiceStack service: <http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-35.png> (i.e. 6 RPC methods vs 1 Msg service)

Here is the difference between WebApi RPC methods vs an equivalent message- based ServiceStack service: <http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-34.png> (e.g. 5 RPC vs 2 msg ones)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > The ARPA/PARC history shows that a combination of vision, a modest amount of > funding, with a _felicitous context and process_ can almost magically give > rise to new technologies that not only amplify civilization, but also > produce tremendous wealth for the society.

[...] felicitous context and process [...]

I am interested in what the process is he's referring to that PARC used.

I think software engineering as a discipline is too young to have decent processes figured out, as is evident with the takeover of the "agile/scrum" process (I don't mean this in a bad way, but before this it was either _NO_ process or a bug tracker with dates in it).

<comment><USER19> He's thinking process at a higher level than you are. He means process in terms of funding, choice of vision and who chooses to commit people and resources. It's his contention that ARPA in the early to mid 60s had a funding/research process that really worked. The nut of it was to pick productive people with vision and get out of their way and let them drive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> While there's no question that some of Alan Kay's achievements are very important, I cannot help but thinking that our industry's tendency to surrender to 'fanism' (e.g: douglas crockford, linus torvalds) - <USER2> ridiculous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Learning the educated insights from the brilliant minds in history is not 'fanism', it's benefiting and building off their experiences and is what Alan refers to when he says: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points"

In his talk he uses Leonardo Da Vinci who despite being one of the smartest people in existence wasn't able to invent a motor for any of his machines, a feat accomplished by a less capable Mr Ford who did it en-masse.

Not learning from history is one of the reasons why the state of the industry is where it's at today.

<comment><USER20> Don't get me wrong, I'm not contradicting that, nor am I advocating not learning from history. I just think that stuff like that:

"The Deep Insights of Alan Kay" "Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science""

is over the top.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never said "Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science" (though he's obviously a contender)

And I have no regrets over the title "The Deep Insights of Alan Kay"...

Alan has generated a wealth of intellect, experience and insights in his works that most IT people still don't know about or even know who he is. The objective of the post is to bring some of his meaningful and powerful ideas to the surface and summarize them so it's more palatable and more accessible to more people - I think the title accurately captures this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some of those points are a bit misleading. Sure, you can define a lisp interpreter in very few lines of code. But to build a decent standard library and optimizing compiler/JIT, that is where the LOCs rack up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Attitudes like this are short-sighted, and part of the problem. Finding innovative and elegant solutions to solving problems is more scalable than the brute-force approach of throwing resources and having them churn out more LOCs to solve it. Not saying its easier and requires less effort to do, just that it results in less LOC's that scales better and provides better building blocks to build on.

Look into the special properties of LISP which Alan refers to as the Maxwell's equations of software: [http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the- maxwells-equat...](http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells- equations-of-software/)

Its more powerful and extensible than most languages despite requiring orders of magnitude less effort to implement (see: Peter Norvig's Lisp interpreter in 60 lines of Python <http://norvig.com/lispy.html>, and re-written in 40 lines of Ruby <http://stuff.thedeemon.com/rispy/>).

<comment><USER21> I'm familiar with the LISP metacircular interpreter and programming language theory. I know you can define all sorts of things with a very small set of primitives.

It's one thing to build a minimal implementation where your main constraint is that it works and its concise. It gets a lot messier once you start worry about constraints like efficiency on real machines - there are limits to how much you can abstract out the heuristics and special cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> And its macro support has a major impact on the small code-base size of their class libraries.

Right, if you need it to be efficient than mechanical sympathy starts creeping into your code-base, though language design should optimally be designed to capture human thought - that's the part that doesn't scale well or solved by adding more machines.

The Nile/OMeta work is an example of using DSL's as one way to reduce the LOC's required, it captures the required top-level math fn's for image processing and uses OMeta to convert it to runnable source code. DSL's might not be the best way forward in all situations, but investing in research of different ways to the solve the problem can only help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Object Orientated"? Really?

How does someone read so much material on Alan Kay and still manage to have "object orientated" stuck in their head? It's like putting together an overview of Edward Said's "Orientatilism".

<comment><USER23> I feel the same way about "orientated". But my British friends tell me that's the normal usage of the word in the UK and "oriented" sounds as strange to them as "orientated" does to me.

That said, Kay did call it object-oriented programming, so it makes sense to stick with his name.

<comment><USER24> I'm British and I think your British friends are wrong. I do agree that most of the people who use "orientated" are British but I don't understand where they get that from.

"Orientation" is the term for the process of orienting something. So a design process in which, say, user stories are turned into object-oriented designs could be called "object-orientation". But it does not follow that the result is "object-orientated" - we'd just call it "object-oriented", in the same way that something which has been through a transformation is not "transformated" but "transformed".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> ... orientated around "visions rather than goals" and "funded people, not projects"

being exclusively goal oriented constrains the originality of the high level ideas that are produced.

on the other hand, being constrained by specific goals (eg: put a person on the moon) can produce a lot of creativity as people's efforts are focused on a narrow domain of problems to solve.

</comment><comment><USER26> Surprised not to see any quotes from Dr. Dobb's interview with Kay from 2012 ( <http://www.drdobbs.com/240003442> )

Some quotes from that interview:

"My interest in education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults."

"Extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve."

"I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire. I'd personally be happy if they reinvented the wheel, because at least we'd be moving forward. If they reinvented what Engelbart did we'd be way ahead of where we are now."

and so on...

</comment><comment><USER27> Alan Kay is a voice that we need to listen more... we are distracted from the fact that our current Industry generates a lot of money... too look at the fact that our Craft is in the pyramid construction age.... we need real architecture and real engineering.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't think the dig on the "web amateurs" is fair. It seems clear to me that the simple and, perhaps, amateurish underpinnings of the web (http & HTML) ended up being a great strength.

<comment><USER29> I disagree.

HTTP is defensible, HTML also has its time and place.

But what it evolved into (HTML/CSS/JS) is pretty obviously a dead-end waiting to happen. The number of hacks we pile on one another for a "modern web- application" is nothing short of ridiculous.

Realistically we still live in the internet stone-age, helplessly piling up stones and wooden sticks...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh, how I would like to base everything on simple abstractions like "real computers all the way down (RCATWD)". However, reality seems to think differently. James Hague recently said it well: "Simplicity is Wonderful, But Not a Requirement"

<http://prog21.dadgum.com/167.html>

</comment><comment><USER30> Good article. I Just translated it into Chinese and posted that in my blog(<http://ned11.iteye.com/blog/1828088>). Thanks for the introduction to such a great people.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's a small thing, I know, but the author's use of "orientated" for "oriented" was a bit annoying.

Other than that, it's a nice collection of quotes and links. Good to see.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd love to get a hold of that Bob Barton article Alan Kay talks about, but strangely it seems like all the PDFs of it have been taken down...

<comment><AUTHOR> The revolutionary 1961 Bob Barton paper Alan Kay was referring to was called "A new approach to the functional design of a digital computer".

Here's a copy of it on Scribd: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000>

<comment><USER32> Great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> has anyone seen him talking about a Tim Gallwey video ? Kathy Sierra mentioned one of Alan Kay's talks called 'doing with images makes symbols'... I'm trying to find this one ..

</comment><comment><USER34> What network protocol did the ARPA network at PARC use?

</comment><comment><USER35> The author lost me here: "Which didn't even require inheritance, which is not like we know it today".

</comment><comment><USER36> My new favorite from Alan Kay, which I just learned from TFA:

 _"Lisp: greatest single programming language ever designed"_

My previous favorite quote attributed to Alan Kay, which is not in TFA:

 _"I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."_

: )</comment>


Mo' Money: Square Now Processing $3 Million A Day In Mobile Payments - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/21/square-3-million-day/ <comment><USER2> So how would the savvy entrepreneur "bet" on Square, given that you can't directly invest in it? What kind of product/service would you build if you assumed this pervasive mobile payment platform?

<comment><USER3> I have posted the following on HN a couple times; Square is a platform.

\---

I think that Square is an exceptional business enabled by a novel piece of hardware, their headphone jack card reader.

It would seem - then, that the card reader and payment service could actually be seen as a platform play.

Platforms are technologies that are useful themselves - but enable far reaching, broader use cases in ways, that at times, can be unforeseen.

Square could enable a range of cottage industries by providing other applications built on their solution.

We have the ability for mobile payments, as it were, and thus we should see a need for dead-simple mobile business management apps; inventory, supply chain, vendor management, invoicing, product lists etc.

This leads me to believe that Square is a platform that, through its deployment, applications can be built upon it that will change the way commerce can happen on the individual level.

Further - it would seem that there is also a great opportunity for sales distribution here as well. A product distributor could reach out to and enable a mobile sales force providing all these applications to their sales force in the field on a single device - as the merchants sell product, it can be tracked in real time and supplies replenished.

This could work very well in connected, yet less-developed countries such as rural Philippines, China and other parts of Asia. (areas where the vast majority of the population have mobile phones, but other forms of infrastructure are less developed)

Couple this with prepaid charge cards -- and the ability to LOAD cards in the longer term, and there are some significant opportunities that can be built using square alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is a competitive rate for a merchant account?

Square takes 2%. Anyone have experience with providers that can go lower than 1%, or is it simply not an option?

<comment><USER5> Also, can anyone familiar with point of sale systems compare the two?

I saw an interview with Jack once where he mentioned cool reporting without going into details. It seems possible that the value of Squares should also include the cost/fees of POS systems (minus cost of your ipad/iphone/ipod that connects to your Square).

<comment><USER6> Their iPad app is a bit more comparable, but you'd really be pushing it to say that their iPod/iPhone app can replace a point-of-sale system.

Square is perfect for mobile business like landscapers, plumbers, artists, etc. But for businesses with a brick & mortar location, they're missing a lot of the things so they won't be replacing pos system as is.

Some of the standard point-of-sale features that Square is missing I don't ever see them getting in to. Things like cash management, re-ordering inventory, employee time clocks... that's what store owners are looking for in a pos system.

The iPad app is OK for more simple businesses, which is why they always show it in a coffee shop and not a retail store. If they offered a payments API I think they would be able to break into this market not by replacing the POS, but by replacing the credit card terminal.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the thoughtful response. It's funny that we had thread right before Square dropped their reverse-CRM bombshell.

Despite being a tool for the buyer more than the seller, the new app definitely incentivizes businesses to become part of the Square ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be interesting to know if they're still processing 33% of transactions as cash. It would also be interesting to know how much of the non-cash mix is fraudulent.

Anyone from Square willing to share?</comment>


How Facebook turned itself into one of the world's most influential tech giants - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21696507-social-network-has-turned-itself-one-worlds-most-influential-technology-giants <comment><USER2> You mean ad-tech platforms.</comment>


WSJ: Why the Economy Doesn't Roar Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-economy-doesnt-roar-anymore-1476458742 <comment><USER2> The article is a preview of Marc Levinson's upcoming book, _An Extraordinary Time_ , which looks at the post-World War II economic boom as a one-time historical event. It reminds me strongly of several of the themes of Robert J. Gordon's _The Rise and Fall of American Growth_ , released earlier this year, though that book covers a much larger time period: 1870 - 2015.

Various reviews suggest Levinson does address a few topics I've found poorly treated in the past -- the obsession of the US Federal Reserve over inflation in the late 1970s, and a general lack of understanding of both economists and politicians at the time (see Kirkus Reviews). At the same time, I suspect that as with Gordon, I'll find Levinson's book missing crucial elements.

Bio: _Marc Levinson is the former finance and economics editor at the Economist and the author of five books, including The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. He lives in Washington, DC._

[https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/marc- levinson/an-...](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/marc-levinson/an- extraordinary-time/)

[http://www.basicbooks.com/full- details?isbn=9780465061983](http://www.basicbooks.com/full- details?isbn=9780465061983)

[http://www.marclevinson.net](http://www.marclevinson.net)

</comment><comment><USER3> I see no mention of a couple of super-obvious factors. First, the USA has let monopolies back in. During the immediate postwar period, there were tons of regional companies in just about every market. Now, there's a few national or multi-national. Almost complete lack of competition results. Second, the rise of "permission culture" and the idea of "intellectual property". Just going ahead and doing it versus looking around to ensure that you're not infringing is costly in time and money, especially when you have run everything past a legal department.</comment>