Explaining REST to Damien Katz - <AUTHOR> http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/08/17/ExplainingRESTToDamienKatz.aspx <comment><USER2> Part of the problem with these REST discussions is that the definition of what is being discussed keeps shifting. The reasonable bits of REST are, well, reasonable, and generally non-controversial.

Most of what he describes in this post is fairly reasonable, but his previous REST post (that I mentioned as silly) focused on the less reasonable (and more dogmatic) parts. He criticized APIs for such things as, "REST API Sin #1: URIs Identify Methods Instead of Resources (The Original Sin)". Referring to design decisions as "sins" may be cute, but it's also a clue that you may be drifting away from pragmatism and towards religion.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I think there's a couple issues that cause confusion.

Yes, REST advocates say your URLs should be for "resources" not "methods", but sometimes the distinction is blurry. For example, a Google search: <http://www.google.com/search?q=restful>

Is www.google.com/search a "resource" or a "method"? I would call it a method, but it's also sort of a resource. I can't think of any way to make it more "resource oriented".

<comment><USER4> > Is www.google.com/search a "resource" or a "method"?

You can look at it either way, but it's a perfectly fine resource.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apropos nothing, Dare Obasanjo needs to seriously reconsider the use of boldface as his link style.

<comment><USER6> Equally apropos of nothing, I saw his tagline and decided to never read anything on his site. Marketing yourself as an alcoholic pothead programmer seems a strange choice. Perhaps I judge too soon?

<comment><USER7> _Perhaps I judge too soon?_

Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that Damien's point is that he doesn't get the "self-evidence" or Good Thinginess of using REST as a _developer_ of a web application. I see it over and over again in development situations: As soon as the topic of webservices comes up, someone starts crying, "REST! REST! OMG, REST!" And that's usually before they've even heard what the web service will do.

It's funny: When REST advocates are pressed about how REST might not be the best choice for every, single development effort, they either:

1\. Simply regurgitate REST's tenants 2\. Deny that they are regurgitating REST's tenants, and then go on to regurgitate REST's tenants

I think that everyone can acknowledge the good of using REST as a _user_ of a web application -- which is what the REST literature addresses anyway. But is REST going help app developers deliver features in a timely manner? Is it the most agile way to develop? Not necessarily.

<controversial>If you follow REST to its purist implications, you probably wouldn't have a dynamic web application at all. Instead, you'd have a interlinked mesh of of hand-written HTML pages that cover every representation of the application. Hello, Early Web!</controversial>

So anyway, if REST works for you, awesome; as long as you've designed your resources and interfaces intelligibly, you're helping to make the waters of the internet easier to navigate. It SOAP/RPC isn't working for you, maybe you should try REST. But if SOAP/RPC is serving you just fine, don't let this topic rock your boat.

</comment><comment><USER9> For the record, Dave Winer didn't come up with SOAP, and didn't do with a "bunch of folks from Microsoft". SOAP sucks and it's largely due to MS' influence, but Winer merely came up with XML-RPC, which is pretty close to Damien's idea that maybe POST is enough.

Not that I'm a Winer fan -- his behavior oddly reflects his surname -- but facts is facts. Dave understands the need for simplicity, and needless to say, the SOAP folks don't.</comment>


Why Nintendo should ignore Super Mario Run's poor reviews - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/20/why-nintendo-should-ignore-super-mario-runs-bad-reviews/ <comment><USER2> This is Nintendo's own fault for not making it $10 upfront. That way people would have had to pay to review.

</comment><comment><USER3> shocking revelations</comment>


RubyMotion 3.0 Sneak Peek: Android Support - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/87048665656/rubymotion-3-0-sneak-peek-android-support <comment><USER2> Maybe it's petty but I've lost confidence in Ruby Motion since I've had a pull request open against it for whole year because they don't support enterprise deployment out of box. The fix is pretty damn simple too [https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotion/pull/64/files](https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotion/pull/64/files)

You'd think enterprise would be a prime use case here. Sucks to have to keep your own fork up to date.

Moral of the story, if you have a Github repo please accept pulls; and if you don't you loose customers.

<comment><USER3> I'm just smiling at the juxtaposition. It's amusing what in most circumstances would be a fact of life becomes a major sticking point. Apple doesn't take pull requests. I'm sure Google accepts patches, sometimes, but the process doesn't strike me as quite on the PR-level of ease.

Is the alternative PhoneGap, and the hypothesis that they're more responsible with taking ownership of your pet features? Just curious.

<comment><USER2> PhoneGap works well so does Xcode or anything that doesn't aim to replace the typical processes.

It's just such a stupid thing with their rake command, it checks to see if your device is provisioned to save you an unsavory error message. Since I have an Apple Enterprise account I am not subject to the 100 device limit and having to provision the device's UDID; so they're checking a non-existent array in the provisioning profile.

Less a pet feature, more an edge case with "rake device" that they missed. It's like they're completely oblivious to an entire class of provisioning profiles in their tooling.

Which doesn't speak well to the maturity of the tool, have they seriously never dealt with an enterprise customer or for that matter an app that had more than 100 devices beta testing it? Almost every iOS development firm I know uses the enterprise provisioning profiles since it's a more simple process than having to juggle UDIDs.

<comment><USER4> It could be a bad sign, or it could speak to priorities, and your priorities are not their priorities it seems. Personally, I accept all pull requests that are solid, written to my standards, fix or extend a feature that is a priority, are accompanied with unit tests, and do not impact or impinge on another feature or future feature. I do not however accept all pull requests. Part of this is that if there is no demand and it's a single individuals edge case, then I'll very heavily scrutinize the patch. If I don't agree, don't understand exactly what every line is doing, or do not feel it will be used by a significant portion of the user base then I won't pull it. Because moving forward, I will have to maintain it, and that isn't free. And if people don't like that, they can fork it.

<comment><USER2> True, but if your business is alternative toolchains to Apple's own; and it's shown to me that you don't support something I know a great deal of iOS developers use then I lose a bit of faith in your marketing message that "lot's of important apps use us... and don't mind what all the naysayers say about our garbage collector, give us $200/year and give it a shot yourself".

It's one thing that my pull hasn't been accepted, the other bigger concern is the nature of the unpatched code that says to me that no one serious has used Ruby Motion. We aren't talking a hobbyist open-source project here, this is a partially open-source commercial offering.

Source: I am a Ruby developer who has to develop native on occasion... and I run a company who's job it is to deploy beta/in-house applications to mobile devices. I just ran a quick sql query and 43.7% of the hundreds of thousands of applications we host are deployed with enterprise provisioning. I wouldn't call this a personal edge case.

<comment><USER4> Enterprise and government comes with a lot of baggage that no sane developer would ever try to take on. You are manifesting your priorities on them, and that simply may not be the case. The $200 price point is likely that high in order to keep the client base low. I'm not saying you're wrong, but Apple itself barely supports enterprise with most of their enterprise management bits being third party. A laptop without a docking station??? Crazy, they might as well not sell computers...

Source: Work for government, not entirely sane, have had Apple reps brought in to discuss in house dev, written in house application, ruby, C#, C, Obj-C, JS, C++ developer in order of preference.

<comment><USER2> On iOS "enterprise provisioning" means less baggage. No UDIDs, which are deprecated in software BTW. To be clear this is a tiny patch that adds support for some 40%+ of dev shops and all enterprises. All we are talking about is this:

      unless App.config.provisions_all_devices? || App.config.provisioned_devices.include?(device_id)
        App.fail "Device ID `#{device_id}' not provisioned in profile `#{App.config.provisioning_profile}'"
      end

Where the provisions all devices is my bit supported by a single line helper, it's not scary. If you have more than 100 devices beta testing your app you use enterprise provisioning PERIOD, it doesn't have anything to do with classic "enterprise" except you need a DUNs and to pay Apple an extra $100/year.

Almost every dev shop that is more than two guys I know uses this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The object model of RubyMotion for Android is based on Java. Ruby classes, objects, methods and exceptions are Java classes, objects, methods, and exceptions, and vice-versa. No bridge is involved."

But then later it says "The runtime uses the Java Native Interface (JNI) in order to integrate with Java".

And then later it says, "RubyMotion Android apps are fully compiled into optimized machine code, exactly like their iOS and OS X counterparts."

Does any of this make any sense? They seem to be contradicting themselves left and right on the same page.

<comment><USER6> That jumped out to me too. There is a significant performance hit when you make JNI calls. Last I looked not all of Android's API are easily exposed to native code. Constantly context switching from native to managed can be beastly. I'd be curious on how often and when it is doing these JNI calls, what is native and what is java.

<comment><USER7> Sorry when you say native versus Java what do you mean? As far as I was concerned all native apps are java?

<comment><USER8> Native machine code, he means, rather than "native to Android" Java bytecode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "RubyMotion for Android features a completely new Ruby runtime specifically designed and implemented for Android development."

That is huge, very excited to check this out!

I would love being able to write ruby instead of java (whereas objc doesn't bother me that much).

<comment><USER10> > I would love being able to write ruby instead of java

You can do that with InfraRuby ([http://infraruby.com/](http://infraruby.com/)) if you don't mind writing type annotations.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the downvotes! In case it's not obvious, this is a free download (follow the "Installation" link). A major update will be released next week!

InfraRuby compiles Ruby with type annotations to ordinary Java classfiles.

<comment><USER11> Wow, that is well hidden. Also: I don't get "Live" form. Wouldn't a "hey you wrote Ruby, but here is your .jar" form make more sense?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just wish they'd release an LOC limited trial version. I'd love to give it a spin, but I'm not about to fork out that much money just to try it...

<comment><USER13> Likewise. $200 is a lot of money to throw down on something sight unseen, money back guarantees or otherwise.

<comment><USER14> I disagree.

Somebody that doesn't want to spend $200 on a product with a complete- satisfaction guarantee probably won't be a very good long-term customer. The RubyMotion guys are filtering out the low-end of the market, which from a business perspective, is a good move.

<comment><USER13> Um.. no. Sorry. I haven't done that for desktop software since the early 2000s. You're asking for a lot of damn money on nothing but faith.

Besides, every crappy product advertised on TV ever offers a "money back guarantee", and some cursory googling should show that those often aren't worth the electrons used to transmit the image to the screen.

This is the internet age, and we're talking about software. You get paid _after_ I see what you're selling, and not before. Code samples and writeups are nice, but it's no substitute for getting one's hands on the tool.

I'd also like to call out the rather annoying trend of any criticism of pricing being met with the "keeping out the low end market" dismissal. Sometimes, your product is just overpriced and your sales methods leave a lot to be desired.

<comment><USER15> I have to say I have trouble taking comments like this seriously. $200 is "a lot of damn money"? Are you kidding? This is a professional tool for software developers. You do know you'll need a $100/yr ADC membership to even run your software on an iOS device, right?

Many developers have no problem whatsoever spending $200 on a tool like rubymotion, in fact I think it's a bargain. A money back guarantee is a bonus, and no-one has any reasonable doubt as to its legitimacy. I agree completely with the GP that this makes good business sense.

<comment><USER13> I'm glad you have the disposable income to spend on something without even knowing in advance if it's something you'll use or even like.

I do not. But apparently personal principles are unwelcome here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was impressed that even with all this translation and Java compatibility going on, the sample code still shows some situations where the nice clean, concise nature of Ruby is still up and running. E.g.:

> @paths.each { |path, paint| canvas.drawPath(path, paint) } if @paths

From: [https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/blob/master/and...](https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/blob/master/android/Paint/app/main_activity.rb)

And: @activity.handler.post -> { @activity.updateTimer }

From: [https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/blob/master/and...](https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/blob/master/android/Timer/app/main_activity.rb)

These things take a lot of lines in Java for Android where we don't have lambdas and function references yet and often have to define anonymous classes just to pass a method in to a handle to be run later.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was just looking at the rubymotion licences [0]. does anyone know if you will get future releases with the licence? do you only get them for one year?

[0] [http://sites.fastspring.com/hipbyte/product/rubymotion](http://sites.fastspring.com/hipbyte/product/rubymotion)

<comment><USER17> > does anyone know if you will get future releases with the licence?

Yes.

> do you only get them for one year?

Yes, though license renewal costs $100, not $200.

<comment><USER18> Actually, the license is good forever. The $100 is for updates and support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am elated. Rubymotion is awesome. It has the ease of PhoneGap with the speed of native Obj-C.

<comment><USER20> I just downloaded it and am impressed so far. Looks like it'll be an extra bonus since I won't have to also learn Ruboto to write Android apps with Ruby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Surely today with this news, the one on xamarin and that on codenameone it is likey orgasm-day for all the crossplatform tools lovers.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know if the RubyMotion price of $200 will include Android support, or will that be a separate product?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is most likely all included in one product. If it is a separate product it would not use --template `motion create --template=android Hello`

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is great news, it will boost the adoption of Ruby and RubyMotion in the huge Android market.

Finally I have a reason to give RubyMotion a try. I'm curious how much productivity gain can one achieve with a language like Ruby once it is compiled (which will ensure the speed of the resulting application).

<comment><USER24> I think the gains are huge, but it depends on your preferred workflow. I know some traditional Xcode developers who kick and scream at the idea of loosing their IDE, whereas I prefer to live in the terminal.

Workflow is one thing, but then writing Ruby code is so _fluid_. Notice that there's not a lot of preamble (imports and such) that you need to take care of in the Ruby code, I think that's great. But, again, language and workflow are very personal, and I think every tends to "think they're right" ;-)

<comment><USER23> Agreed, RubyMotion is appealing if you prefer a fast development cycle. I tend to use C++ for most of my programming projects but every time I've used a more "dynamic" language (Python or JavaScript in my case) I was amazed at how fast I can try/drop/improve on an idea and see the code running. The only problem I had with the "dynamic" languages was the speed of the resulting code, RubyMotion seems to be in the sweet spot between a statically typed language and a dynamic (usually interpreted) language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are mobile apps written with RubyMotion on par with the native equivalent? For example, I've heard a lot of people dislike PhoneGap, AppAccelerator, etc because the final app isn't as polished as something that is built natively.

<comment><USER26> Yes, it says that in the announcement:

> The object model of RubyMotion for Android is based on Java. Ruby classes, > objects, methods and exceptions are Java classes, objects, methods and > exceptions, and vice-versa. No bridge is involved.

You're still coding to the same native APIs, but you're doing it in Ruby. That's how RubyMotion works on iOS/OSX as well as Android now.

<comment><USER25> Very nice, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some code samples already available on Github: [https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/tree/master/and...](https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/tree/master/android)

</comment><comment><USER27> Hey, when it comes to mobile, I develop them in pure Objective-c for iOS, and pure Java for Android. I use tools provided by both compagnies. So yeah, I do the jobs twice, but I think it's ok.

Anyone have feedbacks coming from what I do to something like RubyMotion or Xamarin? These solutions sound very interesting, but I've yet to try them. I think I'm too attached to my Objective-c and workflow.

Also, is there peoples who originally used RubyMotion or Xamarin and went to use OC and Java?

<comment><USER24> If you already have a comfortable work flow, I would not encourage you to migrate just for the sake of it, but having the option to write a native app in Ruby is very compelling to a lot of people who might otherwise not be interested in writing a native mobile app.

RubyMotion supports xib files, storyboards, xcdatamodel files, and Android XML files (and localization files, etc), so if you ARE interested in switching, you don't have to stop using those if you're already used to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there something similar for other languages?

<comment><USER29> [https://wukix.com/mocl](https://wukix.com/mocl) (for Lisp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> BTW is there something like PhoneGap but for desktops (Win, Linux, OSX)? Or even better, Ruby integrated with Webkit.

<comment><USER31> I've used a bit TideSDK [1]. I'm afraid the project might be on hold though since there has been no activity on their github repository [2]. Some explanations can be found on their blog [3]

[1] [http://www.tidesdk.org/](http://www.tidesdk.org/) [2] [https://github.com/TideSDK/TideSDK](https://github.com/TideSDK/TideSDK) [3] [http://www.tidesdk.org/blog/](http://www.tidesdk.org/blog/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm curious if the XML views will remain the same?

<comment><USER33> Presumably yes if it uses native APIs. On iOS, although .nib files are supported, people tend to prefer Ruby DSLs to define interfaces though. I imagine that something similar will happen on Android.

Expect that it won't be long before somebody comes out with a cross-platform wrapper for native UI elements similar to Xamarin 3.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> does this work on all android versions?

</comment><comment><USER35> Pretty damn cool.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is fantastic news. I love RubyMotion and can't wait to try it on Android. Especially want to learn how easy it will be to create wrapper objects to have a common API across platforms.</comment>


PIMP my Google Form - <AUTHOR> http://www.pimpmygoogleform.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Need to send a survey but don't wanna totally suck? As X-ZIBIT did with old creepy cars, this app will just PIMP your old and boring survey into a fonky fresh one.

</comment><comment><USER2> FYI: your copy and social media accounts read "Pimp my GF" \- which reads like: Pimp my girl friend

that will probably get you mixed results..

<comment><AUTHOR> True that! Made it on purpose, we thought it was funny!</comment></comment>


A ski resort used a 1-star review in its ads, so now I'm inspired - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/words-for-life/a-ski-resort-used-a-1-star-review-in-its-brilliant-ads-so-now-im-inspired-945ba7f31fe9 <comment><USER2> I always skim through the worst reviews for places, rather than the best reviews. Every good review is kind of the same, but bad reviews tell you useful information. If all the bad reviews are basically people complaining about minor service complaints, that's usually a good sign. If they're all about bugs or the rooms being dirty, etc, you should definitely have second thoughts.

<comment><USER3> I find this very useful for Amazon reviews too. If all the 1-star reviews are complaints about delivery or nonsense like that, the product is good. If they're all calling out a specific condition or a bad design feature, that's more than likely an actual problem with the product (e.g. frequent dead pixels on monitors or hiss on wireless headphones or some other annoyance).

<comment><USER4> Not true, many complaints on delivery delay can point otwards a totally over- run company with eternal wait-times or massive scale up problems.

<comment><USER3> Anything that has multiple sellers it becomes completely irrelevant, especially if you have Prime and mainly get Prime deliveries.

It's got nothing to do with the product at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's the movie poster with a 2 star review: [https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/sep/09/legend...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/sep/09/legend- review-movie-marketing-false-advertising)

<comment><USER6> I didn't expect much from the abstract, but that's brilliant

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The review says:

"I've heard Snowbird is a tough mountain, but this is ridiculous. It felt like every trail was a steep chute or littered with tree wells. How is anyone supposed to ride in that? Not fun!" Greg, Los Angeles, CA

</comment><comment><USER8> Saw this in the comments...

>> I'm just a copywriter from Illinois who knows greatness when I see it.

> Do you wear a monocle?

 _If anyone ever gives me a monocle I will never stop wearing it._

Luke, your monocle will arrive at the office on Tuesday.

<comment><USER9> Received, thank you. The Internet is fun.

<comment><USER10> The Internet is awesome... but more importantly, are you still wearing it?

<comment><USER9> Yes. My wife has gone from amused to angry to inconsolable. Great monocle, 1 out of 5 stars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I already love Snowbird and spent several days there last year. I saw this ad posted on their Twitter account and thought it was pure genius. They hit the nail on the head, because I friggin love the challenging terrain there. Although my true love in Utah is Brighton Resort :) They probably have the same sort of rediculous "Oh my God there's 'too much' powder" reviews. For the record as long as there's not a lot of flat areas there's no such thing as too much powder

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe they got the idea from Abstruse Goose [http://www.abstrusegoose.com/527](http://www.abstrusegoose.com/527)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how this can work in other cases though. After all, if their selling point is very difficult snow trails, and someone basically says that their trails are too difficult for him, then is it really a 1-star review?

It's cool that they can do this, but very few businesses can rely on this extreme segmentation...

<comment><USER14> "this food is too spicy" at a mexican restaurant. "The rides made me want to throw up" at a wild carnival.

They seem pretty easy to make. Find some feature, make it "intense", make someone whine about the intensity.

But yeah, it's not really a 1 star review, the guy just doesn't get it, and we are in on the joke.

<comment><USER15> "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."

"If nobody hates you, you're doing something wrong"

Trying to be all things to all people means you'll likely be exquisitely mediocre. Excellence very often comes out of limitations, and designing whom your product is _not_ intended for can be more powerful than the opposite. Using honest feedback from someone you intended to not serve is a clever tactic and building something to get reviews like that might improve your business.

<comment><USER14> yeah you said it better :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of how the Grauniad's negative review of the movie Legend was spun: [https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/sep/09/legend...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/sep/09/legend- review-movie-marketing-false-advertising)

</comment><comment><USER17> The most famous example of this kind of ad is VW's "Lemon" and "Think Small" campaigns from around 1960. Google image search for "lemon ad".

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

</comment><comment><USER18> Scenery porn + minimal information dense copy that nails their value position and target market in a nutshell ("wusses -- like this reviewer -- need not apply") + understated contact info.

It's a good formula to follow. You don't even need a 1 star review to follow it. Using a 1 star review as part of it has its own perks, like schadenfreude and irony and thought provoking plot twist. But, it isn't even essential to the basic brilliance of this piece.

</comment><comment><USER19> As austrian and ex-competitive skier I can recommend Snowbird and it's associated venues wholeheartedly. It's great, with easy and difficult slopes, and fantastic management. The only thing which I didn't like was the restaurant in Russian neo-oligarch St.Anton style at the top. But this was just the architecture.

So they have it pretty easy to use such a review in their ads. The target audience knows how to take it

</comment><comment><USER20> A similar advert for the Welsh Tourist Board a few years back:

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nick_Clifton/publicatio...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nick_Clifton/publication/233316800/figure/fig9/AS:300041102217223@1448546781581/Figure-9-Area- of-outstandingly-bad-mobile-reception.png)

</comment><comment><USER21> Nothing like reframing the debate. Sort of like 1 star Amazon reviews where someone complains about never having to recharge a USB battery pack...

</comment><comment><USER22> OP's company can do better than "Dare to be different" on their website after being inspired by all this amazing advertising.

</comment><comment><USER23> weird to see someone unironically bragging about inventing the humblebrag.

</comment><comment><USER24> for mobile development, maybe google should just "embrace the negative" instead of portraying the android ecosystem as a unicorn munching candy grass in a Bob Ross landscape

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree this is a good ad from a tourist perspective.

The sad part is Snowbird is tracked within an hour after any snowfall. First tram up on a powder day at snowbird deserves all 5 stars but after that, it's a legitimate 1 star experience.

EDIT: unless you spent the night in the canyon and an avalanche takes out the access road :)

<comment><USER26> > The sad part is Snowbird is tracked within an hour after any snowfall

Is there any resort where this is not the case?

<comment><USER27> I'm a solid intermediate snow boarder. Snowbird is uniquely steep/aggressive imo. Most other great mountains like Breck or whistler etc. have a combination of relaxing and tough. Snowbird just feels tough almost all the way down.

Good snow probably makes snowbird amazing, limited or tracked snow sucks there more than other places imo.</comment></comment></comment>


Awk by Example - <AUTHOR> https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-awk1/ <comment><USER2> Just grab the awk book, the awk programming language. [https://ia802309.us.archive.org/25/items/pdfy- MgN0H1joIoDVoI...](https://ia802309.us.archive.org/25/items/pdfy- MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7/The_AWK_Programming_Language.pdf)

Yesterday, I wrote production level code using awk. It was either write the code in go which I figured would take all day. But I had really about an hour or so. 40 lines of shell script mixture of about 20 lines of awk and bash/sed/grep/tail/xargs/cut/cat/curl got the job done.

AWK is very freaking powerful if you learn to parse data with it.

<comment><USER3> Might I ask why this old version (I haven't read it) instead of the manual/book for GNU awk? [1] It does a good job of mentioning differences between other implementations and GNU awk extensions are marked

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/)

<comment><USER4> That old version is written by the 'A'[0], 'W'[1], and 'K'[2] that are the eponymous inventors of awk, and the book is at least occasionally cited as basically a masterpiece.[3]

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_J%2E_Weinberger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_J%2E_Weinberger)

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

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

<comment><USER3> I've also seen this book mentioned elsewhere but never took the effort of reading it. Hopefully I'll go through it sometime soon - it may be ~30 years old, but the core concepts is likely to work in gawk even now.

Also, the gawk book is written by Arnold Robbins who is one of current maintainers of the tool and as per [1] gawk was started by David Trueman and Arnold.

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Foreword3...](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Foreword3.html#Foreword3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmm, the vital thing to say is that awk is a series of

       PATTERN { ACTION }

statements, where { ACTION } is optional and defaults to { print }

Side note; I almost always use Perl or Ruby with the -n or -p flags instead of awk. I don't need to have three or four syntaxes to remember when I can use just one.

<comment><USER6> >where { ACTION } is optional and defaults to { print }

There's more to that:

Either PATTERN or { ACTION } is optional (but not both). If no PATTERN is given, the default means "match every line" (and so do the given ACTION for every line).

The ACTION could be anything (even an explicit print, whether or not PATTERN is given), summing up some column, filtering more on substring(...), assigning values to variables, comparing variables and doing actions based on them (awk's if statement), calling a built-in or user-defined function, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I studied under Al Aho a few semesters ago (the 'A' in AWK). I'm dipping my toes in Data Science in Python at my current internship, and while I'm seriously impressed at the bevy of NLP/Machine Learning algorithms I have at my disposal, I've come to realize that some of the stuff I'm working on can be solved by unix tools written in the 70s/80s. And that's dope.

<comment><USER6> This point comes up somewhat periodically on HN - the point you made. And yes, it is "dope" :)

More people should check prior art before making new stuff. Reuse / stand on the shoulders of giants / don't reinvent the wheel, etc. But NIH is alive and well ...

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Part 2 - [https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-awk2/](https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-awk2/)

Part 3 - [https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-awk3/](https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-awk3/)

<comment><USER9> Thank you for this, I could not find the follow up to the first article on the IBM webpage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "And, unlike some languages, awk's syntax is familiar, and borrows some of the best parts of languages like C, python, and bash (although, technically, awk was created before both python and bash)."

Technically??

<comment><USER11> P--- ([https://www.geekcode.xyz/geek.html](https://www.geekcode.xyz/geek.html))

<comment><USER12> P+++

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If anyone's interested, I created a repo that contains some common one-liners that I've used [https://github.com/kirang89/awk- cookbook](https://github.com/kirang89/awk-cookbook). There's a PDF version as well :)

</comment><comment><USER14> In the early 2000s, I spent quite some time learning with the tutorials on IBM developer site. Many of them are well-written and easy to read compared with blog posts. And they paid the authors.

</comment><comment><USER15> I recently looked for a simple scripting language where I would need to do some mathematical arithemetics, and do some formatted output of the results (2 decimal digits). I found awk scripts (stand alone) a good option. Bash it self is not well suited, and also Python felt like a worse option in my case. Also looked at bc as script language but its reusablity and formatting features were more limited.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's another source of good awk examples: [http://tuxgraphics.org/~guido/scripts/awk-one- liner.html](http://tuxgraphics.org/~guido/scripts/awk-one-liner.html)</comment>


ZenExpense: Get your hands on the free beta prior to the official launch. - <AUTHOR> http://signup.zenexpense.com

<comment><USER2> Needs a tour page! Also I can't make out what the coins are poking out from in the logo.</comment>


The hacker culture is winning - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/2015/09/14/the-hacker-culture-is-winning/ <comment><USER2> The benefits of most updates outweigh the cons. Security fixes, Improved algorithms, Better UX/UI, why would we want to 'wait'? The post does not provide a real alternative.</comment>


Tumblr was removed from Apple's App Store over child pornography issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104366/tumblr-ios-app-child-pornography-removed-from-app-store <comment><USER2> Tumblr like any website with image content is liable to have illigal images on it. Apple removing it, but not removing imgur, reddit, or any other site as an app, is playing favorites and making excuses.

Its difficult enough to have reliable, safe sites where arists can create, share in legal artistic pornography, but with Tumblr being forced to mass-wipe things they're deleting both sfw and nsfw content. Most likely based upon reports, which in Tumblr culture are typically fake.

There should be grounds for suing apple in mistreating the market in this manner, as this is real loss of profits involved, but I doubt it would work. Either way Tumblr is gonna lose a good amount of it's userbase.

<comment><USER3> >Apple removing it, but not removing imgur, reddit, or any other site as an app, is playing favorites and making excuses.

That doesn't match what they are claiming though.

Apple requires such sites to have a filter to prevent child-porn and the claim here is that Tumblr was removed for not having one that works. If those other services have a filter that works (sufficiently, I guess) while Tumblr doesn't, then it's not playing favorites, it's just having a policy and enforcing it. To limit the dissemination of child-porn. It might be hard to sue for that.

<comment><USER4> Safari to be removed from iOS 13 due to child pornography issues because some websites don't have a filter

<comment><USER5> Safari has a site filter, Tumblr doesn't.

How effective filters are is another question, but Apple has long stated rules that apps must not provide access to "objectionable" content without some kind of access control which doesn't seem to meaningfully exist on Tumblr.

<comment><USER2> Tumblr has NSFW filtering. You have to be logged in to see nafw tumblrs, and have it active on your settings, iirc.

<comment><USER5> I'm aware, I use it regularly. I'm also saying it doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you've been on Tumblr recently, you'll know that it's a pretty hands-off place. You get the general sense that Yahoo! fired everyone who worked at Tumblr and now it's just running on a server somewhere.

<comment><USER7> As a long time user I think this is largely a misrepresentation. It really feels same as it's ever been.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but the Tumblr code and infrastructure was always a bit special. Few sites of this dimension had so many major bugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ugh, I'm sure no one will really care about this comment but tumblr absolutely has a terrible child porn problem.

I basically stopped using tumblr for porn because of how much nude, as well as non nude pictures of kids I've reported to tumblr.

It's a big issue. It's also incredibly easy to find child porn on there and despite reporting it, it always seems to pop back up.

I get that people will post shit regardless but it really seems like they don't try to do anything but delete the single blog that has been reported.

This is a site that's based around people "liking" and "reblogging" content. It's insane to see a picture of some kid being exploited, see how many blogs have reblogged and/or liked the picture, and then see how tumblr doesn't even attempt to address these blogs that clearly are doing the same thing, clearly liking the same things, and clearly reblogging the same pictures as the reported blog.

I've reported blogs for harm to minors well over 20 times. It's a drag.

<comment><USER10> Yes, agree. I left for the same reason.

The irony is that the same mechanism that allows that content to propagate is also the perfect tool for eliminating it. Liked/reblogged the content? Banned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Two things:

1 ) I'm unfortunately not surprised. For my girlfriends and I, Tumblr was basically effectively a place to express our lesbian-ness and effectively collect 'tasteful' nudes.

It wouldn't shock me in the least to find teenagers doing a similar thing, which, of course, would be illegal.

While others are saying that Tumblr was sort of picked on unfairly here, I'd argue the percentage of NSFW content that's easily-accessible on Tumblr is, in my personal experience, much higher than that of many other social networks.

2 ) That folks are still using Tumblr is a surprise to me. It seems as though many of my friends and I had a mass exodus about 4-5 years ago.

<comment><USER12> > It seems as though many of my friends and I had a mass exodus about 4-5 > years ago.

Seems common for platforms to wind down and for exoduses to occur, but I haven't heard of another tumblr-like. Where did people head off to?

<comment><USER11> Nowhere, to be honest.

We read books. We listen to records. We have actual human interaction. It's awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can't call myself too surprised considering that 'tumblr' and 'filtering' aren't so much strange bedfellows as perfect strangers.

I mean, hell, apps geared towards sexual encounters do a better job of filtering content. Grindr, Tinder, etc. Meanwhile, tumblr is pretty much unfettered access to whatever you fancy, not necessarily able to be bound by iOS' own filtering options such as Parental Controls in an elegant way.

Trouble is, if tumblr raised the app's minimum age to 17+ as with a lot of other apps with , that's a great deal of the app's userbase that can no longer access the service. On the other hand, heavily filtering content now means a __huge __backlog of content to sort through, with plenty of legitimate, if highly erotic, material ripe for getting falsely flagged as inappropriate.

tumblr's in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, though one entirely of their own design.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm always surprised that these web 2.0 sites don't pay people to surf and flag content. It doesn't take much google-fu to find all sorts of stuff on the clearnet that shouldn't be there. I understand that removing offending stuff from Google search itself is very difficult but the walled garden sites like tumblr are much easier as most of the offending stuff is usually linked together by repost and/or likes. Find one page doing something it shouldn't and follow the likes and reposts down the rabbit hole flagging and removing as you go along.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't help that Tumblr had no way to flag posts on mobile (both mobile web and in-app). There was too much friction involved in sending a report which is unlike every other social network I use.

<comment><USER14> There are a lot of weird quirks with Tumblr that I don't understand like how some pages will only open up in the dashboard.

<comment><USER16> Those are marked as "private" if you view those blogs in an incognito window (not logged into Tumblr) it will tell you that the blog is private and you must log in to view the blog. That's entirely the user's decision to make their blog private to the public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One commenter in the OP article pointed an interesting aspect of it: it's widely required, and considered totally feasible to preemptively filter pornography from the user uploaded stuff, and yet: even the giants like YouTube will fall under the burden of copyright filters demanded by EU.

No wonder then that politics usually introduce laws related the Internet under the "safe the children" slogan. It really does changes the perception.

<comment><USER18> An "is this child pornography" filter is a wildly different beast than "is this copyright infringement".

The crucial difference is something either is or is not child pornography, regardless of context. But whether something is copyright infringement depends on a whole variety of factors, and the exact same content uploaded by two different people might be a violation in one case and not in the other.

<comment><USER17> Of course, child porn is easier to identify. For a human eye.

Also, in case of Apple and their App Store it's not only CP, it is all kind of NSFW content that has to be filtered out. And that can be nuanced.

It appears that for now the filter mechanism is simple: the content is scanned against known database of bad stuff. So, a twist on a Content ID.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There really needs to be a FOSS model for detecting this stuff. As someone who got in trouble with the police hosting user generated content I've essentially stopped doing it entirely, although I'd want to.

There are some services that you can funnel content through, but getting access to them is tricky and getting a hit adds some reporting and compliance requirements, not to mention I'd be piping all my users images straight though microsofts servers.

<comment><USER20> There is: PhotoDNA. The name sounds neutral, by design, but don't let it fool you: unless your boss explicitly tells you this is your project now, I'd recommend you stay far away.

Well, I'm not sure it's FOSS or anything like that: it's maintained by the police (a weak assortment of the services that handle that in different countries) and it has a key feature: it's a bloom/hash filter of sorts, i.e. you don't need to open the image to make it work (because even opening the file would be illegal). It recognises photos similar to those already flagged (which are absolutely not free, open or available in any way for obvious reasons). A typical implementation is to move the flagged image in a dedicated folder with very strict access-control, keep really reliable traceability and send details to your local dedicated police team. Even access to the filters is tightly controlled too, because the wrong kind of people could use it to sift through a lot of images.

Because it's a fairly standard tool for any image hosting company, I'm surprised Tumblr has been shamed. Either they messed up their integration, or they ignored police requests. It's odd.

<comment><USER21> > even opening the file would be illegal

Not an expert, but I've worked with large companies that used humans to filter user content. Either they were breaking the law en masse deliberately or there is a safe harbor for doing manual filtering.

Again, I don't know the answer, but I'm very skeptical that it's always illegal to manually filter user content. Presumably swift deletion (and cache purging, if possible), reporting and record-keeping would be important. Although that does raise the issue of how you preserve evidence for police to take action if you delete it immediately... geez this is such a landmine.

<comment><USER22> There is an affirmative defence in most jurisdictions for reporting cp you come in contact with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there really a point to being this strict about child pornography? I'm still uncomfortable with the implications of certain configurations of numbers being illegal, and it's unlikely these laws/bans protect any children, unless there are people who exclusively rape children to distribute the resulting images and videos, which seems dubious.

I can understand individual sites taking down such images, but anything further seems like overreach.

<comment><USER24> The more restricted an item is, the more a few remaining loyalists will pay to obtain it. We've seen this play out a thousand times with drugs. I infer, then, that there's probably a small set of people making a mint by literally raping children to distribute the resulting images and videos.

And I still think enforcement of these laws should be absolutely draconian. This isn't a victimless crime: real lives are being absolutely destroyed. It's not like legalizing weed where suddenly you have a lot of people using it openly and responsibly. There _is_ no acceptable degree of child rape that we can tolerate in society.

I'm 100% with you if we were talking about file sharing. I'm 100% opposed to you on this specific subject.

<comment><USER25> The problem is that the definition of child pornography is fairly broad, and the laws make little to no distinction between the various categories within it. Draconian enforcement is great for the hardened criminals profiting from child rape, but it also leads to locking up teenagers for possessing photos of themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wait until the review team discover Safari...

<comment><USER27> If you look at browser apps and search engine apps, they're rated 17+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is crazy stuff sitting on Imgur, too.

<comment><USER29> > There is crazy stuff sitting on Imgur, too.

But none of it's accessible unless you have a direct URL, and even then the pornographic crazy stuff is taken down quickly. The Imgur front page is pretty sanitized.

<comment><USER28> The first few years of Imgur data sits behind five randomly generated alphanumeric characters. Quite easy to brute force...

<comment><USER30> That is _very_ different from getting to it from browsing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can't say I'm surprised. Tumblr has been so full of (non child) pornographic and outright weird material that it was due to attract this sort of folk as well. It really detracts from the platform for the rest of us, who just want to use it as a micro-blogging platform sitting between Twitter and Medium (where strangely, Tumblr has been horrible in finding its position).

Either Yahoo should clamp down and meanwhile give the platform a solid update -- otherwise they'll probably shut it down sometime in the future. I can image the cost of running it must be pretty high.

<comment><USER2> I don't agree with this slippery slope of pornography somehow leading to cp. Tumblr is an image hosting site, any and all image hosters are used to distribute that kind of content.

<comment><USER32> I don't think it's a "slippery slope of pornography somehow leading to cp" but rather once people realize that there is no moderation and no rules and no one will shut them down, it turns into the Wild West. If criminals learn that there are no police officers anymore, they know they can get away with committing any crimes without punishment.

Since tumblr will host things other sites won't, eventually someone will push the envelope and if they don't get shut down it will get pushed further and further. It's not about "any porn -> child porn", it's a progressive furthering of what is/is not allowed, and once you learn everything is allowed and nothing is banned, child porn (and other illegal content) is an inevitability.

<comment><USER31> Agreed. I didn't want to infer that any porn leads to child porn (that would be ridiculous), but about oversight, which Tumblr lacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is the OS responsible? The browser? The client application?

</comment><comment><USER34> So first Gab now Tumblr. The only ones that remain and very likely will always remain untouched because they are standing in higher moral ground. The holy and all mighty lords and saviors Twitter and Facebook.

<comment><USER35> One of these things is not like the other.

<comment><USER34> Please elaborate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> To add a whataboutism, what about Snapchat?</comment>


The Gmail app for iPhone and iPad: version 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-gmail-app-for-iphone-and-ipad.html <comment><USER2> I was kind of hoping they'd put some more effort into Sparrow after acquiring it. Even without push support: I still personally prefer that UI. I have noticed a few minor bug fixes it being released so it doesn't seem like it is completely forgotten.

Still, I'll give Gmail 2.0 a go for a week to see how I like it. Who knows? I may change my mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> As an Android user it's disheartening to see that the best mobile GMail app is available for iOS only.

As an Android user that recently downgraded from 4.0 to 2.3, it is frankly infuriating: you can only get the latest GMail app for Android if you are on 3.0+, which leaves the vast majority of Android users stuck with what is now a 4th rate app.

<comment><USER4> > As an Android user that recently downgraded from 4.0 to 2.3, it is frankly > infuriating: you can only get the latest GMail app for Android if you are on > 3.0+, which leaves the vast majority of Android users stuck with what is now > a 4th rate app.

As of this Thursday, Gingerbread is two years old. Why would you downgrade to such an old version? That's comparable to running iOS 4 on an iPhone 3GS. I got an iPhone in June, and I'm already being told that I can't upgrade several applications because I'm not running the latest version of iOS and on the latest iPhone.

Second of all, "vast majority" is a bit of a stretch. 55% are on Gingerbread and 15% on pre-Gingebread[1], but given that Android encompasses a lot of lower-end phones that are simply feature phones as well, that's not really comparable to an iOS, which is used exclusively for smartphones. Many of those users frankly won't care that they're not able to use the latest version of the Gmail application - in fact, they may not be using it at all to begin with.

> Android users stuck with what is now a 4th rate app.

This is a secondary point of yours, but I should add that I don't consider even the Froyo version of Gmail to be a 4th rate app, let alone Gingerbread or beyond. I can name several ways that the Android app outperforms the iOS Gmail app.

[1] [http://www.tmonews.com/2012/10/google-releases-october- distr...](http://www.tmonews.com/2012/10/google-releases-october-distribution- chart-for-android-version-breakdown/)

<comment><USER5> I was curious about statistics regarding devices 'in the field,' and all I could find were these figures from Google such as the ones you cite (55% on Gingerbread, 15% pre-Gingerbread), which I think should be tied to a very important measuring detail—they are percentages of Android OS versions hitting the Play Store during a two week period.

I think this is a deliberate choice of reporting statistic to make the Android device world look more modern. They could report on a number of other metrics[0], but from my observation, non-power users aren't frequenting app stores—perhaps they'll download apps a few times when the device is new, but after a while their phone is as customized as it's going to get. This issue is likely compounded after a few times of hearing about some app to try, and finding that it doesn't run on the dated OS.

Basically, I think there are loads of older Android installs in the wild, whose owners aren't going to the Play Store as often as people who just bought a new phone or tablet.

[0] I think something like access to Gmail via Android would be a better representation of the real market, and that figure is likely measured within Google. If not, it could be. I doubt the numbers would be very flattering... even the Play Store access metrics aren't so great to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm getting "The item you tried to buy is no longer available." when I try to update.

<comment><USER7> Workaround: delete the app from your iTunes library first, then download the 'clean' version of 2.0 rather than the update.

[edit] Direct Link: <https://itunes.apple.com/app/gmail/id422689480>

<comment><USER8> How do you get to the 2.0 version? I'm not finding it via searching the app store. (I do however, find dozens of various gmail related crapware.)

Edit: tried the link above and still get the same error (and I've never installed it before, so this should be a fresh install).

<comment><USER9> I had the same problem. I found it by searching for this string exactly: "Gmail email from Google"

<comment><USER10> The built-in updates notification item didn't work, but searching your phrase, finding the item, and then trying "Update" did work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know if this is a native app, html5 app, or a hybrid of the two? I could have sworn that the previous version of this app was at least partially done in HTML5 because of the way the ui would re-render itself occasionally.

<comment><USER12> Looks native to me, sort of similar to the Google+ app.

No unified inbox though. And push notifications still don't work for me (what am I doing wrong?)

<comment><USER13> I had to go enable them in ios settings for them to show up

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, I like Google, I worked there for a while, sadly this is not a shining example of "Googliness".

Let's count the challenges shall we?

1) If you happen to click the link for Version 2.0 in the Chrome browser running on an iPad it gives you a blank screen.

2) If you happen to click on the link in the Safari browser it gives you the download page but the App store says "This App is no longer available"

3) If you read the announcement all you see are iPhone screen shots, which makes me wonder if "iPad support" consists of a "2X" in the corner of the screen like it does on the Google Voice app. Gee, That lets me use 16 pixels on my retina display to show one pixel in your App, I'm so thrilled.

Ok that last bit was a pretty snarky, the snark comes from my massive disappointment at how unbelievably bad Google has been at dealing with the existence of tablets. Have you _tried_ to use Google Docs on a tablet? Gmail? Reader? Every product they own has the "mobile" version which assumes you can hit every button with your thumb, or the "desktop" version which assumes you've got a keyboard and 5 button mouse under your fingers. Hello, its been _years_.

Here is hoping that when they actually put Gmail 2.0 back into the App store it is useful on iPads. I've got $10 - $20 for the right email client for the iPad, anyone want that money?

<comment><USER15> How are these Google's problems? These are all Apple screwing up the update. The direct link provided in many of the comments still works

<https://itunes.apple.com/app/gmail/id422689480?mt=8>

click this and don't worry, the iPad app isn't an iPhone app with 2X.

<comment><USER14> Ok, just clicked that exact link with my iPad and once I authenticate with Apple it says "the item you tried to buy is no longer available"

My rant however is that Google, in general, hasn't made strong product offerings out of their core products for the tablet experience. I could see not investing initially when it was unclear if tablets were a fad or not but it is now well past the point where people should be arguing that they are 'just a fad' (I don't know that anyone does any more, just saying that if they did, it would be silly) and Google can (and has) executed really well in the past in response to things that could be solved by pushing out more ECMAscript code to the web site. I really wish that selector at the bottom of the web interface to gmail was "Mobile * Tablet * Desktop" not just "Mobile * Desktop"

<comment><USER16> Gmail is great on Android tablets.

There might be an overarching desire to not make the Gmail experience _too_ good on the iPad.

<comment><USER17> This is not quite right.

Gmail isn't great on _any_ Android device. If you have only used Android, it might seem great. But after you try the built-in iOS client, your standards will raise a bit (not intending to offend!).

In my experience, nothing that Google has produced for the mobile platform(s) is great.

<comment><USER18> Couldn't you say the same thing about Apple? Almost every one of their apps is bested by some third party app.

<comment><USER19> Is there any serious mail (not GMail) client for iOS except for Apple's own and Sparrow? And it's hard for me to invest in Sparrow now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I finally reinstalled now that they support multiple accounts - but really? No unified inbox? Sparrow still has a leg-up, in my opinion, despite being out of the dev cycle for a few months now.

<comment><USER21> In what cases is unified inbox relevant ? I don't like to mix my personal emails with my work emails. Did sparrow make a clear distinction between which accounts the email was from ?

<comment> dorian-graph It's relevant for those who do not care about such delineations and find it more efficient or so. I like having the unified inbox for several reasons such as being able to get see a quick overview of my personal/university/work accounts and act relatively to them. Sometimes though I'll switch into one account alone.

<comment><USER21> i sort of get it, but I switch the tone of how I respond depending on which of my accounts the email is received. Its seems more troublesome to look through them all and try to figure out after the fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Way better than the first version. Still missing things Sparrow is good at: 1\. Send & Archive button/setting 2\. Option for 'Delete' _and_ 'Archive' on swiping an email in the inbox. 3\. Hold to mark as read/unread for an email.

<comment><USER23> Agree. I havent been able to download the Gmail app yet but I always thought the swipe to be able to archive or delete was really useful. Send & Archive was great as well. I've been slowly looking for a new mail client on iphone lately because it seems like Sparrow is much slower to receive mail than the standard mail app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So is this the fruit of their Sparrow acquisition? Or is this unrelated?

<comment><USER25> It appears to be unrelated. The lead Gmail iOS designer, Chanpory Rith, has been at Google working on this for most of the year. Not sure about the tech.

<http://dribbble.com/shots/843203-Gmail-2-0-Multi-login>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Of course, the blog post seriously breaks when viewed on an iPhone (and rotated from landscape to portrait) and breaks the back button. Lame.

Otherwise the app update looks pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER27> Welp, two showstoppers for me over the native iOS mail. First, it looks like to check my mail I need to toggle between all my accounts. There is no unified inbox. Second, Priority Inbox is not supported beyond having a separate folder for "Important and Unread." On GMail proper, priority items go to the top and are marked accordingly, the Inbox unread count is the _priority_ unread count, and hence I tend to leave non-priority items unread to get to inbox zero. So, iOS experience if you are a priority inbox user is completely broken unless I am missing something.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if they fixed the constant notification spam on this one.

<comment><USER29> Nope - it's still all or nothing. Hope you don't get much mail…

<comment><USER28> Well thanks for saving me time from installing this POS

They even send LOCAL notifications to override my notifications preferences for no notifications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > You can now login to up to five Google Accounts

Why a limit as low as 5?

<comment><USER31> I think the real question is, why a limit at all?

I can understand a limit of 1: it means the software was not designed to handle more than one account. State gets conflated, the software goes awry, and all hell breaks loose.

But as soon as you support more than one, I can't see any reason to cap that at 5 - or any other number, for that matter.

<comment><USER32> Probably performance reasons on mobile. Past 5 large accounts the app probably starts to get slow

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Disappointed that Google's own application doesn't support 2-step authentication and application specific password.

<comment><USER34> What do you mean ? I seemed like web login to me. I got asked for my username and password then my token.

<comment><USER33> I was asked for my normal password and not an application specific password.

<comment><USER35> That's the way 2-step auth works. If you have 2-step auth enabled, and the application supports 2-step it will prompt for your username, normal password, and a one-time token. If the application doesn't support 2-step you have to generate an application specific password (which is a random string). The application specific passwords are only for clients that don't support 2-step (like IMAP and XMPP clients).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nice, it finally has multi account support, which was the big reason I was still using the mobile web version.

</comment><comment><USER37> So did they just buy Sparrow to shutter it? Or for a talent grab? Why wouldn't they rebrand a full native app (that kicks ass too) and run with that?

Not taking anything from this, it's very nice too, but I would have preferred they left Sparrow alone if they didn't intend on using it at all going forward.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's much nicer than the previous version. But still, why would you use it? The standard mail client along with Google Sync (Exchange) does the job quite good. I don't like having two apps for mailing and I'm sure many of you have a second mail account that is not Gmail (for Google Apps).

<comment><USER39> _But still, why would you use it? The standard mail client along with Google Sync (Exchange) does the job quite good._

I still can't find a way to have at the same time both push support _and_ the ability to star/flag messages on the phone and have them starred in the browser.

Now they have support for multiple accounts, I'll be giving the Gmail app an in-depth try.

Edit: that said, if anyone _does_ know how to set up starring and push support at the same time, I'm all ears!

<comment><USER40> Using the flag feature on my iPhone stars the email. I'm using the Exchange method of connecting to email.

<comment><USER39> Do you have push notifications turned on as well? For some reason it seems that I can't have both at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Can't access the app in the app store.

</comment><comment><USER42> After swiping right for hours, I have found that this is sadly only available in the US.

What I really liked about Sparrow was the "hold to mark as read/unread", tap title to see all emails in convo, swipe up/down for next/prev, and the unified inbox. If it has all those, I would consider it.

<comment><USER43> I couldn't find it in the app store but I did find it by click ing on one of the apps made by Google, then scrolled at the bottom and clicked on > Developer info and it was down the list.

It might be because it's not yet available to all in the App Store yet.

It happens to me some times when I submit an update of an app to the App Store. I get the update a few moments after receiving the "Ready for Sale" status from iTunes Connect but then my partner only got the update in the App Store a few hours later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why oh why must blogspot.com break the _back_ button, of all things?

</comment><comment><USER45> Pretty good update, 3 gripes:

1 - No contacts, I know you can use native app, but I want them in gmail

2 - No groups, can't send a message to a group

3 - Autocapitalization turned on, overrides iOS settings

Conclusion, no better than native app.

</comment><comment><USER46> Where is "Press for human support" button?

<comment><USER47> Right below the Buy Subscription button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is the Google+ integration as evident as the web client?

I really don't want the distraction of G+ inside my mobile clients.

</comment><comment><USER49> Now I just have to wait for a jailbreak tweak so I can make this my default mail app on iPhone...

</comment><comment><USER50> Looks great! Hope the Sparrow team they acquired will put out a new OSX app for Gmail soon.

<comment><USER51> They just "acquired" Sparrow because it was an app that used their infra- structure, but bypassed Google Ads completely (showing their own ads in the free version instead).

<comment><USER52> Uh, no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> FWIW the last time I used Gmail from a webkit-based mobile browser it worked very nicely.

</comment><comment> g-garron Now with this and Chrome for iPad. I think I prefer an ipad over an Android Tablet ;)

</comment><comment><USER54> Still can't mark emails important or not important. Disappointed...

</comment><comment><USER55> this app looks great, but there could be fewer clicks when it comes to account switching

</comment><comment><USER51> Dear Google,

That's what you bought Sparrow for?

</comment><comment><USER56> I really wish it had a "Mark all as read" button. Until then, I'll stick with Sparrow.

</comment><comment><USER57> cant seem to update or re-download it!

</comment><comment><USER58> If the update hasn't propagated your way still and you're getting an error try deleting it then reinstall using this link: <https://itunes.apple.com/app/gmail/id422689480?mt=8>

<comment><USER59> I am still getting a "The item you tried to buy is no longer available." error with this link. I've never installed the GMail app before.</comment></comment>


Running JavaScript in an iOS application with JavaScriptCore - <AUTHOR> https://www.infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/articles/running-javascript-in-an-ios-application-with-javascriptcore

<comment><USER2> If ANY information regarding JSCore or Webkit is required, visit [http://whtconstruct.blogspot.in/](http://whtconstruct.blogspot.in/). BFulgham is one of the chief contributors to the webkit project.</comment>


Julian Assange to Be Expelled from Ecuadorian Embassy in London - <AUTHOR> https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1110035/Julian-Assange-news-WikiLeaks-Ecuador-embassy-london-expelled-INA-paper-edward-snowden <comment><USER2> The article does not mention that WikiLeaks claims the expulsion is punishment for revealing corruption within high levels of the Ecuadorian government. [1]

> "WikiLeaks cited the unidentified person as saying the planned expulsion is > a response to the organization's recent tweet linking to a website that > alleged money laundering and corruption during Ecuadorian President Lenin > Moreno's time as United Nations special envoy for the disabled in Geneva." > [2]

[1] [https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1113923253150670848](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1113923253150670848)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-05/ecuador-t...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-05/ecuador- to-expel-assange-within-hours-to-days-wikileaks-says)

</comment><comment><USER3> Note this is the Express - the source of too many articles about planet Niburu coming to destroy the Earth.

<comment><USER4> Being willing to publish anyone's stories is just like reading dead comments. There are diamonds in the rough - don't miss them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would sneak out with fake beard, buy papers and hide in Thailand years ago.

</comment><comment><USER6> Express == garbage journalism.</comment>


Ask HN: Is There a Wall Street Oasis for Software Developers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What do you mean by this? Oasis from what?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a website. [https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/](https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/)</comment></comment>


Bootcards - <AUTHOR> http://bootcards.org/

<comment><USER2> Cards play a large part in Material Design. If you are interested in implementing that type of design, enjoy the convinces of a CSS framework (Icons, responsive grid, etc), and aren't married to Bootstrap I'd suggest taking a look at [http://materializecss.com](http://materializecss.com)

<comment><USER3> Very cool framework. I tend to avoid using this sort of framework for my applications because I'll usually end up having to hack around their components and styles, or because I only need 1 or 2 components and I don't wanna pull in everything. However, I'm definitely gonna be referencing some of their stuff for my own implementations.

<comment><USER4> You might also be interested in Google's own Polymer: [https://www.polymer- project.org/1.0/](https://www.polymer-project.org/1.0/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> fix the aspect ratio on the ipad screenshot

</comment><comment><USER6> Could someone explain to me the difference between a "card" and any other rectangular grouping of content?

<comment><USER7> Visually, a card often has a header and/or footer and is generally embeddable into a standard article body (e.g. Twitter's embeddable tweet cards). Content- wise, a card serves a very specific semantic purpose: presenting a self- contained block of data to a user in a standalone way. The metaphor employed here is something like a trading card or baseball card, such that a block of data or metadata about a particular subject is called out in a self-contained way that is easily understandable and digestable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just saw this the other day while researching card ui concepts for an idea I was formulating. On the one hand, I'm very excited about how easy it will be to make a card ui with this. On the other hand, I was kind of sad that I'm coming into card ui so late that it's about to be the next big overused thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> There are actually two products: XControls.org, which augments IBM Domino XPages and also XComponents.org for an Angular.js environment.

This is one of those open source tools that I'd love to see mature into a commercial offering: emailing request tickets, getting bugs fixed, having access to frequent release candidates, etc. I emailed them awhile back asking for commercial license and inquiring about any support they could offer. They're open to the idea, but seem very new to the game.

<comment><USER10> A customer support team centered around a CSS theme? Seems a little unrealistic.

<comment><USER9> It's not just a CSS theme though. The XControls/Xcomponents libraries are complex toolkits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We've really taken to the "card" design here, too. We've mixed it with Packery (our angular-packery for an Angular wrapper) using the card headers as drag targets, which works really well. I haven't seen this library before but as we need to get serious about organizing our implementation, this may come in handy.

</comment><comment><USER12> We've been using this in one of our products for a while now -- no complaints.

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes, yes! Everyone steal the best parts of WebOS and make 'em universal!

</comment><comment><USER14> I like the concept of card based design but this implementation reminds me of Ext.JS almost.

</comment><comment><USER15> timrpeterson

Your comment has been hellbanned for some reason. You may want to look into it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Semantically a "Card" looks actually like a <Legend>

</comment><comment><USER17> Was hoping this would be a device with a bootloader capable of reading QR codes printed on cards, or maybe a historical perspective about the boot process of a punched card computer.

Clicked, was disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great resource, thanks!

I like it but it has a bit of a dated look to it. I think to really take off, this project's UI should improve on Bootstrap itself, perhaps taking cues from Material and iOS. Also, the icons are overused.

I get that this is just starting and it is emphasizing structural elements of the UI, but it would be great to evolve the Bootstrap look which has some residual heaviness to it IMHO.</comment>


Rust 1.41 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/01/30/Rust-1.41.0.html <comment><USER2> The new guarantees for `Box<T>` across the FFI boundary is welcome. I've been trying to working on trying to pass large data structures (image arrays, for instance) between Rust and C, but have had issues because of doing so without access to FFI-incompatible dynamically-sized things like vectors means that I have consistently run into stack overflow errors at a certain point. Since I believe that `Box<T>` allocates memory on the heap instead, it seems like a step in the right direction for passing that kind of data without needing to resort to `unsafe` on the Rust side of things.

</comment><comment><USER3> IMO, the biggest opportunity for this release is the ability for newbies and experimenters to now "hack" against structs using impl as needed.</comment>


Chart any coinmarketcap coin on tradingview - <AUTHOR> https://www.coinsignals.trade/ <comment><USER2> Nice, but don't you depend on the API they will close in December?

<comment><USER3> Yea same question. Op?</comment></comment>


Why It Pays to Be a Jerk - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/why-it-pays-to-be-a-jerk/392066/?utm_source=SFFB&single_page=true

<comment><USER2> This is an incredible read. Too bad it's about to fall off and near be discovered.</comment>


Much Assembly Required: Assembly Programming Game - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/simon987/Much-Assembly-Required <comment><USER2> Related: [http://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/TIS100/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/TIS100/)

<comment><USER3> Also available on GOG: [https://www.gog.com/game/tis100](https://www.gog.com/game/tis100) if you don't like adding DRM to a DRM-free game by purchasing through Steam.

I bought TIS-100 through Steam years ago, only had it a few days before they decided to suspend my account for 2 weeks and take away all the games I purchased. They we're all on sale when I bought them originally but the sales were over by the time I got my account back. I finally got TIS-100 back last week through GOG because I happened to see it and it was half-off (would have bought it anyway). Can't wait to finish it.

<comment><USER4> Do you have a small claims court where you are? Might be worth going through that - depending on how much the account is worth.

<comment><USER3> I only had 3 or 4 games, they refunded the money. I only rebought 1 game after the incident because there was no alternative and I really wanted it. Now I wont buy anything else through steam, even if there's no other option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool! Assembly has a lot of potential for teaching people the basic concept of a computer program's structure, microcontroller usage, etc etc.

But gee, have you ever tried to teach someone how to program a microcontroller using bare metal assembly?

It is not easy. If you tell someone that the GPIO registers start at memory address 0x48000000 and give them a list of what each register's bits do, they will look at you like your head just grew an extra head. These sorts of abstractions are probably a way, _way_ better idea...

<comment><USER6> It is all a matter of teaching.

Back in the day, Z80 Assembly programming felt natural to a 10 year old version of myself.

I guess what we are missing are updated versions of these kind of books.

[https://www.atariarchives.org](https://www.atariarchives.org)

<comment><USER7> > It is all a matter of teaching

I think there is more to it than that. I started in the early 1980s when every computer booted straight into a programming environment. The manuals which came with them described their languages with examples and there was a large publishing industry supporting these books. The computers were relatively simple, within a couple of hours of typing something in you'd be seeing results.

Current computers and consoles are immensely more complicated and do not lend themselves to exploring. They also have a much wider audience who just want to turn it on and play rather than tinker.

There are still people with an open and exploration mind, they are playing with Raspberry's etc. I expect. We used to be the majority of computer owners, the numbers may have dwindles a little but we're now swamped by regular users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very nice. If you like assembly programming games make sure to try Human Resource Machine[0]

[0] [https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine](https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine)

<comment><USER4> I have a spare key for this, or it's on sale at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for building this! Am getting a "Cannot connect to server muchassemblyrequired.com:443" error. When I try to enter the live demo. Is it just an overloaded server?

Have definitely noticed an explosion of Learn Assembly / Low Level Hacking genre video games coming out. And can definitely see how this will soon become a part of "Computation Structures" courses. Even at the secondary school level. Keep it up!

The 10 Best Hacking, Coding, Computing Games

[https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/11/29/best-hacking- gam...](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/11/29/best-hacking-games/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't drop my biomass...

</comment><comment><USER11> Ah, iron and copper... 2017 is the year I was completely addicted to Factorio. It's not assembly, though you can program things with logical combinators, it's more like complete systems engineering.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sounds cool, unfortunately the live demo does not seem to work on mobile safari.

</comment><comment><USER13> I definitely needed this before my Computer Architecture Final. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER14> A very easy assembly game to start with if you find assembly intimidating is Box256:

[http://box-256.com](http://box-256.com)

It has a very limited/basic instruction set do it's easy to get going and WebGL based so it runs in your browser.

Technically it probably isn't Assembly as it's such a minimal instruction set with no real target architecture etc. but I find it really fun to play!</comment>


AirBnB racism claim: African-Americans 'less likely to get rooms' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35077448 <comment><USER2> > The study suggested that black hosts were just as likely to discriminate > against black people as white hosts were

I wonder if the discrimination is not so much against blacks as against less wealthy people? Blacks are disproportionately represented among the less wealthy in the US so using black sounding names as a filter will also be a weak filter against less wealthy people.

I'd be curious if the discrimination rate depends on the type of host. In particular, I'd like to see a comparison of hosts who are renting out a room in their own residence and hosts who have separate houses or apartments dedicated to AirBnB.</comment>


Unless You Are Spock, Irrelevant Things Matter in Economic Behavior - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/upshot/unless-you-are-spock-irrelevant-things-matter-in-economic-behavior.html <comment><USER2> The idea of "nudging" is growing in popularity in the popular culture. The idea is that the right government policy can nudge the individual to perform the obviously rational self-interested choice. The policies are innocuous enough that many reasonable people do not oppose them directly. Who thinks getting their fellow denizens to invest more of their savings or eat a little more healthfully is a bad idea?

But when you think about it more, you can see some troubling trends of petty bureaucrats trying to control your life through nudging. The most offensive example that comes to mind is politicians in the UK trying to convince ISPs to (by default) block adult content because, you know, think of the children [0]. Of course you could call your ISP and remove the block so what's the concern, right?

Be ready to give up ever more and more autonomy through slight manipulation all backed up by intellectuals tearing down Homo economicus straw-men.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom)

<comment><USER3> More generally, the entire field of "behavior economics" has a very strong paternalistic, authoritarian subcurrent to it. The message is: people can't be allowed to make decisions for themselves because they aren't capable of acting rationally or in their own self-interest. Of course the idea that the government is more likely to act in people's best interest than people themselves is laughable, yet is actually being advocated as a policy rationale.

<comment><USER4> The whole field of UX has a strong paternalistic feel to it, guiding people toward 'defaults' and making it as easy as possible to make 'correct' choices as if they can't act rationally or in their own self-interest.

<comment><USER5> I think there is some merit to the practice from a product design standpoint, though - the commonly cited example of a door with such ambiguous design that it needs a "push" or "pull" sign seems to apply here. Sure, we could leave the door as a blank surface with no hints (design or signs or otherwise) and let people decide whether to try and push or pull on their own, but doesn't that just waste everyone's time?

A paternalistic approach isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're being guided through decisions with the benefit of someone else's experience. It helps avoid spending mental effort on decisions which don't matter as much, so utmost attention can be given to those which do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a > rational person. These things are supposedly irrelevant.

I realize this is the setup for No True Scotsman, but are there any "serious" economists who actually believe the things this article criticizes? I hear these criticisms a lot, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who appeal to these simplifications to support a particular political belief, but from what I have read of modern economics (including some heterodox schools), economists don't operate under these assumptions. The criticisms get more bizarre throughout the article:

> Economists create this problem with their insistence on studying mythical > creatures often known as Homo economicus. ... An Econ would not expect a > gift on the day of the year in which she happened to get married, or be > born.

That example doesn't even make sense in the context of the Homo economicus criticisms. A perfectly rational person who is aware of the custom of giving gifts for important anniversaries absolutely would expect a gift on those days. They'd probably give gifts as well. There's nothing irrational about that.

<comment><USER7> > Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a > rational person.

This is meaningless. Insofar as many models in economics are based on the rational choice model, the definition of a rational actor is one who acts to maximize their experienced utility with perfect knowledge of how their actions will affect their experience utility.

Anything that will affect a persons happiness would affect the decisions of a rational actor.

Now, its true that, even so, reality is known not to comply with the rational actor model, but this article misses most of them and attacks a giant strawman. And I wonder why, because as a professor of economics, the author has to know that, its not plausibly a mistake of ignorance.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, the author does say that modern economists don't claim to believe the simplistic Homo economicus model:

> Of course, most economists know that the people with whom they interact do > not resemble Econs. In fact, in private moments, economists are often happy > to admit that most of the people they know are clueless about economic > matters. But for decades, this realization did not affect the way most > economists did their work. They had a justification: markets. To defenders > of economics orthodoxy, markets are thought to have magic powers.

But I think this criticism is invalid as well, based on what I have read of economics. It seems like few economists believe markets solve _all_ societal problems, even among the notoriously pro-market schools, like Chicago and the very heterodox Austrian.

<comment><USER8> > _But I think this criticism is invalid as well, based on what I have read of > economics. It seems like few economists believe markets solve all societal > problems, even among the notoriously pro-market schools, like Chicago and > the very heterodox Austrian._

They might not think they solve "all societal problems" but they still think they solve too many of them.

Plus, if you take away those crude models, most of the edifice of modern economics crumbles, and what's left is a dismal science that's no more scientific than astrology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Playing devils advocate, maybe the students were being rational, but based their reaction on the information at their disposal. I taught college once, and observed that students make rational and sophisticated decisions based on what grades they expect to receive from their courses. They are also justifiably insecure about their math skills.

They have to decide under time pressure whether this is a good teacher or a bad one, easy grader or hard, fair or unfair, etc. The students have to combine what they know about the mechanics of the grading scale, with their own internal information about whether they trust this guy -- especially if it's before the deadline for dropping the class. Introducing an unorthodox or weird grading scale could influence this judgment. The students may have a rational interest in nudging teachers towards a more favorable grading system.

I have a couple of major misgivings about psycho-economics. First, any empirical failure of theory could be blamed on irrational behavior, when the theory itself is wrong for other reasons. We might just not be considering all of the information that people have at their disposal. Likewise, psychology could be blamed for any failure of economic policy, or of entire economies.

Second, deciding who is capable of rational decision making, based on sex, race, or social class, has a long and sorry history. I'd rather let economics be the study of that which can be understood based on the behavior of rational actors, and put bigger error bars around the predictive ability of economic models.

</comment><comment><USER10> The idea of a 'suboptimal' decision is a core tenet that keeps capitalism's wheels spinning.

If you are poor, you must have just bought too many gifts, or refused to live in a house share with 5 other people, or took the bus instead of cycling to work, and so on.

You didn't act entirely rationally, and so you 'deserve' to be poor.

It seems hilarious when phrased in those terms but this sort of thing happens _all the time_. Especially because some people are capable, either by repression of emotion (stoicism) or by deference to authority (it's always been this way...) of jumping through these hoops.

If we modeled the world in a reasonable way we'd discover how horrible it really is. The fact we don't is part of the cognitive dissonance that surrounds us.

(Nudging has been mentioned lower down here - yet another example of a statistical calculation that completely overlooks individual plight, one that treats the populace as a flock to be herded...)

</comment><comment><USER11> What if you are Eevil Spock?</comment>