Ask HN: what problems in technical and scientific computing are worth solving? - <AUTHOR>

TL;DR - if you work with high-performance computing what problems would you like to be solved in that area?
I work in finance and while there are things that demand a lot of expertise in high-performance computing, low-latency computing and big data and are technologically challenging and very interesting, I sometimes feel that there could be a better application for my skills.
My question is to HNers who work in fields that need a lot of computing horsepower: bioinfo, pharma, aerospace, geological survey, high energy physics, actually any kind of industry that does a lot of analytics.
What, in your opinion, are challenges in the area of high-performance computing, that - if solved - would make your life much easier: be it algorithms, infrastructure, tools, or workflows? <comment><USER2> Generally speaking, high performance computing challenges aren't valuable. And I say this as a guy whose last startup makes 50 million decisions a second and processes 10 petabytes a day (Quantcast).

Making the technology scale was the -fun- part. The company gets paid for solving a specific business problem. A business problem that costs the world $600B a year (advertising).

It's hard to start with a technical ability and find a startup opportunity. That is how we decided to start Quantcast - we had a spreadsheet of business ideas that might leverage our technical backgrounds. But it's a difficult path.

It's easier to start with basic consumer or business needs and design a solution generally. The best business ideas you come up with are not likely to require the cool/fun high performance skills you (we) have.

Murphy's law or something.

<comment><USER3> > It's hard to start with a technical ability and find a startup opportunity. > That is how we decided to start Quantcast - we had a spreadsheet of business > ideas that might leverage our technical backgrounds. But it's a difficult > path.

Really interesting point. I am much in the same boat as you, I am interest in working on highly technical, mostly systems related challenges.

However, I know that the goal of a company is to generate return for their shareholder. At the mean time, startup is a lot of hard, thankless, and grungy work (that makes tooling around with autoconf seem fun by comparison): unless you're genuinely passionate about the problem(s) you're solving, it isn't worth it.

So until a deeply technical idea strikes me, I'll hold off on taking that jump.

<comment><USER2> Here's one that came up in another thread: rewrite the core engine of MongoDB, yet keep all the existing API's and libraries.

You could call it BongoDB. B for better. You can capture all their market share based mostly on technical prowess.

Some of the problems are documented here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3837772>

<comment><USER4> Here is one example: <http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/12/mongograph-qa>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Paul Graham wraps it up pretty well in PyCon 2012 a few weeks ago: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI></comment>


UK police release airport drone suspects, admit there may not have been drones - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/24/uk-police-release-airport-drone-suspects/ <comment><USER2> Earlier discussion after release of suspects yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18745624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18745624)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The suggestion there may not have been any drones at Gatwick Airport was a > "miscommunication by police", a government source has told the BBC.

> During a conference call between ministers, chaired by Transport Secretary > Chris Grayling, it was agreed the 67 drone sightings were legitimate.

([https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk- england-46670714](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-46670714))

As much as "it was all a false alarm" would make a killer headline (and clearly has, even in speculation), it doesn't seem that anyone actually believes that. Just a poor choice of works.

<comment><USER4> The Police in the UK often say the most ludicrous things in statements, and the basic public speaking skills of the people they choose to put out is often very limited. They always look like they're caught in the headlights while trying to sweatily stumble through reading some words off a page.

I'm not sure what institutionally causes this, but it must be something causing it as it's always the same.

Remember when recently a senior Police officer in a statement just decided to call some extremely serious allegations they were looking into 'true' as if they had already had the trial and preempting the whole judicial process? I can't understand how you can accidentally 'misspeak' like that.

<comment><USER5> They don't hire the brightest - recently I heard a former senior ex met natsec policeman who presented as very very stupid individual I would not trust to investigate a missing kitten.

There was also the scandal where a v senior copper on the Cyber side was found cheating.

<comment><USER6> In the USA, courts ruled it was legal for police departments to discriminate based on intellect and refuse to higher persons with high IQs.

They hire less smart people on purpose because they tend to question orders less and do what they are told more (their words, not mine).

<comment><USER7> You should cite a source for that. Where I live the cops are pretty on the ball. I recall one of them casually correcting my math on work-related problem when he was taking a report from me on another topic.

<comment><USER8> [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a- cop/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/) [https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs- cops/st...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs- cops/story?id=95836)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just still can't wrap my head around the fact that in 2018, with a camera attached to every waking persons hand (and some sleeping people too), how is it that there is not a single public photo or video published of this specific drone. Kind of reminds me of when I found out that tipping cows wasn't a real thing...

<comment><USER10> > I just still can't wrap my head around the fact that in 2018, with a camera > attached to every waking persons hand (and some sleeping people too), how is > it that there is not a single public photo or video published of this > specific drone.

I've been in many debates about this in the drone flying community (and with friends who know me and how much I fly) and I keep coming back to this point. I'd even take a blurry "UFO sighting" photo under consideration, but even that doesn't exist.

Virtually every single "close call with a plane" has _thankfully_ (thankfully both for the safety of passengers and for other UAV pilots who would be impacted by the irresponsible party's actions) been proven later to not have been a drone.

PS, cow tipping is real (as in its "possible", not that folks are successful), but it's much harder than folks realize (I grew up in a farm state and have seen it done _once_ with multiple big guys involved, but also seen many a drunken fool fall on their face trying too).

<comment><USER11> Here's a real report of a near-miss (20m) with a drone by an RAF fighter jet: [https://www.airproxboard.org.uk/uploadedFiles/Content/Standa...](https://www.airproxboard.org.uk/uploadedFiles/Content/Standard_content/Airprox_report_files/2018/Airprox%20Report%202018160.pdf)

<comment><USER10> When you put military aircraft flying at high speed in class G airspace so close to the ground, crap like this happens. I know the Tornado was authorized, but as someone who grew up near a military base, it is abusive to those in the area. This is a sore spot with me, so apologize I'm a bit bitter on this.

To avoid situations like the above, I typically file a flight plan or at minimum contact nearby ATC if I know I'm going to be flying above 200ft much. That said, I'm not required too and neither was the drone pilot in this incident either. I wouldn't be opposed to a transponder, if they were made on drones, but to date I don't know of any major manufacturers providing that feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They also claimed these drones were "industrial specification". How did they determine that when they've never seen them?

There should be some sort of penalty for blatantly lying to the public, even if it is done to save face about your incompetence.

<comment><USER13> Who was "they" can you find the on-the-record comment that suggested this?

<comment><USER4> The Police literally said 'industrial specification' on their own Twitter feed.

[https://twitter.com/sussex_police/status/1075723025713127424](https://twitter.com/sussex_police/status/1075723025713127424)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not before plastering the faces of an innocent couple nationwide. I think they deserve reparation for this.

<comment><USER15> The paper's that did that made clearly libellous claims - because the couple had not yet been charged with an offence when their names were published. Those paper's can now expect libel claims against them, although given the clear breach of libel law I expect they will wish to settle out of court rather than take on the extra expense of a court case they can't win.

<comment><USER16> I'm not too familiar with UK libel law. Is it not a defense that they were reporting on statements they were given? Is there a reasonableness question?

<comment><USER17> There's a difference between saying "Mr and Mrs Bloggs were arrested in connection to the Gatwick drone chaos" and "ARE THESE THE MORONS WHO RUINED CHRISTMAS?" in 144pt font on the front page with a fuck-off huge photo of them.

[http://suttonnick.tumblr.com/post/181330292801/hendopolis- ma...](http://suttonnick.tumblr.com/post/181330292801/hendopolis-mail-on- sunday-are-these-the-morons)

But this newspaper probably won't have to pay out anything. They've been careful with their wording; they do this a lot; they have lawyers on staff; and defamation is difficult in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I read about this, the intense pressure the police were under, that they arrested two people then released them due to iron clad alibis, it makes me wonder if they panicked and tried to pin it on the first couple of people to pass within their sights. Reading about English police corruption recently, this doesn't surprise me if it were true.

</comment><comment><USER19> Could it have been a mass psychosis? First a real drone sighting and the closure of the airport; then when the news spread, tens of people reported more sightings. There are two densely populated towns on both sides of Gatwick airport, within a couple of kms from the runways. After the first sighting, any other within that range must have been considered a risk worth closing the airport for. A drone is just a black dot in the sky, I wouldn't be surprised by false reports.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Despite going down the wrong avenue with the arrest, investigators do have more to work with after they recovered a fallen and damaged drone from the north side of the airport. It is being tested for clues on who piloted it, according to The Guardian."

"always a possibility that there may not have been any genuine drone activity in the first place."

Don't these two contradict? The best consistency possible between them is that the damaged drone was placed there rather than flown, at a different time. In all likelihood it probably did crash, though. Given the timing of finding it, it would seem related to this incident. Perhaps there should be some skyward- facing CCTV-like cameras at airports to remove some ambiguity in situations like this.

</comment><comment><USER21> last time it turned out to be a shopping bag

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/21/drone- believed-t...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/21/drone-believed-to- have-hit-british-airways-flight-may-have-been/)

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/04/drone...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/04/drone-that-hit-british-airways-jet-was-likely-a-plastic- bag/)

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://frinkiac.com/meme/S08E16/1219284.jpg?b64lines=VEhBVC...](https://frinkiac.com/meme/S08E16/1219284.jpg?b64lines=VEhBVCdTIFNPTUUgR09PRApXT1JLLCBMT1Uu)

</comment><comment><USER22> And yet, from the article:

"investigators do have more to work with after they recovered a fallen and damaged drone from the north side of the airport."

<comment><USER23> Which technically can mean a lot of things, that drone could have been there for a while, and just been found when they combed everything for a drone.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. If they can't link it to anyone or even any time, then it can't be used as evidence. Although it may be a fruitful line of enquiry if was one of the problem drones from last week. E.g. tracing sale of parts from serial numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So how was the link between non-existing drones and a very specific couple made?

</comment><comment><USER25> The suggestion is that the airports were under major terrorism threat, which is why the army was involved.

They didn't say this to avoid spooking the public, and having a whole lot of people cancel their flights and holidays (plus it would have been major fuel for the Yellow Vests).

<comment><USER26> The yellow vests, as in the protests in France? What's that got to do with drones in the UK???

<comment><USER17> There are some very small protests in the UK from people wearing Yellow Vests. These appear to be from Brexit supporters.

Here's a video of some people blocking a bridge, causing delay to an ambo: [https://twitter.com/LeaveEUOfficial/status/10735588338789621...](https://twitter.com/LeaveEUOfficial/status/1073558833878962176)

<comment><USER26> So Brexit supporters are copying French fuel protesters even though we have a different fuel duty regime that isn't set by Europe, and they want to leave Europe (and by extension, France) anyway?

That makes perfect sense.

<comment><USER24> For a real head twister: the various 'exit' and 'anti-eu' groups have tried to unite EU wide... That one still has me wondering if they realize what they are doing.

<comment><USER26> So they've formed a.... union?

<comment><USER24> If you squint a bit they formed a European Union ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This country ( UK ) is highly prone to mass psychosis. Not really ascribing anything negative there, just an observation.

A few winters ago there was minute by minute updates on Bird Flu.

The press was covering swans and ducks found dead on the ground. Each individual fowl corpse was covered in breathless detail amongst infographics and timelines

The government was manoeuvred into buying close to a billion pounds of Tamiflu treatment. Some of that was returned, but £500m wasn't (thanks to commentators below )

Tamiflu killed more people that the H5N1

So may more examples beyond this

<comment><USER17> > The government was manoeuvred into buying £9 billion pounds of Tamiflu > vaccine.

£9bn was about the total prescription medication budget at the time, so I think you've gone wrong somewhere.

<comment><USER17> The H5N1 scare was around 2008.

Some sourcing on the medication budget: [https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/rising-cost- medici...](https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/rising-cost-medicines- nhs)

> Estimated total NHS spending on medicines in England has grown from £13 > billion in 2010/11 to £17.4 billion in 2016/17

A few years earlier in 2006: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/casenotes_20060509.shtml](http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/casenotes_20060509.shtml) (The transcript used to be available, not sure if it's possible to get to it now, but that gives the £9bn figure).</comment></comment></comment>


Going Green at Google: Data Center Efficiency Measurements - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/corporate/green/datacenters/measuring.html

<comment><USER2> The article is very good, but there is a couple of serious omissions in order for someone to technically evaluate it.

Figure 3, illustrates the point. The red items are overhead and the green ones the IT components. The major energy consumption comes from the HVAC equipment. HVAC equipment - like everything else - is governed by the Laws of Thermodynamics. Energy conversion efficiency should be measured against the theoretical maximum efficiency.

Any heat engine depends only on the temperatures it operates between. This efficiency is usually derived using an ideal imaginary heat engine such as the Carnot heat engine. It would be very interesting for graphs of these temperatures and theoretical vs actual efficiencies to have been provided.

Anyway, Google is to be congratulated both for their interest in minimizing energy consumption as well as making these partial stats public.

<comment><USER3> A/C can be done away with by using high-temp equipment.

[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/03/20/40C104FInTheData...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/03/20/40C104FInTheDataCenter.aspx)

<comment><USER2> Sure remove the need for cooling is the best option, but even at 40 deg C operating temperature you will need some cooling in most locations.</comment></comment></comment>


Hate Java? You're fighting the wrong battle. - <AUTHOR> http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/06/hate-java-fight-wrong-battle.html <comment><USER2> I always had the impression that people that say they 'hate Java', usually don't hate "Java: the language". Most people that dislike programming in Java have a negative sentiment because of:

\- the usage of XML (or now: annotations) to configure all of the tiny parameters that nobody really cares about

\- a class hierarchy in which you have to jump to 20 levels of inheritance to get to where you want to go

\- that a lot of Java developers aren't able to compile their application outside of Eclipse

\- that people build in "flexibility" in form of factory methods but at the same time only have the factory only build the same thing over and over again

\- that setting up java projects is usually an unpleasant experience with way to much work if you only want the basic functionality because there are no sane defaults

\- that there is no proper package management for libraries (similar to something like 'gems' in Ruby)

\- that all of the concepts that the language is missing was 'patched' in using reflection, injection and annotations

\- that the language just seems stuck (for how long did the Java community talk about Lambdas by now?)

\- that most Java libraries don't seem to be able to provide a simple example (compare to ruby, examples on the front page: nokogiri.org, sinatrarb.com)

<comment><USER3> Java is so popular, easy to learn and use that there are tons of terrible frameworks and bad programmers in the community. Rebel against it all you want but in the hands of great developer you can get pretty amazing software written in Java like Hadoop, HBase, Lucene, Cassandra, etc. Java is the assembly language of the JVM and since most of the cooler new languages are on the JVM (and written in Java often) it will likely remain as the way to eek the best performance out of your applications and likely has the library you need to get your job done.

As for your points in here. Most of them I can respond with "don't do that".

<comment><USER4> I don't think those are examples of great software. They are very useful, and many fill a niche that needed filled, but they aren't great software IMO. Hadoop is a very leaky abstraction to give one example. I've seen it crash frequently because people used wild cards for their input and the job tracker would run out of heap and crash.

<comment><USER5> Hadoop is a leaky abstraction because it crashes ? Does not compute!

I'm not very familiar with the others, but Lucene is really an example of _great_ software. In a few lines, it makes you feel as if you can build a Google by yourself !

<comment><USER4> "Hadoop is a leaky abstraction because it crashes ? Does not compute!"

Hadoop is an abstraction over a distributed file system, that allows programmers to crunch large amounts of data using map reduce.

It leaks in the sense that you have to think about implementation details of the job tracker or you will crash it. That's a leak, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oddly missing the point for an article about missing the point.

Either you care about the future and prestige of your platform, or you don't (COBOL).

If you do care about the prestige of the JVM, the future is still definitely awesome. Scala, Clojure, JRuby and all of the other wonderful languages provide a common base for interoperability. That's pretty sweet.

Java the language, as a secure place to get a job is entirely separate from that. Making bank (ha) off of other people's past poor technology choices isn't a future for your tools. It may be an economic opportunity, but it's not a future.

And if all you care about is having a job and writing lines of code, sure, legacy code base work is fine. But some of us care about more.

<comment><USER7> I certainly identify with your point, but I actually had the opposite reaction to this article; particularly the second half.

I started my career working on 'serious' software, then switched to web applications for a few years, and have recently settled into building multi- faceted, research-oriented systems -- and throughout the entire experience, I have consistently found myself having to apologize for the hype and hyperbole surrounding the many of the more modern technologies that I've wanted to work with.

Have a look at the HDF5 libraries... notice the Fortran support? That is a Huge positive for me, even though I hope to never write another line of Fortran in my life. Sometimes there is no 'selling' new tech to a CIO; it just needs to both appear and actually be absolutely solid (for lack of a better word).

Incidentally, I don't think this is a poorly titled article at all -- the author was being ironic, and will probably be rewarded with a 10x spike in traffic from people looking for talking points to take to their next Rails meetup... that's actually pretty funny.

<comment><USER6> Right but there's a difference between hype and experimentation with new tools and methodologies.

Cargo-culting is never a good idea. But to say that new and better techniques have not come out of (or been popularized by) new movements in software and business is simply false.

The stodginess and perhaps arrogance of academic and deeper research posts are just as obnoxious and hobbling as novelty-chasing unprincipled startup entrepreneur.

We should pick technologies because they're the right choice for the tasks we're trying to accomplish. Sometimes that requires reaching for tried and true technologies (POSIX ftw after all), but sometimes new technologies really do change the world, and we should do our best to encourage that.

Lastly, it's really just not true that all press is good press. You can gloss over occasional bad press with a much larger weight of good press, or converting a lot of bad press into good press with a small group of people (Palin's "Lamestream Media"), but bad press is just bad press.

Being known for starting flamewars w/o additional contributions to the community pretty quickly marks you as a troll.

<comment><USER7> My concern, one that I believe I share with the author, is that the zero-sum tenor of tech-community discourse is overshadowing the more fundamental advances (and setbacks) that we could be focused on. And the attitudes of what seems to be a generation of edit-line/update-browser developers is only making it that much more difficult to drag those advances into established industries.

I am genuinely disappointed with the present state of affairs, and therefore more willing to wade through an ocean of arrogance to find some intellectual merit.

There's so much to do...

<comment><USER6> This sounds like redirection to me.

I've just said that i believe that we should be using technology based on its merits. I think that is a separate issue from either whether new technology is always good/better than existing technologies, or whether we need to continue to support and encourage the development of new technologies (meh to the former, a definite yes to the latter).

Established industries on the other hand, need to get over themselves and actually track how new technologies can change and improve their businesses or fields, and I think that, yes, there's a danger of them getting snookered by glad-handing shysters just looking to sell them the hot new thing, but again, this is why it's so critical to have a solid understanding of technological change.

you don't have to wade through an ocean of crap technologies, if you have more finely honed crap detection skills. For example, Coffeescript is a solid and well thought out technology built on top of existing javascript semantics. I can tell almost immediately that it's a sensible and minimalist technology, developed with solid principles, and robust community support. Technologies like Objective-J/Cappuccino on the other hand, do not give me that sense. Sproutcore, up until recently, also seemed like a bloated technology, with a good core idea, but which had become overgrown and lost in it's subsequent iterations.

I am not a long-time Javascript developer, but, i have tastes and aesthetics about what i think is important in a development platform, and the sorts of qualities good ones should have. And the further I develop my javascript chops, the more confident i feel in my assessment.

<comment><USER7> It's more of an antecedent-consequent relationship than redirection, in my opinion.

Anyway, while your examples are instructive (I hadn't even heard of the latter three), they get right to the heart of my complaint: I simply don't worry about how to write individual web applications (though I wish some people would think about it a bit more... cough - quora - cough).

My immediate response to something like coffeescript, though, is to wonder what about how the grammar is defined. Could they do the same thing with antlr or xtext? are they already? how about python-lepl? and, finally, what are the core heuristics that all developers can take from a discussion of the above? I'm not at all interested in thinking about their 'square' function example - I'm sure it's plenty useful in some context.

Worry about what cognitively-tiny (that's not a pejorative - mk is powerful because it's tiny) framework to adopt, and reinforcement of one's choice through pervasive 'messaging' within the developer community, seem to go hand- in-hand. Conversely, since I don't worry about the former, I don't generally take part in the latter.

...

By the way - all this has started to sound overly stern to me - I'm really just sitting on my porch, doing a little good natured ranting about things I can't control.

Cheers :)

<comment><USER6> Actually, yeah, Coffeescript is actually bootstrapped using Jison (a javascript implementation of Bison), and implemented in Coffeescript! :)

I should note that i think what's being done with Sproutcore now is pretty awesome. People like Yehuda Katz have done a good job of turning Sproutcore into a tech that has a solid conceptual foundation, and is aiming for ease of use for developing non-trivial javascript apps.

So, what _do_ you worry about (and i mean that in a non-stern, genuinely curious way)? Web applications really are going to be the solid basis upon which a lot of future technology is built. A lot of pretty complex technology is going to be written in javascript (or things that compile to javascript). It really is a necessary step to see how to make javascript development more efficient and principled, so that there is a common basis for getting stuff done.

<comment><USER7> Yeah- You've definitely convinced me that I need to take a closer look at coffeescript. But I'd only be really interested if it could take something approaching OWLlink Functional syntax and generate code in any popular language, with my main concern being the ease of controlling exactly what is generated. Not because I think OWL Functional is 'better' than JS; I just think flexibility is an important criteria for judging the quality of tools along these lines.

I suppose I do worry about a few detail-ish things: the future of the disco/ddfs project now that Nokia is on the ropes... how to more closely integrate CLIPS rules with redis... if it is ok to let webmachine sit between nginx and an osgi process, or if I need to back-burner erlang for a while...

Don't get me wrong, I've written plenty of JS and expect to write plenty more, with or without node. But I'm also curious if I could ship a native component for chrome that dynamically loads a Xen vm that contains a 'heavy' application, with the UI written in whatever, that renders through an HTML5 canvas (check out the gnome3 html5 demo). I don't worry about it happening though: that's going to take care of itself. I just hope there are no patents or licenses to buy that would prevent me from shipping apps that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe it's not surprising that a mainframe programmer completely fails to understand the debate.

His list of four reasons people hate Java completely misses the point. The real reasons people hate Java are something like this:

1\. It's verbose, providing lots of unnecessary opportunities to add bugs, and because it's verbose, reading code written in it is slow, so modifying it is slow. These are constant-factor problems, though, not order-of-growth problems.

2\. It's early-bound in some important ways, so you're faced with a constant dilemma between adding even more verbosity, making the code harder to modify, and losing flexibility, making the code harder to modify.

3\. Although it's quite CPU-efficient, it's very wasteful of memory. (You'd think a COBOL programmer would appreciate this.)

4\. The tooling around the language imposes enormous overhead. The JVM takes a second-plus to _start_ ; Eclipse uses hundreds of megabytes of memory, if you can get it to work at all; you usually want to run your servlet container behind a reverse proxy; building and deploying a .war file is just orders of magnitude more pain than hitting "reload" after you update your PHP script.

There's another missing-the-point viewpoint shift here, too. This guy seems to think that the point of programming is to enable big businesses to continue to function, like bookkeeping, factory machinery maintenance, and executive team retreats at fancy hotels. Well, programming does do that. But it's also a medium of expression, and a competitive advantage for companies doing _new_ things.

Bookkeeping relies on arithmetic, and factory machinery maintenance relies on paint, but that doesn't mean that Erdos and Picasso were "fighting the wrong battle" because they failed to apply their talents to helping out poor GM.

</comment><comment><USER9> So, which battle are Java haters fighting?

Java is mostly-ubiquitous and is "good enough" for a number of common tasks, and has good enough structure for mediocre programmers working on important- but-uninteresting problems. As a result (and the blog author says this), there is enough hate-worthy Java code there, just as there used to be enough hate- worthy C and C++ code around, and there probably is enough hate-worthy COBOL and Ada code around, if you know where to look.

It's worth noting that the relationship between C++ and Java switched around in the last 12 years or so - before, C++ was the method of choice to write segfaulting bug-ridden Windows applications (MFC anyone?), whereas Java was a rather slow (as in, non-JIT-ted) language that was up and coming and was interesting because it combined familiar C-like syntax with garbage collection.

Fast forward, and we have not only smart pointers (which ease many headaches of non-garbage-collected C++) but also template metaprogramming which really took off and makes C++ much more palatable to the one-man-army approach (i.e., one smart guy who does work that would take several mediocre programmers otherwise). Java has also evolved - Java 1.2's List/Map/Set are much nicer than the old collections, and Java 1.5's generics help avoid much of the old ugliness - but it carefully avoids any constructs that would make it more useful for one-man-army stuff - where Rubyists and Pythonistas are monkey- patching metaclass decorators, the Java world has one or two libraries that do bytecode generation to do something useful, but nothing more magic.

People who hate Java are really out against the programmer-as-a-fungible- resource way of living where programming is treated like shoveling dirt instead of a creative activity. Programming is both - perspiration and inspiration - and some people will be allowed to chose their tools (Java or not) whereas other people are not or have to fight for it.

<comment><USER10> I definitely agree with your sentiment. If you're working on your own personal projects/startup, most of the time you aren't gonna choose Java, but another language whether it be Python, Ruby, etc. But if you're in a corporation, you don't have the flexibility and freedom to choose what you want to work for. This association of corporate life with Java contributes to people's hatred of using Java. I bet if corporations started using Python, more and more people would hate Python as well if they had to use it on a daily basis for boring, business processes

When I actually used Java in one of my first personal projects, i found it very fun to use. But when I had to use it in my first job, my interest and enthusiasm waned.

<comment><USER11> > This association of corporate life with Java contributes to people's hatred > of using Java.

This association happens because the wrong people are defining which technologies will be used. When a manager makes manager-ish decisions, Java is what you get. Or Windows and .NET.

> I bet if corporations started using Python, more and more people would hate > Python

Won't happen because

a) Python is actually good b) The same people who make manager-ish decisions won't pick Python.

> When I actually used Java in one of my first personal projects,

I too had a more optimistic opinion of Java when I started playing with it. But then I remembered how it felt to program with Smalltalk (I learned OOP with it, later played with Actor on Windows). Then I met Python, and Zope and realized web development doesn't need to suck.

The company I work for maintains several Java applications and a couple PHP and Django ones. The difference of productivity from the Java projects and the Django ones is absolutely shocking.

<comment><USER12> You really don't think Python is reaching the point where a manager type would be comfortable with it? It's mature, it has tons of libraries, it's used in all kinds of successful projects. I really don't know. It just doesn't seem anything like a high-risk choice to me.

<comment><USER11> No Python vendor will wine-and-dine the pointy-haired-manager, nor pay a trip to a conference.

Oracle will.

<comment><USER12> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like to compare hating java to hating SUVs - they may be used inappropriately most of the time, but there are scenarios where they are the best tool.

In the enterprise, you need a language that can support \- multi-million line code bases \- a development team of dozens or even hundreds of programmers \- a software project that lasts years \- a team that changes over time \- a team that isn't just rockstar programmers (try hiring dozens of rockstar programmers at once if you are not google, facebook, and you aren't doing something perceived to be 'sexy')

I think java and C# are the best languages that meet those criteria today (and if you don't want to be married to MS, then you are left with Java).

I think dynamically typed languages are not appropriateness for such a scenario.

However, HN is a startup-oriented site, and those certainly are not the criteria you need to meet in a startup.

</comment><comment><USER14> I never thought I would defend Cobol but I have found that Greenscreen terminal based programs written in Cobol and Powerhouse are amazingly fast compared to equivalent web based applications. (I speak from my experience in Financial industry. your experience may vary). Scalability is a mater of throwing more IBM hardware at it and its not very expensive to operate. The IBM Iseries is something unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of scalability. Just saying that your new fancy language of choice is not necessarily better than Cobol.

<comment><USER15> The performance of the resulting program is one of many variables. You can almost always get better performance by losing out on other variables.

Measuring just one variable in just a few anecdotes is unlikely to give you a representative measure of a language.

COBOL is a language designed in an era where _syntax_ was thought to be the difficult part of programming.

<comment><USER16> > COBOL is a language designed in an era where _syntax_ was thought to be the > difficult part of programming.

This is a very striking comment and one that reshapes my criticism of languages in general. Often one says that COBOL "feels old" but it's difficult to pinpoint _why_ ; I think your comment gets to the heart of the matter and explains why languages such as lisp or smalltalk retain influence today. The problem they attempt to tackle is still difficult in modern programming environments, but the problem COBOL was designed to remedy has paled in comparison. Thus, it's similar to how AOL used to be the main method people used to access the internet -- e-mail, IRC, and the general web was difficult enough for a novice to master that a service like AOL _was_ needed. Now the web has matured enough that the problem AOL was trying to solve has disappeared -- leaving it outdated by substance rather than outdated by style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't hate Java, per se. I did a lot of Java coding from '96-'06. I went with it as it became the king of the 'enterprise'. What I realized later though is that you can't use Java very efficiently in a small shop (one or two guys).

Nowadays there are other languages and toolkits out there that bring me better joy on a daily basis. C-based languages are not the issue here (I love Objective-C), it's the frameworks and patterns that soured my interest in Java. IoC, dependency injection, xml config this, facade that - for today's speed of 'innovation' and time to market, the Java universe for development can be too big and slow.

Most of the people I've run into post-'06 don't use Java anymore. These are usually small startups (as I don't do enterprise anymore) and the names that always come out are Python, Php, Ruby/Rails, Obj-C, JS, and even Scala. In my mind this is telling of where things are going, just like the early days of Java when people still used Perl and C++ for web. I think Java's continual evolution (or at least usage of the JVM) into things like Scala and Clojure are good things. But it's glory days being at the forefront of web development are behind it.

Ultimately I think this as fine as every dog has its day. Someone will come up with the next greatest thing that everyone will flock to. But like all the other names I've mentioned, Java will be around in many shapes and forms because, like Cobol, some businesses and users will still need it.

</comment><comment><USER18> TL;DR (as I see it): Complaining about Java as a language is pointless, as all of the "new hotness" languages out there don't slay the old dragons of ancient business system languages like COBOL, which is where the author thinks people should be spending their time.

</comment><comment><USER19> So if I understand this article correctly I should not hate Java, because there are languages out there which are worse?

I'm sorry that just don't cut it for me, and I'm capable to dislike both COBOL and Java.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't specifically hate Java the language, although I'm not enamoured with it either. I do hate the whole culture / attitude and baggage that comes with the language if you have to use it in an enterprise environment. That same culture that warped XML from something moderately useful into a horrible joke. Same goes for SOAP, UML and basically all things 'enterprise'.

 _edit:_ I gave up on the whole thing when I had to use comments to configure part of a build process. (xdoclet & jboss? ... I can't quite remember)

<comment><USER21> Yes, we were talking about this specific thing at work the other day. How come all non-trivial Java programs end up a mass of Factory and Implementation classes?! Several of the systems I support even weave in Spring, which while helping in some ways, completely obliterates readability. :(

<comment><USER22> My theory is that the language's _lack_ of complexity bothers 'high-end' Java devs at a subconscious level, so they think they have to invent it in order to seem relevant to the larger community. Another idea is they may believe elegance is a function of using powerful language constructs, rather than a function of minimalism.

I see the same problems in Ruby sometimes: metaprogramming used without a compelling need. Luckily it isn't as much of a PITA because nobody thinks its OK to program via XML files anymore.

<comment><USER23> Java is way more complex than it should be, specially after badly botched features like generics were added.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder... how many programmers have been exposed to enough different problem domains and languages to really make an accurate judgement on what is "the best programming language", if any such thing even exists (which I doubt).

Maybe the reason you hate some feature of a language because you've never been exposed to a problem domain where that feature would be required.

I mean how many of us can honestly say that we are experts in more than one or maybe two domains: i.e. web development, desktop/native apps, embedded systems, systems programming, 3d programming, mainframe programming, massive enterprise team projects, small one-person projects, in-between projects, etc...?

I say he who is versed in all of these cast the first stone... :)

<comment><USER25> I don't hate the features that are there, I hate the features that are missing. Most languages I know let you express vector<int> without an external library, but the libraries that ship with this language only let you express vector<"oh wait let me call that function/allocate a new object for you">, which is significantly different. It doesn't provide coroutines or continuations, while even C++ does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some of us do Java for a day job and feeling a lack of creative expression at work - explore our creative side with other frameworks. Or even pottery classes.

The world doesn't have to be black and white. Why do we geeks try to make everything 0 and 1? The world is not binary. You can "sell out" yourself - work doesn't necessarily make you happy but it may give you means to do something that makes you happy.

I've been working with Java since 1999 and I'm amazed - it won. From applets to EJB hype to Struts and to now Spring and Scala and Android. Game over - they've become a Lingua Franca. There is always room for other players but Java is so firmly entrenched in Fortune 500 code bases it will never ever go away..

</comment><comment><USER16> Since there are many languages that now target the JVM, I guess my main distrust should be targeted towards that instead of the language itself. Can someone explain to me what the advantage of running on the JVM is compared to something else (including native code generation)? From what I understand it provides: native tuned GC, stable and tuned JIT, and a class/module mechanism revolving around reusable code libraries (e.g., you could drop in a library written 6 years ago and have it 'just work,' when with C everything needs constantly shifting header files). I haven't used the JVM seriously in years, but I always got the feeling that around these core strengths were layers and layers of bureaucracy -- XML 'makefiles,' a stack-based VM that must inefficiently be translated to a register machine, and the feeling that everything is overengineered to the point that a simple "hello world" takes up gargantuan amounts of time and resources compares to things like Chicken Scheme or Go which have roughly the same features. Would anyone who uses JVM- based languages care to address these fears, I'm honestly curious if my hesitation is well-founded.

<comment><USER27> The JVM allows commercial software to be usefully cross platform. If you are working with open source or scripting/jitted/non compiled languages this doesnt matter. Compiled C or C++ code was hard to get for the right architecture and work with.

But it makes no difference for open source, hence the Linux coders disdain for VM languages, and it makes no sense with Python or Ruby where you interpret the source. And native JIT makes more sense now, the JVM being a bad language to write a JIT compiler for, as it loses a lot of important information.

<comment><USER28> You have packed a lot of misinformation into one post. Cross platform does not matter for open source? People who use Linux also have a disdain for VMs like those that run Erlang, Python, Java, Scala, Clojure, etc? The JVM is probably the foremost example of a VM that uses JIT-ing really really well to achieve near-native speeds for a VM language.

<comment><USER23> Of all the VMs you mention, the JVM is by far the least portable of all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Large corporations have the money to run huge applications on serious systems, and might get a slight performance benefit from running Java. Try running it on virtual servers for small web applications though... It's painful. Compared to Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP it eats resources like crazy. Developing and deploying Java apps feels slow and like being stuck in the stone age, unless of course one starts building a large automated infrastructure with continuous integration servers and repository managers... leading back to my first point: complex, heavy and hence expensive infrastructure. Debugging large web applications is worse than any other common programming language for the web. In all honesty, I've never written any serious software in that language – I know more about administration of systems running Java – so I'm not getting into a discussion about the language in se, but it seems very hard to get a clean transparent architecture in larger applications without drowning in hundreds of small little classes littered throughout. While there is a lot of badly written software out there in any language, it's always the Java programmers around me that complain most about trying to decipher how a complex Java application actually works and which code and classes hook into others.

Then, there's the Sun/Oracle thing... While Sun was still pretty respected, being associated with Oracle feels like a wolf trying to befriend a chicken. Especially coming from the open-source perspective, I'd rather not deal with them. If design-by-committee wasn't bad enough, the control of a company like Oracle should set off some alarms...

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't get this whole "Java sucks movement". You don't like Java? Cool, use something else. Your boss not let you do it? Convince him or her. Create prototype of what they want from you using your language and use it as a proof that your language of choice is a proper tool. If you cannot, and your bosses decided to use Java it isn't problem with Java, but with you, or your company, so you need to work on you, or change a job.

I like Java and JavaScript, I don't like too much C# and Delphi (maybe because of this that I used those in my worst job ever? ;-)). But I don't think that C# and Delphi are bad programming languages used by idiots.... I don't think so, because I know some super programmers using those languages, and I know also some very bad programmers using for example Ruby. In short good programmer will use any language and will create cool software, bad programmer may use the best language ever and will create something what sucks ;-)

And this that companies decide to stay with Java or even COBOL have sense, to rewrite code from one language to other you need people who knows both languages, and are in those two languages really good.

</comment><comment><USER31> #Using Java for serious jobs is like trying to take the skin off a rice pudding wearing boxing gloves. -- Tel Hudson

#Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero. -- Paul Graham

#Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS. -- Alan Kay

#Java is, in many ways, C++--. -- Michael Feldman

#C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce. -- Scott McKay

#Arguing that Java is better than C++ is like arguing that grasshoppers taste better than tree bark. -- Thant Tessman

#Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. -- Paul Graham

#There are undoubtedly a lot of very intelligent people writing Java, better programmers than I will ever be. I just wish I knew why. -- Steve Holden

#The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous was the company. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. -- Paul Graham

#In the best possible scenario Java will end up mostly like Eiffel but with extra warts because of insufficiently thoughtful early design. -- Matthew B Kennel

#The only thing going for java is that it's consuming trademark namespace. -- Boyd Roberts

#Java is the SUV of programming tools. A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl. ... But the programmers and managers using Java will feel good about themselves because they are using a tool that, in theory, has a lot of power for handling problems of tremendous complexity. Just like the suburbanite who drives his SUV to the 7-11 on a paved road but feels good because in theory he could climb a 45-degree dirt slope. -- Greenspun, Philip

#JAVA truly is the great equalizing software. It has reduced all computers to mediocrity and buggyness. - NASA's J-Track web site

#C and Java are different in the non-excitability department, though. With C, you don't get excited about it like you don't get excited about a good vintage wine, but with Java, you don't get excited about it like you don't get excited about taking out the garbage. -- Lamont Cranston (aka Jorden Mauro)

#Java is about as fun as an evening with 300 hornets in a 5m^2 room -- andguent

#If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. -- Robert Sewell

Java: write once, run away! -- Cinap Lenrek

Java is a DSL to transform big XML documents into long exception stack traces. -- Scott Bellware

#The definition of Hell is working with dates in Java, JDBC, and Oracle. Every single one of them screw it up. – Dick Wall CommunityOne 2007: Lunch with the Java Posse

#Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly. -- Steve Yegge (2007, Codes Worst Enemy)

#Whenever I write code in Java I feel like I'm filling out endless forms in triplicate. -- Joe Marshall (aka jrm)

Source <http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/java>

<comment><USER32> That's a lot of quotes, mostly by people I've never heard of (PG, Kay, Greenspun and Yegge excepted). I'm not saying there's no truth to them, but they're mostly fluff and little content.

Some notes: I don't know why PG can't, but I can certainly name a dozen great programmers who mostly work in Java. Greenspun recommends that instead of Java, you use (wait for it...) .NET.

The Dick Wall comment I have no issue with :-)

<comment><USER31> >mostly by people I've never heard of

well they make sense :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Blub programmer telling why you should program in Blub.

<comment><USER15> Almost everyone is a Blub programmer, including pg who coined the term:

The interesting thing about Blub programmers is that they do not know they are Blub programmers.

<comment><USER34> _The interesting thing about Blub programmers is that they do not know they are Blub programmers._

Even more interesting: Even those who know about the above phenomenon and make meta-comments on it are Blub programmers and do not know that they don't know this. </mega-irony>

<comment><USER15> I am a Haskell programmer, and aware of the more powerful abstractions available in Agda and similar languages. So I am aware of my Blubness :-)

But I try to keep up to date with regards to PL technologies, so I think I'm closer to the top of the contemporary Blub ladder, but I guess any Blub programmer might think that!

<comment><USER34> Darn iPad! That was meant to be </meta-irony>

My Blub is Smalltalk, and I'm proud to claim it as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Spoken like a true code monkey.

Programming is about the joy of creating: thinking, expressing and sharing of ideas. If your argument in favor of something is, "it's bad, but banks use it", you've missed the point of programming.

<comment><USER36> I enjoy creating as much as the next guy, but I think the "point of programming" is to solve problems. And if banks use Java to solve problems, then that's what you use. If you get the "joy of creating" as you go along, great, but your employer doesn't require it.

<comment><USER35> _And if banks use Java to solve problems, then that's what you use._

No, it means you don't work for that bank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The interesting point in this for me was the idea that Java, or any other development platform with an "enterprise" sticker slapped on it, will be the _obvious_ choice for a given problem space simply because it has the sticker.

I've been in the situation several times where technology decisions are made based on brand. The Java solution is the only one evaluated "just because".

<comment><USER38> >>I've been in the situation several times where technology decisions are made based on brand

I've personally seen a scripting language been thrown out and everything rewritten in Java.

After a couple of years they had to go back to scripting languages for a big part, for productivity. So they would ship sometime... (To minimize embarrassment, they used a different scripting language. [Edit: Yes, the second scripting language have almost as much hype as Java...])

<comment><USER39> We went PHP->Java a couple of years ago, because we'd need thousands of app servers if we didn't. We recently agreed that when we replace the stuff that isn't performance-critical, we don't need to take the productivity or morale hits to do that in Java, but we'll be damned if it's staying in PHP.

<comment><USER40> Did you happen to write/blog anywhere about the scenario and the reasons for the move from PHP to Java? It would be an interesting case study.

<comment><USER39> Sadly no, I've chosen not to identify myself so that I can fully speak my mind. But in short, the PHP 5 interpreter (with APC) was a pig even for a scripting language, and few builtin client stacks lent themselves to making parallel requests to different backend services with timeouts in milliseconds. The rewrite was also an opportunity to jettison technical debt like support clutter for long-disused features (many forgotten after turnover in engineering). We only had to tune the GC a little; the gotchas have been minimizing exception volume (they're still _extremely_ expensive, especially when stock Tomcat 6 handles certain bogus requests that way) and learning to avoid certain J2SE features which impose unexpected synchronization (weird stuff like creating fresh java.util.Calendar instances instead of cloning one). Nowadays we're moving from servlets towards Netty and async everything so our cores don't context switch so much.

We don't _like_ Java, but the JVM has met our needs pretty well. I was tempted to argue for Clojure, but I'm not sure we could have taken the performance or maintainability hits for discouraging static typing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _Tell me, what do the following have in common?

        - Paying with a credit card.
        - Going to the emergency room.
        - Adjusting your 401k.
        - Using your insurance card at the dentist.
        - Shopping around for the best car insurance.
        - A BNSF train pulling a Union Pacific coal car.
        - Transferring money between banks.
        - Filling a prescription.

All the above industries are billion dollar players in our economy. All of the above industries write new COBOL and mainframe assembler programs. I'm not making this up, I work in the last industry, and I've interviewed and interned in the others._

The question to ask is: What are the economic and social forces keeping the COBOL code base alive? Seeking to supplant a long-surviving language in a particular niche without first asking this question is a fool's errand.

<comment><USER41> > The question to ask is: What are the economic and social forces keeping the > COBOL code base alive?

Do you want to be the person who volunteers to rewrite those codebases into $HOT_NEW_LANGUAGE (or even $BORING_STABLE_LANGUAGE) and be on the hook for ensuring that your rewrite _exactly_ replicates the behavior of the old system? Introducing bugs--or even inadvertently fixing bugs--during the rewrite is absolutely not allowed.

Let's say, for concreteness, that each one of those tasks above is a multi- million line codebase. Think about what that would cost, both in person-years and in monetary terms. (Sure, you can write 10x less code...but half a million to a million lines of Python is still a _lot_ of Python.) Remember, you probably have to have a fairly exhaustive specification of how the original system worked before you embark on the rewrite; just getting that specification together is likely to be tilting toward person-years of work.

Do you want to be the manager who goes around to talk to all the involved stakeholders and explains to them why this is a worthwhile use of their systems, time, and money? ("We'll have an easier time recruiting people to work on the system," probably doesn't fly; neither does, "$LANGUAGE is cleaner/faster/more readable.") What do you tell them when they ask about possible issues during the transition? And so on and so forth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm working towards an MVP that uses Java (on Android), C#, and JavaScript. It's interesting comparing and contrasting the languages while using them all at once.

Java is a workhorse of a language. It's stable, gets the job done, and is reasonably sane. It's also readable, which in my opinion is one of the most (if not THE most) important traits of a software product. Readability. Simplicity.

The problem I have with Java is that I feel like it never evolved to meet its potential. It feels like C# 1.1 to me.

These days however I think the most interesting programming topic is not Java vs C++ or Java vs C# or any of these tired old debates.

What's most interesting to me is the notion that dynamic languages are somehow more productive or superior to strongly typed ones. It seems to be a commonly held view in the startup scene especially. It just doesn't make sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't hate Java as long as I don't have to use it. I don't hate COBOL as long as I don't have to use it. The same is true for a number of languages that simply aren't fun to use.

The difference is just that it's more likely that I have to use Java at some point, compared to COBOL.

</comment><comment><USER44> I like the COBOL red-herring. Java can't be that bad because there's still COBOL! We must fight COBOL...

wait.. that's actually kind of a good idea. Raise your hand if you're a COBOL developer. Any young COBOL developers trying to break into the field?

<comment><USER45> Do you want to make a ton of money writing banking applications?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Java is the default language in the best selling phone platform, Android. For that reason alone it will remain relevant for a long time. I know Android can run other JVM languages, but until the platform becomes stabilized (meaning most big security holes are filled, new non-trivial features are rare) there won't be a push to make non-Java languages a first class citizen.

<comment><USER27> I think Go will be released for Android next year. Maybe other languages too. It is a huge legal risk for Android not to have a fallback from Java.

<comment><USER46> I love Go, but it is a systems language (a C replacement), not a UI language. That's not even my opinion, that's how they market it.

<comment><USER23> Actually, Go would be great for GUI programming, precisely because it has a concurrency model that doesn't suck, and GUIs are almost always concurrent. Remember that Go's concurrency model is a descendant of CSP which Rob Pike first used in Squeak, a language designed exclusively for building GUIs: <http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/squeak/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> A lot of transactional systems are being written in Java already. So it's a matter of not being worth rewriting the working systems on production why Cobol is still alive.

Also a point concerning most language wars is that quite a few are initiated by people with interests on the contender; that is, the language authors, software vendors, etc.

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't hate the Java language or the JVM.

However, I hate many of the Java APIs, specifically most "JEE" crap, such as EJB, JMS, most third party ORMs (Hibernate), most Java "web frameworks" (too numerous to list).

Java IDEs are bloated, slow, and often unstable with extra plugins (Eclipse)

<comment><USER5> Have you looked at JEE6 ? They've really pared down a lot of the boilerplate you had to do, and the reference implementation Glassfish is a snappy customer.

ORMs, i feel, are a misguided adventure, and Java on the desktop (eg IDEs) are a really easy target. That said, a faster disk and gobs of memory make IDEs really fly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> There a lot of powerful frameworks in Java that make application development fun and easy (e.g. Camel, Spring, Hibernate). Java can replicate many of the popular features of other languages - anonymous functions are duplicated by single-method interfaces and anonymous inner classes. I say use the best tools available, and Java has still got to be one of those.

</comment><comment><USER50> My sentiments : Good : Java has lot of well-documented libraries. Yay. Bad : Lots of boilerplate code, you can't add flexibility to the langage (not even with "simple" C macros or closures).

</comment><comment><USER51> The irony here is that right now the Cobol model is Java's last hope

</comment><comment><USER7> Did anyone see the link to the originally published article? <http://thecodemechanic.wordpress.com/>

</comment><comment><USER52> The best language for me is the one I know best.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm going to cite Steve Pavlina here: [http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/how-to-get- from-a-7...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/how-to-get- from-a-7-to-a-10/)

Some snippets:

 _A 7 seems very close to a 9 or 10, but often a 7 is a local maximum — you can't get any higher by continuing to follow the same path that got you to that 7 in the first place._

 _A 7 is pretty good. At this level you feel generally content. It's OK, fine, acceptable, satisfactory._

 _What you'll find when you leave the comfort of your 7 and go chasing after that 10 is that your 7 was never a 7. It was only a 3._

Java is the epitome of "7"-ness. It's a decently powerful language that you can do cool things in if you find a good rock and smash the right things in the right places. As a language, it's mediocre but so much work has been poured into it that nothing is _too_ hard to accomplish in it... then again, very little is easy or fun in the way that Ocaml (once you get it) is easy and fun.

Java appeals to business types because it seems like the low-risk choice. The libraries are going to be there, and even if it's hard to be better than a 7.0 programmer in it, mediocrities can easily get up to 3-4, which is seen as "good enough".

 _You might be able to go from a 6 to a 7 in a week or a month, perhaps even a day with conscious effort. A few tweaks here and there, and you've got it. But to go from a 7 to an 8 might take a year or two. 7 doesn't always connect with 8. You might have to take a path like 7-6-4-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-6-7-8 to get there._

This is what switching out of the Java paradigm, into Ocaml or Haskell, is like. You have to work hard and learn new things before you get to a level of skill where you can be even a 5, much less an 8 or 9... but it's actually possible in those languages.

<comment><USER54> "This is what switching out of the Java paradigm, into Ocaml or Haskell, is like."

If you try to do real, production programs in Haskell or Ocaml, you find that they have a lot of problems too.

I've written some reasonably cool stuff in Haskell (like one of the top tutorials that people use to learn it). My teammate got his Ph.D under Simon Peyton Jones and did his doctoral thesis in Haskell. We were talking one day about what it'd be like to write real production systems in it. His strong opinion (and my weak opinion) was that it'd be _hellish_ , because of certain misfeatures like lazyness or the hacked-up record system. All the people that complain about Java would merely find new things to complain about with Haskell, other ways in which the language prevents them from getting useful work done. Instead of whining about verbosity, they'd whine about space leaks.

I find that _people_ who are a 9 or 10 on the expertise scale usually _know_ Haskell, but they don't _program_ in Haskell. Because the causation works the other way. If you're a good programmer, you'll seek out other languages and learn them, because it'll make you a better programmer. But if you're a _great_ programmer, you'll know when not to use stuff you've just learned, because it'll just make your life harder. Learning Haskell doesn't make you a great programmer, but great programmers have probably learned Haskell at some point in their path to greatness.

<comment><USER55> I've been playing around with Haskell recently (actually have been for years, off and on) and have been thinking about doing a real production system in it in the near future.

What is going to be so hellish? Space leaks? That doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me. Lots of scripting languages tend to bloat over time and the usual answer is to kill and restart the process every now and then. Even Apache does this to its children.

If I have to kill some daemons every now and then, but I get the robustness that Haskell seems to offer, it sounds like a great tradeoff to me.

I don't think laziness by default is all that useful in practice, but neither does it seem to be a fatal problem.

I'm not all that impressed with the web platforms for Haskell, but I'm thinking of doing Haskell in the backend, and Python in the frontend.

So... go ahead, pop my bubble; tell me how I'm being stupid...

<comment><USER54> If you're comparing to Python (which is stable but hella slow) or Ruby (which tends to be both unstable _and_ slow), GHC stacks up pretty well. By "production systems", I was mostly referring to the sort of things that are normally written in Java or C++ - Google-scale server farms, or financial transaction systems.

You really want predictable execution behavior in those systems. You want to be able to look at a graph of runtime parameters - memory usage, or server load, or QPS, or 95th percentile latency - and see that it's stable, and not have surprises like a massive spike that then shows up as user-visible outages. Because getting paged really, really sucks, and losing money because your customers can't access the system sucks even more. "Kill and restart the process every now and then" is not robustness.

If your intention is to play around with some prototypes and see what you can build, Haskell on the backend and Python on the frontend is a fine choice. Your biggest issue (other than the learning curve of Haskell) will be finding libraries that you can leverage, and Haskell has one of the nicest C FFIs out there. Other than that, here're assorted other little annoyances I've run into.

1\. Positional data structures (tuples, "naked" [non-record, no accessor] ADTs, functions with long parameter lists) really suck. You _will_ eventually want to stick another bit of data in there, and then you have to update all the usage sites with new pattern bindings. As immature as the record system is, take the time to use it from the beginning; it'll save you pain later on.

This is a very common pattern in C++ as well; many experienced API designers I know will give all their methods the signature of "bool someMethod(const MethodInput& input, MethodOutput* output)", where MethodInput and MethodOutput are structs. At Google, we often use protobufs as the structs; that gives you a bunch of other benefits, as you can instantly print them out for debugging, and you can log them efficiently, and it becomes trivial to turn the API into an RPC service if it outgrows a single process.

2\. Don't be afraid to use type inference; oftentimes, the compiler can infer a more general type than you can write down. If you do write down the types, be liberal with your use of type synonyms; you will probably end up changing those types later, and it sucks to have to visit a few dozen functions with a search & replace. "newtype" is very often worth it, if just for the added typechecking.

3\. Point-free style is cool, but I've never been able to look at point-free code I wrote a month ago and understand what it was doing. Don't do this outside of very specific cases where the point-free version has some semantic meaning (for example, you're treating a partially-applied function as an object that does something. If you wouldn't define a closure for it in Python or JavaScript, don't make it point-free in Haskell).

4\. Haskell module patterns are much more similar to C than C++ or Java. You typically want a clear divide between "data" modules (that define fundamental dataypes) and "code" modules (which define functions and algorithms acting on those datatypes). Trying to use the OOP-style, "one class per file" approach is very frustrating in Haskell.

5\. The "mathematician's naming convention" (all single-character variable names, with "s" as a plural to indicate a list) is just as bad an idea in Haskell as it is in C. Go give your variables some meaningful names and ignore all the tutorials that have "xs" and "ps" and "qs".

6\. Very often, you'll want to define a monad for your code from the get-go (you can even just typedef the IdentityMonad to start out with) and write your code in a monadic style from the beginning. You _will_ want to add error- handling and probably state and logging at some point in the future. If you start out with a typedef'd monad type, you can just change the typedef to some monad transformer stack as you need to.

<comment><USER55> I see -- that all makes perfect sense. Thank you!

However, you're still suggesting that Haskell is only good for prototyping, not for "real apps", which understandably for you are Google-scale apps. There is a very long distance between what Google does and what I need to do, today, and premature scaling is the death of many projects. But let's be ambitious and pretend that one day I will want to operate at that scale. Assuming C++ is out of the running, is there really no alternative to Java?

I've been working on apps in PHP (Flickr, now Wikipedia) and while I admire the language, in the same way I admire how weeds can colonize an area efficiently, I am not going to choose that for a personal project. I agree with your assessments of Python and Ruby, and I'm not sufficiently enamored of any framework in those languages to make it worth the trouble. I can sling Perl as well as anybody (even in a style approaching functional) and it can be very efficient, but it's hard to find collaborators these days.

This seems to leave Erlang, Haskell, Scala, or maybe Node.js + JavaScript.

Scala seems like what an enterprise would choose for its foray into functional programming, and indeed that seems to be the hopes of its creators. While it's a "safe" choice, for Java shops maybe, I fear the massive shear forces between Java's way of thinking and Scala's attempt to paper over all that with functional thinking. Not to mention the complexity of that language. Still, it seems to work for Twitter, FourSquare, et al.

There's nothing wrong with Erlang, and it has its adherents in industry, but the syntax annoys me.

I'm already an expert in JS, and a codebase of a single language has its benefits. The intense competition in the browser to make JS an application language seems to have already vaulted JS performance over other scripting languages and new libraries are being written every day. Still, it just feels odd to write directly to a database or file in JavaScript. And I've gotten myself tangled up in JS' asynchrony a bit too much recently. Maybe that's an irrational prejudice.

I guess this is why I've been looking on Haskell; in part because it offers some hope of really writing a lot less code and having that code be so well- typed, automatically, that it practically writes its own tests (see QuickCheck) or doesn't even need them. It seems like there ought to be _some_ way to get the best of that without needing to shoot yourself in the foot because you suddenly want to log some action and you didn't define some code twenty layers above it as monadic.

<comment><USER54> Assuming C++ is out of the running, the alternative to Java is basically Scala. And that's it. Maybe Go will be an alternative in the eventual future, but right now it lacks the library & tool support.

There's also nothing wrong with writing your v1 in one language and then rewriting in a different one if you need to scale. You will probably need to do this anyway, even if you start in C++ or Java, because the architecture needed to scale by an order of magnitude is usually very different from the architecture needed to iterate quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> > Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web application programming. > On the sidelines, charging hard, new languages are being invented at a rate > that is mind-blowing, to also conquer web application programming. The two > are pitted together, and we're left with what looks a bunch of preppy mall- > kids battling for street territory by break dancing. And while everyone is > bickering around whether PHP or Rails 3.1 runs faster and can serve more > simultaneous requests, there lurks a silent elephant in the room, which is > laughing quietly as we duke it out in childish arguments over syntax and > runtimes.

Nice job writing a 1000 word article about Java and web application programming without mentioning the elephant in the room C# with ASP.NET

I've seen small and medium shops move over to or adopt C# at a very high rate(for internal web apps) in the past 5 years. .NET is big in the government too and C# is adding nice feaures that Java has either no equivalent or a poor implementation not to mentions technologies like ASP.NET MVC.

THAT is what is eating Java's lunch more than anything else. It boggles the mind how someone could write a whole essay on this topic without mentioning C#/ASP.NET. I think that's a symptom of reading popular blogs around the internet which talk only about things like PHP/Ruby/Python etc. but comes across as incredibly shortsighted.

<comment><USER57> The problem with C# is that it's tied to Microsoft, and we're already seeing what can come of that with developers wondering if .NET is a first-class Windows 8 development platform or has been relegated to legacy status and supplanted by HTML5. Microsoft is remaining silent.

<comment><USER58> "The problem with C# is that it's tied to Microsoft..."

What about Mono?

<comment><USER59> Mono doesn't get close to .NET, even in versions and in implemented functionality, there's always missing something. Writing a serious web application in asp.net is not the same as writing a serious web application in mono.

<comment><USER58> "...always missing something"

Such as?

<comment><USER59> You can see that here: <http://mono-project.com/Compatibility>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> >So what is the real problem in the this industry? Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web application programming

What? No. Not at all. Maybe, _maybe_ I'll concede that the JVM, when configured properly, is well suited for the middle layer of a webstack, but to say that Java has completely conquered web application programming is just silly.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm currently writing some cobol for shits and giggles. Its terrible.

I don't really get this article though. The "friendly fire" is what fuels the drive to make new hotness to be as good as it can be. I don't think its damaging outside of the handful of people daft enough to take it too personally.

The argument presented in the article is appealing enough, but ends before it gets to the part where it explains how to make inroads towards the cobol folks. Its been criticized up and down, left and right. The people still using it have taken themselves outside realm of constructive criticism. Any time spent there fighting a losing battle could also be spent improving on what we, who are willing to use new tools, have.

</comment><comment><USER57> Most of the Java hate I see comes from C# fans (which is ironic given C#'s origins).

<comment><USER62> I don't think it's ironic. C# directly addresses many of my concerns with Java.

C# does away with a lot of the boilerplate code necessary in Java (i.e. type inferencing, concise lambdas with true closure instead of anonymous single method classes, yield return for lazy enumerables). By baking this syntax sugar into the language, it removes the need for all of the enterprisey patterns needed in Java to accomplish the same things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Java the language is OK. The only downside to it (in my opinion) is forcing OOP on everyone. Other than that, it's fine.

Java the virtual machine (JVM) is what I dislike more. It's a platform (like Windows) and within its virtual world, things are just not real. It's all pretend and I guess I should expect that from a "virtual machine".

Both the language and the JVM are mainstream and used heavily now... mostly in big, corporate environments. Devs can make a good, safe living writing Java, and there's nothing wrong with that.

If you hate Java or the JVM, do your hobby projects in a language you enjoy more. If you have no hobby projects or strong feelings (one way or the other), I'd argue that you're in the wrong business.</comment>


Ask HN: Vector-space database (as a service)? - <AUTHOR> Methods like collaborative filtering via matrix factorization, Word2vec, Doc2vec, etc.. map large, sparse matrices into a low-dimensional vector space while enforcing similarity constraints. There are extensions for vectorizing various modalities (users, items, documents, audio, images, etc) into one vector-space for similarity search and recommendation ([1], [2], [3]). There is extensive research on approximate nearest-neighbor searches ([4]).
For example: it's possible to map users, songs, and artists into a common vector space ([1]). Two users who listen to similar songs have high similarity. Songs are recommended based on vector similarity to users. This pattern extends to many domains as long as there is a way to enforce similarity (likes, co-occurrences, etc.) to "train" the vectors.
In my experience, training the vectors is simpler than the engineering to efficiently query them (e.g. "select the 10 nearest neighbors to vector with ID 123"). This becomes expensive for large datasets, and correctly using the approximate nearest neighbor libraries is non-trivial.
I can't find any database to insert vectors as they're computed and then run queries against them. It seems often companies build a custom API on top of one of the approximate nearest neighbors libraries. Though the interesting queries seem pretty homogeneous.
Any ideas as to why none of the big DB players have an offering for this use-case? Like Algolia, but for vectors instead of text? Any recommendations for such a product?
[1] IHeartRadio queries various modalities of data from the same vector space: https://youtu.be/jjO1gOH-BW4?t=5m39s
[2] Using a convnet to map new (cold-start) songs into an existing vector space: http://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html [3] Flickr similarity search: http://code.flickr.net/2017/03/07/introducing-similarity-search-at-flickr/ [4] Benchmarks for approximate nearest neighbor libs: https://github.com/erikbern/ann-benchmarks <comment><USER2> Hyperdimensional nearest-neighbor search is a tough problem; there are index algorithms such as ball trees that work, but they don't deliver the big wins that b-trees give in 1-d space, quadtrees in 2-d space, etc.

In many "as a service" offerings computational costs are not a big deal. For this one it would be, thus making the pricing work right for everybody would be a toughie.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought about word2vec as a service. I gave up because I think customers could easily cache (pirate) my data.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not really a problem if the user is frequently ingesting and vectorizing new data. They need a place to store it and efficiently query it. They can cache the queries for an old vector, but still need to compute new queries every time they have a new piece of content. Also old vectors might have relationships to the new vectors that have been inserted since caching, so you don't want to serve stale results.

<comment><USER3> if we forget about making the service for a moment, How would you store and process high dimensional vectors locally? What ready-made library/software to use? What datastructure?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some storage options are: \- Store many vectors in a single HDF5 or LMDB file. \- Store single vectors in many small binary files (e.g. using numpy save() function).

To look up neighbors you might: \- Compute neighbors exhaustively (e.g. using Scipy distance functions). \- Use an Approximate Nearest Neighbors approach like one of the ones benchmarked here ([https://github.com/erikbern/ann- benchmarks](https://github.com/erikbern/ann-benchmarks)). These can be much faster than exhaustively computing neighbors, at the cost of some accuracy and having to periodically re-build an index.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Play Store removed our app, but allows WhatsApp - <AUTHOR> We are a FinTech startup in India. We give unserved people a credit card. To ensure recovery we collect user's contacts and use them to remind people of their bill if they don't pay. All of this is covered in our TnC, and we warn users of the actions we will take before we do so.
About two weeks ago, Google Play banned updates to our app from the Play Store citing this section of their Policy, here: https://play.google.com/about/privacy-security-deception/use...
We complied. This is how the screen looked before the change: https://imgur.com/a/o4Cvh7F
Here's how it looked after the change: https://imgur.com/a/gHP8BDR
We were approved after the change. However 3 days later, we were removed from the Play Store. So now no one can download our app, or update their app if they have a buggy outdated version.
Despite regular appeals, Google keeps redirecting us to the policy above.
Today I checked how WhatsApp handled user uploads, as it's the same thing we do; sync contacts on each launch(we don't sync when the app is not being used though). Here's how WhatsApp looks: https://vimeo.com/user112475576/review/406480240/9ca7c4e2c1
Can anyone help us with what should we do? With the COVID crisis our users are unable to depend on us for their daily spends. We're are the primary credit card for a lot of them, and not being able to service them now, is making us look bad. <comment><USER2> > we collect user's contacts and use them to remind people of their bill if > they don't pay

Are you saying you contact the user's contacts to try to get them to pressure the user to pay their bill?

\---

I read through your TOS and it looks like this is the relevant line:

> In case of default or late payment, GalaxyCard reserves the right to use > suitable means to collect dues including electronic and or physical > communication to the debtor and the debtor's known contacts

I think this is a digusting practice, and I am not surprised Google is blocking your app. This is _nothing like_ what WhatsApp does - in fact I don't know of _any service_ at all that does this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. We first contact the user if they don't pay despite calls/emails/push notification/sms for 45 days. Then we warn them for 15 days that their contacts will be asked to remind them of the bill, as per the terms. Finally we contact the contacts.

We do this to prevent having to file legal cases against the users as those can drag on for very long in India and are a pain for both parties

<comment><USER3> Telling your customers' friends and family about their financial problems seems like a pretty terrible thing to do.

Edit: And doing so in the hope that they shame or pressure your customers is awful. I agree with ccmcarey upthread: This is disgusting. Stop it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do understand that some people may have a financial problem. When user's approach us and tell us that they are not paying due to such issues, we are more than happy to accommodate them in every possible way.

One such example of that is that we told our users that we won't be charging them any late fee during the lockdown as we understand they have issues. We did this even before our government came up with such an option.

<comment><USER4> Such issues? Accommodate them? What are you even saying, you purposefully cause those issues. People should contact you AFTER it happened to ask "please do not contact my contacts" or what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Can anyone help us with what should we do?"

Stop using unethical practices. If you use your clients contacts to spam them, to put pressure on your client, then it seems obvious that you have been removed. And this is not the same as what WhatsApp does. Their method is not quite ethical as well, but your method is way below.

</comment><comment><USER6> > With the COVID crisis our users are unable to depend on us for their daily > spends.

If this is truly a humanitarian issue, then then disable the contact harvesting feature

</comment><comment><USER7> Did these contacts of the user give consent to be contacted? Your behaviour seems spammy.

Also the Google page states the following "We don't allow unauthorized publishing or disclosure of people's non-public contacts. " Arguably contacting these people is disclosing they are in a user's contacts. You do seem to breaching Google's policy.

I'm on Google's side here.

<comment><AUTHOR> In that sense, isn't Facebook showing people you may know, also disclosing to people that they are in my contact list?

<comment><USER7> Contact book presence is but one input into that algorithm, which also incorporates friends of friends, friends of people who've logged in from the same IP, people who frequently interact with the same people/content. Its not directly "You might know Alice, we know because she has your number"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Actually, I think that there's 2 different problems here:

\- first is compliance with Google's term. Obviously, you don't say that the USER's contact will be contacted when the USER bill is out of time and the USER doesn't pay... so your USER might not have understood that this will be the case. I think that you should be clearer about the consequences of allowing your app to access the USER contact list.

\- second, the morality of the app: obviously, some people in occidental (US / europe) countries might find the app principle awful... because we rely more on Justice than peer-to-peer social pressure. But it's more a cultural difference. If the principle is agreed between the people giving and receiving money... why not ? (I guess that the people giving the money is the one requiring the USER to download the app... Am I right ?)

BTW: what happens if the people receving the money desinstall the app ? Or empty its contact list ? Or has no contact ?

If I would like to trick your system, I would fill my contact list with garbage, get the money, spend it, then let you contact these garbage contact... Or do you require contacts to use your app too (forced "net effect") ?

Anyway: nothing common with WhatsApp

<comment><USER9> > If the principle is agreed between the people giving and receiving money... > why not ? (I guess that the people giving the money is the one requiring the > USER to download the app... Am I right

I think your misunderstanding the model. You borrow money from this company using this app that harvests your contacts without explicitly stating why. If you don't repay the loan this company starts spamming and harassing your contacts forcing them to pressure you into repaying your loan.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do give a clear label before asking for user's contacts as to why we need your contacts. See here: [https://imgur.com/a/gHP8BDR](https://imgur.com/a/gHP8BDR)

<comment><USER10> From the wording it's not at all clear that you plan to message their contacts telling them to remind the customer/victim about their outstanding loan. Furthermore, do you get the consent of the people in their contact list in the first place?

<comment><USER11> I am curious. As a thought experiment, how else can having the contacts of your friend and family be use to remind you of your bills, without contacting them to remind you?

Personally I can see no other way to read it.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry but their warning really is not very clear. They write:

"I understand that my contacts will be uploaded and saved on GalaxyCard, and that they will be used to calculate my eligibility and remind me of my bills."

Note the use of 'remind me of my bills' at the end of that sentence. If this company truly wanted to be clear, they could have written that:

"I understand that my contacts will be uploaded and saved to GalaxyCard, where they will be used for two major reasons. First, they will be used to verify that I am eligible for this service. Second, if I am late to pay my bills, I understand that GalaxyCard will contact my contacts to tell them that I have not paid my bills."

That is significantly more clear as it specifically states they will contact your contacts if you are late.

<comment><USER11> Or they will contact them to look for you... like every debt collection service in the world. That you aren't paying your bills, might be inferred by your friends but they aren't forced to come right out and say you are delinquent from the get go.

<comment><USER12> Here's how OP describes their collection process:

"We first contact the user if they don't pay despite calls/emails/push notification/sms for 45 days. Then we warn them for 15 days that their contacts will be asked to remind them of the bill, as per the terms. Finally we contact the contacts."

This company specifically contacts the contacts to remind the delinquent person of their bill. I don't think that warning is very good in light of this practice. Do you?

<comment><USER11> Considering that, I would concede that they could have spent a sentence or two more detailing what they intend to do, instead of burying it in a contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > To ensure recovery we collect user's contacts and use them to remind people > of their bill if they don't pay.

Could you explain this sentence in more detail please.

<comment><AUTHOR> We first contact the user if they don't pay despite calls/emails/push notification/sms for 45 days. Then we warn them for 15 days that their contacts will be asked to remind them of the bill, as per the terms. Finally we contact the contacts.

We do this to prevent having to file legal cases against the users as those can drag on for very long in India and are a pain for both parties

<comment><USER14> So it's basically blackmail? If you don't pay we will let your family and friends know? Cause the whole reminder thing sounds like a thin veil covering that, seeing as you remind them already. It's not about the reminder.

<comment><USER15> Social pressure is actually a big part of the success of microcredit initiatives. In many ways it mirrors arrangements that were common in the now- developed world at the time of the industrial revolution (i.e. your social circle would likely know about your outstanding debts, because anyone's entire world was very restricted).

I wonder if this is a case of "internet friction": Indian people would see no problem with such a behaviour, but one "western" person would be horrified (because this part of the world has largely moved on from those practices).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So you contact people's friends, family, colleagues, and random contacts saying:

"This person you know is too poor to pay their credit card bill, can you pressure them into paying it?"

Damn. That's a new level of crazy.

<comment><AUTHOR> These people are not poor. They assume that since it's an app they taking money from, they can simply refuse to pay. We can, and do, go for the legal route, but it's much much more painful for the user, and for us, even if we want to settle it once a case is filed.

<comment><USER4> Dude you LOST, you and India's laws are morally bankrupt about it, you are NOT heroic! You claim that your customers are not poor but by definition you stupid lending app is praying in the poor and low IQ people to make you money. STOP

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not solutions, but two potential workarounds.

Is it possible to open source the app itself and then distribute via F-Droid?[1]

Can you provide your customers with a direct apk download? Although, you will then need to educate your customers about the "scarey" warnings about doing so. I do not have Google Play Store installed on my phone and it is an annoyance when app developers do not provide a direct apk download.

Initially, from an ease of update point of view, I guess neither option is quite as convenient as the Play Store. However, once you've broken your reliance on Google to distribute your application, you'll never have to deal with such a situation again.

[1] [https://f-droid.org/](https://f-droid.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> We are giving the APK as an option to people who are reaching out on support about bugs. But most people don't have the know how of how to enable installing from unknown sources

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a scummy business and even if its fully legal under the text of the law, you should be ashamed of your tactics and business model.

You'll get no sympathy if a private business will remove you from their store.

</comment><comment><USER19> Holy false equivalence Batman!

First, afaik WhatsApp doesn't store your contacts but checks if they're available on WhatsApp.

Second, it most definitely doesn't contact them.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm from India and your service seems unethical to me. Good job by Google banning you. Period.

</comment><comment><USER21> This has got to be one of the scummiest business models I've seen in ages. Do not do this.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is what worries me about building on these platforms they giveth and taketh at will

</comment><comment><USER23> That vimeo link doesn't work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aah! Here's the video: [https://youtu.be/XVQCJsgmQ0w](https://youtu.be/XVQCJsgmQ0w)</comment></comment>