No Friction – Bad Earthquake - <AUTHOR> http://www.tribonet.org/earthquakes-can-make-thrust-faults-open-violently-and-snap-shut-caltech/ <comment><USER2> > "The findings demonstrate the value of experimentation and observation. > Computer models can only be as realistic as their built-in assumptions allow > them to be."

So, results were discarded previously when they were against one of those hard-coded limits of the simulation?

It's kind of funny, because if a simulation produces some results, I'd expect it to be analyzed, and eventual odds would result in new discoveries or in optimizations of the model with input parameters being better analyzed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that is what they meant as well.</comment></comment>


Ever wanted arc90′s Readability as an API? - <AUTHOR> http://preona.net/2010/11/ever-wanted-arc90s-readability-as-an-api/ <comment><USER2> Readability has been ported to Python and Php: [http://blog.arc90.com/2009/06/20/readability-now- available-i...](http://blog.arc90.com/2009/06/20/readability-now-available-in- three-delicious-flavors/) There is also a C# port here: <http://code.google.com/p/nreadability/>

<comment><AUTHOR> There is also a ruby port here: <https://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby- readability>

The beauty of our approach is that we didn't have to port it and we can adapt much quicker when new versions come out.

<comment><USER3> Great, i searched for a readability's ruby port on github but the closest i can find is pismo: <https://github.com/peterc/pismo>

<comment><USER4> Pismo used to use ruby-readability (linked above) but I ended up writing my own system. It works similarly to Readability but is better on certain types of poorly formatted content (but worse on others, so YMMV). Pismo is more a general purpose content extraction library than Readability and better suited for machine processing and summarization (which is what I use it for).

Pismo also comes with a command line client built-in, so you can do stuff like this:

      $ pismo http://preona.net/2010/11/ever-wanted-arc90s-readability-as-an-api/ title sentences

      :title: "Ever wanted arc90's Readability as an API?"
      :sentences: Over at Preona we have been wanting something just like that for a while now. So we built it! Some time ago, while developing LazyReadr, we were faced with the fact that RSS feeds simply aren't all that lovely anymore.

Note: "sentences" picks the first few sentences by default, but this is ideal for a summary by an automated system or for a news page :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> You should check out topicmarks. It does summaries in a very smart way from what I've seen. We'll likely start using it to do automated summaries for RSS content in our iPad app.

<comment><USER4> Sadly, though, it "takes minutes" (and they even seem to make a big point of that..) It might be useful for slightly better summaries though I've had great luck with going with the first paragraph of an article so far (or certain other metadata if it scores better, like <meta> description).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wrote something similar a while ago as a bit of an experiment - again, it uses Readability and jsdom.

It's slow because there's a lot of unoptimised code in jsdom which makes certain DOM manipulations pretty slow. It's early days for this stuff.

So in lieu of them open sourcing their code, which is almost certainly more robust, here it is:

<https://github.com/tomtaylor/thelma>

<comment><AUTHOR> Having the benefit of hacking around jsdom for a while to fix certain bugs, I could tweak Readability to work around the slowness.

Also node-htmlparser now contains a patch of mine so it's a bit more robust.

I think you'll find your code might be a bit more robust than you left it, in part due to my wanting to make our API robust :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We, too, have ported Readability to a web based API, however ours is synchronous. It's lighting fast under the hood (thank you Cython) and you can hit it as much as you like, as quickly as you like. We currently process about 5 million calls to clean-html.json a month, which is odd, because we added it to our set of API calls on a whim. It's turned out to be our most popular API call, by a large margin.

We're also going to be issuing an update soon to include multi-page reading. So you can grab those long, paginated New Yorker articles all in one API call.

<http://www.repustate.com>

<comment><USER5> Thanks - that looks quite interesting. Do you offer anything that cleans up the HTML but preserves formatting and images in the article?

<comment><USER6> Internally, yes. Give a day or two and I"ll add a flag to let you preserve some of the formatting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE at midnight: the view-scraped-page part of the architecture was meant as a helper function. Being frontpaged on HackerNews obviously crashed it. The two examples have been moved to static files served by nginx. Sorry for any inconvenience.

If anyone didn't manage to view the two examples, please go check them again :)

\--> <http://plateboiler.lazyreadr.com/static/example1.html> and <http://plateboiler.lazyreadr.com/static/example2.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> Boilerpipe has been amazing for me as a Java library: <http://code.google.com/p/boilerpipe/>

</comment><comment><USER8> And there's ViewText as well - <http://viewtext.org/help/api>

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I created viewtext. It also populates RSS feeds to contain the full content and extracts text from PDFs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You guys are awesome. I literally just embarked on building an RSS reader that fits my personal taste and was wondering to myself how to get page content filtered through Readability. I was envisioning weird hacks, but this is perfect.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have two suggestions about making an RSS reader:

1\. Help us instead :)

2\. Use Superfeedr, it will make your life easier.

Also thanks for calling awesome, we're really not that awesome, just have too much time on our hands :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had a similar idea two months ago, but instead of being a web api (with all the scalability and privacy issues that ensue), I made it a browser extension. where people could add parameters to embedded iframes in order to display them nicely formatted.

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nahmdndkmncjhppb...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nahmdndkmncjhppbaomnecihdmijgmne)

</comment><comment><USER12> Does Safari really use Readability? Any sources on that?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/06/08/think-safari- reader-...](http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/06/08/think-safari-reader-looks- familiar-thats-because-apple-used-op/)

First hit on Google for "Safari Readability"</comment></comment>


To fixate on finding work that makes us happy is a luxury - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@austinlchurch/8976ee275d85#.mftuj4fm1 <comment><USER2> Screw that. I don't want to live just to pay the bills, buy a house too big for me, a big car that I don't need and consume more than I should.

If you think the way of life of your elders made the world a better place, go ahead, think and do like them, maybe it will make you happy, like them.

I may be disrespectful, but for me it looks like my elders left me with a suffocating planet populated by too many people taking too many drugs.

And I don't want to be a part of this, I'm not smart enough to change the future, I probably won't do much good to mankind, so I'm going to enjoy myself and leave the tiniest footprint when I'm leaving. Nobody owes us fun, we owe it to ourselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> "You a lawyer, Frank?"

"Me? A lawyer? No. Why?"

"Hoping you might be, is all. I could use a lawyer. Whaddya do, then? Advertising man, or what?"

"No. I work for Knox Business Machines."

"Whaddya do there? You design the machines, or make them, or sell them, or repair them, or what?"

"Sort of help sell them, I guess. I don't really have much to do with the machines themselves; I work in the office. Actually it's sort of a stupid job. I mean there's nothing — you know, interesting about it, or anything."

"Interesting?" John Givings seemed offended by the word. "You worry about whether a job is 'interesting' or not? I thought only women did that. Women and boys. Didn't have you figured that way."

"Oh, look, the sun's coming out!" Mrs. Givings cried. She jumped up, went to the picture window and peered through it, her back very rigid. "Maybe we'll see a rainbow. Wouldn't that be lovely?"

The skin at the back of Frank's neck was prickling with annoyance. "All I meant," he explained, "is that I don't like the job and never have."

"Whaddya do it for, then. Oh, okay okay –" John Givings ducked his head and weakly raised one hand as if in a hopeless attempt to ward off the bludgeon of public chastisement. "Okay; I know; it's none of my business. This is what old Helen calls Being Tactless, Dear. That's my trouble, you see; always has been. Forget I said it. You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me buddy you've got nothing to apologize for. Anybody comes along and says 'Whaddya do it for?' you can be pretty sure he's on a four-hour pass from the State funny-farm; all agreed. Are we all agreed there, Helen?"

\- Richard Yates, _Revolutionary Road_

</comment><comment><USER4> The accusations of "bloodsucking millennials" coming from other higher earning millennials (and ones who usually followed their "passions" to get there) is beyond ridiculous, it's actually a bit nauseating. The author starts the piece by saying that he is not only a millennial, but one that does work that intersects with his passions. That preface pretty much destroys any credibility he has to discuss dropping one's passions for a paycheck.

Not everyone has a passion that also involves a high paycheck, and since yours does you really have no right to criticize those that don't.

This line really sums up the sentiment.

> You do not deserve to pursue your passion.

Who are you to judge what someone deserves? From the contents of the piece, you gave up nothing in the pursuit of your paycheck (and if you did you should probably rethink the structure of the piece). Why should anyone else?

Also, did you ever stop to think that maybe Santiago's father's passion was to provide for his family, and so - in a way - he was following his passion?

This is all coming from a millennial that has a well paying job, and one that is also generally pretty damn proud of his generation.

Go back to reading your Ayn Rand novels.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Screw Your Passion. Get a Job." what a title, and the same attitude throughout the article. While I'm not one of the people your post targets, I really dislike this kind of rhetoric. Where you have to use "strong" words to cause rumble for attention.

Back to the core topic. I would argue about balance though. A lot of people are lucky to be in a position where they have that extra room. It's good to use part of that room,

There are parts of the world where that room was present for a long time, and yet due to fallacy of logic and paternal traditions people were forces to a "safe" choice. Now that this room is not existent, you have the majority of people that hate their job and their "safe" choice is not safe anymore. At least with passion it would have been easier and happier even to the whole society.

Suffice to say, that parents of course will try to do everything to take care of their family. No doubt about that.

<comment><USER6> The mystical myopic millennial trope is quite popular. It seems to me to be just a reflow of "kids these days"

"Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt." Horace, 20BC

But maybe more jaded, I also see a business owner looking to maximize profit and minimize expenses by gas-lighting a bunch of kids into shoveling shit all day for peanuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think most people commenting here missed the key lines:

> Are you a burden to those around you?

> No? Good on you! By all means pursue your passion. Feed your Chinese Crested > Hairless.

> Yes? Screw your passion. Get a job. Support yourself. Pay your own way so > that you can stop draining the people and resources around you.

<comment><USER4> Okay. Define burden.

<comment><USER8> How about "a net drain on resources that the provider of the resources would prefer to spend elsewhere"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my 20s I got my masters degree in poetry and taught literature. I was content with the work but had a programming hobby that was more creatively satisfying than teaching. I quit my job to follow my passion. Fast forward several years, and I'm still programming; I'm pretty good at it, and I really enjoy the work.

My passion was being creative, and I used to write poetry, but I found a way to express my creativity and make good money in programming (I truly find programming to be a transcendent creative process—much like writing poetry).

I, like many others, have had times when my oxen were in the ditch, and I had no choice but to work to get them out. Some folks are stuck in that place. But if you can, try to involve a little passion in your work and carve out a space where you can feel at least a little fulfilled at the end of a day.

P.S. I just read the author's bio, and coincidentally, it's not so different from my path, so flip a coin and take either person's advice—or neither person's advice.

</comment><comment><USER10> Relevant: Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs (TV show) fame: Don't follow your passion

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CVEuPmVAb8o](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CVEuPmVAb8o)

<comment><USER11> This is an excellent talk, but I wonder if Rowe realizes that the days of blue collar work are numbered? Tradesmen will be around for quite a while yet, sure, but everything will eventually be turned over to the machines. That's why we need to seriously invest in a proper changeover system to handle the droves of unemployed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Trade financial stability now for passions later is my take on this post, this resonates with me strongly as I'm at this very crossroads (and im a millennial) and leaning towards financial stability to provide foundation on which to find my passion. I always found it hard to "explore" what I wanted to do because time was always limited by how much money I had and I never had a lot.

<comment><USER13> See, I've actually found the opposite: I was much happier when I stopped pretending the large salary was actually enough to justify wasting a third of my life, and just worked at the library on a cheap laptop while helping a friend build his house to cover bills.

People also like me a lot better now that I don't hate a third of my life, am not trying to compensate for that with money, and have a certain zest from getting to genuinely work on things I'm passionate about.

YMMV, as some passions are more expensive than mine to get in to, but my point was that there's a spectrum of reasonable reactions to work-life balance, and the choice needs to be individual.

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands I worked with someone who had something similar to the author. I worked with an Iranian developer at one of my first gigs. He said his family fled Iran after the fall of the Shah because his family had been marked for death since his father was a successful businessman and owned a growing telecommunications company.

When his family got here, he was just happy to be alive. His father used his technical knowledge to land a job at a computer company. He was told the same thing by his father. Work to provide for your family, _then_ create your opportunities to do what you love. His father told him it was more important to be employed doing something, then sitting around chasing your dreams not doing anything.

He said it was because he had to work menial jobs, it allowed him to go to school, get a degree, and move up in the world.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why do people, such as this author, treat the world as this dichotomy of passion and work? Isn't wanting to be great at whatever you do a passion? Isn't wanting to be challenged and learning new things a passion? I've worked (literally) in the shit, and now I'm writing this on a $2,500 Mac a company bought for me, while sitting at a desk. I think the lesson us millennials are failing to learn is that you can pursue your passion, but find a way to do so that is valuable to others.

Want to end world hunger? Okay, quit whining about the 1%, get to work, and create an organization that can make that happen. If it truly was your passion, there shouldn't be anything stopping you from accomplishing it. It seems, then, that the "passion" is really just an excuse for not trying.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the current focus on people following their passion is partly a practical response to the needs of creative/knowledge work.

No one ever got pulled aside from ditch-digging to be asked "I'm just not sure if you're _really_ into this"

</comment><comment><USER16> You really can't do your best work unless you're at least somewhat passionate about it. I don't get why people can think you're more productive at a job you dislike or hate and have to force yourself to get anything done, rather than doing something valuable that you'll get things done without huge amounts of willpower.

Failing to find something that your're passionate about and valuable is cheating both yourself and other people out of the value you could be creating, if not for your masochism.

<comment><USER17> Entering work life gets one disillusioned about that pretty fast. Those kinds of jobs you want us to find are _very_ rare, and the only reliable way to love a job that's accessible to the most of us is to keep harming your own soul until you finally develop a case of Stockholm syndrome for your line of work.

Seriously, most jobs are about you doing stupid - and often morally questionable - shit to enrich the owners, while only incidentally providing any value to society at large, and only the minimum amount of value the company can get away with. All of that in exchange for currency which you need to stay alive.

Do you think grocery store clerks have _passion_ for their work? In particular, are they passionate about all the shenanigans like washing old meat with dishwashing fluid to make it smell less? No, they do this to stay alive. Do you think programmers writing all those stupid superaddictive on- line games have _passion_ for sucking money out of people who lack impulse control? Well, maybe they do, but that's exactly the soul damage I'm talking about.

So sure, by not working on something I'm passionate about I am "cheating" the society out of the value I could be creating. Except that the society is not often giving away jobs I can be passionate about without utterly destroying my very self.

<comment><USER16> There's times I forget how lucky I am to _kinda_ like my job, and that most people are forced to sell their time to some distant corporate noble rather than providing value to their friends and neighbors. Thank you for reminding me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ah, the never ending debate about passion.

What if you put that aside for a while and think about it in terms of going with your strengths instead? Same thing, different angle. If there's any choice about what job you might take, take the one where you can add the most value, relatively. That's a job where you'll be appreciated more and hopefully compensated well for. The thing is, there's a correlation there to passion, but passion is not required.

</comment><comment><USER19> Parents choose to sacrifice their own happiness for the pursuit of happiness of their children when they have children. This article applies to them, I agree, because they have taken on a lifetime (or 18 years at least) commitment to others' lives. Non-parents do not have to sacrifice their happiness for anyone else and can therefore pursue their own happiness. I don't see anything wrong with that. To assume that everyone must work a hard job they hate just to make more money when there are alternatives is absurd. By this logic, I should quit the job I'm working now doing something I like (software) simply because I could make x times more money on Wall St. and be miserable. Or even parents who are doing well and paying the bills: why would they pursue higher paying jobs they hate when they are able to manage just fine? This one size fits all solution seems illogical. And I won't even get into what happens to the _idea_ of 'hard work' when automation starts to take over ...

</comment><comment><USER20> I have a different take on this. The idea of "pursue your passion" is a thing in part for the reasons the author implies (or is explicit about) but he's eliding something. He doesn't really touch on the capital owning class' interest in cheap labor, and "find work that you're passionate about" is about a subtle and indirect way of pursuing cheap labor, mainly by the implicit suggestion that offering employment that fulfills a passion is itself compensation to some degree. Edit for clarity: so my view is that blaming or scolding millennials for this may be a bit misplaced. They've been raised in an environment where they've been told repeatedly that they can (and should) pursue their passions as their careers and also that it's possible and even feasible for everyone to do so.

"Money doesn't by happiness" may be technically true, but it is necessary in our society to fulfill basic needs and it's absurd to think its utility beyond that diminishes significantly.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh come on: there's a hierarchy of needs and if one level is satisfied it opens up options at another.

Or to put it another way: suffering is not itself a virtue, but the willingness to suffer when needed certainly is. And if suffering is unnecessary, failing to do so is hardly wrong!

My grandfather had a third grade education and worked quite hard; outside work he enjoyed his life. He and my grandmother insisted that all the kids get educations and were gratified that their kids could choose and enjoy a different kind of fulfilment.

Baby boomers were spoiled by parents who found themselves in a prosperous society after themselves having grown up in depression and war: they didn't want their kids to have to live such a life. The results were mixed (I'm younger than the boomers) but I still feel that was a great choice.

If you find yourself in a circumstance where that isn't possible then you need to just put your shoulder to whatever grindstone you can.

</comment><comment><USER22> I understand where this is coming from and yes many people are hung up on passion but there are a lot of people breaking their backs out there with no interest in what they are pursuing. It's not that complex, just weigh the pros and cons of your options and pick something that's inline with your goals and commitments.

</comment><comment><USER23> submitted title: _" To fixate on finding work that makes us happy is a luxury"_

blog actual title: _" Screw Your Passion. Get a Job."_

Both the submitted title and the blog's title do not pinpoint the author's _main issue_ : don't make others (such as your parents) unfairly _pay_ for your pursuit of passion.

It's not about "passion". It's about _funding_.

They are orthogonal. So... either:

1) pursue your passion part time while paying the bills with a "day job" \-- which is what many musicians, poets, novelists, artists, etc do.

2) consciously downsize your lifestyle and stick to the budget of a starving artist (cheap apartment, used car, no Starbucks) while selling your artwork on the street or whatever. When the big commission money from the Guggenheim Museum comes in, you can start buying Starbucks.

Many variations of those 2 options can keep passion-seekers from burdening their parents.

<comment><USER4> That operates under the assumptions that you are:

1) _Making_ others pay for your pursuit of passion.

2) That having others paying for your pursuit of passion is unfair to them.

Neither of which are safe, or even good, assumptions to make.

Conversely, I am willing to assume that Santiago's father probably gladly paid for some things that allowed his son to pursue his passions, and - as stated in the piece - allowed him to do work that intersects his passions. Immigrating was probably one of those things.

<comment><USER23> _> Neither of which are safe, or even good, assumptions to make._

I'm not making that assumption. I'm responding to the article. Author already framed it with the question:

 _" Are you a burden to those around you?"_

That self-diagnostic question is really the main point of the article. The "screw passion" in the title is just provocative bait. The article goes on to admonish those who mentally say "yes" to that question.

<comment><USER4> I am also responding to the article, and I'm also responding to your response to the article. I'm responding to part of your response that seems to take the assumptions that are made in the article at face value.

Yes, he promotes that self-diagnosis without defining _burden_ , which is also kind of the point of my response to your comment.

<comment><USER23> _> , he promotes that self-diagnosis without defining burden,_

Personally, I don't _need_ the author to define "burden" for me to understand his point.

Part of being an adult is to judge the financial relationship with your parents as being fair. This includes _overriding_ your parents saying to you, _" Oh don't mind us, we don't need that $5000 for a European vacation or retirement funds. We want you to use it to produce your rap youtube video!"_

In other words, parents can be simultaneously "generous to you" and "unfair to themselves".

No doubt you have your own idea of what is a burden which may be different from many other readers but it doesn't really matter right? Every parent-child dynamic is different.

<comment><USER4> > but it doesn't really matter right?

Yes, it _absolutely_ does matter. The difference isn't that I'm defining the meaning of _burden_ differently than you. It's that I'm choosing to _not_ broadly define it at all (because I _know_ that every dynamic _is_ different), and that the author (and you) _are_ choosing to define it.

The author's entire point _completely relies_ on a universal definition of _burden_ because he's also making a universal statement about following one's passions. That universal definition doesn't exist because (as you said) every dynamic _is_ different. So, his entire argument (the title of the piece) falls apart once it's understood that the definition of _burden_ is inherently non- universal.

Also, the word _burden_ is just not a very good (e.g. very descriptive) word in this context.

<comment><USER23> _> falls apart once it's understood that the definition of burden is inherently non-universal._

If you have a personal non-universal idiosyncratic definition of "burden", please share it.

I assume its something compatible with _" ,gladly paid for some things that allowed his son to pursue his passions,"_

(I don't think it would change the plug-and-play nature of the author's essay but I'm willing to be shown that _your_ definition completely throws the author's words into a mess of contradictions.)

<comment><USER4> Okay... As a preface, when I say defining _burden_ I'm using it in the context of this article and the question it poses.

> Are you a burden to those around you?

Where _burden_ is being used as an attribute, i.e. to be a _burden_. This requires knowing what a _burden_ is, which you actually stated yourself as being different from person to person.

> your own idea of what is a burden which may be different from many other > readers

My logical reasoning, like I said, doesn't rely on some "personal non- universal idiosyncratic" definition of _burden_ , it relies on the statement you said yourself, that what a _burden is_ is contextual.

But, the author needs a universal definition (which is why I said that _burden_ isn't a very good word), and part of that definition is a universal judgement on the absolute moral correctness of being a _burden_.

Am I a burden on those around me? Yes? Well maybe that's okay, because being a "burden" doesn't have to be inherently bad.

That Chinese Crested Hairless is a "burden" by some definition, but that's okay.

A newborn certainly could be a "burden", but that's okay.

Someone's parents are paying for him or her to go to college and graduate debt free, that certainly could be a "burden", but it's also okay. He or she probably shouldn't drop out of school and get a job, so he or she can stop being a "burden".

<comment><USER23> _> Am I a burden on those around me? Yes? Well maybe that's okay, because being a "burden" doesn't have to be inherently bad._

Then all you have to do as a reader is personally define "burden" as _" burden-that's-not-inherently-bad-which-is-okay"_ and therefore you mentally answer _" no I'm not a burden"_ and the plea from the essay no longer applies.

Also, I don't assume the passion-chaser _coerced_ the parent to pay unfairly. (That was _your_ assumption of my answer.) What's unfair is up to the reader to decide.

<comment><USER4> _Oh!_ So there's a bunch of context and nuance to the question? And a bunch of other questions that need to be asked about like what is bad and what is good (and what is okay), or why is it bad, or how long will it be bad? Because none of those things are discussed in the article.

That pretty much undermines most of the "value" of the article, it skips all those steps in the discussion and tries to sum it up under a single (universal) question. And then goes on a terrible rant about how people don't deserve their passions.

That's my entire point.

How about we just skip all that garbage (e.g. bullshit) about _screwing_ your passions and just say: if you need a job, or if you need to pay bills, or if you want to be self-reliant, getting a job is a good way to fix or do those things?

Also, I never said anything about coercion, but it is implied by your use of the word _make_ in the phrase: "don't make others (such as your parents) unfairly pay for your pursuit of passion." And I just cast a light on the _implication_.

<comment><USER23> _> So there's a bunch of context and nuance to the question?_

Yes! That specific context is in _your_ (the reader's) head!

 _> Because none of those things are discussed in the article._

It doesn't have to. You know more about your situation than the article.

 _> if you need a job, or if you _need_ to pay bills, or if you want to be _self-reliant_, getting a job is a good way to _fix_ or do those things?_

And anyone can do the same to your sentence that you criticize the article for. What does "need" actually mean? What does "self-reliant" actually mean? What does "fix" actually mean? Every word in every article dissected. Ad infinitum.

(No, that doesn't mean I want you to you to add "context and nuance" to all those words. Same for the article about "burden." It would be tedious.)

To me, your special exemptions for burden look compatible with the article. To you they don't. Seems to be a matter of about the lens of language rather than a philosophical contradiction. I don't think the article depends on 7 billion people to _universally_ agree on what "burden" means. Very few writings outside of mathematical proofs can meet that standard of agreement.

<comment><USER4> Okay. This will be my last comment in this chain.

A normal article would say: _Here 's why you should do X._ And then it would explain why you should do X. This article does not do this. It makes a universal statement about the immorality of being a burden, and says if you're a burden you don't deserve your passions. And it fills the rest of the space with strange anecdotes about Santiago, and ridiculous judgments from a man who, from what I can tell, followed his passions to his paycheck.

If the only interesting part of an article is in my head, why was the article written? This article provides absolutely no interesting insight at all.

I know meaning has been a hard sell in this conversation, but...

The difference between my conditional statement and a question, is that in my statement I'm only providing a solution to a problem, not defining the problem. The theme of my article would be "what to do if you need a job," not "you need a job." I'm not trying to provide clarity into the "why" just the "what." That's fundamentally different than this article.

I don't have a special exemption for _burden_. I'm not dissecting the sentence. I just look for substance in the things I read, I didn't find any here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As someone who makes a great salary on doing what I love to do, I don't think it's all bullshit. Following your passion doesn't have to mean that you want to be a rock star. It's ridiculous to think that you can't find something you're passionate about in your work.

<comment><USER25> If you're finding something in your work to be passionate about, are you "following your passion"? I always read that expression to be about changing your life, not adjusting your passions to fit it.

<comment><USER17> Yet the latter seems to be the only reliable way to accomplish it. I often wonder, if those people writing about "following passion" actually found a work that fits their passions, or made their passions fit their work...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 500\. HN hug of death? Anyone got a cached version?

<comment><USER26> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lFMSlIo...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lFMSlIonwxoJ:austinlchurch.com/screw- your-passion-get-a-job/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=dk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've got a job I really enjoy now and make a decent salary. However it's my time outside of work that I'm more concerned with. Out side of one key hobby I don't really know what to do with my time so it doesnt feel wasted. I've never had an issue putting in my 8+ hours day if I have something to look forward to when I get home.

</comment><comment><USER28> Getting 500 on and off. Web Archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20161221164424/http://austinlchu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161221164424/http://austinlchurch.com/screw- your-passion-get-a-job/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Work is a majority of your work. Keep that in mind folks.

It's well worth the effort, and justifiably something to fixate on.

<comment><USER30> This is largely a choice—especially for the HN crowd, who typically earn above average salaries. If you choose to inflate your lifestyle to match your income, you're right—your work will be the majority of your [life's] work. If you choose to not do this, you can have a relatively brief career, and spend most of your life doing work you care about, regardless of the financials associated with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, we should just stick with the status quo, be serfs and dig ditches?

</comment><comment><USER32> Bull shit presented in an interesting and rhetoric way.

</comment><comment><USER33> Pretty good article. Some parts of this are very relevant to me at the moment.</comment>


Deposit your physical cash notes and coins to the bank with your smartphone - <AUTHOR>

Dupo is a start up idea I want to develop that collects the direct cash notes and coins you want to deposit in your b-account and us will make a rapid transfer of the amount you need to dispose for a small fee.<p>Currently looking for feedback to keep this idea alive. <comment><USER2> You're going to have to make a very good case for me not just keeping my cash in my wallet, where I can spend it anywhere.

Otherwise, the risk doesn't seem worth the apparent convenience. This seems less "deposit my cash with my smartphone" and more "give you my cash and you'll give some of it back."

</comment><comment><USER3> The only hitch will be perfecting teleportation.</comment>


Circuit diagram of the MARIA Atari 7800 graphics chip found in a dumpster - <AUTHOR> https://www.retrorgb.com/atari-7800-schematics-found-in-dumpster-treasure-trove.html <comment><USER2> What memory hole? What needs to happen to fill the hole?</comment>


Was Alan Kay wrong? And why does that matter? - <AUTHOR> http://braythwayt.com/2013/12/22/wrong.html <comment><USER2> I wrote the tweet that likely triggered this post.

My original joke on Twitter was that I was waiting for Alan Kay to tell everybody how Smalltalk did reactive programming and FRP first.

My original point is Alan Kay has made a hobby of co-opting virtually any paradigmatic trend or fad that has arisen since his original work on Smalltalk, usually claiming Smalltalk did it first/better/whatever.

The point here isn't original sin or only creating objectively perfect things. It's a different problem of people who don't seem otherwise engaged with the work being done in the present only talking about the work they did in the past.

Call for information: is anybody aware of Alan Kay directly contributing to the development of any open source programming languages that aren't Smalltalk in recent history?

I'm not aware of him releasing any new languages or publishing any new papers in the last decade or two, yet his paradigmatic peanut gallery commentary seems to spread pretty quickly.

I haven't seen anybody actually say what raganwald is attacking here.

<comment><AUTHOR> _My original point is Alan Kay has made a hobby of co-opting virtually any paradigmatic trend or fad that has arisen since his original work on Smalltalk, usually claiming Smalltalk did it first /better/whatever._

Lisp was co-opting everything long before Smalltalk started co-opting everything.

But on to the main point: what am I attacking here? Nothing, in fact, I think the post is praising the idea that discussing his quote is a useful exercise, leading to fertile grounds.

Whether OOP is or isn't what he says it is, or whether greenspunning a feature is somehow less useful than choosing a language with that feature built in is an exercise I leave to the reader with little comment other than the observation that while i no longer program in Java, I haven't gone so far as to adopt Clojure or Squeak.

<comment><USER2> I use Clojure and Haskell, I live in the future above and beyond what traditional Lisps have ever offered.

I just find the aggrandizement of those-that-came-before obnoxious and unfair to people doing work _here and now_.

<comment><USER3> The flip side is that people have been reinventing Lisp Machines and Smalltalk environments, poorly, for the last two decades, and many would argue we still aren't at feature-parity with them. It's obnoxious to see people take credit for ideas that predate them and pretend we're innovating.

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty happy with Clojure as a next-generation Lisp.

<comment><USER4> cute.

<comment><USER2> Did you have anything useful to contribute here?

I'm fine with Clojure because I'm more interested in languages with type systems anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There might be an interesting point hiding underneath this article, but the badly forced analogy between evaluation of Kay's _definition_ of OOP (which is an abstract concept with no objective external existence) and evaluation of Newton's _description_ of physical laws really gets in the way.

The question of whether Kay is wrong is meaningless. Kay can't be wrong when he says _what he means by OOP_. You can discuss what language features and programming practices are useful in particular contexts, and you can argue whether Kay's definition of OOP represents a particularly meaningful set of features and approaches. But to discuss whether he was _wrong_ is pointless, and to frame a discussion of OOP in those terms -- and to pretend it has any meaningful analogy to evaluation of how Newton was right, and how he was wrong, in his physical models is pointless. Its an analogy that serves to try to create a false connection and sense of generality, and does more to obscure than illuminate.

<comment><AUTHOR> NEVER MIND:

I tried rewriting the opening as your comment suggests, and it looks better. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Allen Newell at CMU AI built a system called Lstar that was only for "Greenspuning", it was a language for bootstrapping up higher languages. It's very hard now to find even a mention of this on Google. This was decades ago.

2\. I recently have been spending time learning and using the Go language from Google. It has almost no facilities for booting new languages. Nowadays that's called building a DSL. The thing is, Go is very useful, efficient, and easy to learn. Plus, it has an excellent system for concurrent and parallel programming. They explicitly decided against building in facilities for DSLs, as they are seen as making systems hard to understand.

Alan Kay wasn't wrong, he had a particular point of view. To me, today, Kay's view seems old-fashioned compared to Go. Both Go and Kay's OOP are very sophisticated. In very different ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a personal view, but my feeling about Lisp and SmallTalk is that they have opposing views of DSLs. Lisp culture seems to celebrate "bottom-up programming," While SmallTalk seems to celebrate writing programs that are unmistakably SmallTalk.

<comment><USER7> It's Smalltalk. Not SmallTalk.

I guess that Smalltalk also likes bottom-up programming, but it does not meta- level or language-level programming often in an object-oriented way. Lisp might do that too, but it often puts other interfaces on top. CLOS is an example: CLOS is itself an object-oriented system (see AMOP), but on top are functional and descriptive (macro) layers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think the quote was meant to be taken literally. You are missing the point if you are.

It should be obvious by now that OOP is a programming method that is possible in any programming language, and it is easier in some and harder in others. There is no language that exists where you can't force out non-OOP code, and you can always build your own OOP framework, even in C or assembly.

A more productive use of the quote would be to compare the design of small talk and lisp vs say java and c++, and think about why someone as brilliant as Alan Kay should consider that it is not easy to write OOP code in java or c++.</comment>


Ask HN: Laid off, frustrated, looking for advice - <AUTHOR>

This is a combination of venting and looking for advice. It's a different account than my usual Hacker News, would like to be anonymous at this point since I'm looking for work.
I live in a large city in the Eastern time zone, 40+ years old, my most recent job was for 12+ years at the same place, 10+ in Java. I got laid off in May. Got my resume together, talked to some recruiters, the usual stuff. I've had a couple of nibbles, couple of interviews, but no offers so far. It seems my problem is that the assignments I was given was just regular Java coding, more back end than front end. Not much J2EE technologies, light on servlets, JSP, JSF. Also, the company didn't use Hibernate or JUnit. Basically, I don't have the fashionable skills. I have no doubt that I could pick them up quickly, but if I don't go in saying that I have actual experience with them then firms don't want to talk to me.
Here's an example of my frustration. Back in early June I sent my resume through a friend to a company they work at, they have an opening. I hear back that they're looking for someone with Google Web Toolkit experience, I don't have that, no luck. I talk to a recruiter in late July, I hear that the position at that company is still open. I could have learned GWT in six weeks, I think any decent developer, at least a decent Java developer, could have learned GWT in six weeks, but the position is still open and whatever project they want to do is stalled while they wait for the perfect candidate. <comment><AUTHOR> So, here I sit, trying to figure out what to do to maximize my chances. I've worked on some home projects off and on, but lately my time, and my attention, has been talking to recruiters, researching companies that I'm about to interview with, that kind of thing. I'm looking for some general advice, but it wouldn't bother me to get comments like "You should have done X, Y, Z, five years ago, but you didn't, sucks to be you" so this can be a cautionary tale for others.

Moving isn't really an option.

I consider myself a developer, programmer, whatever you want to call it, and not a "Java developer", but it's where I have the most experience, and if I went off to semi-master PHP, Ruby on Rails, or something else I'm afraid I'd be in a worse position than I am now where no one looks at me because I don't have the experience.

Some questions: So far I've been going through the recruiters, haven't really hit sending resumes directly through what I see pop up on LinkedIn, or Dice, any of those. I've sent my resume directly to companies twice, heard nothing back. For a senior developer, is going direct and trolling the career sites a way to go, or will I just get spammed and waste my time?

I've heard that hiring slows down in the summer, is that the case? Is it me or is it the season?

Would a J2EE certification help? It might not make a difference to the startup guys here on HN, but would Java experience, no J2EE experience but J2EE certifications get me in the door somewhere?

What technologies are in demand? I see J2EE (whatever that means to some people, that's a lot of technologies in there), Hibernate, JUnit, HTML/CSS/JQuery.

Do home projects & code on Github make a difference at the non-startup companies I've been talking to?

I have time on my hands, and can to "anything", but I don't know the one or two things to do to actually get me back to work.

<comment><USER2> Get off recruiters as soon as you can. They are very risk averse and follow the sage advise for bankers - 'lend money to those that dont need it'. ie if your job search is not going great to begin with its unlikely a recruiter is going to put in the effort to connect you with an opening.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, just like Facebook and Gmail, "if you're getting something for free, you're not the customer, you're the product". I'm definitely feeling like a product.

But I thought I was doing things "in the ways of my people", that posting your resume to sites like Dice etc. just gets you lots of spam from recruiters etc.

Bear in mind that I haven't looked for a job in, lets say, over 12 years, and really don't know the best way to go about it. I'm on LinkedIn, of course, I get the occasional "jobs you may be interested in", someone else mentioned indeed.com, any other suggestions for good sites?

<comment><USER2> Hang in there, things will get better! Job apps are a stochastic process, just have to keep plugging until you get through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't rule out Android development as a very marketable skill you could pick up as a Java developer.

The catch is that you will need to do your first apps on your own, just so you can get your foot in the door as a mobile app developer - but get them published on Google Play (the former Android Market), and you'll be set.

All you need to get started is Eclipse, and at least one Android device to test on. Two would be great, especially if one runs 2.3 and the other runs 4.0 or 4.1.

FWIW, if you are interested in learning Hibernate, I wrote a couple of books on Hibernate, and the publisher sent me stacks of them that clutter up my closet. Happy to send one over to you.

</comment><comment><USER4> Eastern time zone, eh? Are you open to the possibility of a job in either Durham, NC or Chicago, IL? A job that could involve the need to travel up to 50% of the time? If something like that could work for you, email me a resume, my dayjob employer (Open Software Integrators) could very well be interested.

Otherwise, my only real advice is: start an open source project, or at least a side-project of some sort, even if it's closed/proprietary. Use the fashionable / cutting-edge stuff, even if you might not otherwise feel the need. Use it as a platform to learn the stuff you think you're lacking. Side projects / OSS work _do_ "count* with (at least some) companies. And the kind of companies who do "count" that stuff are probably the more attractive ones to work for anyway.

Unfortunately, that is more of a "long game" strategy, and doesn't do much to help you in the short-term.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, neither of those, but thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's my take:

What do you _want_ to do? What are you passionate about. I understand you've got bills to pay (possibly a family to support), but look at this situation as an opportunity to work on something you'll love doing.

It sounds like (from your description), that you would classify yourself as rather specialized at a set of Java technologies that were related to performing your previous job. You know java, that means you can pick up C# really really quickly. Honestly, you should be able to pick up a lot of other programming languages rather quickly just by the virtue of knowing one. Even if you don't want to invest the time into learning something new to a certain level of comfort, at least get some familiarity with a few others so you can at least talk to them.

I've had the benefit of working at a research lab for the last 8 years, which lets me work on new projects and new technologies constantly. I've also been involved in the hiring process a number of times, so here's what I look for: passion, attitude and willingness to learn.

Regarding your question about personal projects and Github, I think that's absolutely a perfect opportunity to either showcase your abilities, or at least demonstrate some creativity, collaborative development ability, productivity (I got X done in Y days/weeks/months) as well as coding ability. I think anything you can point to and say "I did that" and allow them to critically review it would be a big benefit.

Check out www.indeed.com (if you haven't already) to keep tabs on relevant job openings.

</comment><comment><USER6> First, figure out which technologies are best to know in your market, then start learning them AND create a small (but quality) public product that will showcase what you can do.

Having public work on your resume makes a big difference and it's what you should lead with. I know how it can be when everything you're paid to produce is used behind closed doors. It makes it really tough to demonstrate your chops.

NotifyWire.com (shutdown, but I can still demo) and PuppyShowdown.com in my portfolio get's me in the door pretty much anywhere I need. It shows you know how to produce a product, it's a conversation piece, it makes everything else on your resume more believable, and it separates you from 99% of other applicants.

Regarding time. Don't waste it on your job search. You need less than 2 hours a day to effectively look for a job (that leaves you 8-10 on re-tooling). Just like it takes very little energy to float in water, when people panic they flail about trying desperately to stay on the surface and then drown.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just went to puppyshowdown, looks nice.

What's a good way to list a "personal" site on a resume?

Do you put the source code anywhere for employers to peruse? And I mean this in the nicest way, but you know how some things are developed nowadays, how much is original original and how much is using example code? Does that make a difference when explaining your site?

How do you host puppyshowdown? For a personal project site I figure I can a) use my VPS, but it's only 512M of memory and I'd probably do a J2EE-based site, b) get a Linode or something, but too expensive for the memory, c) get a static IP at my home internet and leave a computer up, or d) figure out an Amazon EC2 site.

<comment><USER6> >Do you put the source code anywhere for employers to peruse?

Much of the front end stuff isn't obfuscation (thus open), but the back-end stuff is closed sourced and all done in .NET. I can speak very intelligently to how it's done, the challenges I faced, and the solutions I came up with. If they ask nice, I can show them code as it's all in a private GitHub repo.

>and how much is using example code? I take advantage of various libraries, but these are mostly resume builders, like jQuery, KnockoutJS, SugarJS, Massive, etc... The code that make it all work is completely custom.

>How do you host puppyshowdown? I have a dedicated server at a hosting company, but a VPS would also work fine...512MB is a bit low though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you consider yourself simply a "Java developer" then it would be in your best interest not to apply-to/join-a company that is insistent on pigeonholing the developers into certain technologies. Avoid recruiters since all they do is keyword matching between a job requirement and a resume. Why were you not comfortable with a regular/back-end Java coding interview? What would you have preferred to be asked?

Are there any meetups in your city? Start networking. If your a good developers, then there is no need to just join any company for a paycheck. Join the right company.

The key question I ask anyone I interview is "how do you keep current"? Not everyone needs to spend their free time on some open-source project, but a proactive interest in your profession is a requirement IMHO. Get a free account on AWS and/or Google App Engine. Just create something.

Your skills have stagnated over the years. Do not get into this scenario again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Stagnated...maybe, maybe not. Over the past few years I've taken an interest in functional programming and machine learning, lately doing some programming in Clojure and looking at Scala. I've been "keeping current" with these technologies, but none of that is J2EE, Hibernate, JUnit, JQuery. We all love to hate Larry Ellison but I'm starting to think he was right when he said that the computer industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.

I will be creating something, but right now I feel like I have to do something that uses the fashion instead of something I love. A project motivated by fear instead of love? I cringed while I typed that, but there will come a time when the savings runs out and the family will still need to be fed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Get your friend to set up a call with the manager (or even just to give you their phone number) for the team with a vacancy and try talk to him/her for ten minutes. If their main worry is lack of particular knowledge is the problem you could potentially offer your first couple of weeks for free or expenses only basis to show them what you can do.

If decide just to do an independent project for experience I would try something substantially different and/or demo able. Maybe a mobile app or a web service. It sounds like your recent experience is narrow so any substantially different project will make you appear.

Most of all do something that you think is cool and you can get excited about. Enthusiasm is worth a lot even before the project is complete and it will help you see the project through.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input. I think I have something approaching a plan.

Continue to have the recruiters do their recruiter thing, doesn't hurt. Start sending out resumes myself, from LinkedIn, from indeed.com, etc. Start getting some kind of J2EE certification, when I get something put it on the resume. Pick a project using the technologies I think I need, when I get something put it on the resume. Wait for summer to be over and employment picks up (?)

When I get a job I'll update, link back to this post.

</comment><comment><USER9> Since you say you don't have much recent work with J2EE technologies, I would suggest getting a REST lib and learning to develop RESTful services, demand is high for back-end REST developers and you can be spitting out JSON in a day or two and other formats shortly there after. If you have Java experience and can stand up a REST service, you will find something.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can you tell us what city you're in, or at least be a little more specific? I know you're main point was to vent and get advice, but a lot of times these posts can result in actual job leads and offers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll go ahead and say Atlanta. If you're familiar with the area I live up I-75 in a suburb, and with traffic being the way it is I'm trying to stay from I-75 down to I-285, then over as far as the Perimeter Mall/Alpharetta area. Duluth, Norcross, downtown and Buckhead are a bit far, quality-of-life wise and I'm not that desparate yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What kind of domain/industry have your worked for? I have friends in financial industry in the East coast and could possibly refer for Java positions. But they prefer financial experience.</comment>


Roger McNamee: Facebook's 'business model is morally wrong' - <AUTHOR> https://www.channel4.com/news/roger-mcnamee-facebooks-business-model-of-converting-peoples-lives-into-data-is-morally-wrong <comment><USER2> I'm not sure it's "morally wrong" but I certainly don't understand why people don't value their personal information more. At the very least, if a company is making money from selling my data they should cut me in on the profit.

<comment><USER3> eh? you are getting value from the service. if you weren't, why would you use it?</comment></comment>


Dear Web Developer, We are so very sorry about IE6... [pic] - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/rzDbD <comment><USER2> So, can somebody explain what's preventing Microsoft just fixing it rather than apologizing for it. Just patch it in the next security update to run ie 9 in an ie 6 window.

<comment><USER3> 1\. The latest IE version to run under Windows 2000 is IE6 2\. The latest IE version to run under Windows XP is IE8 Both versions are still widely used (especially Windows XP) - especially in the setting of big corporations 3\. There are business applications that either depend on IE6's rendering model 4\. There are admins (especially in the corporate field) that fear updates because they could break essential applications

<comment><USER2> You could have an ie6 mode that you could make difficult to re-enable for those sysadmins. I don't know what to say about ie9 requiring vista, it's so obvious that ie8 will be the ie6 of 2013 when we are all trying to rely on HTML 5 features. That's just a bad decision.</comment></comment></comment>


The Twitch Streamer Who's Reinventing the Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LRb4jZu8Ts <comment><USER2> I've seen a hundred streams doing that. They don't last</comment>


ITSM, DevOps, and why three-tier support should be replaced with Swarming - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@JonHall_/itsm-devops-and-why-the-three-tier-structure-must-be-replaced-with-swarming-91e76ba22304#.q8kga8p1l <comment><USER2> > The classic organisational structure for IT Service Management is the three- > tier support hierarchy:

> \- Level 1: A frontline Service Desk, directly fielding incoming customer > communication (typically by answering phone calls). [...]

> \- Level 2: A second tier of support, often closely associated to the > Service Desk, but with deeper general or specialist skills. [...]

> \- Level 3: Specialist support teams focused on specific technologies and > applications. [...]

It's amazing how one can write a description that is correct, yet so wrong and misses the point so much.

Three-tier support structure is not centered around staff's _training_. It's centered around the staff's _responsibilities_.

\- First tier is people who _help customers directly_. As customers usually have most trivial problems, these people mostly need the most basic skills from technical point of view (though the most diverse in all three tiers).

\- Second tier is _administrators_ , whose work is structured differently than just sitting at desk phone and waiting for somebody to call. If they were to be interrupted as often as first tier staff, their work would suffer heavily.

\- Third tier is either _programmers_ of some system or _veteran administrators_ that sit so deep in their system that they rarely see the sunlight. These people work on a completely different schedule than first two tiers, who work largely (or mostly) in a reactive manner, so any interruption is very, very costly for third tier's work. Third tier is only called when their attention is absolutely unavoidable.</comment>


Daimler's electric short-haul city trucks are coming to the U.S - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/14/daimlers-electric-short-haul-city-trucks-are-coming-to-the-u-s/ <comment><USER2> I worked for Frito Lay when they had just started rolling out their electric fleet. It wasn't a bad fit (short daily routes moving around mostly air). But range and reliability where a huge issue. I was told they had to call tow trucks so often that they were spending more on towing costs than they were saving on fuel. The base ended up having to buy a significant portion of their diesel trucks to keep on backup.

Here's hoping the next generation of trucks can deliver.</comment>


Steve Blank Nov-20 Lunch @ SV Computer History Museum "Secret History of Silicon Valley" - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1224286060

<comment><AUTHOR> Harry Truman once observed "the only surprises are the history you don't know." This is an eye opening perspective on some history "hidden in plain sight" of the origins of Silicon Valley.

Video of a version of this talk given at Google is available here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ>

The most interesting aspect of the talk for me was a vision of "systems fighting systems" in an accelerated co-evolution.</comment>


Web Components article feedback - antonio-R Hey guys, i wrote an article about Web Components introducing the elements that are under this big umbrella. Can you please give me some feedback about it? Written english and content wise.
Some people tell me it's too long, others it should have more images to illustrate the shadow DOM...
http://blog.premium-minds.com/old-legos-made-new/ <comment><AUTHOR> I read through it. It's a good introduction but as someone who doesn't know anything about the shadow DOM, some things went over my head.

<comment> antonio-R I get your point, as I was writing it I thought "this shouldn't be too technical otherwise I end up writing a tutorial" but had to be technical enough to give some context and practical examples... But yeah, I should have gone deeper explaining the Shadow DOM part.</comment></comment>


The economics of artificial intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-analytics/our-insights/the-economics-of-artificial-intelligence <comment><USER2> Management consulting nonsense.

Here's the author's pitch: The value of AI is in "cheaper prediction." So economic value capture occurs by looking for prediction problems in your business and unleashing AI on those. The author further prescribes that one may have to "recast" certain problems (e.g., self-driving cars) as prediction problems to make it all work.

But the stunner for me was the assertion that the value of the semiconductor was "cheaper arithmetic."

I find these over-generalizations neither accurate nor helpful.

<comment><USER3> _> But the stunner for me was the assertion that the value of the semiconductor was "cheaper arithmetic."_

In what way would you disagree with this?

For purposes of enterprise resource allocation (the article's domain), it seems an accurate simplification.

<comment><USER4> Maybe mentions of all the crucial peripherals would have been relevant. The enormous storage capacity, the networks, high resolution displays and sophisticated interfaces.

<comment><USER3> The original quote was about semiconductors. Not computing systems. From which the author was drawing a thread to the profound impact a decrease in cost (or increase in throughput) of an input can have on the economy.

Taking an abstraction out of context and then griping about minutiae with "Well actually..." quips is intellectually dishonest.

If it's an inaccurate simplification, that's fair, but I thought it was valid for the domain the author was addressing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't seem like a perspective offering anything new and possibly involving a few problems.

Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence also emphasized the predictive qualities of intelligence but again, this was a new emphasis, not really a new idea but a new emphasis in that it's well known time is implicitly an element of nearly any cognitive process.

Moreover, the current deep learning driven AI renaissance is has been most effective in predicting patterns in quite static phenomena; image recognition and competitive video and board games (game involve change over short periods but their context remain identical over long periods). Similar success hasn't come in say, the stock market (so far as I know). So it seems increased prediction at the corporate level will come only as long as larger processes stay static (when you have cascade of change, you'll have cascades of failing predictors, which generate further change what could go wrong?).

<comment><USER6> > Similar success hasn't come in say, the stock market

Depends on your metric of success, I suppose.

I couldn't begin to imagine there aren't a bunch of ML tasks hammering away at something like a mutual fund where a conservative investment strategy could (probably, dunno?) be learned by an algorithm.

A seat of your pants day trading strategy learned by ML, probably not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "There's some number at which Amazon might think, "We are now sufficiently good at predicting what you want to buy. Why are we waiting for you to shop at all? We'll just ship it."

This is one of the most politically, economically, and psychologically tone deaf things I've read this year.

<comment><USER8> A better way to put it is: "We are now sufficiently good at predicting ... We'll just ship it to the warehouse closest to you, so in case you buy it, you get faster shipping." To me, that's value of AI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> McKinsey? Well, I guess this cements the fact that AI is now the buzzword of choice for godawful management consultant bullshit artists.

<comment><USER10> AI is so good at predicting, we predict it will replace consultants buzz- wording by the end of the year.</comment></comment>


The race to the riches of asteroids - <AUTHOR> https://physicsworld.com/a/the-asteroid-trillionaires/ <comment><USER2> I have been looking into this, and one of the few commodities that has value at scale is Nickel, there is a large demand for it and the prices have been generally high.

The Spanish brought back gold and silver from the New World, and crashed the markets: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution)

Mansa Musa of Mali splashed gold on his trip to Mecca in the 1300s and caused economies to falter for several years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali)

There would seem to be more danger to the economy by being flooded with rare metals than from an actual meteorite impact.

<comment><USER3> > There would seem to be more danger to the economy by being flooded with rare > metals

I think that this case is not directly comparable to the price revolution; in the cases you've linked, Gold==Money, and so by bringing back gold the Spanish massively increased the money supply (from the first article, "Prices rose on average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to 1–1.5% per year, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century").

In the case we're discussing, Metal!=Money. The more metal you bring back, the lower the price falls, until it reaches a new equilibrium where it's no longer economical at the margin to bring back more.

This would significantly affect certain markets (i.e. mining, industrial processes that consume these metals), but it's not the same thing as creating money; you can't spend nickel, you need to find someone who will buy it from you in order to turn it into money.

<comment><USER2> That was the point I was trying to make, seemingly not very well. That Nickel is a metal commodity that would probably be able to soak up much of the production.

I need to work out how to deal with too many ideas hitting me at once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Move the nasty industrial processes out there, factories in space and only ship high end processed materials.

Once there is rocket fuel in large quantity "boost backwards". Slow a well designed space plane to a safe entry velocity and fly to a regular airport. It's and idea that can not even be imagined until there is a filling station in space but should be standard after the first water asteroid.

<comment><USER5> Why would belters send you goods?

<comment><USER6> Umm, fresh fruit, beef, beer, to name a few reasons.

<comment><USER5> What was the last time you exchanged fruits for an iPhone? Even in orbit it might be easier to grow your own.

<comment><USER6> Cows don't fly, man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My first thought was of Seveneves by Neal Stephenson - not perhaps his best book but it did clarify the value of mining near Earth objects :-)

<comment><USER8> The first two parts are great. Rip out the third one.

But Seveneves was about using the resources of the broken up moon, which is pretty much like hopping onto the bus (on the middle lane of a three-lane- highway) compared to the challenges of getting an asteroid into earth orbit

<comment><USER9> What a great book. I still get chills thinking about the way he describes the danger of alpha particles.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but tbh, if he had split it up into three novels and give more time to the second and third part it might climed up to the hill-top from which, in my opinion, The Long Earth rules this decade of SciFi writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Surely if you flood the market with asteroid-mined minerals, then the price of those minerals will drop rapidly?

<comment><USER11> Right now the world's entire mineral supply is worth X dollars.

If I acquire a bunch of asteroids and double the size of that supply, I now own X/2 dollars worth of minerals, instead of the zero dollars worth that I did before.

<comment><USER12> Maybe not. If the worldwide demand is N tons and the worldwide supply is estimated at 0.75 * N, then doubling the supply to 1.5 * N is likely to reduce the unit price by more than half.

For a simple example, consider the case of decorative diamonds today.

<comment><USER13> Diamonds aren't a good example since their price is build on artificial scarcity and marketing. Dare I call this a straw man?

<comment><USER14> I think it's an excellent example and the artificial scarcity is irrelevant to the point being made: total market value of all $substance _is not constant_ when quantity of $substance changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We'll need "commerical astronomers" to help find promising asteroids.

At last February's AAAS meeting in Austin, Martin Elvis (quoted in the article) noted that over the next several years, a number of larger (20 to 30 meter) terrestrial telescopes will be coming on line. That will free up some the smaller 10-15 meter instruments, some of which could be used to search for watery and/or metallic asteroids.

<comment><USER16> > We'll need "commerical astronomers" to help find promising asteroids.

Isn't that what Planetary Resources are doing?

[https://www.planetaryresources.com/](https://www.planetaryresources.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see research in bringing captured small asteroids back to earth cheaply for processing. Maybe attach a large ballute. Or the bfs payload version could land one.

<comment><USER17> The cost to do so would be so prohibitively high that it would never be worth doing. Whatever gains you got from "cheaply processing" it here would be completely eclipsed by the cost of bringing it back.

The simple rule of space is that changing the velocity of anything is the most expensive thing. Getting an asteroid from whatever orbit around the sun it's currently in and bringing it to earth would cost far more than it would to instead bring an entire mineral processing plant to the asteroid, and just sending back the bits worth a lot of money.

<comment><USER18> Alternative: crash the asteroids into the moon, have robots recover the valuable minerals. Use a rail gun system to fire it back to Earth, processed, while enjoying the low gravity of the moon.

<comment><USER19> And firing chunks of metal at the earth doesn't seem problematic to you?

<comment><USER18> You can fire it relatively slowly because of the low gravity of the moon, and take plenty of time bleeding v. Ideally there would be a space elevator and capture system to bring them back, but other methods work. You're not just firing "at" Earth. Even if you were, Earth is mostly covered by oceans, and landing them there would be acceptable.

<comment><USER14> The low gravity of the moon isn't the problem, it's the high gravity of the earth: it _will_ hit hard even if you had a lunar space elevator and gave it the minimum possible delta-v to reach Earth from that Lagrange point.

The other problem is that even if you intend to use it safely, you have just built a massive gun which is too far away to shoot back at and which has the capability to target specific locations on this planet.

<comment><USER20> "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein involves some of that.

But how difficult would it be to intercept the payload safely outside the atmosphere? Seems it would be easier than intercepting an ICBM.

<comment><USER14> I get the impression it would be harder, because ICBM launches are really obvious (to current equipment) and you can at least make a good guess about their ballistic path, while anything of that size launched from the moon would be invisible until it had almost hit you.

While it is often said that stealth is impossible in space, that tends to assume the appropriate tech has _actually_ been manufactured rather than sitting in a lab somewhere waiting for a purchase order. Radar, even lidar, is going to have _awful_ signal-to-noise ratios and almost all of the return signal will be stuff that bounced off the moon rather than any projectile. Even the lunar retroreflector turns 10^17 photons out into one photon back, according to Wikipedia, and that's about as far from stealth as you can get.

Edit: I suppose one could reasonably argue that any industrialisation of Luna would, as a result of my own argument, make governments choose to put loads of effort into appropriate defence technology. On the other hand, I'm told trench warfare was more accident than deliberate planning in WW1, so perhaps governments would be as myopic as ever even with a massive space gun on the moon.

<comment><USER21> Once it gets within a few tens of megameters, pulsed radar systems could easily distinguish an incoming projectile thanks to the 2.4 second round-trip- time to the moon. Metallic objects have ideal visibility. If you are concerned about solar thermal radio emissions bouncing off the moon and reducing SNR, that could be an issue -- a phase-of-the-moon bug in the system, if you will. But based on what I've overheard from friends working on 21-cm radar teaching telescopes, I doubt the luminosity of the continuous background is high enough to pose a big problem, assuming you have a decently large antenna.

I'm more concerned that there's nothing much you can do to redirect such an object in the few hours it takes to fall on your head. By that time it will have reached 4km/s.

<comment><USER14> Good to know. In that case, I'm not concerned by the first n (n<5000 ish, varies by nation), but the _relative_ ease by which an attcker can just keep going until the target run out of missiles to shoot at the attacker's projectiles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone made predictions on the implications of "rare-earth" minerals becoming "not-so-rare-anymore"? What, today, costs a fortune due to the requirement of certain matter that we don't have much of? Jewelry is obvious, but what else in my home right now is expensive to replace just because of the matter it's made of?

<comment><USER22> One example of this from the past is aluminum. In the 1850s, it was extremely rare and difficult to produce - costing more than gold, used as serving utensils in Napoleon's court, and as the capstone of the Washington monument. Now it's one of the cheapest metals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are there any regulations preventing "asteroid collectors" crashing them in the middle of sahara or where they own the land?(i.e. only redirecting the asteroid to the place)

</comment><comment><USER24> Neil Degrasse Tyson once said that if you wanna be the first trillionire in the world, start mining asteroids.

</comment><comment><USER25> The derivatives market has quadrillions of dollars, more money than asteroid mining.

<comment><USER14> The derivatives market only has quadrillions of dollars if you do silly things such as counting a $1m transaction buy followed by an identical sell, each performed every hour of the year, as being worth 2x24x365x$1m = $17,520 million. You can't just cash out a quadrillion dollars from the derivatives market and buy everything else in the world economy — apart from anything else, there isn't enough currency around to do so.</comment></comment>


Facebook Does It Again. Cheating Dalvik - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mohitkanwal.com/blog/2014/08/11/facebook-does-it-again-cheating-dalvik/ <comment><USER2> There's a weird and arbitrary limitation in Dalvik, and the Facebook guys needed to work around it. The author makes it sound like it's some horrible sin. How about shaming the Google developers who thought 65k methods was enough for anyone? Wouldn't be good proper either, because they probably had a good reason for it.

Software development isn't always stacking neat abstractions on top of each other. Sometimes you have real hardware and real legacy and you just got to deal with it, one way or another.

<comment><USER3> I imagine the devs and management don't care much as they're going to migrate to ART soon, which I imagine does not have Dalvik's circa 2003 design decisions. Google hasn't been investing in Dalvik because its days are numbered.

edit: why is this being downvoted? Do we really think ART will have these limitations? Android has been hot to get off Dalvik for many reasons and they're finally doing it in L. This is very good news and makes Andy Rubin-era Android decisions, which made sense for a 2003 phone, replaced with more modern thinking.

edit2: Apparantly, I'm wrong. Looks like the 16 bit limitation in still there in the current version of ART. Maybe this will change in the final production version.

<comment><USER4> I believe ART still uses DEX as an intermediate format, so it's possible the limitations will still exist.

<comment><USER5> It does still exist: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21490382/does-the- android...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21490382/does-the-android-art- runtime-have-the-same-method-limit-limitations-as-dalvik)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We have this problem. We have a large, mostly-Java game for Android. It won't run on gingerbread, because we just have too much code.

While the official solution looks quite brief, retrofitting it is a nightmare. Unless Facebook got around to rewriting everything again, I can understand why they'd do it their way.

<comment><USER7> I don't think anyone with a phone running 2.x can run games. I have an HTC One or whatever (4 years old; got it from a friend) and I could never ever imagine playing a game on it. Even the home screen lags!

<comment><USER8> If you code in C++, which most games do, the Android version is not that important, given the little exposure of Android APIs to the NDK.

Everything that matters, besides the existing graphics, sensors and audio APIs, can be built with standard C++ libraries.

<comment><USER7> The problem lies with the hardware, I think. Truly, there's never a smooth moment with my phone. Sometimes it hangs for a minute. Random shutdowns and similar bugs in software as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a bit confused by this article, the author mentions:

        While the official standard way to to fix this problem is described in the offical Android Blog.
        Seems like Facebook missed it. What a waste.

However, in the post linked by facebook, they explain why they couldn't use it (vaguely)

        After a bit of panic, we realized that we could work around this problem by breaking our app into multiple dex files, using the technique described here (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/07/custom-class-loading-in-dalvik.html), which focuses on using secondary dex files for extension modules, not core parts of the app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes i sort of forgot about it, the facebook article was old, i read it a long time ago, i rediscovered the issue when running FB on one of the Gingerbread devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google early on made decisions about code size that made sense at the time, but now seem to be a serious limitation (at least in the interim). FB's decision on getting around this architectural limitation isn't all that bad. What I don't understand is how their solution can affect other applications. As an iOS dev screwing up my app is one thing but being able to screw up other apps seems like an even worse architectural problem.

<comment><USER11> I'm confused on how it can screw up another application? Aren't all the applications sandboxed?

<comment><USER12> This hack can't screw up another application, the author is wrong about that. It's changing the local process only and has no influence on any other apps (which are not just sandboxed into their own processes but also their own user ids)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Zuckerberg 2012: Our biggest mistake was betting too much on HTML5

Zuckerberg 2014: Our biggest mistake was betting too much on Dalvik

<comment><USER14> Sounds like his gambling problem is the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Below are some choice quotes from the last time this came up almost 1.5 years ago; interesting how the peanut gallery has mellowed over time. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5321634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5321634)

> _I can 't believe an app requires 8M RAM just for method names!_ \- > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323153](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323153)

> _They bloated the app so badly, they would have had to monkey patch the OS > to let it run at all_ \-- > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323930)

> _Basically these engineers decided to be really clever, painted themselves > into a corner, smashed a hole in the wall so as to escape from said corner, > and then bragged about how great they are._ \-- > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5322286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5322286)

Also, the bug that was filed was also referenced: _Dexopt fails with "LinearAlloc exceeded" for deep interface hierarchies_ [https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=22586](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=22586)

<comment><USER5> I don't think we've mellowed, just that we have become more sympathetic to Facebook's problem. I think the reality is that the 65k method limit problem has turned into something Android Developers put squarely at Google's feet. At the time I thought, what the hell is Facebook doing? Now, I've run into the 65k limit myself on an app written by 4 people over 18 months. Sure it's not a throwaway weekend project, but that is a pretty standard app.

Google either needs to blow away the 65k method limit, or figure out a way to make Google Play Services a lot lighter. As it stands right now, if you want just push notifications you are giving up ~20k methods of your 65k limit for that alone.

Just look at this post from Jake Wharton (leading Android open source developer): [http://jakewharton.com/play-services-is-a- monolith/](http://jakewharton.com/play-services-is-a-monolith/)

<comment><USER16> Slimming down Play Services just punts on the problem for a while. My view is that Google needs to do two things with this:

1) Split up the Play Services client libraries. 2) Figure out some solution for developers hitting the 65K limit.

I'm sort of assuming that the solution would come in the form of a framework or tooling that we'd have to implement. Such a solution should allow us to build fully working apps with multiple dex files, with some decent documentation. It should also work fine for debug builds without proguard, and also without bumping build times up beyond a two minutes. What's more, we should be able to split off pieces that are defined in the manifest into secondary dex files, and fire intents at them.

That, to me, seems like a reasonable response to this problem by Google. The company I work for has been hitting the limit for the last few months, and some of our other dependencies are becoming more and more expensive with newer releases (things that our users actually like.) So far, we've been able to build with a stripped down Play Services jar, but I'm not terribly happy about that approach.

Regardless, I'm not going to blame Facebook for a problem that Google caused. If Facebook can find a solution, and tell the community how they did it, I'm all ears.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On the 65K methods restriction, how many lines of code per method do these projects have on average? That just seems like a lot of code. Is this a result of the Java acessor-and-mutator-methods-for-everything approach?

For reference, Tomcat and Maven are both 1M lines of code (would be ~15 lines of code per method @ 65K methods). Lucene is <500K.

<comment><USER18> I used to think this was a non issue. 65k methods is a lot right? Well I ran into the 65k method limit with my one developer game I'm working on. Can't remember if it while i was using gradle or maven(recent switched) but it would print out all the methods for each package. Method counts add up quick when you are importing libraries. For example google guice by it self(if memory servers me) had ~6k methods. Thats one library. Starting adding different Apache libraries and its possible. Granted the majority of these get stripped out by Proguard, but having to run proguard for every build is a major pain. I have since refactored and am now well under the limit, but this issue is a lot more prevalent then i thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I understand, Dalvik uses 2 bytes to select a method found in the list at the start of the dex file and then to execute it. Is there any particular reason it is limited to 2 bytes ?

<comment><USER20> This is just me guessing but one of the initial goals of Dalvik was to use as little space as possible (due to memory constraints of hardware at that time). Perhaps they thought saving a a byte or two on method identifiers was a good idea. This would not be a problem if it weren't for the fact that dx also squashes all classes into one single class, meaning that instead of being 65K methods per class you now get 65K per apk.

<comment><USER21> Ah, mobile. Recapitulating all the horribly constrained hacks of the early PC era, in handheld size containers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Note that the Facebook blog post about this hack is from 4 March 2013, i.e. more than a year ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and still FB relies on this patch to run its app, and sometimes it does fail as happened on my device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't see how facebook cheated Dalvik 'again'? Seems like it's still just the one 'patch'/'hack'. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER24> What they do "again" is pull some nice engineering feat that's also a bit of a hack, and therefore fun to read about. I assume the author is impressed, and likens it to some of Facebook's similar bend-the-world-to-my-turd undertakings such as patching git to be able to deal with Facebook's single gigantic (!) source code repository.

<comment><USER23> Oh, I see. I assumed the 'it' in the post title referred to the 'Cheating Dalvik' that followed. Not that it referred to a more generic concept of bad- practise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article seems to conflate the limit on number of methods vs the amount of memory required for one of the dexopt steps.

</comment><comment><USER26> I understand blackberry messenger also has the 65k method hack in its android app.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if this 65k limit is part of the reason they made messenger its own app?

<comment><USER18> I'm sure it was a consideration. Also from a team/project structure standpoint it probably a lot easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Mirror?

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe it would have helped missing out in the mandatory spying features, and providing only the required customer features.

Those features really take a lot of memory:

* "Record audio with the microphone … at any time without your confirmation"

* Take videos and photos using the camera

* Access the phone's call log

* Read data about contacts stored on the phone, "including the frequency with which you've called, emailed or communicated in other ways with specific individuals"

<comment><USER30> > * "Record audio with the microphone … at any time without your confirmation"

There's no way in Android to record audio with the microphone at only certain times with your confirmation. Facebook needs microphone access for video and voice calling.

> * Take videos and photos using the camera

The Facebook app lets you take photos and videos to post on your feed. How else would they be able to do that without camera access?

I can't speak for the other two (I use iOS myself) but Androids permissions are generally way too broad (stuff like to be able to pause music when the user is making a call you have to ask for access to their phone number and the phone numbers of everyone calling them) and users have to accept the kitchen sink. The "Facebook spying" stuff is an Android bug, not Facebook.

<comment><USER31> _The Facebook app lets you take photos and videos to post on your feed. How else would they be able to do that without camera access?_

Isn't the point of the Android app model of breaking everything up into Activities that you can call another Activity which does the video/photo recording, and then you just deal with the result?

(That's not a rhetorical question; I may be misunderstanding the intent of the design, or how people use the design in reality, or both.)

<comment><USER32> Yes, you're right that activities are broken up like that. Permissions are defined in the application manifest, and apply to all activities within the application.

Facebook would have to break their application into a calling app and newsfeed app to split the permissions apart. It would still request permission to record and take videos for both, though, if they implemented video recording on the newsfeed app.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The World Wide Web Is Dead - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dacodanelson/the-world-wide-web-is-dead-b36aaebe708d <comment><USER2> The irony of this post being on medium isn't completely lost on me while the author is perfectly capable to publish it on his own website. Consider Spain's linktax , Google's AMP and continuous Reactification of the Web into SPAs. The present doesn't look bright but everyone except Big Tech realizes that decentralization is needed. The same thoughtless article about the Web gets posted every week with one being worse than another, the Web is dead long live the Web!

</comment><comment><USER3> We should have listened to Ted Nelson the first time around. For Nelson, hypertext is not just hyperlinked text. It's a permanent repository of text with hyperlinks _and_ transclusions, both being permanent references, _and_ DRM to ensure the rightsholders of linked/transcluded text get automatically remunerated whenever their work is downloaded/read, _and_ a microtransaction system to enable such remuneration.

Tim Berners-Lee thought he could nick just the "good bits" from this model -- or rather, the low-hanging fruit, punting the tricky-to-implement stuff until later -- but you really need _all_ of the parts, otherwise you will have a broken, half-working (if that) system with seams showing all over the place.

It's time to realize that Project Xanadu was the correct way to view hypertext, and compromising on that vision has cost us dearly.

<comment><USER2> > really need all of the parts, otherwise you will have a broken, half-working > (if that) system

WWW won exactly because it was half finished - extendable and not despite of it, otherwise we would all be using Gopher now.

<comment><USER3> It's one of those things like C that seemed like a good idea at the time, and only with the fullness of time do we come to realize its bone-deep irreparable flaws... but now we're stuck with it effectively forever.

<comment><USER2> Worse, it isn't that we stuck with it, but the public have lost control to WHATWG (el Goog & the Gang)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And the award for "clickbait title of the month" goes to...

The article makes some good points despite being written from the perspective of someone too young to remember the time without significant link rot when most websites were someone's home (and equally permanent), links came from people, and search engines were an immature competitor to curated directories.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regretted the title about 20 minutes after "publishing". Mistakes were made. I do remember directories and personal pages though. I still stumble across them from time to time and it's such a pleasure. This was my latest discovery: [http://www.macdougallelect.com](http://www.macdougallelect.com)

<comment><USER4> Around 1994, when the choice of technological platform for someone's public internet presence was between FTP or Gopher or HTTP from a server on their own network, _all_ pages were a curated publication. Corruption required a lot of time and technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More like undead.</comment>