United States to fund gun-violence research after 20-year freeze - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03882-w <comment><USER4> Gun violence research is a good example of how science can be skewed to make different political points. For example, one of the new tactics gun control advocates have adopted is lumping homicides and suicides together into "gun deaths" even though the policy implications of the two things are quite different. (Suicides accounting for the large majority of "gun deaths," but bans on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines will have little effect on suicides. Likely red flag laws as well. Those are the three most viable gun control laws on the table right now.)

Measuring homicides versus "gun deaths" also changes whether there is an observed correlation between gun ownership rates and "gun death"/homicide rates: [https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/everybodys- lying-a...](https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/everybodys-lying-about- the-link-between-gun-ownership-and-homicide-1108ed400be5) (there is no correlation for homicides; there is a moderate correlation for suicides). So, for example, whether you research homicides or "gun deaths"/"gun violence" is already a politically significant choice that will alter the results.

So yes, more research and more data is always good. But this data _will_ get twisted and abused for political grandstanding. People need to be prepared to cut through that.

I'd also point out that, at the end of the day, gun rights derive from the Constitution. Gun control is therefore not merely a policy choice to be made based on facts and data. In fact, there are lots of areas where we are quite reasonably sensitive to research efforts being misused for political ends.

<comment><USER5> Another way I've seen statistics misused when advocating for gun control is bringing up the high number of "mass shootings" any time an event makes the news. The majority of "mass shootings" are gang violence, but gun control advocates will bring it up when there is a school/mall/etc. shooting to play on people's fears and make them believe that almost every day there is someone killing a bunch of kids in a school. I'm not trying to imply that gang shootings are acceptable, but it's misleading to lump them in with school shootings to push the "think about the children" angle.

<comment><USER6> The _vast_ majority of gun violence of all types, suicides, gang murders, mass shootings, domestic violence etc. are committed with hand guns. Hand gun ownership popularity is at a high in the US across many demographics.

But assault rifle bans are the most popular form of gun control, probably _because_ of the popularity of hand guns.

<comment><USER7> I think it's because it's easier to divide and conquer with 'big scary assault rifles meant for the battlefield' \- it helps gather some people who are in the middle, and agree with Heller in that people should be able to defend themselves especially at home... if you say assault rifle bad - no one needs one to hunt with - you get some people nodding...

so it's easier to pass and claim a victory lap.

I saw a definition recently that said assault rifle bans.. any rifle with at least one 'military type accessory' \- that wording is part of the charade. I'm guessing a forward grip, maybe a red dot would be in that?

Frankly if the grandma next door needs to use a weapon, I would hope that she is not limited by regulations such as that - I would like her to have as good of a grip and sighting options as absolutely possible. I'd rather her have an easily controllable SBR type of weapon, expandable stock and maybe 30 rounds of 22 winmag - this would be much safer for her and for the neighbors I think if something went down... JB's double barrell shotgun suggestion would not be the best protection for many grandmas, imho.

so maybe 'because of the popularity of hand guns' is that in a way, in that people in the middle want them.. I think some people will read that as in 'the popularity' is causing lots of shootings and that makes gun control popular.

maybe. all situations are different not an exhaustive suggestion(s) thought processes atm. ymmv.

<comment><USER8> > Frankly if the grandma next door needs to use a weapon, I would hope that > she is not limited by regulations such as that - I would like her to have as > good of a grip and sighting options as absolutely possible. I'd rather her > have an easily controllable SBR type of weapon, expandable stock and maybe > 30 rounds of 22 winmag - this would be much safer for her and for the > neighbors I think if something went down... JB's double barrell shotgun > suggestion would not be the best protection for many grandmas, imho.

Is this a real risk in parts of the country where old people need serious fire power to defend themselves? Maybe it is and I just haven't been exposed to it. For me, I'd feel more nervous with someone with deteriorating memory and eyesight handling a lethal weapon next door.

<comment><USER7> a mag full of 22 win mag is not really 'serious firepower' \- I mean it is, but I think people would consider like a SCAR or M60 to be serious - and lots of people chuckle at someone using '22'...

I think it depends on where you live, and how valuable you are in terms of theft and attractiveness.

For examples - the super rich in Miami probably need more security than the richer in Beverly Hills. If you are attractive / sexy in Miami you are probably not more in danger than if you are that sexy in like St Louis or Newark NJ / Detriot.

There was a country girl in the news a couple years back, she was young and very pretty. The whole town knew her husband had died / had a funeral - <USER2> couple weeks later she needed firearms to stop bad things happening at her house.

I've been in Nashville (TN) and the suburbs of it for many years, and I will say that you won't need weapons everyday, but the crime, especially with violent younger people is increasing at a rate that is kind of shocking. We have multiple armed robberies all around us. Last week someone put a knife to a convenience store customer;s throat in order to rob the gas station.

People and places are being robbed left and right around here these days - <USER3> many of them get extra violent without reason. Some have been caught on door cams lately. With the 'gentrification' that certain places are bringing - it's not going to get any better.

I spent more than a decade working the nightshift downtown. It was during those times it became clear to me, when you need help, if you have time to call the cops - it will take a long time for them to get to you.

My neighbor who is grandma age has had her house attempted to be broken into multiple times throughout the years. Partially because it is off the main road enough to be secluded for privacy in attacks.

People around her are busting into cars, jacking mail from mailboxes a lot.. that is not usually violent, but when you catch these people doing these things, sometimes they pop off with all kinds of crazy, sometimes with stolen guns.

I don't know what it's like in the part of the world you are in, but around here it's not everyday you in the thick of it - not like SE DC was in the 80s.. but everyday there is lots of crime all around us (like within a 1/2 mile and lots within 5 miles) - it's just a matter of time before you are in a normal place at a bad time.

Hopefully you can run / drive away and maybe just use a pepper spray and whistle.. but the criminals around here have really stepped up the violence and guns the past few years. There are signs it's getting worse. I would suggest the possible need for weaponry during the daylight hours is much more often now than it was a decade ago I'd say only those who worked at night needed to really be extra aware of surroundings and such.

<comment><USER9>
      lots of people chuckle at someone using '22'

President Reagan very, very nearly _died_ from one _ricocheted_ .22 round.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Ron...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Ronald_Reagan#George_Washington_University_Hospital)

<comment><USER7> I had not known that, appreciate the reference. Indeed I think a 22 or 22 win mag is probably good for most grandma situations - it could certainly stop a couple of bad guys that are not wearing plate armor.. easy to control recoil, so they won't be afraid of it going off, and they can focus on sending multiple rounds towards targets to stop them.

From what I've seen in the news and videos most of violent criminals around here have been tshirts and hoodies, generally 1 -4 people, although the group of kids that took a musician out recently over a van I think was 5 maybe 6 at once. 30 rounds of 22 would be better than trying to swat them with a heavy purse.

If your threat was high value target, or some kind of state entity, I would not count on a 22 to be the best choice. Some people have suggested winter coats and layers of cloth can impede a 22, maybe if it's hollow.. for grandmas in Minnesota and such I'd probably suggest training with and getting used to something that can run critical duty or critical defense ammo through it instead maybe.

Most of my older neighbors would do well with any low recoil round if the platform was easy to handle.

Which is one reason this assault style banning talk bothers me so much. It literally makes them more dangerous and puts them in more danger by regulation, which is not silly.

It gives the strong criminals an advantage and the weaker citizens a disadvantage in life threatening situations.

again, not an expert, doctor, lawyer, etc.. just been doing some research and trying to share some things I have found that may be surprising for those who have not. There is certainly more to know, ymmv.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I am an opponent of gun control I will be glad to see this change go into effect. Ethical research shouldn't be constrained by politics, and the optics of the policy weren't great anyway...

<comment><USER11> On the other hand, shouldn't the Center for Disease Control spend its time and focus on things that could reasonably be argued fall under the heading of "disease control"? By all means, gun violence research should be conducted by, say, the Department of Justice.

Like many policies in the US at this stage, the goal appears not to be good governance but simply "pwning the other side".

<comment><AUTHOR> Quote from this website [1]

=====

"Gun violence is America's most preventable disease. I say that because it's almost entirely preventable and the numbers of people affected are so high."

        Judy Schaechter, MD, MBA
        University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine

=====

[1] [https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/disease-gun- violence](https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/disease-gun-violence)

<comment><USER12> You could say a similar thing about car accidents. Does that make car accidents a disease?

<comment><USER13> Regardless of whether you classify it as a disease, the CDC does in fact track and research car accident deaths and injuries: [https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle- safety/index.ht...](https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle- safety/index.html)

Additionally there are two federal agencies (NHTSB and NTSB) that regulate the various elements of vehicular safety at the national level, on top of state DMVs and transportation departments. By comparison, the federal BATFE is basically hamstrung on firearms regulation, and outside a few States so are its state level equivalents.

<comment><USER14> Additionally, CDC funds and publishes research of motor vehicle safety[1].

Their seat belts topic is a good example: [https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbelts/pubs.html](https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbelts/pubs.html)

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/](https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's dismaying in the comment section to see people who are seemingly unaware of the Dickey Amendment straight up defending it. The Dickey Amendment banned the CDC from funding any research that may be used to advocate or promote gun control. And it was lobbied for by (who would've guessed) the NRA.

Pretty much all medical associations have called for the amendment's repeal. It's had a stifling effect on research into gun violence __since 1996 __because most research in this area is funded by the federal government.

This is nothing but good news and a blow to groups who want to stifle public knowledge to protect their own interests.

</comment><comment><USER16> Slightly related but I come from a country where guns are pretty much illegal and you need to go through a ton of background check etc to even get a 6 bullet pistol. Yet my country has a severe gun violence shooting problem because of illegal guns being manufactured at home as well as imported from neighbouring countries. Another similar example is Mexico with less than 2% legal gun ownership and only a single gun shop and yet they have mass gun related crimes. If one were to look at US or Switzerland, huge majority of the gun deaths (60% if I remember right) are from suicide and another 15% if law enforcement). Gang related crimes happen using handguns and not ar15 etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> But only $25 million

<comment><USER6> That's actually a huge number given the clout and lack of nuance of the gun lobby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Man fuck the government. I ain't free until I can purchase a fully automatic AK with grenade launcher attachment and the finest kush this side of the Rocky's at Walmart.

</comment><comment><USER19> Honest research on gun violence can't help but find some inconvenient statistics, so I'm somewhat surprised anyone in the current political environment would be interested in lifting this freeze.</comment>


3D Scanning/Printing - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=SmRlyz1mHl4#t=903s <comment><USER2> The link is about a Video Search engine?? Turns out we are doing the same thing :)</comment>


Most hackable new cars: Bluetooth on same network as steering, brakes, engine - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/01/technology/security/most-hackable-cars/index.html

<comment><USER2> Wow. It is 2014, one would say security practices would improve a bit.</comment>


Announcing CoffeeScript 2 - <AUTHOR> http://coffeescript.org/announcing-coffeescript-2/ <comment><USER2> In open source, it's lovely, and fairly rare, to see someone pick up the ball on a quiet project, and run with it to completion without getting frustrated or losing interest first.

Geoffrey Booth — with big assists from Simon Lydell and Chris Connelly — has really gone the distance here, spending a full year working on drafts of CoffeeScript 2.0 to upgrade it from a language designed around ES3, to make it as ES6+ friendly as possible.

[https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/commits/master](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/commits/master)

He also redid the website and the docs for good measure: [http://coffeescript.org/](http://coffeescript.org/)

Bravo.

<comment><USER3> You can also see on the "Contributors" graph a major increase in CoffeeScript contributions in the past year or so: [https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/graphs/contributor...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/graphs/contributors)

A bunch of people helped out: [https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/CoffeeScript-...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/CoffeeScript-2-Honor- Roll)

And GeoffreyBooth coordinated the effort, posting regular status updates & calls for help, handling bugs / feature requests, etc. I didn't realize he was also writing most of the code!

CoffeeScript2 started with a manifesto at [https://github.com/coffeescript6/discuss](https://github.com/coffeescript6/discuss) which turned into a cooperative effort with jashkenas to move CoffeeScript forward in a responsible way. An interesting story in its own right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> CoffeeScript is still very relevant for me. I have two medium-sized Ember projects written in CoffeeScript (and Emblem and Sass--the original, indented variety, thank you very much).

I have been looking at React (will probably skip due to the patent license) and Vue, but cannot imagine going back to semicolons and (excessive) curly braces and parens.

If you married CoffeeScript just out of convenience (being able to avoid prototypes, bind, etc.), then it no longer serves much of a purpose. But if, like me, you fell in love with CoffeeScript's beauty, then no amount of ES6+ features will make it obsolete (as long as you can also keep using those features directly in CoffeeScript).

<comment><USER5> > cannot imagine going back to semicolons

Actually, Javascript does not require semicolons to be present. If you skip them, the only edge-case is when you try to start your line with `[` or `(`. In that case, you can prefix the line with `;`.

<comment><USER4> I like consistency. And I am paranoid. When I write JS, I always include semicolons. When I write CS, it is a non-issue.

<comment><USER6> > And I am paranoid

You _should_ write tests when building a project in a dynamically typed language to alleviate some paranoia anyway. As long as you have decent test coverage and use a decent linter/formatter such as StandardJS[0] or prettier[1], you'll be fine.

[0][https://standardjs.com/](https://standardjs.com/) [1][https://github.com/prettier/prettier](https://github.com/prettier/prettier)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, if your linter/build tool can't handle Javascript that doesn't have semicolons, it should be considered fundamentally broken and/or incomplete.

So the question to me becomes, if the build tool doesn't correctly parse the JS that's lacking semicolons, should you really trust that build tool with the _rest_ of your code? You already know at that point that it doesn't handle your otherwise-valid semicolonless JS correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't imagine CoffeeScript will see much adoption these days as most people seem to think ES6+ is "good enough". I miss how concise functions are in CoffeeScript and also miss being able to do object literals without the braces. But there's no chance at all in convincing my team to adopt it, as modern JS really is "good enough".

<comment><USER2> And that's totally fine! I don't get a chance to use it much these days either.

But for the folks who still do — or have existing codebases — this update is for you.

<comment><USER9> Hey, I'm working on a template language that compiles into Redux + IncrementalDOM. Part of it involves a pipeline syntax similar to underscore or lodash. I'm wondering what you would consider a modern equivalent of those two libraries using native methods, iterators, etc. or if vanillajs is sufficient now.

If anyone wants to take a look it's at tmzt.github.io/isymtope and github.com/tmzt/isymtope

The #cleanup-symbols branch is much further along and has a mostly working TodoMvc.

<comment><USER2> Hmmm. If you're doing the compilation yourself, I'd imagine you could rely on what browsers provide these days, and compile to what you need. For the kinds of data transformations that templates tend to need, I wouldn't imagine that you'd really find a utility library to be necessary. Check out the Svelte output, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Never used CoffeeScript in anger, and I don't see it regaining the level of hype it once had, but despite its lack of dominance I think it emphatically suceeded in helping to push Javascript towards its modern (and much improved, IMO) incarnation. A good recent example of how a technology doesn't need to capture marketshare in order to have a positive impact on the market.

</comment><comment> srb- As a CoffeeScript fan things were looking pretty bleak a year or two ago. In particular there was zero momentum for new features.

How things have changed! Major kudos to Geoffrey Booth and all involved. Coffee's beautiful syntax combined with async/await has taken a lot of the 'ick' away from coding in JS, at least for me.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. I'm glad to see people arent absolutely shitting on it here like they have been over the past year or two, which is when I started using it,

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love Coffeescript. Even with ES6+ around, I ALWAYS used coffeescript when I work on projects. Because, my end goal is a business user who cares if his software functions correctly or not, not whether my stack consists of bleeding edge.

It's easy to oversee the benefits of CoffeeScript - "It just has a nice looking syntax", but in reality, it saves me a ton of time, not having to type all those braces. I'm a Ruby guy, it's really the difference between Ruby and PHP for me.

This is perhaps one of the best news items I woke up to.

</comment><comment><USER13> > So a CoffeeScript => is now output as =>

Wait, using the arrow function notation doesn't bind _this_ , _arguments_ , _super_ , or _new.target_ [1] in javascript, as opposed to the normal function syntax. Not being a user of coffeescript, did coffeescript not do that already, or did they also throw in code to change that in the generated code?

It seem to me it would make sense to map items that match conceptually, not just notationally (unless it's common to have both coffeescript and JS side by side). Can someone comment on how this is handled?

1: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Functions/Arrow_functions)

Edit: Added "in javascript" after reference to make it obvious I was talking about JS behavior for the binding.

<comment><USER14> Coffeescript's => binds this. Javascript's => also binds this (more or less)

Seems to map fairly well conceptually.

<comment><USER13> > Javascript's => also binds this (more or less)

Javascript's => doesn't bind this though, and function does, which was my point (and is what the reference I included was saying). That's a specific change in JS, and either coffeescript had code in place to emulate the current behavior in prior versions where they used function(), or they have code in place now to emulate function() now that they're using =>.

I'm going to update my original comment to be a bit more clear on what I was saying.

<comment><USER15> Old Coffeescript behaviour for => was to use a function where this was bound to that of the environment. This seems subtly different from having this not being bound at all (in that you can't rebind it under the new translation), but that's unlikely to have been a common use case.

The main other difference seems to be that there is no arguments object for the local function anymore, although once again that's unlikely to be a problem in most functions defined with a fat arrow.

As someone else also said, there were two ways to define functions, one using =>, one using -> the latter maps to a normal JS function.

<comment><USER13> > Old Coffeescript behaviour for => was to use a function where this was bound > to that of the environment.

Okay, so it sounds like coffeescript 1.0 => was effectively doing what JS => does now, so it makes sense to move to the newer JS syntax Thanks for elaborating! (It's interesting how "binds this" can, and was interpreted in multiple ways, Perhaps there's a better, more specific wording I could have used to cut through those misunderstandings, whether they be with those that replied or me reading their replies).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> CoffeeScript has lost a lot of adoption after Typescript and ES6 gaining its turf. But by all means it's a good wrapper to JavaScript. Congrats on shipping.

</comment><comment><USER17> I respect CoffeeScript for what it did and playing a part in making Javascript and its ecosystem better.

That said, for a new development, is there any reason to use it over ES6? If you don't like the current Javascript, Cofeescript isn't going to convince you (Elm, Purescript, Scala.JS etc. might). The only direct value is see in this version is as an upgrade target for existing codebases.

<comment><USER18> > That said, for a new development, is there any reason to use it over ES6?

Obviously your mileage may wary. I think, the biggest reason is a time boost.

\- Less noisy code (no braces etc) that is easier to scan

\- No time wasted on flirting with new ESXXXy stuff

\- There is no callback hell to deal with

\- Writing React code is sweet. As previously noted: [http://rapin.com/blog/2015/02/03/reactjs-with- coffeescript/](http://rapin.com/blog/2015/02/03/reactjs-with-coffeescript/)

\- Less distractions on things that don't really matter in 98% of use cases. Like var/const/let declarations

<comment><USER19> \+ very lightweight dependency to pull in, in contrast to installing the operatingsystem-size babel (tip: there´s also buble)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd happily go back to CoffeeScript if I could keep using Flow/TS/ESLint and the rest of my toolset.

That's entirely possible, and the setup would look like this:

CS would produce a babel-compatible AST, instead of producing the final ES6 source code. It would simply leave the job of generating the final code to babel (via babel-generator).

You'd then be able to re-use some (though not all) of babel plugins on top of CoffeeScript. babel-macros for example will work out of the box: [https://github.com/kentcdodds/babel- macros](https://github.com/kentcdodds/babel-macros)

ESLint would mostly work out of the box. Syntactic rules won't be relevant anymore, such as the one that enforces semicolons, but other rules will be fully useful. You could still enforce no undeclared vars for example. Importantly, you'd still see ESLint errors in your editor exactly where they occur in the .coffee source file, and not in the final transpiled file. This would work, because ESLint can read a babel-compatible AST which is what CS would produce. I've already tried in a small POC.

I'm sure it would be trivial to patch TypeScript to accept babel-compatible AST instead of doing the parsing itself. You'd then use TypeScript as a type- checker and not as a transpiler (This is already possible iiuc with babylon 7). Type checking would then work in .coffee files just like it would in .ts files. Some language-server commands like find-references, goto-definition, and show-type would also work. Refactoring commands of course wouldn't work, because they are specific to the typescript syntax.

Flow would work out the same way too. Right now it has its own parser written in OCaml, which produces an AST that is compatible with that of babylon 7. All you have to do is to bypass that parser and get the AST from CS. You'd then get type errors inside .coffee files, and all the other goodies you expect from flow.

\---

There is no reason why one should have to choose between CS and the rest of the JS ecosystem. The fact that you have to give up type-checking and linting in exchange for CoffeeScript/SweetJS/your-favorite-stage-1-proposal, is only because the tools don't play nicely together. They could. And with all the recent standardisation work already done, that is a low-hanging fruit.

<comment><USER21> You might like Lightscript: [http://www.lightscript.org/](http://www.lightscript.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since you were changing everything, I thought it would include a bunch of new revolutionary syntax and features, just like Coffeescript 1 did many years ago and made the world jump into ES6+.

Since this is just keeping up with the already existing ES6, why would anyone bother to move from ES6 to Coffee?

<comment><USER23> Because it's more concise and readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> At work we started node with node 0.6, CS was nice at the time, it would bring cool stuffs such as arrow functions. Nowadays we are using Typescript, and we love it. To be honest, I am quite happy we are getting rid of CS, the lake of variable declaration specific syntax (as opposed to assignment statements) is really a big bug of the language IMO which can lead to really awful bugs in your code if you are not careful. We have been using [https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate](https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate) to help getting rid of our CS files, it works quite well.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is the language refrence at [http://coffeescript.org/#language](http://coffeescript.org/#language) completely up to date with CoffeeScript 2 or only partially?

Edit:

[http://coffeescript.org/#whats-new-in- coffeescript-2](http://coffeescript.org/#whats-new-in-coffeescript-2) answers this I think.

> The biggest change in CoffeeScript 2 is that now the CoffeeScript compiler > produces modern JavaScript syntax (ES6, or ES2015 and later). [...] There > are very few breaking changes from CoffeeScript 1.x to 2 [...]

So probably that means that the language reference is up to date.

</comment><comment><USER26> As much as I love CoffeeScript (because I love Python), I think over time the project is loosing it's value due to ES6 (Frankly I believe even TypeScript is going to suffer the same plague soon). One possible incentive for me might be the toolkit and the pre-built stuff that I can get out of box from such transpilers (JSX is a good addition for example, however I am surprised why something like PUG, or HAML was not adopted instead of JSX from syntax perspective). None the less I greatly appreciate the hard work team is doing and look forward for stuff like pattern patching and some functional inspirations.

<comment><USER27> For what it's worth, Earl Grey has a more lightweight syntax to build HTML, advanced pattern matching, and looks more like Python: [http://www.earl- grey.io/](http://www.earl-grey.io/) (Disclaimer: I made this).

<comment><USER26> You just read my mind... makes me wonder why is this project so underrated. Will try it out for compile speed and stability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> TypeScript still seems the much better choice.

<comment><USER29> I wish someone could take the best parts of TypeScript and CoffeeScript and put them together.

<comment><USER11> I think its likely that at some point in the future cs will get strong type support. Iirc the creator is opposed to it but theres interest from others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is honestly the first time I have looked close at CoffeeScript. At a passing glance, it looks really close to Python with javascript elements added in. Is that a correct assessment? If it is, this might be for me.

My other question is: how nice does coffee script play with other libraries? We (unfortunately) use jQuery a lot. I have also been using underscore and lodash as well. Are those two even needed when writing coffee script? I'm kind of assuming not, since they're both largely just adding methods/functions.

<comment><USER4> If you like Python, you will love CoffeeScript. :)

I have not used Underscore/Lodash in production, but I use jQuery a lot with CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript does not replace jQuery, although it can make your jQuery a lot nicer.

As far as other libraries, there really are no restrictions; CoffeeScript compiles transparently to JavaScript. The only thing holding it back would be poor support in the specific ecosystem you are working with, such as a lack of plugins that automate the build process. In that case, you may need to compile manually or set up your own build script. But other than that, you can use CoffeeScript in place of JS pretty much anywhere.

<comment><USER30> I figured jQuery would be fine. Now that I think about it, I can't imagine why most things wouldn't really, since all javascript libraries are just extensions of those things.

Does CoffeeScript just convert the modules methods/functions accordingly when needing to be called?

Just curious how that works.

Since so much of JavaScript development, especially nowadays, ties into a lot of frameworks/libraries (modules? I'm not always sure what we want to call it), I just didn't see a reference (maybe I missed it) on their page in regards to what it actually looks like to invoke module/framework/library specific things.

<comment><USER4> CoffeeScript does not do anything framework- or library-specific. It simply compiles your code to JavaScript, which is then parsed and executed as usual.

<comment><USER30> Good point. I guess I'm not making myself clear. If I'm working with jQuery, for instance, do I need to do anything different than I do now in terms of invoking say, the simplest thing, $(function({_..code here.._}) (or for you old schoolers $document.ready({_..code here.._}). Thats what I guess I mean. Maybe I just need to toy with it. I suspect I might be overthinking this in my head.

<comment><USER11> Its actually a great example of Coffeesctipt conciseness, the jQuery ready function is just $ ->

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Will the next version of Rails include this by default? ...Unfortunately, it would be a breaking change, so maybe not until Rails 6?

</comment><comment><USER32> I never understood the need for CoffeeScript. I especially don't understand why someone would want it now.

Compilation of JavaScript is a terrible idea. I have worked with loads of different compile to JS languages. The compile step is a huge pain. The language has to be much much much better than JS for it to be worthwhile. I think that even JSX or TypeScript don't cut it... Close but still not worth the hassle! I used CoffeeScript for 6 months, it was a very lucrative contract but I had to quit in part because I really didn't like CoffeeScript.

What I love in a language is simplicity and unfortunately, you cannot make something simpler by adding a layer of complexity on top of it. It might look simpler at first glance, but it isn't once you start debugging, messing with source maps and buggy source code watchers.

If there was a native CoffeeScript interpreter inside browsers, then I might consider using it... Otherwise, no.

<comment><USER18> Do you use any modern JS tools? Webpack? Require or import? Babel? In my experience any es6 tooling is much of a bigger pain compared to coffeescript tooling.

<comment><USER32> I'm full stack so when I saw the monstrosity of the React ecosystem rear its ugly head a couple of years ago, I retreated to back-end work mostly (I'm waiting out the storm).

For my side projects I currently use the Polymer framework so I don't need a bundler, a compile step or 100 pointless dependencies. The only compilation that happens is when I vulcanize the front end for production (purely as an optimization). No transpiling happens when debugging and this saves me so much time and frustratiom - I just cannot bring myself to use React or TypeScript.

<comment><USER18> That is kinda the point. CoffeeScript pipeline is literally nothing compared to modern a frontend pipeline complexity. And it brings tons of goodies. That is why people use it, even now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So great to see a good release after all these years. Congratulations to all!

I'm curious though about what happened to the Kickstarter project that took a few grand to write what was to be "CoffeeScript 2" at the time - did any of that code end up in this release?

<comment><USER2> It didn't.

Although Geoffrey and folks considered a rewrite of the compiler along the lines of Michael Ficarra's CoffeeScriptRedux, they decided it was more pragmatic just to work with the existing compiler and get it to produce Modern JS instead of the Lowest-Common-Denominator JS it previously output.

A wise choice, especially given 2017 interest and energy levels.

 _Edit:_ To be clear, to the extent anything can or can not be considered official in open source, Michael's project was his project, and never made it in to the main repo. We encouraged it just as we'd encourage anyone to try and make an independent implementation — but CoffeeScript has never asked for financial support.

<comment><USER33> Agreed, getting this upgrade out the door in 2 months is a monumental achievement and I can't imagine a full rewrite happening at anything close to that pace. I'll be happily hacking away with CoffeeScript 2 + Crystal this weekend! Thanks for being awesome :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Huge thanks to CS2 team! Great to see CoffeeScript alive again and targeting ES6, making lot of easier to to choose it for new projects.

I never abandoned CS or converted existing codebases to ES6, as I feel that ES6 hasn't much to offer compared to CS, and you lose the elegant syntax, which was always the major selling point for me (former Pythonista).

CoffeeScript is closer what Javascript was originally meant to be, before Brendan Eich had to adopt Java-like syntax, a decision made by Sun marketing team.

</comment><comment><USER35> I really liked CoffeeScript, it's a good way to generate sane JavaScript. But I have switched to Elm for larger projects. The maintainability it brings is a lifesaver.

</comment><comment><USER36> I love coffeescript, I don't find anything else in Javascript that reflects the strict spacing of python and also shorten the code in a pleasantly communicative way.

</comment><comment><USER37> While I understand the let vs var thing, I wish I could tell the compiler that I promise not to non-obviously reference a local var (e.g. in an eval). Then CoffeeScript could determine it is only written at decl time and could use const. Technically, this could be used for var scoping too in the let vs var issue.

> Keep in mind that const only protects you from reassigning a variable

While I haven't looked, I'd suspect there are performance implications too.

</comment><comment><USER38> Congrats!

I loved the elegance coffeescript & it was the language that convinced me JS was a reasonable target.

Though I, like many, moved to TS, I use CS every day via its spiritual child es6.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think this is great! It allows people using an existing coffeescript code base to transpile to the latest ES.

My question is: Why would you adopt coffeescript in a new project?

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't know what to think about coffeescript anymore. I love it back then before babel and ES6, but right know I didn't even know how to use coffee and a library used today. Still miss the python/ruby-sque sintaxt witouth brackets.

Edit: After reading more about the changes about CS 2.0, I may give it one more chance, let's see how it work now.

</comment><comment><USER41> Huh, just finished migrating a small 5K front end from CS to Scala.js.

Miss the concision of CS, both in terms of syntax and generated output, but otherwise really enjoying _typed_ JS. Also, it's kind of cool not immediately knowing whether a particular source file is for the front end or back end -- like, oh, wait, this is the front end ;-)

</comment><comment><USER42> Been following for a while. Great job getting it out!

CoffeeScript has saved me thousands of hours of parentheses closing alone.

</comment><comment><USER43> I used CoffeeScript for personal projects and absolutely loved the syntax.

Wasn't able to promote it at work though, because of the lack of support at that time (it felt kinda rusty, most 3rd party libraries were deprecated, and no jsx).

Glad to see things are changing, the new release looks great !

</comment><comment><USER44> The breaking changes page is ironically quite broken (latest chrome)

[http://coffeescript.org/#breaking-changes](http://coffeescript.org/#breaking- changes)

Edit: Seems that my computer doesn't consider the cert authority valid for bootstrapcdn.

<comment><USER45> Seems to work here okay. Also latest Chrome.

<comment><USER46> I tried before and after the very latest update without a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It would be nice to have a date on the announcement page. I can only assume it was published on/around September 17, 2017 by looking at the changelog.

</comment><comment><USER48> I wish someone would do the same for LiveScript.

</comment><comment><USER49> I love CoffeeScript. Thanks for this.

I know, I know, "what about types". Perhaps it'll get there one day. There's always flow.

Thanks again.

</comment><comment><USER50> Jeremy,

First off thank you for Underscore, Backbone and CoffeeScript. Your work really has helped me and my development team.

This question is a little off topic but one I've been wanting to ask for a long time:

Last year you took a year off from The New York Times to ride your motorcycle across the Western Hemisphere. Just recently you were hired back at the paper, doing what it appears to be the same thing in the graphics department.

From a hiring perspective, did you have to reapply for your job, or did the Times just give you the necessary time off?

If this was considered a "sabbatical," how did you justify traveling around the Americas as something that could benefit the paper?

I don't mean to offend. I'm genuinely curious. A lot of people aren't fortunate enough to take a year off for traveling and then be rehired at their company, especially in the journalism industry with the revenue declines, job cuts and managers wanting to hire cheaper people.

Thanks again for all you've contributed.

<comment><USER2> Happy to answer, although this is a bit of a funny forum for it:

From a work perspective, it's pretty simple. I quit, and then was rehired to the same position a year later.

But The Times' Graphics Desk was super nice about it. We had a handshake agreement that I'd come back when I got back, and they even lent me a laptop to maybe file some travel-ish bits and bobs from along the road. So in that sense, it was partially justified.

In the end I didn't end up writing anything for them for a few reasons: I didn't want to turn the ride into work; I wasn't on my best NYT-standards behavior (booze, bribes, women) — well, one spectacular woman, and we're married now; and finally, I personally hew somewhat to the Janet Malcolm attitude:

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Especially with respect to travel writing. You can do it right, but you really have to take the time and be invested and involved. And I was riding to follow the seasons and wasn't.

Ultimately, even though the industry as a whole is in decline, the NYT and other world-class news sources are still strong, and in some ways, getting stronger. In particular, the visual journalism The Times publishes every year keeps pushing the state of the art.

<comment><USER50> I admit it is a funny forum to ask this, but, hey, here we are.

Thanks for the response. It seems your situation was unique, and you're definitely fortunate to have a department willing to make this agreement.

The Average Joe more than likely can't pull this off, especially if the company can hire a replacement.

<comment><USER51> I'd say NYT was fortunate to have him, and realized it.

<comment><USER52> agreed, he's a star. And companies, rightfully so, do pretty much all they can to retain stars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Great!

</comment><comment><USER54> Augh. Anytime I see a Coffescript project all I see is wasted money trying to recruit engineers who actually want to use it. 90% of people who write JavaScript roll their eyes and move on.

<comment><USER4> Another way to look at it: you will only draw developers who share your appreciation for whitespace-significant languages.

I have worked on two startups with a fellow programmer who knew Python but not CoffeeScript. He picked it up very quickly, along with Emblem (indented Handlbars alternative, useful for Ember projects) and indented Sass. Once we told the text editor to insert 4 spaces in place of tabs, we had much less to worry about in terms of stylistic disagreements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> First congrats, this is hard-work. Second I implore people not to use a language where the designers think breaking changes are OK, while giving no real advantage over plain modern Javascript or the use of a linter. Worse, since CS has slighly different semantics than JS it will lead to so much confusion. Coffee Script served its purpose, now let it rest.

<comment><USER56> >Second I implore people not to use a language where the designers think breaking changes are OK

This is a big deal when you also have to use libraries written in the same language. Python 3 being a fundamentally different language (the underlying bytecode is not backwards compatible) from Python 2 made the transition very difficult.

However, this will never be a problem for a javascript transpiler.

And also, the list of breaking changes really isn't too incredible. I imagine it'll be fine for most coffeescript projects to take this update quite liberally, as it shouldn't be too hard to write CoffeeScript 1.x/2.x polyglot code to transition to the new version.</comment></comment>


EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/ebays-traffic-drops-amid-identity-crisis/?src=twr

<comment><USER3> eBay's mantra should be, "make it easy to buy, sell, and trade shit". Unfortunately they lost sight of that a long time ago when they were trying to hard to woo bigger sellers with "Buy it Now" and all the other professional features they built into eBay. Their vision was too vague and looked more like, "build a big, online marketplace". Unfortunately for eBay, Amazon started with this vision and executed it much better.

I don't use eBay anymore because its hard to list an item and deal with all the emails about it. Instead, I buy stuff on Amazon much easier at about the same price without all the aggravation of bidding. If I want to sell something, like a book, I can list it on Amazon and sell it without answering a billion emails and typing up a big description.

Amazon is kicking eBay's ass.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, and the subject of eBay came up. The people there were all 30-something professionals, and none had ever bought or sold anything on eBay! Few even bought stuff online. These people are my friends, and I had just presumed that their buying habits were like mine. As I stood in front of them with my mouth open, they asked, "What kind of stuff do you buy on eBay?" in a gee-wiz sort of way.

We at HN are not at all representative of Americans. Everyone in that room had at least one college degree, and the average earnings were probably $100K. Even then, they weren't buying online.

</comment><comment><USER5> It baffles me that eBay is trying to kill its own core competency: connecting people with unusual stuff to sell with people who have unusual things that they want. Auction fees are ludicrously high, and the process is increasingly hostile (and expensive) to small time sellers.

I understand that they want to expand their market into new goods, but given that they have vast competition in that area, why hurt the revenue stream that they had a virtual lock on?

<comment><USER6> _Auction fees are ludicrously high, and the process is increasingly hostile (and expensive) to small time sellers._

Indeed. Isn't it ironic that eBay used to be a community of people (many of which were buying and selling at the same time) and just as social media started ascending, eBay moved in exactly the opposite direction - towards a warehouse model that pissed off the little people who were selling things to clear out their attics.

I am so annoyed at them that I have literally given stuff away rather than sell it on eBay. Right now as a retail site, they are a dead man walking, no matter what their uniques and cash-flow is. I can't see Ebay lasting another 3 years in its current model.

On the plus site, etsy.com seems to have done a great job picking at least one niche of the old eBay market (handmade goods).

<comment><USER7> I agree -- Craigslist is far easier, and suits me much better. generally I don't even have to mess with shipping, but can just drive over and pick something up or have them drop by.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> its all about $$$.

eBay used to save you a crapload over other web stores. Now the difference is so tiny, that there is no reason to take the risk with eBay

<comment><USER9> On the contrary, I think it's all about eBay has long been a market for new goods, instead of the used stuff that the original idea was based off of. Auctions just aren't a very good means to sell new goods.

Go search for any product you like on eBay - the overwhelming majority of the results are new items, from large-scale eBay dealers, using the Buy-it-now feature instead of real auctioning.

In this case eBay has simply become another webstore - and Amazon has had third-party sellers for quite some time also. As a _webstore_ , Amazon's brand name is considerably more powerful than eBay. Not to mention Amazon takes payment on your behalf as a trusted entity - which is more than can be said for the money order and PayPal-based payment system of eBay.

Oh, also, so many eBay listings lowball the selling price and then destroy you on shipping. This is the primary reason why I stopped using the service - <USER2> was too much work having to figure out exactly how much it would cost to get it shipped to me. Amazon third-party sellers are locked to certain shipping rates.

<comment><USER7> Even as a web store eBay sucks -- it's hard to search for something and not get swamped in accessories/manuals/related junk for an item.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Question: If you pooled together a ton of people through some social networking, etc (say 1k people per each state across the US), and got these people to commit to selling their "junk" on a new service for say 1-year, would this be enough of a critical mass to get the ball rolling in terms of creating a real competitor to ebay?

You could start a grass roots movment and have people sign an online petition that says they will boycott ebay and use your service instead. There's enough people that are tired of ebay's overpriced fees that they would probably sign the petition and create some internet awareness.

Is this crazy talk?

<comment><USER11> Facebook has their marketplace, but to be honest, craigslist is better traffic wise than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where do you guys sell your old stuff online? E.g., old laptop you don't need, old GPS navigation when you get a new one, etc?

Ebay is too much hassle, and afaik Craigslist is only local. Any ideas?

<comment><USER13> Amazon, if you close your eyes and ignore the egregious fees. You'll still probably get more money than Craigslist and less danger/hassle than Ebay.

<comment><USER12> Can you sell things on Amazon that they don't sell? E.g., a five year old GPS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ebay lost sight years ago...first with greedy fees, commisions and other pricey features. If they had followed the route necessary to maintain an honest and even keeled market for both sellers and buyers they would be enourmous. It happens so often that corportate greed and shortsightedness does them in. Ebay is no different. Also, Amazon.com is on its way to the same corporate debacle hurting both buyers and sellers with higher fees and controlling the shipping charges. WE NEED A TRUE FREE INTERNET MARKET...

</comment><comment><USER10> I've always thought it would be a grand adventure to try to create a startup that could take over ebay. I was hoping Google would come up with a better model and put them out of their misery but I don't think that's going to happen.

Does anyone know if any up-and-coming startups that are trying to take ebay's market? I'd be glad to support them.

</comment><comment><USER15> Even though I criticized them in another comment on this very thred, hell, maybe this stretagy is working better for them? Of course we as intelligent free-thinking HN readers might not agree with their curret strategy, but if it's making you megabucks, would you actually care?

</comment><comment><USER16> Meg Whitman bailed out on a ship she caused to start sinking.

</comment><comment><USER13> two words: PayPal lol

Ebay was so awesome when it was the wild wild west and you had to actually email back and forth with buyers and sellers to establish a repoire before you trusted them. It baffles me that a smaller auction company has never really risen from Ebay's apparent ashes. I really had my money on Gbay for a while...

Between Ebay, Craigslist and Amazon (who charges say a 15% fee to sell video games), I'll get the most money in my pocket selling on Amazon and that is bullshit.</comment>


PHP Fog is Free Forever, and Now Even More Free - <AUTHOR> http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/12/06/php-fog-is-free-forever-and-now-even-more-free/ <comment><USER2> Kind of funny to have this making front page while the "Don't be a free user" link (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320931>) is the top story. What is the business model here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I am founder and CEO of PHP Fog

The business model is that free is on a shared and limited infrastructure so our costs are low. We also limit the number and resources for free. We have found that we had some room to offer even more without cutting into our margins significantly which is what drives this decision.

Thanks for all your great questions!

<comment><USER3> Alternative answer: "Our business model is freemium-based, as shown here: <https://phpfog.com/pricing> "

<comment><AUTHOR> Touche

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What makes Jason angry?

Company blogs that have the company logo linked back to the blog rather than the company.

PHPFog people, do a quick test: from this blog entry, what can you click that gets you to phpfog.com so that the potential new user you've lured to your world can find out more about your thing and potentially become a customer?

      - Your logo?  No.  Goes to the blog
      - Anything on the sidebar?  No.  Also blog stuff
      - Your logo in the footer?  No.  Not even a link
      - ANYTHING in the footer? No.
      - ANYTHING on the page??? *At All???*  No.

So what can we click? Personally, I clicked the back button. Your thing might be interesting enough to give a few seconds of attention, but I'm not about to go typing things in the URL bar just to figure out what it does.

<comment><USER5> Even more confusing... Go to AppFog (who they renamed to, but seem to still be furthering PHPFog) and click on "Blog" and it goes to the PHPFog blog... but there actually is an AppFog blog, just nothing links to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My interest in having my business rely on PHP Fog has just dropped to zero. This strikes me as a company going on tilt.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. I got the contrary impression: that from top to bottom this looks like a serious company that's going for a sustainable freemium business model, with no intention of flipping. I mean, this isn't a consumer-facing mobile- social-photo-check-in app. It's a platform for developers that has a pretty clear selection of tiered products that includes an introduction tier that's free, for development and testing on shared domain and servers. And they seem to have a pretty clear focus on their customer: developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I am founder and CEO of PHP Fog

Joe hit it right on the nail here. We examined our costs very carefully and found some room to give back to our community.

The right blend that we were going for was give enough to do dev/test for free, and be reasonably priced (<https://phpfog.com/pricing>) when you are ready for production.

When Linode gives away more RAM or AWS makes inbound traffic free, it is not a sign these companies are less trustworthy, but that they love their users. We love developers and are trying to do right by them.

<comment><USER8> Just wanted to say thank you for doing this. It was a rather fortuitous coincidence because I'm starting on a Drupal project and was evaluating hosting options to use for development. I am exactly the demographic you mentioned: use for dev, with a strong consideration of upgrading for production.

So thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, looks like the race to be the PHP PaaS king just got a little hotter. It sounds like PHPFog may be responding to some competitive pressure. Orchestra.io has been offering 2 free apps per account for a while now, and as far as I know, Pagoda Box has offered free-forever apps since they've been around. The free apps are only limited only by resources. Customers can have as many free apps as they like as long as they don't scale beyond the free resources.

This is an interesting move, but not totally unexpected. It'll be interesting to see how the next couple of months play out.

<comment><USER10> I suspect Heroku is going to add PHP in the near-term as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recommend giving PHPFog a try.

I've been running a good-traffic site on PHPFog for about 6 months on the $29 plan. The product has some issues but, overall, I'm quite fond of it, the site speed, newrelic monitoring that they bundle in, and responsiveness of support.

Here are a few subtleties you may uncover. These may or may not be deal- breakers for you - they weren't for me (at least, yet):

1) No control over client-side caching policies via .htaccess. Though, I've heard it's in the works. 2) $5 subdomains seem highly priced. I would be using them if not for that. 3) No SLA (i.e. availability) which makes me a bit jittery. 4) Documentation is murky on MySQL resource usage limits (other than disk space). 5) Flashy error pages from PHPFog when/if the service is down make no secret about where the site is hosted and instance status. Some discretion is probably in order.

There's always room to improve ;)

Keep up the good work, PHPFog!

</comment><comment><USER12> I think the Internet has conditioned me to think of Evony whenever I hear the phrase "Free Forever."

</comment><comment><USER13> While this is a good way to test drive the service, the 3 free apps are only going to work for extremely lightweight apps (20mb database for example) and does not include a custom domain (this costs $5p/m). Without a custom domain it is obviously limited to non real world app deployment. It's a good marketing attempt but don't think you're going to be hosting real world apps unless you pay.

<comment><USER14> That's the brilliance of the the model which I believe was pioneered by Heroku. The ingredients are a super easy-to-use platform and a free plan with resource but no time limits. This way you attract people in when they are poor, inexperienced, have no admin skills, and no expectations for success of their app (which is a huge market). By the time they need to upgrade the platform is proven to them and it's a significant pain point if they want to move, so they willingly pay a heavy premium over what the raw resources would cost if they set them up themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Somewhat off topic, but it looks like their blog has absolutely no link to the main site. I had to edit the URL to see what it was all about.

</comment><comment><USER16> How will they make money? Also, I'm not sure if I want to host my product on the same server where free loaders are.

<comment><USER17> > How will they make money?

Paid plans.

> I'm not sure if I want to host my product on the same server where free > loaders are.

Then don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> None of PHP Fog's paid plans share the same app servers as the free plan.

<comment><USER16> That's good to know. Thank you for clearing that up. I think you should put that on the pricing page. But it could just be a minor concern of mine. I've told my friends in case they're interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It looks great, but I immediately closed that site after I saw that I need to pay 5$ for a custom domain.

<comment><USER19> are you serious? So you want a free domain too? some people!

<comment><USER20> $60 a year for a domain is a bit much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What does it mean by even more free (sic)? Getting paid to use the service?

<comment><USER22> and you get those three apps free forever, can't skip that little tidbit :)

<comment><USER23> Or until PHPFog goes bust/gets bought.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crazier things have happened, but it is hard to go bust with $10M in the bank - [http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/08/11/what-php-fog-will-do- with-...](http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/08/11/what-php-fog-will-do-with-8m/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oh HELL yeah

<comment><USER25> Looks good. I'm going to sign up and setup an account to test some development work. If all goes well, might stay on for production.

Just noticed that the version you have for CodeIgniter seems old. The current CI version is 2.1.0 (<http://codeigniter.com/downloads/>) , you have it at 2.0.0

Any chance you could update it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we will update it shortly!</comment></comment></comment>


Companies Rethink Across-the-Board Pay Raises - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-rethink-annual-pay-raises-for-all-employees-1471964521?mod=pls_whats_news_us_business_f <comment><USER2> This article discusses the benefits of providing few significant raises to high performing individuals rather than a nominal raise to all.

From the employee's (my) perspective:

* If I get a small nominal pay raise, I might stick around for up to the rest of the year, depending on how recently I started at the company. I don't know if this is a good idea, but sometimes promotions and raises aren't on the same schedule.

* If I get no raise, I'll be leaving ASAP.

* If I get a significant raise, I'm more likely to stay stay until next year's raise.

Having nearly doubled my salary in a short time by "hopping" at good offers, there's little reason to stick around in companies that value manager bonuses over employee retention.

<comment><USER3> > Having nearly doubled my salary in a short time by "hopping" at good offers

Watch out, though, because there's a catch-22: if you hop too many times, you can end up being rejected for too many hops.

<comment><USER4> I have never seen this be a serious consideration in this industry. IMO that is a fairly "old school" outlook. Anecdotally I have never had a job for more than two years and it hasn't been an issue for me yet.

An exception to this would be someone who has had a lot of contract work without a lot of FTE, that is definitely a red flag.

<comment><USER3> > I have never seen this be a serious consideration in this industry.

You've been lucky - I've been turned down for positions I was otherwise qualified for because of "too many job changes" (and yes, they told me so). I've also seen hiring managers (from the other side) not even consider resumes with too many jobs of too short a duration. I don't think it's the kiss of death, as long as you're competent; I've never been out of work, in spite of a four-year period where I held four different jobs, but it's worth keeping in the back of your mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> First of all, cost of living goes up gradually, so at the very least, it makes sense to have your satisfactory performers not literally lose purchasing power in their base salary year to year. Or if that's not compelling because a corporation doesn't concern itself with its employees' finances, at the very least, it should be tracking the market, which is liable to change from year to year.

When it comes to me, policy is whatever; at the end of the day, no matter how my comp package is arranged, I'll be looking after my bottom line. If I'm not happy, I'm confident in my ability to seek a better deal. I'd have to really believe bonus-based comp is likely to work out in my favor, at least on the timescale of a few years. Longer than that, it's not appealing, due to the lack of compounding of bonuses.

But I feel like as a developer, I'm a bit insulated from concerns of the mainstream labor market. I just worry that for people without a whole lot of mobility, this is just another step toward institutionalizing wage stagnation.

> Moreover, managers are reluctant to increase base pay further because higher > payroll costs could result in heftier prices for customers, says Tom > McMullen, a senior compensation partner with Korn Ferry Hay Group.

That's rich.

<comment><USER6> Maybe they could give an x% baseline inflation increase, and then y% bonus for quality of work.

<comment><USER7> That x% inflation increase is already what most employers have right now. I get a ~3% raise every year in November, my manager has the ability to +/\- it to distribute the total allocation based on merit to an extent, but everyone gets roughly between 2.5-3.5% which keeps up with inflation - this is fairly standard practice from what I've seen.

<comment><USER8> I can't speak for other large corporations but Oracle does not follow this practice. My experience with small businesses (which employ more Americans than large corporations) is that they too have not followed a practice of guaranteeing a minimum wage increase every year to keep pace with inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The working class should similarly rethink annual pay raises and instead demand annual cuts in working hours.

<comment><USER10> love it

<comment><USER9> For a development of this idea, see [https://www.versobooks.com/books/1989-inventing-the- future](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1989-inventing-the-future)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "For most of us, yearly pay raises are a fixture of corporate life"

Was this article written in 1955 and then accidentally drawn out of the archives and posted in 2016? The annual pay raise died a few decades ago. There were countless articles about it. You can go back and re-read early issues of FastCompany, from the 1990s, where they talk about "you" the worker needs to make themselves essential to the company, because annual raises are dead and only real promotions bring real money any more.

And of course, at some point there emerged in the USA the odd habit of top managers, such that to get a pay increase an employee needs to quit and go elsewhere, or at least has to get a real offer from somewhere else, and only then will "your" company give you a pay increase, to match that competing offer.

<comment><USER12> Dunno about the U.S. but in Australua they are definitely a fixture.

<comment><USER13> UK here - agreed. I don't know anyone working at a corporation where annual raises aren't a thing, they might be small(3-4% if you aren't doing well on your performance review) but they almost seem mandatory.

<comment><USER14> UK as well, pay raises have fluctuated between 1.5% and 15% during my career. Only one year (2009) did I not receive a raise and that was down to the small agency I was working for at the time having a mortgage lender as a primary client. Not the easiest of years for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One thing I missed is any mention of inflation. If you are doing a satisfactory job not deserving of merit or demerit, wages should still be adjusted.

<comment><USER16> What if the larger economic climate in a country is worsening and increasing costs for both the business and its employees?

<comment><USER17> I have had some 0% years during the early 2000's. A couple times I've seen companies slash 5% across everyone to not do layoffs. Just nit happening right now in the US, enjoy the good times while they last!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you want people to not always be looking around to hop to the next salary tier, then ideally people's salary should be ratcheted yearly to "what they could get elsewhere", not blindly based on some simplistic formula like starting * 1.xx^year + performance. Labor is a market just like any other service, and prices (compensation) are set by what the market can bear.

</comment><comment><USER19> B.F. Skinner has demonstrated in his famous experiments that animals react much stronger to rewards that are highly unpredictable. Recently this principle has been applied with much success to the design of addictive online games. Time to apply the same principle to employee motivation?

</comment><comment><USER20> This probably works for C-levels, but for rank and file up to first and second level manager it's just more friction in the job search and recruiting areas. Because now, besides salary, you have to negotiate bonuses.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why would bonuses, which are 1) Taxed higher than income most of the time, and 2) Not guaranteed to happen, be more of a motivator than salary?

<comment><USER22> Bonuses aren't taxed higher. They are, when paid separately, subject to a different (flat) withholding rate, which is often higher than your average withholding rate and, when paid together, they are subject to a higher withholding rate than your average withholding rate because regular withholding rates are shaped by progressive tax structure.

They are actually just regular taxable income, and are _taxed_ exactly the same as additional non-bonus income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Since recruiting excellent people costs nothing and is extremely easy this idea makes sense.

Additionally team and corporate culture are valueless, so retaining these things is unimportant.

Finally we can observe that consultants and executives are the fundamental creative loci in our economy.

<comment><USER24> To play devils advocate, I've quit a few jobs who offered small annual raises because other companies offered me a lot more money to leave.

Honestly a few percent raise a year for a competent programmer is insulting, assuming you're increasing your skill set all the time.

<comment><USER25> > Honestly a few percent raise a year for a competent programmer is insulting, > assuming you're increasing your skill set all the time.

This is wishful thinking. Your skill set (learning new technologies + critical thinking) is unlikely to improve over time. Furthermore, you're constantly competing against new graduates in a world where your "skills" are a generic commodity.

Good luck.

<comment><USER26> If your skill set is not improving over time, you are in serious trouble. When the next lay off bus comes around, they gonna throw you under it.

<comment><USER25> The only skill you need is to read man pages. I don't think you'll become a better reader every year. But if you master this, you could change jobs tomorrow without worry about adapting.

If you're calling technological knowledge a skill, you've already lost.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PyPy 2.6.1 released - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2015/08/pypy-261-released.html

<comment><USER2> Great! I had trouble with vmprof at 2.6.0, so I'm looking forward to giving it a try on 2.6.1.

<comment><USER2> Ok, the problem is that it seems to not work well in a virtualenv, from what I've seen (both 2.6.0 and 2.6.1). Outside of virtualenv, the _vmprof extension gets built automagically, but that step got omitted in the virtualenv install (via pip).</comment></comment>


When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/science/artificial-intelligence-when-is-the-singularity.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&moduleDetail=inside-nyt-region-5&module=inside-nyt-region <comment><USER3> TLDR the singularity hasn't happened yet so it will never happen. Typical low quality technology "journalism".

"For starters, biologists acknowledge that the basic mechanisms for biological intelligence are still not completely understood, and as a result there is not a good model of human intelligence for computers to simulate."

Duh. We don't know how the brain works yet. A big chunk of The Singularity is Near deals with how we build that understanding. Once we know how the brain works, computing will take advantage.

<comment><USER4> We didn't need to know how birds fly to build planes.

<comment><USER5> Mind is different, because you do not want to create a zombie, that acts like a human, but an actually conscious system.

<comment><USER4> Please provide proof that humans aren't zombies. If you act like you're conscious, you _are_ conscious.

<comment><USER5> Consciousness does not have external signs; I have not a slightest idea what it means "act like you're conscious"; a paralyzed person is conscious after all. The only reason to believe that humans (aside of myself, obviously) are conscious is that all humans share structural similarity with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unless there's a page 2 I'm missing, this is a terrible article.

He seems to dismiss the singularity with 3 points

1\. We don't understand human intelligence

2\. "We've" been wrong about it before

3\. Moores law is ending

1\. Who says it has to be human intelligence? 2\. That's not an argument 3\. Moores law -might- be ending but datacenters are getting bigger and bigger

<comment><USER7> Seems to be a lot of people thinking Moore's Law ending means that innovation in computers is over. It's really just the opposite. We can't rely on simple scaling anymore, so we need to take more innovative steps to push computing forward.

<comment><USER8> There's a limit to what you can do without "simple" scaling, meaning, without making cheaper, faster, smaller individual gates. That is, an architecture optimized for a given problem domain will give you maybe 1000x efficiency improvement over a more general architecture, but that's it. (Typically it will be <1000x, but let's say you're lucky; the point is, that's your last 1000x, and then you'll see no improvements, _ever_.)

So if Moore's law is indeed over, progress will be slow, domain-specific, and decelerating due to diminishing returns (specializing for a problem domain is worth it as long as that domain is not too narrow but at some point it's too narrow to justify the investment into building specialized hardware for it; you'll be better off using something less specialized. GPGPU, which does not provide amazing performance in an absolute sense, but does beat CPUs on a large range of problems, is an example to this - any accelerator more efficient than GPGPU needs to be justifiable in the sense that GPGPU is already there wherever there's a need for GPU doing graphics, which is where GPUs do provide amazing performance in an absolute sense [you can totally beat GPGPU with more specialized hardware on most benchmarks, while you can't beat GPUs in graphics.])

I'm a chip & accelerator architect, so it's not like I'm particularly happy about this, I think I'm realistic though. A higher-caliber architect saying the same pessimistic thing is Bob Colwell.

The one nice thing about really stopping at some manufacturing technology and not being able to improve any further is that the cost of using this technology will likely continue dropping for some years. Only when it reaches the bottom will progress have truly stopped.

<comment><USER7> Interesting analysis, thanks. What do you think about the development of more radical redesigns like quanum computers, memristors, or anything else that might show promise to displace the traditional CPU? It seems that there's a lot going on in the more experimental side of computing right now that is reaching enough maturity where experiments might become practical products within the next decade. Even if we don't have pocket-sized quantum computers, the existence of cloud computing might make something like quantum annealing practical in the near future. Is there anything that has you excited?

<comment><USER8> Displacing CPUs is not the issue (the CPU occupies less than half the area of a modern application processor chip for instance), the problem is displacing CMOS. I don't know much about the alternatives, but I trust Colwell's skepticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For me, the tl;dr on the entire subject of the Singularity can be summarized as:

"...the field of artificial intelligence has a long history of over-promising and under-delivering..."

That being said, I think we are finally at the dawn of "useful AI," like when my iPhone correctly guesses where I am headed and gives me a time estimate. For normal humans such as myself, this is WAY cooler and more exciting.

<comment><USER10> _> That being said, I think we are finally at the dawn of "useful AI"_

Were AI systems that outperformed humans in solving complex differential and integral equations useless? Were systems that diagnosed diseases better than doctors useless? Were systems that handled logistics at scale never possible before useless?

All of those were created in the past (60s, 70s, 80s).

The problem with AI was never the lack of results. It was the hype that far exceeded the results, however useful and practical they were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was told that driverless cars would not be in my lifetime, and that a machine would not beat a human at Go in my lifetime. We'll see.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. I remember attending a presentation by Google regarding their self- driving cars. What they told us fascinated me. Their last main hurdle is ethics, and they used to following scenario to illustrate:

Two motorcycles are coming towards the self-driving car, and the car is forced to crash into one of them. One of the motorcyclists is not wearing his helmet, and there's a definite chance of fatal injury if crashed into by a car. By not wearing his helmet, he is also breaking the law.

The other motorcyclist is wearing her helmet, and there's less of a chance of fatal injuries.

Should the self-driving car crash into the law-abiding motorcyclist who is doing everything right but with a less chance of fatal injuries, or into the irresponsible non-helmet wearing motorcyclist where injuries could be fatal?

That's the kind of scenarios they have to deal with. The technology however, works.

<comment><USER13> The answer to almost all of these hypothetical problems is "hit the brakes". Speed is the main killer in automobile accidents, it's a power law. Just a small reduction in velocity can have a dramatic impact on the survivability of an accident.

What about the question of whether to swerve into traffic to avoid a kid who ran into the street from between two parked cars?

Answer: you were going too fast to begin with. If you're travelling anywhere that this is a possibility, your maximum speed should be less than 20mph. A collision at that speed is almost never fatal. That speed also allows almost instant braking.

The fact that autonomous cars will be driving so slow and defensively in the suburbs will perhaps be the biggest cause for the coming backlash against them.

<comment><USER14> We're talking about exceptional circumstances. With hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles on the road, 1 in a billion is next Tuesday. We can minimize the need for this decision, but leaving the behavior undefined will just lead to headaches when it does happen.

<comment><USER13> We have currently ~30,000 fatalities in a year. What portion of these are trolley problems? Less than 1 in a million, I'd bet. What percentage of those trolley problems are entirely avoidable through proper defensive driving techniques?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> so the whole idea of the "singularity" has been overblown by fiction and media. The reason we call it a "singularity" is because it is part of the "acceleration" which is the observation that the rate of human progress in technology is increasing faster over time.

The "singularity" is the point beyond which the rate of change is faster than humans can internalize and react to it. Super AIs and being uploaded to the great server in the sky are just ways we imagined an event literally defined by our inability to imagine it.

The singularity could have a few outcomes:

\- The classical "humanity gets left behind by it's creations" doomsday

\- The rate of change caps out simply because humanity cannot drive change much faster than humanity can react to it.

\- The rate of change asymptotically approaches our capacity to handle it.

Interestingly, even after the "singularity" happens these three states may be indistinguishable to us.

Right now I am leaning towards the second outcome, that the singularity has come, and now we are simply crap at predicting the future because of it. I saw this a few months ago and considered it a potential symptom of that outcome [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEIPfpxFrlg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEIPfpxFrlg).

</comment><comment><USER16> While I concede it is unlikely anything resembling a Vingeian singularity is going to occur in my lifetime, I am actively working towards building the technology to bootstrap the singularity. It seems far more useful to spend time building new technology that people look at and consider real and surprising accomplishments (for example, AlphaGo), or to understand the neural correlates of intelligence, than to spend time pontificating about whether the singularity will occur.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very poor quality times article.

Read the two Wait But Why posts on this: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolu...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolution-1.html)

[http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolu...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolution-2.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> "The notion of the Singularity is predicated on Moore's Law" \- is it?

<comment><USER19> No, it's predicated on exponential growth, of which Moore's law was one small part...

<comment><USER20> > it's predicated on exponential growth

Is that part even necessary? Even linear growth with a higher constant factor than humans have due to faster iterations could rapidly outgrow human capabilities if we take a hypothetical human-level AI as starting point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> IMHO the "Singularity" will be achieved when AI will invent new things. We have only reached the point where AI can only do improvements of something humans have created... Innovation is something hard for humans, so I don't know if we will see AI innovations anytime soon.

<comment><USER20> I think your standard needs some work. Humans also only improve something other humans have created. And in niche applications AIs already outperform humans.

[http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of- circuits/](http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/)

Ctrl+F for "baffling"

<comment><USER22> That is really interesting! Here's the paper. [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.63....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.63.4366&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your view on singularity largely depends on your relationships with John Searle Chinese room argument; I accept it, and do not find Kurzweil views convincing.

<comment><USER23> I read the Chinese room argument, it seems really naive. It's like saying "my neurons aren't conscious therefore I am not conscious", which is clearly not the case.

We're made of matter, computers are made of matter, where is the difference?

<comment><USER5> > It's like saying "my neurons aren't conscious therefore I am not conscious", > which is clearly not the case.

You need to read Searle's works again; his point is actually the opposite - <USER2> are machines made out of biological neurons, which seem to have an externally unobservable property of being conscious; we do not know what it is caused by, but we can see today that it is possible to create a simulation of human behavior by means of logical gates. We have no idea if it will have mind or not.

> We're made of matter, computers are made of matter, where is the difference?

That's an odd argument. And actually does not contradict Searle at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The "Singularity" would be the end of humanity, if it ever happened.

<comment><USER25> By definition not in our lifetime then.

<comment><USER26> Well the laws of physics means it would take some finite time from the initiation of the singularity to the end of all life even if the singularity was extremely hostile to humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py less HUMINT more LOVEINT

</comment><comment><USER27> This article raises literally zero new points that have not been addressed over and over by futurists, "transhumanists", and others optimistic about the singularity.

1.) Moore's law still holds true at the moment. If and when it does stop the argument will begin to have some weight. The claim that Moore's law is about to stop has been made over and over since the 90s. Until then it is empty.

2) Moore's law continuing ad infinitum is not a necessity for the singularity. Distributed computing, neural chips, quantum and biological computing all provide avenues for continued vertical hardware evolution, not counting the Google method of rigging together thousands or millions of average machines to produce incredibly powerful supercomputers.

3) The sheer amount of data we are collecting continues to increase exponentially. ([http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt- data/](http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/)), much of which is applicable to machine learning algorithms which brings us to point 4.

4) The efficiency and adaptability of machine learning algorithms continue to improve year on year. See DeepMind's early videos playing video games., etc., etc. To imagine that we won't see new innovations just as incredible almost every year from here to 2050 is incredibly naive and unrealistically pessimistic.

So considering that in each of the fundamental areas that we know are necessary for an AGI -- ie raw computing power, processable/interpretable data, efficiency/cleverness of algorithms -- we are achieving exponential growth year on year, it is reasonable to conclude we will get a machine that can pass the Turing test in our lifetimes.

This is also ignoring the multitude of other areas that contribute to the likelihood of an intelligence explosion. Brain to computer and brain to brain interfaces are in their early days but already exist. As they become more practical they could lead to exponentially more efficient research. Systems like Watson will speed up scientific research as they evolve. Nootropics and electromagnetic brain stimulation also help in this area.

Capitalism strongly incentivizes innovators to produce technology that automates ever more complex problems, or create tools that improve the efficiency of creating complex problem solving technology. This is an iterative, continuous process that we are all a part of, knowingly or not.

Now that humanity has been connected with a sort of digital nervous system, and is thoroughly incentivized to all aim towards this intelligence explosion, one way or another, it is naive to think we won't continue to find novel ways of improving the efficiency of every single system we utilize no matter how macro- or microscopic, which creates an intelligence creating feedback loop. The singularity has already happened, its just not running fast enough yet for it to 'feel' magical and miraculous the way it will once human level intelligence is shown across multiple fields by integrated computer systems.

<comment><USER28> > "1.) Moore's law still holds true at the moment. "

No it doesn't, it's already broken. Consider:

[http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/07/intel-confirms- tick...](http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/07/intel-confirms-tick-tock- shattering-kaby-lake-processor-as-moores-law-falters/)

<comment><USER27> Depends who you ask. Until we clearly go a reasonable amount of time in which it proves false we should assume that any momentary hold ups/falterings are just that.

[http://www.hpcwire.com/2016/01/11/moores-law-not-dead-and- in...](http://www.hpcwire.com/2016/01/11/moores-law-not-dead-and-intels-use- of-hpc-to-keep-it-that-way/)

[http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/11/20/top500/](http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/11/20/top500/)

<comment><USER28> I didn't see anything in the first HPC Wire article about Moore's law not being dead. All they really said was that HPC was a useful tool to continue improving processor performance:

"Without supercomputers, we wouldn't be able to understand what it takes to continue the march of Moore's Law, and without this understanding, we wouldn't be able to create more powerful supercomputers. This symbiosis is at the heart of the relationship between Moore's Law and HPC."

As for the second HPC Wire article, this sums it up fairly well:

"What you see is that the performance per core has taken a dramatic hit around 2005-2006, but it was compensated by our ability to put more and more cores on a single chip"

Increasing the number of cores on a CPU is not the same as keeping Moore's Law. We could keep doubling transistor count every two years if we could keep doubling the silicon wafer size at the same time. Moore's Law only really makes sense if you consider it as doubling the number of transistors within the same wafer size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The real problem with people saying "not in your lifetime" is that they fail to understand the exponential nature of a self-improving AI entity. That's the whole reason it's the singularity. Lets say we create an AI that can rewrite and improve itself. The first iteration may take a year to actually be better. But then the next version is only a month away. Then the next is only a day.

Suddenly the AI has self-improved beyond our understanding before we even realize or understand what happened.

The true singularity is dangerous precisely because we won't know when it actually happens, and it will outpace us before we can respond.

Preemptive drone strikes against AI programmers don't sound too far fetched given the direction things are going.

Of course, the singularity is a zero-sum game, in the sense that the first entity there wins. Which is why I plan on programming the singularity AI as a copy of my consciousness so that I will be the singularity god.

<comment><USER30> I think your plan just has the AI god more likely to be fond of you.

<comment><USER29> I consider that good enough. Also, confused about the downvotes with no response/explanation.

<comment><USER31> Basically, everyone is downvoting you because you're out of your mind.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Verifiable Data Structures (2015) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/trillian/blob/master/docs/VerifiableDataStructures.pdf <comment><USER2> How does it relate to blockchain?

<comment><USER3> A block chain is a similarly verifiable append-only log and map. However, block chains loosen the restriction of "trust this other singular party but verify what they have done" and broaden that to, "trust the majority of nodes in this network, but verify." It's likely that there is some improvement in the periodic "publish an authoritative tree hash" step which digital currencies do not use yet, see the table at the back and think about how many cases one needs to download the entire ledger for with digital currencies... But of course the proof-of-work schemes are important to get that "majority of the nodes" trust.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Switching from application development to games development? - <AUTHOR> Senior developer with 7 years experience developing software for web and mobile.
I've read up plenty on how to begin a career in games programming from college/university to junior, mid etc.
However I haven't found anything about developers wishing to cross from application to games or vice-versa.
Since I was young I have modified games, from simple things like INI files in C&C to fullscale modding in military simulation games.
My interests would be more on logic and scripting (FSMs, triggers, levelling etc)
My weaknesses are definitely complex maths, memory management (Java guy) and networking.
I had thought about getting into a games dev as an application developer and then working my way to internally work on a game engine.
Tech (2 years C++, 6 years Java, 7 years Javascript, 2 years Kotlin)
Interested to hear on suggestions.
note: I am building a portfolio for the new year. <comment><USER2> Unity is an excellent place to start.

I took this Udemy course on Unity to get started, and enjoyed it quite a bit. [https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse2/learn/v4/overview](https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse2/learn/v4/overview). The coding parts go by a bit too slowly if you can stare at a C# function and get the gist despite not knowing C#, but the graphical portions are exciting. Meanwhile, if videos or paid courseware aren't your thing, I've seen several great free tutorials online.

I was also helped out by a casual background in Blender (from 3D printing and modeling) so messing around with Blender is a great to wrap your head around asset creation, rigging for animation, and scene design. If you end up liking Blender a lot, there's a python scripting engine you can use for designing the entire game with Blender (personally I prefer the whole-package experience within Unity more, despite being a Python developer by day).

Once you're decent in Unity, it's a pretty employable skill and you could get a job working in game development or with something else (interactives for museums, flight training module design, and web interactives are all examples of fields where friends use Unity). That could be a good way to get paid to learn.

Finally, consider the non-technical skills necessary to create a game (particularly in a small studio). Music, artwork, storyboarding, UI design, etc are all important parts of the process, particularly at a smaller studio that may not have teams of teams to handle every little task. Picking up a few of those can't hurt, and will be necessary if you'd like to make games for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Regardless of you want to code your engine from scratch, I recommend you to watch at least 1 Unity training video, that will reveal the current state of the industry.</comment>


The Bin Laden Tapes (audio) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b065sx7b <comment><AUTHOR> BBC Radio Four has a great set of audio documentary that they've released as podcasts under the title "Seriously".

This one is about the approx 1,500 audio cassette tapes found in the Bin Laden compound in 2002, and what was on them.

> In early 2002, following the fall of the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden's > abandoned compound in the Afghan city of Kandahar was ransacked.

> Among the finds was a collection of more than 1500 audio cassettes featuring > sermons, speeches, songs and candid recordings of Arab-Afghan fighters, > recorded between the 1960s up until the 9/11 attacks.

But there are many documentaries and many of them are going to be of interest to HN.

The art of starcraft: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06r4gpd](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06r4gpd)

Hippy Internet - the whole earth catalogue: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rx8jc](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rx8jc)

(The Whole Earth Catalogue was _amazing_. I really miss that level of curation.)

The main page for the Seriously collection is here: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/8gfBTh59WxRB9Q2bd7s...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/8gfBTh59WxRB9Q2bd7sbW/the- archive)</comment>


What is this site? - <AUTHOR>

I just got here and im wondering what is this site about? <comment><USER2> Social news site with a community of people interested in hacking (the non malicious kind), startups, and Paul Graham.</comment>


Elon Musk: Moving to Mars would cost about $200,000 - <AUTHOR> https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/elon-musk-cost-spacex-ticket <comment><USER2> How much law to take with? See, marslegalcode.org.</comment>