Caltech glassblower's retirement has scientists sighing - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassblower-20160613-snap-story.html <comment><USER3> While unfortunate, Caltech had years to let the current glassblowr train a replacement - it's not like this was an unforeseeable event.

While it's unfortunate that it's a struggle to find a replacement now - <USER2> from the outside I don't know what went on leading up to this - I can't help but think if they'd set the budget for it a decade ago, they wouldn't be in this situation.

<comment><USER4> Now we need a massive governmental program to encourage children to become scientific glass blowers and promote tons of glass blowing courses on Udacity.

<comment><USER5> I do look like a decent hobby and craft. Probably on par with knifemaking.

<comment><USER6> given that they have to craft a design for an apparatus based in part on a knowledge of chemistry so they understand the experiment, thermodynamics, as well as material science, etc, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more complex then knifemaking.

<comment><USER5> > part on a knowledge of chemistry so they understand the experiment, > thermodynamics, as well as material science, etc,

By coincidence proper heat treatment requires all of those too :) Depending on how deep you want to plunge.

<comment><USER7> The difference is that a knife isn't likely to explode, sending hot, toxic gases and acids all over the laboratory.

<comment><USER8> Not to belabor the point, but Knifemaking _can_ involve exposure to high temperature molten salt baths (Sodium and Nitrate salts), liquid nitrogen, precise timing, temperature control, and varieties of chemical etchants.

It seems that they probably have similar risks, though glassblowing for the lab might require a broader domain knowledge.

<comment><USER7> You're talking about knife-making, I'm talking about _knife-using_. While it may be the case that a knife-maker works with high temperatures and toxic substances, it is not the case for a knife-user. Users of laboratory glassware, on the other hand, are constantly risking exposure to this stuff. They depend on high quality glassware to keep them safe.

The consequences for using a poorly-made Erlenmeyer flask are potentially devastating on a far larger scale than for a poorly-made knife.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We had a machinist in the Physics department at my university who made incredible things. He made things that are out in space and tons of cool and very difficult hardware for laser systems and particle accelerators. He could make practically anything and was a great resource for us physics students to learn some practical things like how to use a milling machine, machinability of materials, tolerancing, and how to articulate our needs to a machinist. Sadly when he retired, I heard that they didn't replace him. I still feel like it was a huge loss for the department.

I think the glassblower here is the same. Such a shame that we don't have pipelines for more people to pursue things like this.

<comment><USER10> In the engineering faculty at my university there's actually a machine shop with people of various specialities. If you go there you can get things made as long as you have a CAD drawing for them to work from. They'll also point out issues in the drawing if they see them.

We also had a student machine shop where students could work and there was a technician on hand to give advice (and prevent you from doing something stupid).

<comment><USER11> Having machinists in an engineering school makes sense from an undergraduate education perspective; for certain types of engineering, designing something with CAD and having a machinist make a prototype is a core part of the work students are being trained to do.

I assume getting custom glass blown isn't a core requirement of the chemistry curriculum, or a very common thing for working chemists to be doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how many skills like this are getting harder and harder to find as people retire?

I'm reminded of an article I read about 20 years ago by James Boyk, who was Caltech's music lab director and pianist in residence, about the difficulty of finding piano technicians skilled enough to maintain pianos for concert level pianists after his long time piano technician moved away [1].

[1] [http://www.its.caltech.edu/~boyk/essay.htm](http://www.its.caltech.edu/~boyk/essay.htm)

<comment><USER13> Or the case of the optician Achim Leistner [1]. He had to be brought out of retirement for the kilogram replacement project, as no-one else could feel atomic scale irregularities. His employer is no longer looking for a replacement optician, as the lab in which he worked has been closed [2].

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

[2] [http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/a-thing-of- beauty-...](http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/a-thing-of-beauty-csiro- scientists-bemoan-loss-of-worldleading-technology-20160223-gn1upg.html)

<comment><USER14> Fascinating. Is there an explanation for his 'atomic feeling'? Doesn't seem possible. And if it's more accurate than machine measurements, how do they determine that?

<comment><USER15> The best hypothesis that I've been able to piece together from various description of these types of "feelings" is that the individual exhibit very specialized forms of visual synesthesia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Same thing happened at the University of Washington which as a world class research institution has only a single glass shop in the Physics department. A cost cutting *sshle chair (theoretician) didn't like the expenditures on experimental physics and forced the glass blower into early retirement. Chemistry doesn't even have one.

This is a beautiful HD video of sealing a nixie tube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_sKuQ8Fm8c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_sKuQ8Fm8c)

Borosilicate Glass working is like throwing clay + science, with added dimensions of heat and time.

<comment><USER17> "subtle science and exact art" \- s. snape

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a shame the apprenticeship culture isn't as prominent these days. Are we really fine with keeping the torch in the last generation?

<comment><USER19> It is very much alive in Germany, and this is regularly mentioned as a reason why the economy there is doing relatively well. [0]

From the German wikipedia, I see there's a school that educates glass blowers, and they have various areas of specialisation. [1]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany#Apprentic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany#Apprenticeship) [1] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasbläser](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasbläser)

<comment><USER20> Even there it's definitely not as robust as it used to be, though it's not declining as quickly as elsewhere. I'm more familiar with the Danish system, which used to be somewhat modeled after the German one, but has rapidly changed over the past 20 years. The main problem is that, of two higher- education tracks that were previously both seen as a path to a stable, well- paying job, the vocational/training and the university tracks, pay and employment rates have diverged rapidly to the point where university is now clearly seen as the better path. Lots of reasons, ranging from automation to outsourcing to immigration. In the 1970s in Denmark a skilled machinist working at a shipyard made more than a typical office worker, and had high job security. But that is no longer the case. Every shipyard in Denmark has now closed, for one thing, which led to many of the people who used to have good jobs there struggling to find new work.

There are definitely still niches where the vocational path can get you a very high-paying job, but as a whole it's seen as a riskier bet than it used to be, so is getting less popular. There's also a feeling that even picking a vocational area that looks hot now is too risky, because in 10 years it might share the fate of the shipping industry. (A similar story can be told about the steel industry in the US, which was once seen as a very good career path, but now tends to serve as more of a object lesson for why not to follow the vocational-skills path.)

<comment><USER21> Most plumbers and electricians I know make a lot more money than the infinite number of "social media specialists" or "copywriters" I know. The problem isn't risk, it's perception of self-worth. Many millennial-types view the trades as beneth them (as they pour coffee at Starbucks waiting for some value to be realized from their worthless gender-studies degree.)

<comment><USER22> I don't think these millennial-types are any different in that regard than their Gen-X predecessors.

Except of course that adult Gen-X slackers, who are more likely to be a homeowner, have had a lot more time to learn what a good plumber or electrician is worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wandering through the halls at Caltech was always fun. There was all the clutter of lab equipment that spilled out into the halls, and gas cylinders stashed everywhere. Rooms filled with equipment of inscrutable purpose, and the well-equipped machine shops.

Quite a paradise for a nerd like me.

</comment><comment><USER24> Notably the Salem community college program has produced a number of the big names in "scientific" glass pipe blowing(i.e. bong moguls).

I'd imagine the money is better making high end smoking apparatus than lab gear.

<comment><USER25> As far as I'm aware, artistic glass blowing is a different field from the scientific stuff, with different training and different schools. For those unfamiliar with what's out there, the work of this person is pretty famous and sought-after [http://saltglass.com](http://saltglass.com)

<comment><USER16> Artistic glass blowing (lampworking) absolutely overlaps with scientific glass blowing. What you are thinking of is hot glass using a kiln.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Call me crazy, but something like universal basic income might make people more apt to "go for" skills and apprenticeships such as this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Quote from OA

 _" This year, Salem Community College graduated 31 glassblowers — for years, the school graduated about 20 each year — and it expects 66 incoming students next school year. Social media videos have sparked new interest in the craft, Briening said."_

Perhaps a couple of apprenticeships while the experienced ones are still around? Wouldn't cost _that_ much.

I'm liking this increase in interest in craft production and manual skills - the kind that are harder to taylorise.

<comment><USER28> Exactly, they make it seem like it somehow is society that changed to not have glassblowers anymore but the reality is that it was their simple business decision.

Hiring a rookie glassblower or two at maybe 50.000 a year for 5 years would have cost them perhaps half a million. And now instead of that they're going to have to 'steal' one from another university for god knows how much money and God knows for how long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My undergrad university had the same issue, and the last glassblower retired 15 years ago founded a company and kept supplying the necessary equipments to the research cluster.[1]

The glassblowers there seemed to think that the repair of broken glass equipments is potentially hazardous to the glassblower, and one of the founders who handled more repair requests had two cancer surgeries. It's only an anecdote, but it could be a reason why it is difficult to find a successor of this 71 year-old person.

[1] [https://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ha...](https://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hankookilbo.com%2Fv%2F62ea2d5f5a404979ab473302c20be9cc)

</comment><comment><USER30> There is a curious effect that seems to bring together the most advanced science and technology with very old tech otherwise thought obsolete. The place where you are most likely to find floppy discs is probably a research lab, because a rare, very expensive instrument saves its data on them. Space probes use ancient CPUs like 386's as they can handle the radiation.

<comment><USER31> I suspect the effect at work is simply a lack of money. Those ancient technologies aren't better in any way, but developing new ones has an implicit cost that's hard to justify when the old technology still does the job, however poorly. It would be possible to use a radiation hardened CPU that's far better than a 386 but only if someone spends millions in research and testing first - no one is willing to do that when an existing variation of a 386 does the job already.

<comment><USER32> As feature sizes shrink it becomes much more difficult to create rad hardened integrated circuits. Modern DRAM just barely works at ground levels of background radiation, let alone what it would see in space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sounds like someone needs to do a _Foxfire_ [1] series around Chemistry and Physics departments.

[1] [http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx](http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx)

"With nearly 9 million copies in print, The Foxfire Book and its eleven companion volumes stand memorial to the people and the vanishing culture of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, brought to life for readers through the words of those who were born, lived their lives, and passed away there—words collected by high school students who wanted to be a part of their community and preserve their heritage."

// edit: corrected link, added quote

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm amazed that chemistry equipment is not made in some sort of factory that uses machines to spew out millions of containers?

How many other things do you think are actually made by hand, where you'd think they're made by machine?

<comment><USER35> The article says that he worked mostly on custom glass shapes with properties that were very difficult to factory produce, or had very low demand, not enough for a factory to bother with.

<comment><USER34> Sure, but you'd think there was some 3D printer sort of thing that could do this?

I've never seen it done with glass, just plastic and metal.

<comment><USER36> 3d printed glass doesn't have nearly the optical clarity or strength properties of blown-annealed glass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does this mean modern apprenticeship systems fail us? If there is such a strong demand for this very niche skill set, there's gotta be financial incentives to raise journeymen to the masters.

</comment><comment><USER38> Some chemical companies still have scientific glassblowing departments.

</comment><comment><USER39> Could you replace glass blowing with 3D printed ceramics with a glass doping?

IT would have better thermal resistance, integrity, and be able to still stand up to corrosive chemicals due to a glass doping.

The main issue is that it would not be transparent.

</comment><comment><USER40> Considering the loss of old time glass factories in West Virginia and Ohio, some only have had shut down in the last decade, one or two are still about, plus the former glass blowers and artists are working independent there are ample people who could get up to speed and work glass for laboratories

<comment><USER41> The problem with laboratories is not only technique working the glass, but as the article points out, also generally knowing how the experiment might affect the glass (or vice versa). These can be very specific issues that the chemist might not think of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> That's a bong.

</comment><comment><USER43> It takes ten years to train people of that skill. Not having access to a capable glassblower as a chemical researcher is an infrastructure problem that cannot be solved with any amount of money. You need a master glassblower to train the next generation, and you need capable apprentices, and it still takes ten years.

Neoliberals, note that fact.

<comment><USER44> Noted. Please explain how this interesting article warrants political mudslinging.

<comment><USER45> While snarky in tone, he has a point - The Market doesn't have a spectacular track record of having foresight longer than the next quarterly report.

<comment><USER46> I remember having this argument with an invisible-hand fanatic, who thought that the economics of supply and demand simply solved everything.

"So... a neurologist takes 13 years to train from scratch. How does the market manage that?"

<comment><USER44> Well, to be fair the market _does_ manage quite well! Since it's so hard to become a neurologist, there's a shortage unless the pay is _so_ good that people are willing to forgo 13 years of their life to get there.

<comment><USER47> If you ignore the massive subsidization by the federal government, then the market manages just dandy. Taxpayers spend north of $15B on graduate medical education annually.

<comment><USER48> Were there no neurosurgeons _before_ those gov't subsidies were in place?

<comment><USER7> Government subsidy of the arts and sciences is a practice that dates back to the ancient world in the form of _patronage_ [1]. If you wanted to be ridiculously pedantic, as some people on the internet are known to be, you could argue that the neurosurgical procedure known as trepanation [2] dates back to at least 7000 years ago. However, the modern science of neurosurgery is far more recent so I do not think it is at all unfair to claim that gov't subsidy predates neurosurgery by a wide margin.

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

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

<comment><USER48> Neurosurgery (as we know it today) first came about in the early 1900's.[1] CMS, the gov't institution that funds residencies, was created in the 1930's (well, it predecessor was).

And if we look outside of neurosurgery to general medical practice, we'll find that it was humming along quite nicely without any gov't support.

[1][http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/index.php/about_us_history.html](http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/index.php/about_us_history.html)

<comment><USER7> You just provided a link to UCSF, a _government-funded public university_ [1], to prove your point that the government didn't fund the development of neurosurgery?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#Histo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#History)

<comment><USER48> Just because a government-funded institution creates a webpage describing the history of a subject, _doesn 't mean that government funded institution created that subject._

If I link to a NHTSA website on the history of cars, are you going to argue the government invented cars?

<comment><USER7> So your argument is that government didn't come up with the original idea for neurology and therefore, what, exactly?

What is your argument?

<comment><USER47> I think that, because at some point there was a doctor, therefore the free market will make doctors just fine. Ignoring that medicine is one of the least free markets in the US (and even less outside the US) as irrelevant. From education (college subsidies, loans), public financing of med schools, public financing of post med school education, etc. Not to mention who actually pays for all that medical treatment. Or just random free market magic argle bargle.

<comment><USER48> I don't disagree that the US healthcare system is the exact opposite of a free market. But I do disagree that it would be impossible for a functioning healthcare system to exist without the gov't.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. The free market is predicated on free individuals making free choices. If you contract a fatal, but curable disease there is no practical limit to the amount of money you'll pay for the cure. The fact that your very life depends on this treatment makes you a non-free person, rendering the free market dysfunctional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Why is this guy hard to replace? There are tons of college stoners who have the skills to blow you any glass you want. Visit your local head shop if you doubt this. Why not get one of those?

<comment><USER50> It's not just general glassblowing skill; it's the intersection of that skill with knowledge of the sets of uses to which it will be put, and the techniques specific to creating forms that are not just bongs and statues.

<comment><USER42> I've seen some pretty intricate and complex bongs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> there are a lot of good glass blowers in the weed industry. I just don't think they would leave their current job. :)

</comment><comment><USER52> Are we at the point of being able to 3D print glassware yet?

I don't know if printed would have the same strength as hand blown, but they could maybe fill in some of the gap with printed pieces.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is it technologically feasible to "3D print" (or "3D blow") scientific glassware?

I know it's possible to use computers to design the glassware apparatus that take into account the material constraints of glass, but is there a difficulty gap in translating that into an actual machined product?

<comment><USER15> I'm curious why this is being downvoted. Did I miss something fundamental in the original article that speaks to why this works or doesn't work?

The intent of my question wasn't to blindly try to techsmith a solution, but rather, to understand what a traditional practitioner brings to the table vs. what can be provided via an automated process.</comment></comment>


How Apple's new medical research platform was born - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/104983/the-inside-story-of-how-apples-new-biomedical-research-platform-was-born/

<comment><USER2> It leads to an improbable, but still interesting, question about sampling bias. We may learn a ton about affluent people who can afford iphones.

(Not a critique of the work, which I think is awesome and has the potential to do great things. I just think it's an interesting angle to think about.)

<comment><USER3> If this works, recruitment costs will go way down & researchers could afford to give/loan people iOS devices who may not own one. Very excited about Research Kit.</comment></comment>


The Booz Allen 'Partner In Ethics' Progam [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/Partner-in-Ethics-Questionnaire.pdf

<comment><USER2> Participation requires _" A policy requiring your employees to report misconduct"_

Looks like Sonwden's off the hook, at least with his empployer!</comment>


[Show HN] Showofffr.com - our DjangoDash project - <AUTHOR> http://showofffr.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the product of 48 hours for a team of two (myself and my friend Chris Jones).

Showofffr is a handy place to put HTML, CSS, JS and images so you can easily show them to a client, co-worker, whatever as mockups/wireframes.</comment>


Show HN: Desktop all in one messenger - <AUTHOR> http://meetfranz.com/ <comment><USER2> too bad it's not open-source, unlike [http://rambox.pro/](http://rambox.pro/)

<comment><USER3> I love RamBox - and hope it continues to gain momentum. Really wish someone would add Spell Check support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't seem to support Open Whisper Systems Signal messaging app. Did I miss it in the list, or is there some other reason why it's not included?

<comment><USER5> Franz is basically a browser wrapper around all those messaging services. As Signal doesn't have a Web UI, Franz can't really easily support it.

Yes, Signal-desktop is being rewritten to Electron now but I doubt it's suitable for in-Franz integration

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh God. It's Trillian/Pidgin all over again.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've given Franz multiple chances over the past 1.5 years and always find that it is filled with bugs that make it a horrible experience. One example is a bug that crashes the app whenever the settings view is closed.

Thanks for the poster who shared an open alternative, I will try it out later today.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would call it "A messenger" at all only if it had history search that spanned services.

I often remember I got a message from X about Y but to find it I have to look independently in whatsapp, iMessage, email and 2 bulletin board style systems.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this this functionally different from Pidgin and other libpurple based messengers?

<comment><USER10> Yes, but maybe not in a good way -- this is basically just a tabbed electron wrapper around various chat webapps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Electron for a messenger? What a wasted opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER12> Electron within electron.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hasn't been updated in a year though.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is awesome!</comment>


John Dvorak: "Yesterday I was fired from PC Magazine" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/THErealDVORAK/status/1043180806020116480 <comment><USER2> About 12 years ago I was working for a PC Magazine competitor when they cut the Managing Editor loose, a man who'd worked there 20+ years and was in his late 50s.

I ran into him in the bathroom, tears in his eyes, asking me what he was going to do now? That this is how they reward decades of loyalty?

Ironically that magazine, dedicated to predicting future technology trends, would go down the toilet some years later because they didn't see technology trends like Google and internet advertising coming.

Companies have no loyalty folks...neither should you.

<comment><USER3> "Companies have no loyalty folks...neither should you."

That's a broad brush to paint with; companies are just a group of people, not some inhuman construct. People make the decisions and just like every other aspect of life, some people care don't put their impact on others first, or can't because of circumstances. Not every company discards employees like garbage, and it's a lousy narrative to propagate.

<comment><USER4> That may be true but then your boss's boss fires my boss and brings in someone new and doesn't know or care about you or your company gets bought just to shut down a competitor or any of a million other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h The funny thing is, if you gave me the option of reading a Dvorak article or an arbitrary PC Mag article, all other factors held fixed, I would pick Dvorak every time. That is, they just laid off an asset that was more valuable than the rest of the company.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely true. Dvorak should start his own venture...a lot of fans would jump (the sinking) ship in an instant.

<comment><USER6> He should do his own Wordpressed based blog with Adsense and other advertisment on it to earn money. Do podcasts and stuff like that.

<comment><USER7> If you didn't know, he has a blog ([http://www.dvorak.org/blog/](http://www.dvorak.org/blog/)) and is a co-host of the No Agenda Show Podcast ([http://www.noagendashow.com/](http://www.noagendashow.com/)) and DHUnplugged ([https://www.dhunplugged.com/](https://www.dhunplugged.com/))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While Dvorak's right that it was a shabby way to end things, it very well may be that PC Mag is on its way to shutting down. Note that the screenshot of the email notifying him indicated they were going to 'put all outside columns on hiatus.' That sounds like pure cost cutting to me.

<comment><USER9> Is Tim Bajarin still a columnist for PC Mag? Wayne Rash? Whitson Gordon? Brent Johnson?

<comment><USER8> No idea. Assuming those are all 'outside columns' (I don't know as I haven't read PC Mag in years), it seems like the veracity of the story Dvorak's been told will become clear very soon.

<comment><USER9> They're listed as Columnists (as opposed to Contributing Editor, which means you're an employee), have non-pcmag.com (unlike all of their other authors) email addresses in their Author Bios on PC Mag's site and with one exception (a twice-yearly contributor anyway) they all have published PC Mag articles within the last week. Moreover, they all have full-time jobs which are not at Ziff Davis.

Knowledge is power.

<comment><USER10> > (as opposed to Contributing Editor, which means you're an employee)

It might mean that at PC Mag, but it definitely does not mean that on other magazines. In fact, at most publications it refers to someone who is _not_ an employee. For more, see [1]

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

<comment><USER9> You're certainly right. In fact most authors actually have Analyst or Reporter. I was looking at Tim Gideon and a few others as an example, who happen to have a pcmag emails. Thank you for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He may always have been wrong, but he was like a lovable crazy uncle who is always wrong. This is a terrible way to treat a legend.

<comment><USER12> I won't have that!

He wasn't always wrong.

<comment><USER11> You know what they say about stopped clocks...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is really too bad. After 36 years, they don't have the courage and decency for a call.

On a side note, I had always assumed 'Dvorak' was a penname --however, I've learned he's actually related to the actual Dvorak Keyboard creator.

<comment><USER14> You _may_ be confusing him with Robert X. Cringely, which is a pen name.

<comment><USER15> Back at Caltech in the 70s, user accounts on the DECSystem 10 had 3 characters, and was set as the student's initials. One fellow had no middle name, so he used 'x'.

He got so used to it he legally changed his name so his middle name was 'X'.

<comment><USER16> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_X._Cohen](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_X._Cohen) is actually David S. Cohen but the name was already taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you need your JCD fix, he does a bi-weekly podcast with Adam Curry called No Agenda. [0]

[0]: [http://noagendashow.com](http://noagendashow.com)

<comment><USER18> They don't have advertisers (listener funded) so they're able to sift through the news in a reasonably balanced way.

Each show also has crowd-sourced, listener produced podcast album art that's generated about an hour after the show airs live.

Try listening to the noagendashow at 2X speed to start.

<comment><USER4> I've tried to listen to NoAgenda twice and both times it was conspiracy theory borderline-racist garbage

<comment><USER19> You didn't miss anything, that's what the show is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There must be something to learn from Dvorak because he seems to have done something rare among the HN crowd, and that is being both very wrong and very appealing at the same time.

<comment><USER21> I'm curious how being very wrong is a liability for a journalist? Can you give me some examples where the being wrong part violates the ideal, and maybe explain what that ideal is, in the tech world?

To me, a reader of his since the very beginning, Dvorak has been wrong about a lot of things - but him being wrong has prompted much discussion in the broader world of things, and he is truly one of the very first 'social media influencers' of the tech world. I spent many a day in the 80's and 90's discussing mag articles with colleagues, in the ops centres, the desktops, the laptop and now the pocket era's, and .. it seems .. whatever Dvorak has to say about something, is going to get a rise.

But if there is some other standard by which such a rabble-rouser might be judged, I'd like to know. I seem to have missed something.

<comment><USER22> Being wrong about tech probably has no ill consequences. But the quintessential example of journalists being wrong as a moral failure that I always think of is the lead-up to the Iraq War. Even that had historical precedents too, eg. the Spanish-American War ~100 years prior was also ill served by journalism.

<comment><USER21> So you could argue that Dvorak has been a dark influence on tech, since he convinced (by stint of his popularity) a lot of people to be wrong on things, quite a few time?

I mean, in the case of war journalism the standards are pretty high. But for computer tech .. its really more just an industrial mob being led by a malcontent loud-mouth boldly corralling the in-cognoscenti with his megaphone de-jour held high and proud? Or, at least it was.

I mean, I think Dvorak played a role in managing peoples expectations. Its interesting that for some its high, and others low in terms of journalistic decrepitude. 36 years is a long time to be wrong about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you're an employee (no equity), be assured your employers don't care about you when the money starts to dry up. If you're overpriced for the revenue you bring in, you're gone. This is stuff everyone learned in the 90s bubble. Now the paper mags are falling over and he's acting surprised. SMH

<comment><USER24> Don't think that some paper equity gives your employer more loyalty to you

<comment><USER25> I agree, when the startup piggy bank runs out, the paper equity doesn't mean much, speaking from personal experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I stopped following him after he turned his podcast with curry into infowars lite.

</comment><comment><USER27> My guess is they couldn't afford him anymore. As a 36-year-old star veteran, his compensation was probably a sizable chunk of production costs. Meanwhile, the magazine business is still hurting.

<comment><USER28> He's not 36 years old, he's 66 years old. He's a 36-year veteran.

<comment><USER29> I bet you're fun at parties.

<comment><USER30> Personal attacks will get you banned here. More generally, please don't post uncivil or unsubstantive comments.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> He's been infuriatingly wrong in every article of his I've ever read, but holy shit! He was an icon. 36 years and they "fire" him via e-mail!? Despicable.

<comment><USER32> I read this guy back in the 90s. I think he put down mp3s. I think I emailed him and told him he was on the wrong side of that.

<comment><USER33> Dvorak's greatest hits: "nobody wants a mouse", "Steve Jobs going the way of pet rocks", "cable modems are a dead end", "the mac is dead", "ipod is a niche product", "wikipedia is a dead end", "podcasting is a dead end", "linux is a dead end", "time to short apple", "the iphone's a flop", "ipad's a flop", "apple watch's a flop", etc.

<comment><USER34> When I used to listen to the TWIT podcast (its been years..), I liked Dvorak's cynical perspective vs the love everything new and tech of the other hosts. He was cranky. I give him bonus points for remembering lotus's Jazz software in the podcast (and calling it out for its problems when it came out).

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

<comment><USER35> "I get no spam!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What a dick move. Oh well, will the last subscriber of PC Mag turn out the lights?

<comment><USER9> Subscribers? It's all clickbait-driven traffic to squeeze out fractions of cents worth of ad revenue nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wait, PC Magazine is still a thing?

<comment> swingline-747 Homebrew/home-assembly computing _nostalgic sigh_

All those trips up and down the Valley, like was a spread out Guangzhou JDR Microdevices, NCA Peripherals, WierdStuff, Central Computers, MicroCenter, Halted, Egghead, mom&pop shareware and even the "evil" Fry's and CompUSA.

IIRC I spend somewhere on the order of $5k on basically a homebuilt workstation... Adaptec U2W, IBM Ultrastar whopping 9 GB drive, Plextor CD burner, PC Power & Coolng PSU, GUS and a Courier modem. IIRC i got tired of hearing the 7000 RPM fan droning like a 1U server and made a fanless water- cooling setup with an RV heater core and CPU cooling block. Oh and UPSes since 1986.. south San Jose had frequent power outages.

IIRc we had back issues of PC Magazines for at least the previous year. I had C++ PJ and DDJ.

<comment><USER38> > Central Computers

Is still kicking. I think their business model is you a pay a small premium for retail service and stuff that works reliably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Sad to see all these comments focusing on what Dvorak "got wrong" instead of his better columns, including recent ones: [https://www.pcmag.com/dvorak](https://www.pcmag.com/dvorak)

</comment><comment><USER40> I would only read that magazine due to him so stupid move.

</comment><comment><USER41> I didn't realize PC Mag was still around.

<comment><USER42> I felt the same when Yahoo was breached.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Those of you who are Dvorak fans (as am I) should find, read, and support the No Agenda podcast and email newsletter he's been doing with Adam Curry for about 10 years now. In the latest newsletter, John argues that he was fired for writing negative things about 5G networks -- and offers evidence that PCMag routed links away from his critical columns to more positive pieces.

I got to work with John a bit over the years. He is many things, but I have never known him to lie, or get his facts wrong when reporting. If what he says about PCMag unlinking from his columns about 5G is true, it's even more rude and insidious than the way he was fired.

John argues that it's more evidence that advertising drives much if not all supposed "journalism" these days. I hope he's wrong, but fear he's more right than most of us know or suspect most of the time...

</comment><comment><USER44> [https://mobile.twitter.com/W6VA/status/1043181935667761153](https://mobile.twitter.com/W6VA/status/1043181935667761153)

Interesting exchange in the comments…

<comment><USER4> Ugh. That reaffirms my dislike of Dvorak

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> That's a real shame, he was the only reason I read PC magazine. We canceled our subscription years ago, but I'd still go to Kramers and pick up a copy to read the columns. Aging out of the tech industry is a tremendous problem, but I don't see there's much we can do about it.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wow, that is a pitiful way to let a long-term employee go.

<comment><USER47> The email says outside columns, he probably was a contractor.

<comment><USER48> Does this matter on a personal level? He's been writing for PC Mag for more than 3 decades.

<comment><USER49> This is such a shallow comment. Regardless of how long he's written articles sponsored by PC magazine, you don't know the details of his contract or the relationship he had with that sponsorship. Why bother creating a comment if you add no content?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> His column was the only reason I still remembered PCMag exists, that's such a dumb move.

</comment><comment><USER51> I remember reading him decades ago. That's beyond ignomious.

<comment><USER52> I remember him explaining why Microsoft wouldn't be able to ship Windows 2000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> He had a good run and was getting paid for about a decade longer than he should have.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what happened to the linked tweet.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is he related to some keyboard keymap?

<comment><USER54> No, that's August Dvorak - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Dvorak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Dvorak)

<comment><USER55> They are, however, related:

"nephew of sociologist and creator of the Dvorak keyboard, August Dvorak"

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I thought PC-Mag and Dvorak were both already dead. How long has it been since either one was actually relevant?

</comment><comment><USER57> Wait, Greenwald is now considered faux pas?

<comment><USER9> He spent a couple of years blasting Hillary for being a warhawk, for how her campaign was run and questioning the obsession with Russia.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/glenn- greenwal...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/glenn-greenwald- the-bane-of-their-resistance)

Apparently questioning the party status quo is the worst thing that you can do.

"Greenwald's political writing, which focusses on dramas of strength and weakness, and on the corruptions of empires. Greenwald writes aggressively about perceived aggression. His instinct is to identify, in any conflict, the side that is claiming authority or incumbency, and then to throw his weight against that claim, in favor of the unauthorized or the unlicensed—the intruder. Invariably, the body with authority is malign and corrupt; any criticisms of the intruder are vilifications or "smears." He rarely weighs counter-arguments in public, and his policy goals are more often implied than spoken."

<comment><USER58> I've been reading Greenwald for years and don't recognise that description at all. But it comes from the New Yorker so this is perhaps not a surprise.

It's worth being extremely careful paying any attention to American media on the topic of Glenn Greenwald. He is essentially the only journalist in the world who routinely and strongly criticises other journalists and points out their lying and manipulations. In recent times he's written a series of articles showing how frequently US media's stories related to Russia collapse, are retracted or turn out to be fraudulent.

He also got the scoop of the decade when Snowden went directly to him and Poitras, news non-entities, because he simply didn't trust other journalists at all.

I suspect by now most Washington/New York based journalists hate his guts.

<comment><USER59> > I suspect by now most Washington/New York based journalists hate his guts.

Not so - he is a regular guest on Fox News.

He's become very partisan over the years, and you can guess the slant based on the media where he chooses to appear.

I wouldn't say he is so much pro-Republican as anti-Democrat but it's getting really hard to say. Pro-Russian and pro-Republican politics have gotten all mixed up together since 2016.

I wouldn't say he is outwardly pro-trump, but he certainly doesn't seem to criticize him to anywhere near the extent he lavishes on the Democrats. Nor does he seem to be particularly concerned with criticizing American foreign policy now that Republicans are in the drivers' seat, which was his fig-leaf back in the early teens.

And in fact, he spends most of his time justifying the exact same types of behavior from the Russians. So much for "questioning the politics of the status quo and the corruption of empires".

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

<comment><USER9> > If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

So the anti-war, anti-domestic spying, gay progressive duck is a conservative Trump-lover?

What ducks are you looking at?

<comment><USER59> Oh, well, if he's gay then it's cool. /s

Poltics makes for strange bedfellows. The enemy of my enemy can easily become my friend. There is a certain segment of the left that seamlessly transitioned from criticizing Democrats and American foreign policy into cheering Russian propagandizing and backing Russian foreign policy goals ("as a counterweight to American power" or similar). Greenwald is one of them.

If his critical of the power of empire, now would be a good time to start criticizing the other side too. Democrats haven't held power for almost 2 years now and spending all his breath criticizing them isn't really helpful. It _is_ , however, revealing about his agenda.

Again, I don't think he was always like this. He used to be doing legitimate journalism, deep dives into American abuses of power that nobody else was doing. It was good work, regardless of whether the expose happened under a Democratic administration.

That journalism is still happening, while Greenwald is off doing Fox News segments on how bad Democrats are. He's just not involved in it.

His decline from investigative journalist into partisan shill is very, very blatant. And I do feel from him, there is no question the media gave him a very rough go after Showden. But it doesn't excuse his "activism" since 2016. One good expose doesn't beatify everything you do for the rest of your life.

I think it's probably mostly him burying his head in the sand about the consequences of his activism. I don't think he consciously wants to trade American empire for Russian empire, he just can't get past the whole "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing, or viewing Russia as a counterbalance to American power, however you want to put it.

I hope he gets back on the horse, but right now he's definitely kinda broke- brained. C'mon, the guy spends his time on his farm caring for the 40 dogs he's rescued, nobody does that who's not at least a little broke-brained. I wish him a speedy recovery (dogs help with that!), but right now you really shouldn't be taking him overly seriously.

<comment><USER57> Conversely, someone who agrees with my enemy on something is not automatically my enemy as well. My enemies aren't always wrong, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Isn't this the guy who was upset by the idle process and rubbished the mouse?

</comment><comment><USER9> It's worth noting that JCD had posted some tweets the day before that were critical of postmeritocracy.org and some comment by Al Gore about Trump.

Looks like a de-platforming may have happened.

<comment><USER61> Yeah, not really how that works.

<comment><USER9> Please explain. Having a strong political opinion as an editor and firing your most popular author who has the contrary opinion sounds exactly like what that is.

That's just how it appears anyway.

<comment><USER62> The email states they're winding down more than just him. Not everything is a conspiracy, PC Mag could just be cost cutting or downsizing due to a reduced readership.

<comment><USER9> The timing looks really bad. I'm reserving judgement to see confirmation from their other columnists (whom I listed in a separate reply). His tweet also claims it to be a false pretense -- why take one person's word over the other?

<comment><USER63> Because his whole tweet stream is like that. There will be no perfect timing where you will not be able to find something political adjacent to "explain" firing.

Still, firing over email is still sucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This absolutely has nothing to do with John's involvement with the No Agenda podcast and the talking points of this particular podcast.

Nope.

Just budget issues which suddenly pop up after 36 years without any problems.

Sure...

Do the people involved really think John and his fanbase are THAT stupid?</comment>


Kashmir: A statically typed Lispy language compiling to Go - <AUTHOR> https://owickstrom.github.io/kashmir/ <comment><USER2> I'd really like to see an snippet in the front page. There are some samples in the tutorial, but I like to see an example to get some feeling of the language. For example, a mix of

      (define (factorial n)
        (if (< n 2)
            1
            (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))

and

      ;; here the type of y is inferred
      (fn ([x : int] y) (+ x y))

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, thanks! I'll try to come up with something representative.

<comment><USER3> Do you know how much effort/time it would take to spin up a "play.kashmir", similar to "play.golang"? If it is minimal, it could be one of those items that really lowers the barrier to entry into the language.

<comment><USER4> Especially if you just do the compilation to Go and redirect the user to a prefilled play.golang.org page with the resulting code.

And a comment withe original code and a link back to your site :)

<comment><USER5> Pre-filling a page on another domain isn't possible unless the creator of that page explicitly creates a way to do it. That's an important security feature of web browsers.

<comment><USER4> You can create and run the entire snippet and redirect the user to the resulting page. "Prefilled" was a poor choice of words :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I understand this project, along with most of the other "Lisp compiling to ..." projects are just for fun, but it's still annoying to see so many of them announced. Half the time it's a stretch to even call them "a Lisp." It's a little silly to call your language a Lisp if it's missing a lot of the stuff that Lisp is associated with. Does this Lisp even support macros? Just say it's a new language that uses s-expressions and compiles to Go or whatever. Calling it a Lisp makes it look like a lame attempt to get more attention.

I'm mostly just annoyed because everyone releases all these incompatible Lisp wannabes, when Common Lisp, Scheme, and even Clojure, are all perfectly good languages. Common Lisp has a few really good compilers (sbcl, lispworks, etc.) that produce code that's competitive with C in some situations. QuickLisp has really modernized the CL library ecosystem, and while there aren't as many libraries available as there are for Python, Ruby, and Java, the situation has drastically improved recently, and is continuing to improve.

<comment><USER7> Here here! It seems like every week someone posts their pet flavor of lisp. This doesn't have an substance. How about coming up with something new!

<comment><USER8> I hope I don't get downvoted for this, but the correct way to say this is "hear hear". It's derived from "hear him" or "hear her". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a long-time user of Lisp-derived languages (Scheme, Tcl), Kashmir looks like an interesting variation.

It's heartening to see a revival of Lisps. For reasons I can't explain, s-expr syntax has a certain symmetry and beauty and is far more understandable to me than the alternatives.

Not sure yet what Kashmir brings to the table besides the Go output, and what advantages that provides. I'll have to study it further.

A half-formed thought floats across my brain that a Lisp/Scheme compiling to Rust might have merit. Considering the idea that a Rust back end could possibly minimize the necessity for GC, performance of the resulting executable would be less encumbered.

Really don't know how far one could get in that direction, probably more difficult to achieve than I could imagine.

<comment><USER10> It's because you understand that programs, when you write them, are frozen at time zero, that it's s-expr tentacles are ready to accept inputs, and when they get an input, they contract in computation and, for long lived programs, emit _new tentacles_ that no programmer ever wrote.

(If you can write reliable tentacles and dress them up so that people want to touch them frequently, you can become very, very rich.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the advantage of targeting go for a new language project? Could you explain about why this made sense for your project?

<comment><USER12> There are so many motivations for this (and so many lisp/go projects that are abandoned). This looks _very_ promising and I hope it takes off.

A few of the motivations:

* A lisp with an amazing startup time

* A lisp that can tap into a big and vivid ecosystem, like Clojure is tapping into Java's and its own

* Cross compilation and self-contained binary (I've personally tried doing this with various lisps, and none of them _really_ support it)

* Go as a platform is improving version by version and is very performant already

Another way to think of it - if only Clojure compiled to binary directly, then this would be pointless. Because chances of that happening are virtually zero, is why this project made my day.

Go is the assembly language of cloud infrastructure, just as Javascript is becoming yet another "assembly" language. I believe Go is perfect for this, because it is also simple (as opposed to ES6, for example).

<comment><USER13> "Go is the assembly language of cloud infrastructure"

People say this about JavaScript because to run code in a browser, it has to execute as JavaScript. As a result, there are lots of actual libraries or webapps that are written in other languages and compiled to JavaScript.

In contrast, you can do cloud computing in Java, C++, or various other languages. Go may have advantages, but compiling to Go would just be a choice.

In short, I really don't know what you meant or why you'd say it.

<comment><USER14> Javascript would be the assembly language of web i.e. what runs on your browser. Although that won't be true with the advent of Webassembly. Go is language of choice on cloud.

If you ask me following is the checklist it passes:

1\. Low memory footprint/good GC

2\. Concurrency (goroutines) builtin

3\. Great dependency (package) management

4\. Compiled/closer to bare metal

5\. Fast compilation

If you check other languages against the list they lack at least one of the above. If you feel any other language is better suited please tell.

<comment><USER15> > Go is language of choice on cloud.

I don't think this makes any sense. Javascript is the assembly language of the web because it's the _only_ choice for the web (or more specifically, the browser). At best, any other legitimate choice will just compile to JavaScript, which is why it's thusly named. Go has no such privileged position; it's not even clear what it would mean to be the "language of choice on the cloud." You can write cloud software in any language you want, provided that the language has libraries for networking. All of the features you list are great, but none of them are exclusive to Go, nor are they required for cloud computing.

<comment><USER14> I agree that that the statements cannot be analogues. But then I never implied it. My answer was only to counter the statement that JavaScript is the assembly language, in future WebAssembly will likely take that role. Then I continued on my intended answer of why Go is the preferred language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here are nice code samples:

[https://github.com/owickstrom/kashmir/tree/master/experiment...](https://github.com/owickstrom/kashmir/tree/master/experiments)

</comment><comment><USER17> Has anybody come across a list of languages that compile to Go?

<comment><USER18> There are a number of Lisp interpreters written in Go [0-3]. There is a Lua interpreter [4]. The only compiled language I know is Gisp [5] by jcla1. I also built on top of Gisp with Gsp [6] to provide wrappers to the Go stdlib and support more standard lisp functionality.

However, Kashimir is the first statically typed language implemented in Go that I have seen. The rest are dynamically typed.

[0] GLISP - [https://github.com/zhemao/glisp](https://github.com/zhemao/glisp)

[1] golisp - [https://github.com/SteelSeries/golisp](https://github.com/SteelSeries/golisp)

[2] go-lisp - [https://github.com/janne/go-lisp](https://github.com/janne/go- lisp)

[3] Kakapo - [https://github.com/bytbox/kakapo](https://github.com/bytbox/kakapo)

[4] Golua - [https://github.com/akavel/goluago](https://github.com/akavel/goluago)

[5] Gisp - [https://github.com/jcla1/gisp](https://github.com/jcla1/gisp)

[6] Gsp - [https://github.com/gsp-lang/gsp](https://github.com/gsp-lang/gsp)

<comment><USER17> Wonderful, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Project renamed to Oden and moved to: [https://oden- lang.github.io/oden/](https://oden-lang.github.io/oden/)

There were a bunch of reasons to change the name and I was going to create a GitHub organization for it anyway. Kashmir was not a good choice for Googleability and it turned out there's some city or region in the Kashmir region called "Golang"... :S

Sorry about the confusion!

</comment><comment><USER19> Despite the fact this post may appear critical, this is in the spirit of feedback to a young language, not a mean spirit.

One of the things I'm not sure you're looking at, and that you really ought to decide sooner rather than later, is how much interaction with Go itself you want. You very much do not want to leave the Go FFI interactions until the end.

In fact I daresay this is a critical decision that needs to be the next thing you really spend a lot of time thinking about, because a Kashmir that has a very poor Go FFI leaves me little reason to prefer it to Haskell, or Liskell if you want to get closer to Lisp. (Truthfully, reading over your goals & features, this sounds closer to Haskell than a Lisp, except in syntax, so I'm going to use Haskell as my benchmark.)

However, many of those goals and things in the type system will be at odds with having a simple Go FFI. If all functions in Kashmir are auto-curried, then Go has a hard time calling in to them, with a clumsy syntax and probably slow performance. If Kashmir's type system ends up complicated enough that the Go type system can't express Kashmir function types _at all_ , then Go can't call into Kashmir at all, or some complicated "generic instantiation" step will be required. On the other side, you have to worry about data structure compatibility, too; if Kashmir data structures don't have a nice mapping to Go data structures then Kashmir is going to have a hard time calling into Go code.

Also, I'd suggest before proceeding much farther that you are very, very sure that you understand Hindley-Milner deeply, including what can break it. It offers a lot of inferring power, but at the corresponding cost of laying a lot of very specialized restrictions on your program. These carefully mathematically-specified things often have a way of breaking down the instant you put a toe outside their specified line. (The Haskell community has added things to it that have good bang/buck, but it's always something they have to be careful about.) Go's native type system, for instance, has one huge difference with Haskell that would have me a bit nervous, which is the difference between:

        (+) :: Num a => a -> a -> a

        type Num interface {
            Add(Num, Num) Num
        }

Haskell's type there guarantees all the a's are the _same_ Num type. The Num typeclass does not promise that _all_ "Num"s can be added together, only that a Num can be added to other same type things. Go's type system can not guarantee this; that interface in Go is promising that either A: You can hand it any two things that implement Num and it will return yet something else that implements Num which may or may not have any particular relationship to the original types or B: it will panic at runtime. (Or loop forever, I suppose, but it seems strange to be seriously discussing "bottom" in Go at all....)

Where in practice you can turn to a programmer and say "Hey, obviously, it makes no sense to add a rational and a Peano integer together, and if you did, you obviously wouldn't expect a BigInt back. So just don't do that.", your type inferencer will not be able to make such assumptions, and if it does, you're right back to the problem that that will raise all sorts of hell in your FFI.

 _These are not necessarily unsolvable problems!_ For one thing, there's the sort of degenerate solution of simply not permitting any FFI, and only permitting Kashmir->Go in a very restricted, stereotypical manner that requires a specialized binding step. You could also write off calling Kashmir from Go, if that helps, which is not a bad decision, but is one you should be deliberate about. But I would suggest it is deserving of being the very next issue you tackle, and spend a lot of time thinking about. Go's type system is really, _really_ weak for a static type system, in the sense of what guarantees it is capable of expressing, and trying to cozy that up to a Hindley-Milner system without giving up on a lot on one side or the other is going to be a challenge.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback! I have deliberately not done any big work on the Go FFI yet because, as you say, I have not thought all stuff through. This is very valuable input, thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can you please give one reason to name the project "Kashmir"?

<comment><USER21> Pure guess: its beautiful? (in case its about the place in India)

<comment><USER22> Yes a beautiful place conflicted between India and Pakistan. Major cause of wars and conflicts between the two nations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a fun project, I'm looking forward to seeing how far you can take it. One thing to note is that Go doesn't have TCO so performance when using a lot of recursion might be pretty bad or the compiler has to be smart and use loops and states.

<comment><USER24> JVM also doesn't have TCO, so Clojure has a special form, which transforms recursion into an ordinary loop: [http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28recur%2...](http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28recur%20exprs*%29)

Author of Kashimir could use a similar solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How do goroutines work out? And/Or channel and stuff like `select`?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently not at all. :) Haven't gotten that far yet, but I have it in mind. There will probably be a 1:1 mapping to these concepts in Kashmir.

<comment><USER25> Cool, looking forward!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is targeting Go source code like this really the best option for a Go-like language? I've been curious about hooking into some stage of Go's compiler. Looks like there is an intermediate Go assembly language, which PeachPy ([https://github.com/Maratyszcza/PeachPy](https://github.com/Maratyszcza/PeachPy)) can target. Not sure how well documented it is, though. Anyone know of other projects that do this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably not the best option in the long run, but I didn't want to focus too much on that to begin with. Hooking into the Go compiler would be nice, perhaps that's something to look at when the Kashmir compiler can be written in Kashmir. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is this intended as a human-written language, or as a target for machine generated Go?

In my mind, the second one is where this language can really find it's niche.

<comment><AUTHOR> Human-written is the purpose, but as it builds on the LISP syntax, which is just simple data structures, generating it would be simple. I guess one could do a more Haskell-like syntax front-end for Kashmir and transform it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am sure Kashmir is a great idea - in fact, I was wondering why there couldn't be a typed lisp compiling to C, but please put more coding example!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! :) I'll add more examples as soon as possible. Actually there's not much you can do with Kashmir at the moment, I've mostly focused on getting the basic model up so there's no library functions available etc. I have an idea about how to read the type signatures from compiled Go packages to be able to do simple interop between Kashmir and Go - no extern declarations or anything like that.

<comment><USER28> One thing I wonder: does _let_ take types? Something like:

        (let ((x :string "hello"))
             (fmt.Println (+ x "owickstrom")))

(Although in that case the type can probably be infered...)

<comment><AUTHOR> It does!

      (let (([x : string] "hello"))
        (fmt.Println (+ x "owickstrom")))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm looking forward to trying this with Gobot [http://gobot.io](http://gobot.io)

</comment><comment><USER30> Just now seeing this, wondering if it will generate code readable enough to contribute to Go projects.

</comment><comment><USER31> Amazing work. I always want to learn more about creating a language. Will look more into this.

</comment><comment><USER32> Then just use llgo and compile it to asm.js!</comment>


OpenStack bare metal deployment? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for bare metal deployment of OpenStack with support for Ceph. Tools I found interesting: Foreman, Cobbler + Puppet or SaltStack, Fuel, Crowbar, MaaS + Juju...<p>Foreman looks great, but after I tried SaltStack I'm not going back to Puppet. Also I tried Cobbler, but I had some issues with provisioning Ubuntu machines. Which tools do you use? <comment><USER2> Salt stack developer here, glad you find it useful! Please hop on IRC freenode #salt if you have questions, we're a pretty friendly community.

As far as other tools, I use and love cobbler quite a bit, but for Ubuntu support, you need a fairly new version. Also ask on #cobbler if you're having problems. The cobbler community is healthy, but not nearly as large or active as the salt community. A few other nice tools would be collins[1] and graphite[2]. If you use OpenStack horizon, it is using graphite under the covers. Disclaimer: I'm also a developer / co-maintainer of graphite. You can join us on #graphite via IRC on FreeNode. The graphite project just released 0.9.12 and is about to start moving forward much faster. For metrics collection... I'd suggest collectd[3] with the write_graphite plugin _or_ diamond[4].

Same as here, I'm SEJeff on IRC.

[1] [http://tumblr.github.io/collins/](http://tumblr.github.io/collins/) [2] [https://github.com/graphite-project](https://github.com/graphite-project) [3] [http://collectd.org/](http://collectd.org/) [4] [https://github.com/BrightcoveOS/Diamond/wiki](https://github.com/BrightcoveOS/Diamond/wiki)</comment>


A good smartphone comes but once a year - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/23/2651347/a-good-smartphone-comes-but-once-a-year

<comment><AUTHOR> The graphic[1] comparing the iPhones and the HTC phones over (a short) time really stood out for me.

1\. <http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/834118/apple-htc.jpg></comment>


Prime numbers in F# - <AUTHOR>

http://diditwith.net/2009/01/20/YAPESProblemSevenPart2.aspx <comment><USER2> This was not meant to be a self-post, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I am not even sure how I ended up with that.</comment></comment>


Openfund - The business plan of a seed capital fund - <AUTHOR> http://gtziralis.com/openfund-the-business-plan/

<comment><USER2> hey George. Good luck.

You've done great job with the Greek OpenCoffee so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is just like YC clone except asking for 20% of share in return... i think this is a lot for a startup to give away... i'm not saying its wrong or bad but can't justify it either ...</comment>


Is Dark Silicon Useful? (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mbtaylor/papers/taylor_dark_silicon_horsemen_dac_2012.pdf <comment><USER2> I thought that this article was going to be able black silicon - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_silicon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_silicon)

Black silicon is used in some novel NIR cameras by a company called SiOnyx.

</comment><comment><USER3> The heat problem makes you wish for a Gatling chip, that transfers activity to the next coolest core. Or a Grid like structure that allowed direct access via a non-corrosive coolant..</comment>


Facebook have quietly retired their Notifications RSS Feed - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/notifications <comment><USER2> Eh, since they decided to fill it with "trending" stories it was pretty much garbage anyway. Seems like they're pushing _really_ hard to remove value from their platform

</comment><comment><USER3> this is very bad, the open web dreamed by Aaron Swartz, is becoming a feudal empire governed by authoritarian executives.</comment>


Boeing announces fixes for its 737 Max aircraft - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47722258 <comment><USER2> Hopefully this will also be a fix for all the 737 Max posts on HN.</comment>


The Next Phase of Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nodejs.org/2014/01/15/the-next-phase-of-node-js/index.html <comment><USER2> What about the bnoordhuis story?

It seems not to be active again for his lib: [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/graphs/contributors)

For people who don't know, bnoordhuis exiled himself 2 months ago after the bashing the node.js community imposed him for not merging a pull about gender. It was a shame because he was in the top 3 contributors. (all details: [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015))

<comment><USER3> What about 9/11?

<comment><USER4> I'm starting to think everyone involved with node.js should probably start speaking through a PR person. I can't even remotely imagine the logic behind this comment.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if you're American or not, but it's a fairly common meme of sorts in U.S. discourse. "But what about 9/11" is shorthand for "I'm bringing up some random political point that is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because I hope I can outrage people."

For a period absolutely _everything_ , whether at all even distantly related or not, was somehow tied to "because 9/11" or "what about 9/11". Not because people actually thought it was relevant, but because politicians can't pass up a chance to grandstand by invoking something that people have strong opinions on.

I thought it was a succinct way of conveying the point here. "But what about the node.js gender incident??" isn't as widespread and not as big a problem as the "but what about 9/11???" crowd, but suffers from a sort of isomorphic logic.

<comment><USER4> On 4chan, "Jews did 9/11" is also a meme. Should I not consider that a horrible comment simply because it has some meme qualities?

Bend over backwards to forgive and explain all you want, I guess.

<comment><USER5> If someone were to mock a conspiracy theorist by saying he was like the "Jews did 9/11" people, I wouldn't have any problem with that comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _I am starting a company, npm, Inc., to deliver new products and services > related to npm._

I don't know whether I should be concerned a core part of Node.js is becoming "businessy". Is this common amongst other big software projects?

Providing "premium" services is a slippery slope. What happens when someone wants to add a feature to npm that the premium services already provide, for example?

Python and Django have non-profits which help sustain their ecosystems, but AFAIK Node.js doesn't. Perhaps it would be a good step.

<comment><USER7> I think it can work, though you have to be careful to avoid conflict with community goals. It seems to work best when the "premium services" involve technical support or custom open source development, rather than closed-source code.

Canonical and Red Hat are examples of for-profit businesses that primarily build and distribute free software, including employing some of the developers and managing some of the open source projects they distribute. I believe both make money primarily through "premium services" (especially "enterprise" support services).

Ximian was a for-profit company started by Nat Friedman and GNOME project founder Miguel de Icaza, which developed much of the GNOME code base for a while. (It was later acquired by Novell.) Miguel went on to found the Mono project and Xamarin, the for-profit company that leads development of Mono.

Qt, MySQL, InnoDB, and Berkeley DB were each developed in part by businesses using dual licensing models, where licenses for use with non-free-software were available for a fee. (The original companies have since been acquired by Nokia, Sun, Oracle, and Oracle, respectively. Sun was itself later acquired by Oracle.)

The author of SQLite earns income by providing commercial support and custom development services: [http://www.sqlite.org/support.html](http://www.sqlite.org/support.html)

The developers of CyanogenMod recently founded a VC-backed company to fund its development. I'm sure there are a bunch more examples like this that I've forgotten or don't know about.

I agree that a non-profit foundation has benefits for free software projects. (I've been a developer on three projects associated with non-profits: Audacity, Debian, and Mozilla.) "For profit" as I used it above may be the wrong label, though. "Taxable" might be a better word in some cases. If a company is privately held, then its owners can use it to pursue a mission other than maximizing profit. For example, I'm employed by the Mozilla Corporation, a taxable entity that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non- profit Mozilla Foundation. The Corporation has to pay taxes because of the nature of its income and spending, but its mission is still that of its sole shareholder, the Foundation.

<comment><USER3> > If a company is privately held, then its owners can use it to pursue a > mission other than maximizing profit

Well, that depends on your shareholders.

Mozilla Corp can do this, because its only shareholder is Mozilla Foundation.

However, the minute you take institutional investment, hand out shares to employees, take on debt financing, etc., you are now bound by a fiduciary duty to do right by those other parties. You still _can_ focus on other things, but only if they don't _conflict_ with turning a profit.

In my opinion, "turning a profit" in fact serves the greater needs of the npm/node community, because servers cost money. npm isn't just a program, it's a service, and services require infrastructure. So, it's not a conflict at all.

It is a very foolish business person who sees an exponential curve of user engagement, and decides that the best way to make money is to screw all those people.

<comment><USER8> _> However, the minute you take institutional investment, hand out shares to employees, take on debt financing, etc., you are now bound by a fiduciary duty to do right by those other parties. You still can focus on other things, but only if they don't conflict with turning a profit._

This is not true. The shareholder value myth has been debunked by law professors.

"...shareholder primacy theory was first advanced by economists, not lawyers. This may explain why the idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value is based on factually mistaken claims about the law."

[http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6482](http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6482)

"Contrary to myth, the sale of Ben & Jerry's to corporate giant Unilever wasn't legally required."

[http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_truth_about_ben_...](http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_truth_about_ben_and_jerrys)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, whatever. Academic. IANAL, but I'm guessing you aren't either, so let's leave that to the lawyers. I'm sorry I brought it up.

Bottom line, I've done a lot of work on npm over the last 4 years, and I've got some ideas about how to best take care of it in the future. Those ideas require money, and it's a lot easier to get money if you have a plan to turn it into MORE money. (This IS still a site about startups, right? ;)

If things keep expanding and growing like they have, then it's going to require _more_ money. So, we've gotta earn our keep to be sustainable, and the way to do that is to provide stuff people will pay for.

Also, I like to make money. It's fun, and it keeps you grounded in reality, if you run it like a responsible business. So that's another nice plus of going this route. I still have full flexibility to carve things up however I want later on, and like I said, we're keeping every option on the table.

<comment><USER6> > _This IS still a site about startups, right?_

Yes, but this thread is still about a language.

> _I like to make money._

Of course. And the main concern with npm, Inc is whether making money will at some point conflict with wanting to make npm better, no-strings-attached.

<comment><USER3> npm's "no strings attached" low-ceremony approach is the _reason_ why it's taken off like it has. The purpose of all this is to keep that going.

If "make money" ever appears to be in conflict with the thing that puts us in a position to make money, then we're thinking about it wrong.

For example, imagine if Twitter were not from the get-go a for-profit company. If they got really popular, and then said, "Hey, guys, we can't keep the lights on without figuring how a monetization strategy, so we're gonna take some VC and do that." It wouldn't be wise to assume that "make money" was going to mean "charge to read or post tweets". Forget love or greed or good and evil, that wouldn't be a smart way to make money.

What is currently free will remain free, precisely because the free-ness of it is what makes npm interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So NPM Inc.? Interesting. I do think NPM requires its own team, but I am unsure if NPM itself is a business (although I can see it being a sponsored foundation.) But there are hopefully creative business solutions to be had here.

Q: How does this relate to the money I gave to the Scale NPM project a few months back? [https://npm.nodejitsu.com/](https://npm.nodejitsu.com/)

<comment><USER3> > But there are hopefully creative business solutions to be had here.

I sure hope so! I'll be sharing many more details about the specifics in the next few days. I just kept it brief in this announcement so as not to drown out the message about TJ taking over Node.

> Q: How does this relate to the money I gave to the Scale NPM project a few > months back? [https://npm.nodejitsu.com/](https://npm.nodejitsu.com/)

The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. I'll continue to be closely involved with Nodejitsu.

But a service of npm's scale and importance can't survive on handouts forever. At some point, we need much more continued investment and a focused team, and the way to get that is to develop additional features that people are willing to pay for.

<comment><USER9> IsaacSchlueter: Your NPM & Node made this possible btw: [http://facebook.com/Exocortex](http://facebook.com/Exocortex) [http://clara.io](http://clara.io)

Thank you!

(And yeah we do an "npm install" from the NPM servers during production deploys, I guess we like to live dangerously. We should probably fix that.)

<comment><USER10> Clara.io looks great, nice work on that! Would you mind elaborating on how it was created?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's next? The pip corporation? Worldwide Gems Inc?

"Global ./configure&&make&&make install Industries" ?

<comment><USER12> I hope so.

The problem with things like rubygems is so long as it's a community project with people donating their time to it, any grievances you have with the service can be trumped by "we're just doing this in our spare time, lay off".

While I respect people who contribute to software in their spare time, pip and rubygems are way, way too important for them to be taken so casually. I really appreciate that the NodeJS community is increasing their commitment to the NPM infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about the 200k Nodejitsu crowdfunded not long ago for npm? Also, how the npm revenue model is going to affect packages distribution? To whoever may concern: I expect some clear answers. There's simply too much money going around Node at the moment and while it _might_ eventually be a good thing (as involved companies will push node adoption among devs), it's also scaring and quite weird.

[EDIT: Isaac already partially replied, see other answer]

<comment><USER3> Copied for posterity from the other answer:

 _The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. I 'll continue to be closely involved with Nodejitsu._

 _But a service of npm 's scale and importance can't survive on handouts forever. At some point, we need much more continued investment and a focused team, and the way to get that is to develop additional features that people are willing to pay for._

> There's simply too much money going around Node at the moment and while it > might eventually be a good thing (as involved companies will push node > adoption among devs), it's also scaring and quite weird.

Yes, there is the hazard of extrinsic motivation messing up intrinsic motivations. That's why pursuing revenue around npm must be done carefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I assumed from the title this would be an announcement about Node 1.0, but I'm not terribly surprised to see the trend continue of approaching 1.0 asymptotically.

Still, this is interesting stuff. Does anyone know if any similar repos (Ruby Gems, etc.) have their own for-profit companies?

<comment><USER15> RubyGems is funded through Ruby Central [0], a 501(c)(3).

I imagine Ruby Central gets a significant chunk through conference ticket sales? Someone more knowledgable here can chime in :)

[0]: [http://rubycentral.org](http://rubycentral.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Node is becoming a business not a community, and the community is taken by surprise. I saw this coming, but I think many people thought Node was about free love and changing the world. It is down hill from here. You can avoid a lot of politics when there isn't any money involved, but now there is, and that changes everything.

</comment><comment><USER17> NPM "app" store? Should I laugh, cry or try to monetize?

<comment><USER18> All three, at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good luck Isaac and thanks for all the fish!

You did a great work as a node lead. The brief moment when our paths crossed, due to a security issue in node, was handled perfectly. Seriously. You will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Awesome, so glad Isaac gets to focus on what he loves. Congrats to TJ on his new role!

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd love to see an alternative to npm that:

* Puts security as a high priority

* That is operated as a federated system (think bitcoin block chain)

* Puts uptime as a high priority

Many companies and individuals could run deployments of it, removing the need for a new NPM Inc to pay for service costs.

</comment><comment><USER22> While there are ways to create private registries [0], having a new packaged way to do it would be very useful to some orgs.

[0] [https://npmjs.org/doc/registry.html#Can-I-run-my-own- private...](https://npmjs.org/doc/registry.html#Can-I-run-my-own-private- registry)

</comment><comment><USER23> "The peacekeeping budget for the 2013–14 fiscal year was $7.54 billion" \- this is from the Wikipedia UN page

I'm not saying that npm is like, that important, but - take 0.01% (one ten thousandth) and npm would have an annual budget of 3/4 million bucks.

Will we get to a place where core software distribution to devices not humans is deemed as critical infrastructure?

It would be great to know that npm (and github and every other package distribution tool) were somehow too big to fail like banks have shown to be.

Meanwhile - everyone who has worked hard to make npm and node brilliant - thank you!

<comment><USER24> Are you actually suggesting to divert UN money to run NPM servers? ;-)

<comment><USER23> lol not the 'actually' part : ) just comparing the budgets and saying npm is 0.01% as important to the world as the UN

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Open-Source Democracy 101"... 3 Leaders in less than five years: Ryan Dahl(2009-2012) -> Isaac Z. Schlueter(2012-2013) -> Timothy J Fontaine(2014-2016?)

<comment><USER26> True but it is quite a load of work. People on average change jobs about that often as well nowadays. It is like a massive project or a fulltime job for x years. Even Guido the Python BDFL largely is more of a Board of Director for Life. He developed Python largely on his own for 5+ years. Only so many years in a project per programmer, not everyone is a Linus or Guido. Too many other fun things to get into after the initial purpose/goal is achieved.

Python's code_swarm: [http://vimeo.com/1093745](http://vimeo.com/1093745)

<comment><USER27> I hope ry can bring us more surprise for node for he invented node and libuv.On the contrary, I didn't see any new techs from Isaac or TJ Fontaine to compare with both of two yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's nothing wrong to focus on NPM.

Take a look at Maven[[http://maven.apache.org](http://maven.apache.org)] and Sonatype[[http://www.sonatype.com/](http://www.sonatype.com/)] (dependency management in Java-land).

Works awesomely (and maybe even better!).

<comment><USER29> There's no "maybe" about it, I don't think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> wonder if this has anything to do with the npm maintainer who is missing. Hope he's ok.

<comment><USER3> No, this does not have anything to do with him. This has been in the works for several months.

I also hope Luke's ok. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just wanted to wish Isaac the best with his new initiative. He's been a great contributor and helped make the node community a fun and friendly one.

[edit] - originally thought TJ Fontaine wasn't employed by Joyent but apparently he is.

</comment><comment><USER32> Kind of disappointing this wasn't more about the technical direction. Really feel the title is misleading and should have been something about leadership/people change so I would have known not to bother reading it.

</comment><comment><USER33> i think is a great thing! communities flourish when they are support by companies with effective ( preferably transparent) revenue models. exciting times . npm inc , best of luck !

</comment><comment><USER34> The next phase of npm should be to fix this open issue:

[https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4131](https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4131)

<comment><USER35> and to add namespaces to packages , i think its the single thing npm did not get right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I suspect that the ecosystems forming around node will find more success by emulating what Ubuntu has done vs RedHat.

</comment><comment><USER37> Node.js is a scam.

<comment><USER38> Can you explain? I program in Node and have not encountered any plea for money or such. I am guessing the "scam" is that the former lead developer is now trying to monetize Node.js in someway. I wouldn't worry because the core project is free and that cannot be undone.

<comment><USER37> Oh no, nothing so prosaic as that. (For the record I am in favor of making a [good!] living via open-source software.) The scam is this:

I believe that Node.js is waaay too immature to be used as a foundational technology, yet so many people (both folks who should know better and their naive followers) are trumpeting it as a great wonderful thing, pushing it hard as hell.

If you really need dynamic programming on your back-end server use Twisted. Twisted.

If you just said "but my engineers only know JS!" reflect: you have people that won't or can't learn Python but who feel okay about writing your back-end code.

Fire them and hire a real programmer.

Toys are very fun, and I would never try to take that away from anyone, but (in my opinion) there are waaay too many people pushing Node for production work that should know better, and that's the scam.

Node is not ready for the position which people are hyping it for, and (again in my opinion) if you are telling your non-tech-savvy clients or students that they should learn and use Node because it is ready for prime time then you're lying to them or simply naive and misguided.

<comment><USER35> > I believe that Node.js is waaay too immature to be used as a foundational > technology, yet so many people (both folks who should know better and their > naive followers) are trumpeting it as a great wonderful thing, pushing it > hard as hell. If you really need dynamic programming on your back-end server > use Twisted. Twisted.

I fail to see how Twisted is a better choice than Node , but I agree on Node.js(and NPM) immaturity.

All async frameworks need async libraries. With Node async is the default.You cant use any python sync io lib with Twisted for instance. Or it defeats its purpose.

I dont think Javascript is an issue especially with ES6 coming.

But like Twisted , NodeJS is not for everything ,that's the main issue here,with people trying to be fullstack javascript, and claiming they will replace CMS X or MVC framework Y with NodeJS.

<comment><USER37> Twisted is (would have been) a better choice because it is (was) already done. (And done really really well.)

To me it feels like people are busily (and happily) rewriting a lot of stuff in JS that might just be written better in some other language (Go) or have already been written (Erlang)

I actually like JS (Thank you Crockford) but it was startling to see it show up on the server side, and downright alarming to see so many people go apeshit over it.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>