Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer's Hotel and Urban Slavery - <AUTHOR> https://notevenpast.org/slavery-in-early-austin-the-stringers-hotel-and-urban-slavery/ <comment><USER2> _it is not impossible to imagine enslaved people taking on leading roles in running the Stringer's Hotel and other establishments in Austin._

There's much comforting in imagined logical possibility. Reading Fredrick Douglas's autobiographies or Blight's recent Pulitzer winner dissipates such illusion. If the knowledge of children for sale provided in the article somehow wasn't enough to demonstrate how unincharge slaves were.

<comment><USER3> What do you think the purpose of the quoted sentence was? To shift some of the blame to the victims? Something else? (I really don't know)

<comment><USER2> It is structural to American journalism. (edit) a trope, maybe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Consider:

\- Lincoln was not an Abolitionist hero as popularly lionized, but a status quo "moderate,' reluctant to rock the boat. Even though he knew it to be wrong, he did nothing in the affirmative until Secession. That's not moral courage, that's political expedience.

\- 13th Amendment, Section 1 giant slavery loophole:

 _Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction._

\- for-profit prisons

\- elected district attorneys eager to make large numbers of convictions for reelection stats

\- politicians at all levels (e.g., municipal, county, state and federal) $upported by the prison lobby

\- mandatory minimums

\- the highest incarceration rate (per-capita) on the planet except Seychelles

\- and corporations eager to exploit cheap labor (most belong to ALEC)

and what do you get?

Slavery never ended, it just hides in a slightly different form, out-of-sight in the prison-industrial complex that most people never think about. And that doesn't even include the matters of discrimination and segregation like Jim Crow laws like poll taxes, red lining, property requirements and voter ID laws.

Here's just a few of the corporations that exploit prison (slave) labor:

\- Allstate Insurance

\- American Express

\- AT&T

\- Bank of America

\- BP America

\- ExxonMobil

\- Fruit of the Loom

\- GEICO

\- Johnson & Johnson

\- J.P. Morgan

\- Mary Kay Cosmetics

\- McDonalds

\- Microsoft

\- Procter & Gamble

\- Quaker Oats

\- Sara Lee

\- Sprint

\- Verizon

\- United Airlines

\- Wal-Mart

\- Wendy's

Source: [http://affinitymagazine.us/2017/06/29/heres-a-list-of- corpor...](http://affinitymagazine.us/2017/06/29/heres-a-list-of-corporations- that-use-prison-labor/)

<comment><USER5> _Lincoln was not an Abolitionist hero as popularly lionized, but a status quo "moderate,' reluctant to rock the boat. Even though he knew it to be wrong, he did nothing in the affirmative until Secession._

Lincoln's election triggered secession by the south. Maybe the Southerner's had a better sense of Lincoln's abolitionist credentials than you?

Secession started after Lincoln was elected, but before he took office, what actions could he have taken? His abolitionist rhetoric was enough to trigger a civil war. That's a pretty big boat rock.

<comment><USER6> > Lincoln's election triggered secession by the south. Maybe the Southerner's > had a better sense of Lincoln's abolitionist credentials than you?

Abolition was clearly in the Republican platform but he was chosen as a moderate candidate in the convention vs some more firebrand candidates, in the hope that he would forestall war. This is not controversial -- you can read accounts of the convention in old newspapers.

The famous quote from Lincoln shows where his priorities lay: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." [https://www.nytimes.com/1862/08/24/archives/a-letter-from- pr...](https://www.nytimes.com/1862/08/24/archives/a-letter-from-president- lincoln-reply-to-horace-greeley-slavery-and.html)

<comment><USER6> In addition he didn't address slavery until relatively late in the war; when he did it was as a (failed) tactic to flip rebelling states and excepted slave states like Maryland and Delaware that remained in the union.

<comment><USER7> This is flat wrong. The Emancipation Proclamation was drafted in late 1862, the second year of the war when things were very much in doubt. Lincoln issued it in the wake of the major battle at Antietam, which was a brutal "tie" and the deadliest day in American history. The tactical purpose of the Proclamation to try to recapture the momentum and make it clear that the North was now on a path of total war with the South.

<comment><USER6> I apologize: "relatively late" draws a misleading conclusion. I really meant that it wasn't a precipitating or contemporary part of the beginning of the war, the primary objective of which (from _his policy_ — obviously many supported it for other reasons) was the preservation of the union.

The rest of your comment speaks to my point: it was a tactical effort to try to split the confederacy but as far as I can tell failed in that effort. It only had "force" in the parts of the country not controlled by the federal government.

Fortunately actual emancipation was ultimately extended throughout the union, at least in theory.

Here's what the national archive has to say on the subject; in particular the second paragraph speaks to the limited scope of the directive: [https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured- documents/emancip...](https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured- documents/emancipation-proclamation)

<comment><USER8> It should be said that he urged compensated emancipation in the states not seceded. He did justify this by comparing the cost of that emancipation to the cost of the war. But in his statements in general he was very clear that he thought slavery wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know where this hotel existed? The article says it is where the "Piedmont" hotel currently stands, but there is no Piedmont hotel in Austin.

As an aside, I'm getting to detest more and more how Google only seems to show current events. It's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to search for anything historical.

<comment><USER10> Seems to be the space on the southeast corner of 8th & Congress, next door to the Stateside Theater.

Pieced this together via:

1) "[...] named the Avenue Hotel but locally known as the Stringer's Hotel" ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swante_M._Swenson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swante_M._Swenson))

and

2) "The Jan. 18 announcement indicates that The Avenue's name is an homage to the original structure built on the site in 1880, the Avenue Hotel." ([https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/01/18/31-story-...](https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/01/18/31-story- boutique-hotel-would-be-something-new-for.html))

<comment><USER11> I came to the same conclusion by looking at the maps in the article and looking for the Avenue Hotel. You can it is at the corner of Congress and Hickory St.

Hickory St (now 8th St) is 3 blocks south of the Capitol.

I guess at some point the tree named streets were converted to numbered streets.

<comment><USER11> Re: tree named streets were converted to numbered streets

[https://www.statesman.com/news/20171101/austin-answered- why-...](https://www.statesman.com/news/20171101/austin-answered-why-did-tree- named-streets-switch-to-numbered-names)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "On the eve of the Civil War, an advertisement appeared in the Texas Almanac > ..."

This was 1862. The war was well underway by then. I'm really not sure how that made it into the article. I'm very curious if an editor added it in, because I suspect that the author knows better.

<comment> blaser-waffle If it was late Dec. 1862 it was just after The Battle of Fredericksburg, a bloodbath for the Union.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I pass this site every morning, negotiating a throng of homeless people. Not everything about modern Austin is more humane.

</comment><comment><USER14> That second map was made by a sociopath. North faces to the right? For those less familiar with Austin, Pecan St is also 6th Street.

It's an interesting frame of mind to think about who would have been walking down the same streets I walk, over 100 years ago.

<comment><USER15> Having the East at the top of the map is very common. That's why they call it "the orient".

<comment><USER16> >That's why they call it "the orient".

Not challenging your claim that East-on-top is common (since I have no idea), but: it's called the orient because oriens is Latin for rising, and the sun rises in the east. Many other languages also have a word for east based on their word for rising. For a cursory reading, check out the Wiki article on the etymology Orient: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient#Etymology)

<comment><USER17> The grandparent comment makes a valid point, just backwards. The reason orientation and orienteering contain the string "orient" is because Europeans historically put the East at the top of maps, a practice which changed some time after the introduction of the compass.

Which points North, unless it points South; Chinese maps traditionally put the South at the top.

Here's an example of such a map, of the form known as "T and O": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#/media/File:D...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#/media/File:Diagrammatic_T- O_world_map_-_12th_c.jpg)

It's interesting to me that, as moderns, we barely recognize such a stylized image as a map.

<comment><USER14> I learned more than I expected about maps. So so you think it was a style decision in the late 1800's to make a map with the top facing east? Or was it still common?

<comment><USER17> North was pretty standard by the 1800s, or indeed by the 1600s.

But there's a map in the public library of my hometown, showing it in 1890, in which the Old West Side is at the top of the map. So I'd guess that non- standard orientations were more common than they are now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Woozyman's – helping my city eat local - <AUTHOR> https://woozymans.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Most restaurants don't allow people to eat-in anymore to help with social distancing, so I cobbled this together this afternoon to help residents of my city find the restaurants that are offering pickup and delivery options.</comment>


Google patents device that you inject into your eyeball - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/google-patents-device-that-you-inject-into-your-eyeball/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0a <comment><USER2> How hard will it be to remove when they quit supporting it?

</comment><comment><USER3> > and will apparently be powered wirelessly from an energy harvesting antenna

I assume it would use the natural heat of your eyes, but "harvesting" makes it sound like it's digesting your biomatter to power itself.</comment>


Internet Archaeology: sordid past preserved and curated - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/10/10/internet-archaeology-in-which-the-sordid-past-of-the-internet-is-preserved-forever/

<comment><USER2> A sci-fi novel begins:

...Long after the humans were gone, and the internet was gone, and the servers and the datacenters and the geeks who were lord of it all were gone, the images of the cats remained. Thus, by this queer turn of fate, it came to be that those who came after regarded these felines of old the dominant species of the sad little planet that no one got around to visiting. Almost no one, that is...

 _Where is Douglas Adams when you need him?_</comment>


That's the Biology That Turns Decision Makers into Quitters - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@irinatsumarava/thats-the-biology-that-turns-decision-makers-into-quitters-59f4101a4fe7#.x9w22quga <comment><USER2> Totally disgusting to drag Robin Williams into this.

<comment><AUTHOR> What specifically is disgusting about it?</comment></comment>


Will Scala ever be enterprise-ready? - <AUTHOR> http://alblue.bandlem.com/2013/08/will-scala-ever-be-enterprise-ready.html <comment><USER3> Smooth upgrades between major Scala releases is one of our[1] two top priorities (the other being compiler performance). I disagree that "nothing" has happened since 2.8 to improve Scala's enterprise readiness (the Scala team at Typesafe does just that).

Binary compatibility is one (desirable) way of making upgrades smoother (but certainly no panacea). We haven't reached the point yet where we're willing to freeze the whole library across major releases, but we're working towards this. In Scala 2.11.x, we've slimmed down the library (by deprecating more aggressively and modularizing), so as to reduce the core to something that we're comfortable enforcing binary compatibility for.

In the mean time, we're working on mitigating the upgrade pain with tooling and "community outreach". We're working with the developers of core Scala projects to assist them in cross-building their projects, and we're investing in tooling to automate this. With every 2.11 milestone we're working to get the eco-system in shape for the final 2.11.0 release, so that your dependencies will be available when you upgrade.

We're also working on gaining engineering experience in enforcing full backwards and forwards binary compatible, albeit only between minor releases of Scala 2.10.x (enforced with [https://github.com/typesafehub/migration- manager](https://github.com/typesafehub/migration-manager)). This means code compiled against Scala 2.10.x is guaranteed to run on a Scala 2.10.y run time (you're free to pick x -- a different one for each dependency, even -- and y). Scala 2.10 gets a bugfix release every 3 months, and a lot of the features we're developing for 2.11 (as modules) will be available for 2.10 as well.

Happy to hear your thoughts and experiences in upgrading! Several of our clients and other big Scala users have reported successful upgrades from 2.9 to 2.10, though others are still happily running on 2.9. Doesn't that make us _more_ enterprisey?

[1] I'm the Scala tech lead at Typesafe.

</comment><comment><USER4> > most of these people have not gone through a Scala version switch, or seen > the pain that it can cause, or extrapolated that out thinking what it will > do for future releases.

Seriously oversold.

I have been through the 2.9 to 2.10 switch. Anyone's who's used Play over the past year has also (maybe unknowingly) been through that switch since the Play plugin was using SBT 0.12.x (and Scala 2.9.x) even if your code was compiled under Scala 2.10.x.

It was practically painless.

The worst that happens in reality is you have to wait a couple extra months for someone to release a new build of something you depend on (or heaven forbid, clone the source and build it yourself).

Contrast that with waiting years between stable releases and new features with some other popular languages.

I'll take Scala any day. It remind me a lot of the early c# days. And that's a good thing when it comes to really building up a language and what you can do with it.

<comment><USER5> I think your feelings on this depend on the size of your codebase/team. For a smallish project it's no big deal. For something large upgrading can be a significant effort.

Foursquare is still on 2.9.2. We hope to move to 2.10 fairly soon but it's by no means painless.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough.

But "fairly soon"? 2.10 hasn't even been out a year! Think about that. It's pretty cool IMO. I mean, Scala's community at-large does in months what takes Ruby's years. And with _fewer_ breaking changes, with better tooling to help you make the transition. That's really refreshing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Other than the community and leadership issues mentioned in the article, Scala will never be enterprise ready because I can't think of a worse language for the enterprise. Large IT departments working on multi-MLOC codebases need a solid, clear language. Scala was promising back when it was meant to be "a better Java". And you know why people liked it? Mostly because it had lambdas and traits - two features that are in Java 8.

Since then, Scala has become a sort of a testbed for new ideas in compiler technology. Consider this – it's basically got three complete type systems: an OO, inheritance based type system, a Haskell-like algebraic type system (sealed traits and case classes), and a duck-typed type system (structural types). Each of these type systems has been enough to write good, complex software, on each own. Scala's got all three, while at the same time missing on all of their advantages. It doesn't have Haskell's type safety and purity (or type inference). It doesn't have OO's simple, highly extensible, and just- powerful-enough type system, because it's so big and complicated, and it doesn't have duck-typing's care-freedom, because it's so heavy. Oh, and it's got macros, too, just for the heck of it.

I know some people like it because they have fun writing lisp, Haskell, Java and JavaScript in the same file and have it compiled by just one compiler. Yeah, it's a cool compiler. But seriously, it doesn't offer anything enterprise would want. It doesn't offer safety; it doesn't offer simplicity; it doesn't offer familiarity. It doesn't even offer much compatibility: it's much harder to integrate Java with Scala than with Clojure or Groovy, let alone Kotlin.

And I'm willing to bet that almost all large companies that currently employ Scala, do it because of its original promise of being a better Java. But if you're a superset of about 4 language families, than you clearly can't a better Java.

For those who want that productivity boost while maintaining familiarity and compatibility, there's Kotlin. And Java 8, of course.

<comment><USER7> >And you know why people liked it? Mostly because it had lambdas and traits - two features that are in Java 8.

I don't think this is the main reason people like it. Java's lambdas are also inferior to Scala's.

>a Haskell-like algebraic type system (sealed traits and case classes)

What do case classes and traits have to do with _types_?

>It doesn't have Haskell's type safety

How so? Can you explain how you think Scala isn't sound/typesafe?

>It doesn't have OO's simple, highly extensible, and just-powerful-enough type system

Uhm, can you explain to me an example of a simple OO type system that is 'just powerful enough'? Because most of the ones I know of are broken, and Scala easily has the best OO type system. C#, java, Go, etc. are all either missing generics (lolwut) or completely fucked up variance.

<comment><USER6> > How so? Can you explain how you think Scala isn't sound/typesafe?

Because you can do casts, and it's not pure. It doesn't even enforce immutability. You know what? Forget about enforcing – it doesn't even make mutability or casts hard. Look, Haskell is certainly not my cup of tea. Personally, I don't think the effort of thinking about my program twice (once in terms of logic and once in terms of types) is worth it in most circumstances, and pure functional languages don't support concurrent data structures which is what I deal with the most. But I do recognize Haskell's elegance, and if the elaborate type system is worth it, it's only because it can enforce many guarantees. I mean, the whole point of Haskell is that it supposedly makes safer programs. So you pay for the elaborate types (though some consider it a plus), but you gain safety. With Scala you just pay.

> Uhm, can you explain to me an example of a simple OO type system that is > 'just powerful enough'?

Sure. C++, Java, C#. Almost all of the world's software is written in C++ or Java. The question is not which language has "the best type system" (and even if it were, Scala can't make up its mind because it's got three of them). A type system is not an end but a means. Practically everyone who deals with type systems agrees that they come at a cost (and Martin Odersky himself admitted as much). But the cost hopefully buys you something. It arguably buys you better design, and it definitely buys you safety. Well, Scala doesn't give you safety any more than C++ or Java, and as for design, it can't even pick one type system; a cornerstone of great design is that you have to make hard choices.

<comment><USER7> >pure functional languages don't support concurrent data structures which is what I deal with the most

This is false, you were misinformed.

>Sure. C++, Java, C#.

C++ Has a good type system, IMO. The other two are _broken_. Literally, you can write broken code. Scala has a long list of warts, I just don't think you're listing any of them.

>Well, Scala doesn't give you safety any more than C++ or Java, and as for design, it can't even pick one type system; a cornerstone of great design is that you have to make hard choices.

This is just FUD. Are you telling me Java/C#'s type systems enforce more safety than Scala? Because they don't. They don't get variance right. Do you know what variance is? You ignored that part of my comment.

<comment><USER6> > This is false, you were misinformed.

If I'm wrong, I apologize. I am not familiar with any concurrent data structures in a pure functional language, but I'd love to learn of any. I have not encountered a data structure in a functional language that supports more than one concurrent writer (and I don't mean parallel construction of an immutable DS - that's trivial – but concurrent mutation, like in a concurrent B-Tree, concurrent skip-list, or concurrent hash map).

<comment><USER8> I haven't checked anymore than glancing through the slides but it has the words "concurrent data structures in haskell" at the beginning:

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/28336206/Multicore-programming- in-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/28336206/Multicore-programming-in-Haskell)

<comment><USER6> You are right! Didn't know about MVars. Got some learnin' to do now...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The blog post and question is somewhat inflammatory (no wonder it gets upvoted so readily). Scala has been in category "adopt" in Thoughtworks Radar for a while now.

[http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar](http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar)

It's not only Enterprise ready, but is in production in a large number of enterprises in many different sectors.

<comment><USER10> It's not inflammatory for the sake of it; the point is I wrote about this four years ago:

[http://alblue.bandlem.com/2009/10/scala-is-still-not- enterpr...](http://alblue.bandlem.com/2009/10/scala-is-still-not-enterprise- ready.html)

and there has been very little change since that 2009 post and the 2013 post to show any kind of serious movements on these issues. For single teams based on small projects the ability to up and move all your tools (IDEs, build train, library dependencies) really isn't a problem; but if you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of users and tens of thousands of libraries, you simply can't do an all-in-one upgrade.

And no, 2.10.x and 2.10.y being compatible isn't something to crow about; it should have been the default. The fact that you can't compile or test code in Eclipse with the Typesafe developed Scala IDE plugin for anything other than that exact version is one reason why developers are moving to IntelliJ's Scala development tools.

Ironically the problem is that the Scala IDE is written in Scala, whereas the IntelliJ tool is written in Kotlin, and Kotlin doesn't have compatibility problems (plus, it shells out to the specific compiler instead of Eclipse's Scala tools which embed their own).

Yes, teams at the Guardian are using Scala - but only in teams of less than ten people, and where they don't need to share libraries across multiple users and clients. That still doesn't make it enterprise ready.

Sadly I feel that Rod Johnson's keynote presentation at ScalaDays - <USER2> pointed out the same things as this post, and was the trigger - is being ignored. Unfortunately Typesafe are also ignoring this advice, and until that changes we won't see Scala being adopted in large enterprises.

Scala had a chance back in the late 2000s to be the next Java. Now - even with Java 8 having been delayed so much - it's probably too little, too late.

<comment><USER11> From the article:

> This self-limiting process means that Scala will never truly die out; at any > point, there are still more people who are new to Scala than people who have > been burnt by it, so there's always a fresh supply of people willing to > believe that it can't happen to them. The same is true of smokers, of > course.

If that's not inflammatory for the sake of it I don't know what is.

> And no, 2.10.x and 2.10.y being compatible isn't something to crow about; it > should have been the default.

The moving of the of the goalposts isn't helping your case that your not being inflammatory for the sake of it.

Few people are going to state that Scala doesn't have any problems. However, if you want to raise issues about the language, at least argue fairly and don't insult the users and developers of said language in the process.

<comment><USER10> I spent a long time trying to get the issue raised back in 2009.

[http://alblue.bandlem.com/2009/08/modularity-for- scala.html](http://alblue.bandlem.com/2009/08/modularity-for-scala.html) [http://alblue.bandlem.com/2009/09/draft-scala-modularity- req...](http://alblue.bandlem.com/2009/09/draft-scala-modularity- requirements.html)

Key to both of these was 'real' backward compatibility (i.e. the compatibility between versions like 2.8 and 2.9, not the patch level compatibility that exists at the moment).

I'm not moving the goalposts here; the issue is that having 2.8.x compatible with 2.9.y (or 2.9.x with 2.10.y etc) is a key point where Scala has failed, and continues to fail.

Until this is fixed, Scala won't be enterprise ready.

Rod's point (from his Scala days keynote) is that in 5 years Scala has a chance of being 'the' language, but only if it gets the backward compatibility issues sorted between 2.x and 2.x+1.

My point was I made exactly the same argument almost 5 years ago and nothing has changed, and since the past is the best predictor of future performance it is a safe bet that in 5 years time Scala won't have solved that problem, and thus won't be applicable for large enterprises.

This isn't a rant against users of Scala, it's a critique of the development plans that doesn't see this is a problem, or is happy to use Scala as an experimental playground that isn't likely to get widespread usage in enterprise.

If you can fit all your organisation's development teams in a single conference room, these problems are never going to apply to you, since you can just mandate that everyone switches at a particular date. But for organisations with hundreds or thousands of developers such an all-in-one switch isn't feasible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this is the wrong question to ask. It's clearly enterprise ready considering enterprises are actively using it in their _critical_ infrastructure. A better question is "Will scala ever have major release backwards compatibility as a feature."

This isn't to discredit the author's viewpoint. I strongly agree with many of the assertions he makes. Backwards compatibility is a major problem.

Back to backwards compatibility (wee, puns), I think a major part of it is not due to ABI changes. The JVM has very well defined entry and exit points to deal with this. The problem seems to stem more with the libraries. As long as the libraries keep changing at a fast rate, the scala cmomunity will never achieve backwards compatibility at the level this author wants to achieve. Until typesafe makes a strong commitment to put APIs through a sunsetting lifecycle with deprecation, it will continue to be a problem.

Fortunately, they have made a commitment to not make breaking changes in minor releases. E.g. 2.10.0 compiled applications should continue to work with all release 2.10.* runtimes.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a former lisper I cant but help feel that haskell and scala are the modern lisps. In 10 years all industrial languages will be undeniably influenced by these pioneers but the languages itself wont be the next big thing.

<comment><USER4> Maybe. But it feels like Functional programming at least is a thing now. I can't see the next decade's language remaining an imperative bog...

I cringed at seeing the following Ruby today:

      "error#{'s' if errors.size > 1}"

:-)

<comment><USER8> Did you start that paragraph with a "Maybe" on purpose? lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Odersky is already working on a Scala successor: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/data-types- issues](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/data-types-issues)

<comment><USER11> That isn't intended to be a Scala successor. That is intended to be integrated in future versions of Scala.

<comment><USER15> lol :-) Sums up what the whole fuss is about.

Scala is a great language. It gives me OO + functional in one great package that has no equal out there. Couldn't do without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Will Scala ever be enterprise-ready? I don't know. Will enterprise ever be Scala-ready ? No.

And I'm not being flippant here.

</comment><comment><USER17> For Scala to gain any traction with the enterprise market, it will need strong backing from enterprise middleware vendors. If IBM, HP, Oracle , RedHat and VMWare start shipping IDEs and libraries compatible with Scala and start pushing Scala over Java, only then would the development managers in large enterprises would give Scala a fair shake. And that is unlikely to happen as these vendors have made huge investments in Java that they are not going to cannibalize.

Until then it Java or C# only for the enterprise s/w development; the silver lining is that Java 8 is a significant improvement.

On a personal note, as a java programmer I do not find Scala worth the learning curve. I am into Clojure for my personal/ hobby/ bootstrap programming because it forces me to think differently about programming and I enjoy that.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd add one thing to the list of requirements before it is enterprise-ready: faster compile times.

<comment><USER19> You're right, C++ will never be enterprise-ready.

(Scala could indeed really do with faster compiles, but I think that's actually _less_ of a problem for enterprises than it is for the agile startup world)

<comment><USER20> A lot of money has been invested in infrastructure to deal with C++ slow compiles and make it more feasible; Google for example has some amazing build reuse and caching tech. There are many other ways of dealing with slow compiles vs. just making compiles go faster; e.g. you could make them more incremental (which is also useful for IDE use).

<comment><USER19> Scala already has some very good incremental compilation tech, built into its IDE support. For day-to-day coding the compile times aren't an issue (though they can become one if you like to e.g. make releases frequently).

<comment><USER21> Ugh, ever since we added scala to our projects, the compile-time has doubled. It's certainly an issue to me. It makes it harder to get into flow when I have to wait several minutes for compilation.

<comment><USER19> For day-to-day coding where you need that flow you should be using an IDE with incremental compilation. Full compiles are for releases or the like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Most of the "enterprises" I know are still on Java 6. So clearly the need for a "big-bang" migration is not enough to turn enterprises off a language.

To talk about minor version numbers is to miss the point, I think. Scala 2.10 brought more new features than java 7, and scala 2.11 will bring more new features than java 8. It's just happening faster.

<comment><USER22> That's part of the problem: Scala needs fewer features and more focus in other areas, such as tool support (IDE's mostly) and backward compatibility.

The problem is that Scala's leadership is conflicted: you have Typesafe trying to turn it into a product and the researchers inside Typesafe more focused on producing papers for their academic careers, and therefore steering the boat in a direction that conflicts with pleasing new users.

<comment><USER11> Why do you think that those doing research inside Typesafe are steering the language in a direction that is user hostile? From what I have seen the effort appears to be more focused on simplifying the language in order to make it easier to use: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/data-types- issues](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/data-types-issues)

<comment><USER22> > Why do you think that those doing research inside Typesafe are steering the > language in a direction that is user hostile?

Macros come to mind. It's a feature that completely circumvented the SIP (and was later retrofitted into it), which is still heavily controversial inside scala-internals to the point that we're still not sure whether they will ever be officially part of scalac and which will probably never be used by more than a very tiny minority of Scala users.

They took months of work (which could have been put to better use, e.g. IDE support), mostly done with little transparency and which started generating papers for conferences before the project was remotely close to a prototype.

This kind of project would never have seen the light of day if the language was led by a company focused primarily on users and sound engineering.

<comment><USER9> Macros were not done at Typesafe, but by Eugene Burmako, who's a grad student at EPFL. Grad students do new stuff, and they publish about it, IDE improvements are typically not their piece of cake (Typesafe does have a very capable team working on IDEs).

As you imply, macros are labelled experimental, which means that you have to enable them explicitly. Having experimental features is Scala's way of reconciling a vibrant open source community with the stability needed for enterprise use. Needless to say, we do not recommend use of experimental features in enterprises. They are good for playing around with interesting new concepts and sometimes they do lead to something which is a win, such as the beautiful async/await library that will ship in 2.11.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Scala will be enterprise-ready when there are readily available affordable Scala programmers.

If you can master Scala and write complex Scala codes, most likely enterprise crud jobs does not interest you.

</comment><comment><USER24> Scala is a fine scotch, but at a very young age. It's version 2.10.3, everything is still changing fairly rapidly. All it needs to be adopted in a more widespread manner is to improve it's approachability. Even for engineers who've been programming for years, Scala is hard to grok. The vast deviations in style don't help.

I'm betting it's going to take over the world in a few years, especially as it expands it foothold in the Big Data space.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think a lot of what people were ruffled about was his remarks about reinventing the wheel. There are preferred ways of writing code in all languages, some more extreme than others. However, while Scala is backwards compatible with Java, it's not always as nice to use a library which is firmly rooted in Java.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not until Set is not a Functor

<comment><USER27> To be pedantic, you mean Set to not implement map, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Enterprise ready is such a useless term because the readiness is dependent on the particular enterprise asking the question.

For some enterprises Scala or even Go are "enterprise ready", for others, it will be decades.

</comment><comment><USER29> Scala has the potential to become an enterprise useful language because people can write a simple script to monitor how many mutable states appears in the codebase.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does scala follow semantic versioning? It sounds like they should still be in the 0.x stage if there are enough breaking changes to merit this discussion

<comment><USER4> Yes it does. AFAICT it's working well. There are 5 releases in the 2.10.x line and I haven't had a compatibility issue between any of them.

The deal is (I think) that Scala is a much quicker evolving language than say Ruby. Ruby 2.0 was rumored to be released the better part of a decade ago (anyone else remember Pickaxe 1.8, pre-Rails, saying that eventually parenthesis would no longer be optional in Ruby 2.0?).

Scala has developed new features at a pretty quick pace. By and large this doesn't mean breaking source compatibility. Most source seems to be forwards compatible, or require minimal effort.

The reason this comes up at all is because of Package Management. Where Ruby only needs to worry about a parser compatibility level, Scala has to worry about binary compatibility in packaging since it lives in Java's packaging ecosystem. Since Maven doesn't encode a binary version, breaking binary compatibility (say you added a new default argument to a method signature, that wouldn't otherwise break source compatibility, or you introduced a new superclass for a return value) means breaking your packages.

SBT gets around this by encoding the binary version (the Scala minor version) in the artifact name.

Some day this will all probably get sorted out.

It hasn't been much of a pain point for me personally. Most 3rd party binary packages are Java packages, which are binary compatible since Java 5(?). For the few Scala libs you might depend on, you might as likely be using a source dependency from Github, which means you don't need to worry since you're compiling it yourself, or most popular packages will have published versions with a new compiler pretty quickly.

The next time this will be an issue is when Scala 2.11.0 is released. And AFAIK that should introduce any breaking changes for source code at this point. So if you want to move to Scala 2.11.0 you either wait for package authors to cross-compile to it, or you build it yourself as a source dependency if you have access to the code.

<comment><USER10> Just FYI; semantic versioning is split into three numbers:

major.minor.micro

Changes in .micro are assumed to be interchangeable. Scala does this.

Changes in .minor are assumed to be backwardly compatible, but with new features added. Scala does not do this, it requires a recompile.

Major versions indicate a completely incompatible change.

If Scala were to follow semantic versioning, it would need to coalesce the first two versions together and have e.g. 210 and 211 to indicate that they are not compatible with each other.

<comment><USER4> .minor: Scala does this at a Source level IME.

Which depending on your background may mean everything or nothing at all I guess.

Most Ruby libs would claim to follow semantic versioning. I think it's also fair to say there are a lot more mis-steps with compatibility on that side of the fence but I've not seen this argument used there that I can recall.

I mean, to be fair, your argument was "large enterprises". Which, means Java. And in that regard you're not wrong since binary compatibility there is a given.

Still... As long as you can clone and build the source (it's not like you're buying licenses for UI binary libraries built in Scala after all) I fail to understand why this is a bigger deal than say: String interpolation. Partial Functions. Function Lifting. Type Inference. Type Classes. Tuples. Pattern Matching. The list just goes on and on...

The question isn't "Is Scala ready to be the basis for closed source, licensed libraries" after all? If it were then a "we must maintain a decade of binary compatibility" might have a point. Otherwise it feels like a really hollow criticism. I mean, what actual Scala _users_ out there actually want to see Scala 2.11's features put to death on the altar of binary compatibility?

<comment><USER10> > I mean, to be fair, your argument was "large enterprises". > Which, means > Java. And in that regard you're not wrong since > binary compatibility there > is a given.

Exactly, and that's what Scala is up against. Java 8 will allow Java 7 compiled libraries to run without changes, and though there's a world of difference between Java 8 and Scala, in practice Java 8 gives developers some new features that they'll find useful and more performant than Scala (parallel collections, no implicit casting/conversions etc.)

It's also worth noting that 'backwardly compatible' and 'new features' aren't in conflict with each other. Java has had new features added (invokedynamic at the JVM, try-with-resources and string switch in the language layer) but they've still remained binary compatible. The problem is that Scala's approach to new features is to break binary compatibility between 2.x and 2.x+1 releases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Pretty sure its already in enterprises, perhaps the more cutting edge ones but nonetheless it powers some very large websites.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wonder how the JVM will compare to .NET in 10 years time.

<comment><USER33> They will both become just compatibility layers implemented on top of node.js.

/s

<comment><USER34> ...because single thread is enough for any task!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Twitter thinks so...

</comment><comment><USER36> No. Next question.</comment>


Ways You Can Help EFF - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/helpout

<comment><USER2> Don't forget The Humble Bundle :)</comment>


The End of Publishing, or the Rantings of a Manic-Depressive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/the-end-of-the-publishing-cartel

<comment><USER2> I honestly have no idea if this is some kind of performance art or parody or whatever.</comment>


Usability of Footnotes - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/07/usability-of-footnotes/ <comment><USER2> Before even clicking through to the article I was thinking about Infinite Jest.

> As an author, I want to add more details which don't fit in the main body of > the text. Because I hate deleting text and my editor told me to take it out.

I joked about IJ doing that exact thing, that the editor was all "no, you can't just list nonsensical film titles for four straight pages" and DFW said "watch this."

Of course it's us poor readers that pay the price having to use two bookmarks (or three, as some footnotes have footnotes). And there was plenty of this:

> the user is forced to break from the flow of reading

I've never had to reread so many passages. If you take it all in stride it's quite fun, really. I found it humorous and chuckled each time I had to skip to the back, like I was privy to an inside joke.

The article does raise good points, and I've never used an e-reader. I bet it helps a ton, I imagine something like the pop up doc/diff/def viewers like in a modern source code editor. I imagine it would've taken away some of the fun from IJ, but of course that's not a typical case.

<comment><USER3> I tried to read Infinite Jest once but eventually gave up because I found it kind of exhausting to read and I couldn't really follow along.

After reading your comment I decided to have another look at it. I knew last time that it was a weird book, and that it was enjoyed by a lot of people. But even looking at the first page of it again I just don't feel compelled to read it. Maybe some day.

<comment><USER4> There's a decent audiobook too, if that helps.

<comment><USER5> As someone who has done a little work on the side recording audiobooks, I hope they paid that guy well. That sounds like a nightmare.

<comment><USER2> How do you handle footnotes in audiobooks?

<comment><USER5> I was told to read them right after the sentence in which they appear. It sucks when there's one in the middle of a sentence or multiple in one sentence, really breaks the flow of the thought. On the other hand, I can't think of a better way to handle them without omitting them entirely.

There's a few things like that which have really made me realize how _visual_ books are, and how challenging they are to translate to the spoken word (simple example, imagine how to express with your tone of voice that this is a parenthetical rather than a new sentence).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> just-ok Footnotes are great when done right.

If you're using footnotes to cite things, you're doing it wrong: inline citations exist. If that's not enough for you, use a different syntax (say, ^[1] instead of ^1). If you're using it to define terms, you're doing it wrong: use a margin note. If that's not enough, you should probably typeset a nice box that makes definitions easy to identify. Footnotes (imo, of course) should _only_ be used as a "here's more information for the curious" and should similarly only appear at the actual foot of a page (I _despise_ endnotes).

My experience is biased towards print and print-like (PDF) use of footnotes, but I don't think it's much of a problem to expect users to click every footnote when provided with a convenient pop-up UI like in the OP, provided that you've clearly defined a convention or pattern of their usage to your readers.

I do wish websites showed footnotes on hover, though... jumping within the page is nonsense and often mucks with URL sharing.

<comment><USER6> IMO inline cites are the worst of all possible worlds: they butcher the text but don't provide enough information to resolve the citation and require another two levels of lookup (brief-ref mapping, referenced work) to resolve the reference.

Either just name the damned work already in the text ("as Smith writes in _Academic Observations_ (1972) ..."), or use a numbered note and cite the work fully or partially. Any decent bibliographic tool (LaTeX + BibTex) can handle long vs. short cites, and your reader will thank you. For any sufficient volume of references, footnotes are the only sensible tool.

There's also the silent notes form (unsure of the proper name) common in serious-but-nonacademic works --- no indictation in the main text but page- referenced notes with anchoring context. This solves one problem (interrupting the main text), but introduces another (failing to _sufficiently_ notice additional references or comments).

<comment><USER7> Personally, I like my citations short and meaningful. Easy to skip over, but also easy to resolve if I care. That means something like [Aut19] where Aut is some contraction of the author names, and 19 reffers to the year of publication.

My issue with simpler citations like [13] is that it is hard to figure out whether two citations are to the same book. "Was [13] that reference to the horrible tome of complete mathematics, or was that [14]" "Was [15] the paper this is trying to generalize?". By creating a small amount of meaning, it becomes much easier to remember the actual reference.

My issue with longer citations, is that I generally don't care about the source of a statement. When I am trying to follow an argument, I will just take the statement as fact, and focus on the big picture. Only when the fact is surprising, or when I have gotten the big picture, will I care about the reference. By having full inline citations in the argument, the text of the argument gets very bloated. Making it much harder to get the high level point of the argument.

I can imagine this is a feature of very technical, close to mathematical proofs, kind of texts. For other fields, maybe this matter much less. Especially when 'truth' is a lot less objective, knowing the source of a statement becomes more important I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the best uses of footnotes is in _Softwar_ , the book on Ellison & Oracle. There, footnotes are an entertaining editorial compromise: the author refused to give up final approval, but he gave Ellison the right to respond within the book.

Ellison will either expand on - or contradict - the author's points. Easily the most appropriate and defensible use of footnotes I've ever encountered.

Link to book: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AK78QVI/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AK78QVI/)

<comment><USER9> I skimmed through part of it and found this gem in a footnote:

"LE writes: Gardens last for hundreds of years, companies don't. That's because people love and take care of gardens."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _...There have been many attempts to get a <footnote> element into HTML..._

HTML is now well into its 2nd quarter century, grew from academic origins, and yet still lacks a <footnote> or <note> element and standard presentation(s).¹ I've not followed developments at all closely, references here are based on current DDG searches, bit so far as I'm aware, the situation's not improved and has arguable regressed.

Suggestions to use <cite> fail as not all footnotes are citations. Using <aside> overloads the element, creates ambiguities as to usage, and leaves us with nonstandard footnote mechanisms.

There was a 2003 proposal for a <referral> tag which seems ... excessively Byzantine.²

David MacDonald's <note> element proposal seems to cover most of the features (and objections) I'd anticipate.³

I'd consider footnotes (bottom of current page), endnotes (end of document or section/chaper/article), sidenotes (margin adjacent to text), inline notes (parenthetical communts, such aas this), or pop-up dialogues to be for the most part implementation details of an underlying notes element. An author might specify a default presentation, but the reader or device / media properties could override this in all cases to suit needs, limitations, or preference.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. HTML3 had the <FN> element, long since abandoned: [https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/footnotes.html](https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/footnotes.html)

2\. [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www- style/2003May/att-0...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www- style/2003May/att-0050/proposal.draft.html)

3\. [https://www.davidmacd.com/blog/html51-footnotes.html](https://www.davidmacd.com/blog/html51-footnotes.html) See also [http://spec-ops.github.io/html-note/index.html](http://spec- ops.github.io/html-note/index.html)

<comment><USER10> Does footnote (bottom of current page) in html mean bottom of viewport or bottom of webpage that when printed out can take 4-5 pages. If bottom of webpage what is footnote if infinite scroll.

In the MDN example for cite it is inside of a footer element [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ci...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/cite)

I believe a combination of aside, cite, and footer can achieve most of what is wanted - at any rate the main problem is that footnote is a concept arising from printed works and perhaps not directly transferable to the infinite canvas that HTML in the browser represents.

on edit: minor clarification.

<comment><USER6> "Footer" is a page/section element, not an in-text document relation. Footnotes are document or article relations, similar to sections or figures. The refer between the main text and supplemental material, with enumeration.

Again, how the note itself is presented should be definable by the author/publisher, media, device, or user, ranked from least to greatest priority.

Whilst infinite scroll is a misfeature, most such designs are based around subunits, usually articles. Notes at the end of an article, much as they typically appear in printed anthologies, encyclopedias, and collections, would seem a fairly obvious choice.

<comment><USER10> >"Footer" is a page/section element, not an in-text document relation. Footnotes are document or article relations, similar to sections or figures. The refer between the main text and supplemental material, with enumeration

Most words have more than one meaning - the one you give for footnote is certainly one meaning of footnote, however if I go to [https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/footnote](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/footnote) it says "a note printed at the bottom of a page that gives extra information about something that has been written on that page" which I actually think is the commonly understood meaning.

This would also explain the strong relation between the words Footer and Footnote.

The Footnote was invented in a particular media, it was presented in a particular way that was suitable to that media. My main point is that there has not been an obvious way to translate between how it is used in that media to how it should be used in the browser, and therefore attempts to make a footnote element specification have met with lackluster response at best.

<comment><USER6> _The <footer> element represents a footer for its nearest ancestor sectioning content or sectioning root element._

 _A footer typically contains information about its section: author, links to related documents, copyright data, etc._

[https://www.w3.org/html/wiki/Elements/footer](https://www.w3.org/html/wiki/Elements/footer)

A <footer> element is one possible container for a <note>. It is not the note itself, need not contain _any_ notes, nor need notes appear in footers.

The mapping is both inaccurate and ambiguous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tufte's footnotes are my favorite. They're especially brilliant when you have typeset documents on 8.5x11" paper, because you wind up with huge margins if you're using a humane line length for your main text.

[https://www.overleaf.com/articles/implementing-the- teachings...](https://www.overleaf.com/articles/implementing-the-teachings-of- edward-tufte/hvtnngcxqnwm)

<comment><USER12> Tufte is underappreciated for sure. He's often aped, but rarely do I see his ideas actually applied as he teaches them. The whole point is a theory and practice of communication. Before he gave up and decided to just focus on sculpture he was almost to the point of actually developing a solid theory of representing 5-6 dimensional information representation in 2space. Of course I understand why he gave up, because 3space is way more interesting when you've solved the 2space problem to your own satisfaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the article:

> But I want to talk about the cognitive issues at play. When footnotes can > contain anything from a citation to essential background information, the > user is forced to break from the flow8 of reading – often in the middle of a > sentence. This is a problem in both paper books and electronic books.

I think this is...the idea of footnotes? That you _don 't_ break the flow and it's safe to skip over them, but if you're coming back for a leisurely read later, you can look them up and see what you missed. [1] When you go over the text a second time, you can follow the references to the footnotes and see the interesting crumbs that the author laid out, which often lead to a train of thought separate from the main flow of words.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

[1] At least, this is how I have used footnotes for a while when reading, and it works quite well. YMMV, since people read and comprehend differently.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think my confusion is about how to read the footnotes which are more than just citations. If I read them "inline" then I don't understand why they're not part of the main text. If I wait until the end of the chapter, I've lost context.

I'm prepared to believe that I haven't been taught to read in the right way. But there seems to be some disagreement on what the right way is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find footnotes annoying even in print books. When I'm reading a book, I have to figure out if the book is the type that uses footnotes as citations or the type that uses it as actual content. Or worse, the type that does both. If it's the type that uses them as citations, then meh, I can skip over them. If it's the type that uses them as content, well ugh now I need to read this footnote and then get back to the original text, which is a context switch. Even worse if the footnotes are actually endnotes because then I need to physically flip the pages. Even worse if the endnotes are gigantic and have subnotes ( _cough_ Infinite Jest).

If it's the type that does both then I have to look at every damn footnote only to be disappointed by a "Pfaffenberger, 2016" 90% of the time.

I don't have a good answer to these problems. Tufte style is better because I don't have to move my eyes that much. But there's only so much one can put in a note in the margin. And it still distracts.

<comment><USER12> I like endnotes best. For a book where they are actually useful I either unbind or buy two copies so I can lay out the endnotes side by side with the book. Think of it like having two monitors where one is the working screen and the other is the reference screen.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't it be more useful not to have to do this? Keeping them footnotes saves buying another copy, or damaging yours.

<comment><USER12> Think of it as the difference between having two monitors and having one monitor where the bottom 1/8th to 1/2 randomly gets hijacked. Two monitors are also more expensive. My method has its trade-offs as you note, but I find having an uninterrupted flow through the main text while having access to the notes on an as desired basis works best for my enjoyment and comprehension. Without my method endnotes are so frustrating I almost never use them, and about half the time when I think ok this time it's worth it to context switch, it turns out not to be.

This all comes down to Tufte's idea of letting the optic nerve do the work. A glance requires almost no conscious brainpower, this is why thumbing through a book you've read works so well. Thus I can glance over at the footnotes pages and decide if I care to read the note without even slightly interrupting my flow reading the main text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > How does the user know whether the footnote is a citation or is explanatory?

Used to be that was one of the distinctions between footnotes and end notes. This is an affordance where that lost distinction in ebooks is most felt, I think.

An equally old practice, however, is to use different marks for footnotes versus end notes, and that's something I've felt could be readopted in a digital context. In particular the asterisk, dagger, double dagger, very rare triple dagger symbology was used for foot notes only (as there are only a few such symbols, versus numerals, and they can't be "document global").

In a medium with hyperlinks, symbol uniqueness is less of a problem so asterisks for all footnotes and numbers for end notes is possible.

Similarly, we aren't as limited typographically with what metal we have available in ebooks, we could enlist a much wider variety of symbols (emoji notes, perhaps?), or even pair symbols and numbers.

Perhaps the biggest thing holding us back right now is that publishers want to use the same design tools for both print and ebook (for good reason), but ideas like increasing symbol variety or pairing symbols and numbers are both reasonable options to make it to print as well if they need to be kept close in similarity for ease of production.

</comment><comment><USER17> I personally like the approach that Gwern takes (e.g. [1]), which works fairly well on screens where you have a lot more horizontal space than needed for the main body of text (it's beneficial to keep the text somewhat narrow anyway, since lines that are too long become harder to scan/read).

It seems to be somewhat similar to what Edward Tufte does in his books, which is also putting the footnotes in the margins close to where they are brought up, and often even interrupting the current line for an additional note or image at the point of reference.

1\. [https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3)

<comment><USER18> More info: [https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes](https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Footnotes are great! There's something wonderful about the affordance of a digressive paragraph at the foot of the page. I do not need to break the flow of reading, just flick my eyes down, read and return to the body text. What are terrible are _endnotes_ , which force one to page or click back and forth. That action breaks flow.

I wonder if the issue is with how footnotes are displayed electronically? Perhaps a Sufficiently Smart E-Reader could display a footnote as long as its footnote marker, sentence, line or paragraph (would need research to see which is best, I think) is on-screen.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have often used footnotes in my own reading. For things I want in the text for completeness, but do not consider essential to the story.

However, thinking about it, they are completely nonfunctional for me when reading. Unless I am skimming a text, I will immediately look up any foot-note I come across. I suppose that, if it is a quick explanation of something I already know, or don't care about, it is easier to skip the footnote in full. Whereas an in-line explanation is harder to skip because it is part of the text.

</comment><comment><USER20> The worst thing ever is end-book-notes (or end-chapter ones) in a paper book. I have the habit of "precise reading", e.g. I usually read books from first to last page without skipping information. The "end-notes rich" books are the worst reading experience for me (bottom page foot-notes are OK).

When I write text I quite often use footnotes - they are special for the organisation of the text, adding kind of additional dimensions to the main narration.

I don't (or very rarely) use ebooks, so hard to tell.

</comment><comment><USER21> The worst case I had to deal with was when reading _War and Peace_ by Leo Tolstoy. I can read Russian, that's not a problem. The problem is that about 20% is in French which I cannot read, and translation was given as footnotes. So annoying.

</comment><comment><USER22> I can't believe he wrote a whole article on the usability of footnotes, using footnotes, on a site without links to return from the footnote back to where it was used.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm being deliberately ironic to help underscore how usability issues affect footnotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice to see Coil icon light up. The author just earned $0.02 from me because of their Web Monetization tag.</comment>


Ask HN: How do we add a second reply to a question we were asked re. our application? - <AUTHOR>

We were asked a question regarding our application, to which we gave an answer. We also said we would follow up with another answer today. Is there a way to add a second reply? <comment><USER2> Nice, looks like you have interest shown..did you receive a question via email or was there a separate page you're suppose to check on yc reponse?</comment>


A better way to profile multithreaded programs - <AUTHOR> http://jvns.ca/blog/2015/10/31/papers-are-amazing-profiling-threaded-programs-with-coz/ <comment><USER2> As someone who has written an APM profiler for multi-threaded, async .NET web applications I can attest to how hard it is. There are actually a few ways to do async type methods in .NET and supporting all of them was even more fun.

Begin/End older style method delegates

async/await with normal tasks

async/await with TaskCompletionSource (aka fake tasks)

and of course completely custom ways in 3rd party libraries

Crazy hard profiling magic, FTW!

FYI, I wrote the .NET profiler for Stackify ([http://stackify.com](http://stackify.com)) as part of our APM solution

</comment><comment><USER3> Author tries to optimize for execution time (finish program fast). But most users want to decrease total CPU resource consumption, because most tasks runs in parallel on server. In second case traditional hotspot profiling works just fine.

<comment><USER4> That can definitely be true, but note lots of things are _latency_ -, not throughput-bound. In particular, microservice-based systems are likely to hit 99% latency of _some_ service on (many/most/all) requests; I'd expect that a similar trick would be helpful there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice review of an interesting paper.

Aside: How did you design the ribbon? I looked at the triangles on each end of the nav bar, and it looks like you've done that by styling the ::before and ::after section with a top and bottom margin respectively, which because it's zero content makes a triangle. How on Earth did you come up with that? Is that a standard technique?

<comment><USER6> Not really standard, but also not unheard of. Google "css only shapes" for examples.

Top hit is [https://css-tricks.com/examples/ShapesOfCSS/](https://css- tricks.com/examples/ShapesOfCSS/), which has several examples of before: and after: use to create, for example, a five-pointed star.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm getting into concurrency from living a calm life where blocking the main thread was a thing.

What are HNers experiences with different models for concurrency and inter- process communication? To me, something like go and clojures channels (actually CSP) combined with green threads seems like a really neat solution.

<comment><USER8> Or Erlang/Elixir, which I found simpler than Go (though that may be due to my experience with Erlang, and my tending to think in Erlang ways, and it not quite matching Go's). Certainly, the guaranteed immutability, better pre- emptive scheduling, supervision, easy distribution of processes across multiple nodes, and better process isolation meant I felt my code was more reliable than with Go.

EDIT: Since you didn't mention Erlang, just to give you a point of reference, Erlang message passing is directly between lightweight processes, rather than an intermediate channel like in Go. I've heard people reference it as files vs file descriptors, but for myself, I think of it architecturally. Go creates an abstraction for the message type, that is, create a channel for ~this~ kind of message, and pub/sub to it as needed, and you shouldn't have to care about who is subscribed to determine what channel to publish on (it's enough to say 'it's this kind of message, so it goes on this channel'). Erlang, on the other hand (and Elixir) send messages directly to different processes, no additional abstraction. As such, you end up thinking about who needs to communicate with who, and how best to do that. So by default, it's like having a channel with exactly one known listener. Of course, you can easily build a channel like behavior, by creating a process whose sole job is to collect messages, and determine how to federate them out to other subscribed processes. I prefer the Erlang way because oftentimes the level of abstraction Go gives is unnecessary (and sometimes even a source of bugs, where I did a poor job of defining my messages, and not thinking about who was listening to the channel meant that a process got a message that it should not have, because of another, similarly typed message that it should have; I needed two channels, but created only one), but when it's useful I can always easily build it in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Better link for paper: [https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/blob/master/Coz- Curtsing...](https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/blob/master/Coz-Curtsinger- Berger-SOSP2015.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> Coz co-author here. Feel free to ask us any questions.</comment>


Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://rickyyean.com/2016/01/22/privilege-and-inequality-in-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10955285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10955285)</comment>


Show HN: My friends' new Flower E-comm Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.thebouqs.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the OP. Just wanted to share a site some old college buddies started. I think it's a very nice setup. They control the supply chain entirely. They have both an on-demand and subscription model.

Personally I like it b/c I can get flowers sent to my wife regularly. And I really like that they wont resort to the old bait-and-switch that I always see from the likes of FTD where the advertised of listed flowers are $19, but the eventual price somehow reaches $60.</comment>


Implantable Eye Telescope That Treats AMD Finally Gets FDA Approval - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/07/08/implantable-eye-telescope-that-treats-amd-finally-gets-fda-approval/

<comment><USER2> Something like this is quite dangerous outside the question of sight I think. Someone with these implants will now have eyes that simply don't look right to others. Many people might either consciously or unconsciously look at these people as somewhat other than human, as some type of machine in some ways. The eyes are likely the most important physical feature a person has toward developing a sense of social communication. Perhaps implant recipients will end up wearing sunglasses at most times like the blind.

</comment><comment><USER3> Those telescopic eyes look kind of awesome. But it does sound like the technology still has a long way to go. Only two thirds of people saw "notable" improvement. Meaning one third saw no improvement (or possibly even deterioration) after months of rehabilitation, and among those who saw improvement I imagine a lot of it would fall under the category of minor. Which seems like a pretty big risk considering that the operation does not look reversible. But then again, if you can't see already...

<comment><USER4> I think the whole point of the qualifier "notable" is to indicate that it would not be categorized as "minor."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Never read the Bible and know nothing about Christianity? I need you - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone,
I am conducting a study and writing a paper on the Bible & specifically Christianity's impact on technology workers and those in the startup space.
Qualifications for the study:
1) You have NEVER read The Bible, ever. 2) You know NOTHING about Christianity.
If you are interested in being a part of the study please email firstname.lastname@example.com.
Please NOTE: You will not be preached too, etc. this is strictly a data and survey project. <comment><USER2> I'm seconding the call for a better definition of "you know NOTHING about Christianity".

Given this is written in English, I'm assuming applicants to your study can know that a cross is a significant thing in Christianity, but ideally not know the difference between a Catholic cross and a Protestant cross. I'm willing to bet line can be drawn at knowing there were disciples, and being able to name any (besides Judas).

Can you clarify if you mean "know NOTHING (beyond South Park and Charlie Brown Christmas specials"?

<comment><AUTHOR> This means that you have no idea what the Bible talks about or what Christianity believes. You have never learned about Jesus. Hope this helps.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> To clarify: I am looking for people who have no idea what the Bible talks about or what Christianity believes. You have never learned about Jesus. Hope this helps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Define "know nothing about Christianity".

<comment><USER4> "Know nothing about X" is a figure of speech and not meant to be taken literally. It means that the person would describe their knowledge about X as "I know nothing about X." Consequently what titusblair is looking for are people who would describe their knowledge about Christianity as "I know nothing about Christianity."

<comment><USER5> Maybe its not best idea to use figure of speech in such requirements.

Especially when your requirements will be pretty much required only by English as second language speakers.

<comment><AUTHOR> This means that you have no idea what the Bible talks about or what Christianity believes. You have never learned about Jesus. Hope this helps.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Publish tweets by any other user - <AUTHOR> http://kedrisec.com/twitter-publish-by-any-user/ <comment><USER2> I found this difficult to follow, but from what I can gather, sharing the media file with another user generated a new media key/identifier that was considered to be owner by the victim - instead of the original user uploading it?

And then from here, by abusing the ad studio tweet functionality, it's possible to tweet using the victim's account?

Edit: Twitter's HackerOne summary makes a lot more sense "The reporter discovered a flaw in the handling of Twitter Ads Studio requests which allowed an attacker to tweet as any user. By sharing media with a victim user and then modifying the post request with the victim's account ID the media in question would be posted from the victim's account. This bug was patched immediately after being triaged and no evidence was found of the flaw being exploited by anyone other than the reporter."</comment>


The Student Loan Crisis Is Overblown - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/07/28/487032643/is-the-student-loan-crisis-fact-or-fiction <comment><USER3> I think a big point that wasn't touched on in the article (maybe her book does, I haven't read it) is that the increased debt load on students means they are delaying or forgoing buying other major purchases, such as homes and cars. Both of which are huge economic drivers. It isn't that people can't afford the loan payments, it is that the loan payments are reducing the disposable income of those students for quite some time.

<comment><USER4> I can see how car buying increases GDP (as each new car must be produced) but the same doesn't necessarily apply to home buying. Home supply is relatively fixed. Increases in demand cause asset price inflation, more than they do additional homebuilding. So home purchases don't 'drive the economy' in the sense of causing additional economic output.

<comment><USER5> Home supply is fixed in some areas, but certainly not in all. Plenty of people around me are buying new houses in brand new subdivisions. When I bought my house, the sellers were moving to a brand new house. If someone hadn't bought their house, they would't have bought a brand new house. My area is growing by thousands of people per year, and the existing houses are already filled. If people want to move in, they have to build more houses.

Meanwhile I buy only used cars, so me purchasing a car doesn't drive the economy any more than buying a used house does.

<comment><USER4> Your point about used home sales enabling the sellers to buy new homes applies equally to used cars.

But cars are different from homes:

1) No zoning preventing new cars from being built

2) Cars wear out within a decade or two

<comment><USER5> Cars vs houses is actually a pretty interesting comparison. Houses wear out after a decade or two as well, we're just willing to spend more money keeping a house in good working order than we are keeping a car running. If your central air goes out, it could cost you $7000 to fix it. If your car's engine goes out, that repair would cost $4000. But no one throws away their house, they just pay to get a new air conditioner put in. Few people would put a new engine in their car, though.

The average price to replace a roof is $12,000. But again, people are more likely to replace a roof than they are to replace an engine in their car. They'd just scrap it and buy a new car.

Houses wear out just as fast as cars do, but we're more willing to fix our house versus fixing our car. And it's not just a function of cost: you can get a new modular home for $50,000 and it will last decades. The double-wide I grew up in was installed in 1994 and there are still people living there over 20 years later. Very few people keep $50,000 cars for 20 years, though. And I see a lot of people with $5000 used cars parked in front of $150,000 houses. But if they bought a $50,000 brand new manufactured home, they could be parking a BMW out front instead. And if they wanted to, they could throw the house away just as fast as they throw away their car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Based on my personal experience and that of friends and acquaintances, 23-24 year olds with a bachelor degree working at Starbucks (or equivalent) is not at all rare. The 'crisis' may be overblown by the media a bit, but it is definitely not something that can be ignored. Every media and politic mouthpiece also said everything was perfectly fine, right up to the 2008 crash. I take anything like this with a healthy dose of salt.

<comment><USER7> It's not all that rare, but it's not as common workers _without_ college degrees working as baristas. Here's a post from the New York Fed: [http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/01/working...](http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/01/working- as-a-barista-after-college-is-not-as-common-as-you-might- think.html#.V5oTmZMrLq2)

Your odds of working in a low skilled service position or manual labor job without a college degree (as a young person) are a little over 50%. With a college degree, it's about 25%/

<comment><USER8> Still, the remaining 25% have a lot worse financial situation due to student loans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For context, this is the ramp up of student loans: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=nQY](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=nQY) and [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALGOV](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALGOV).

<comment><USER10> I think not being on a logarithmic scale makes that slightly misleading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another overlooked problem is that easy debt financing (not to mention need- based aid) inflates the cost of attending university for those who have to pay full-price, including those who borrow the cost. This raises the sticker price required to remain competitive as an institution, and is terribly distorting as the many schools with no or poor endowments compete with wealthier universities for students, professors, and capital.

<comment><USER12> That should only be temporary. Assuming there's competition (and it seems that there is - no university has a monopoly), the influx of money allows the industry to grow. The prices should level out over time.

<comment><USER11> One would think that is true, that tuition is seeking a new equilibrium based on: subsidized lending; lack of bankruptcy protection from student loans; desire of high school grads to enroll in university. However, we do not seem to have reached a tuition plateau yet. Further, the expensive tastes of both public and private institutions, and the leverage undertaken by students, means that this system overall is fragile. If there is a rapid change in economic circumstances, we will find that overlevered students (including those that we thought had "reasonable" debt loads) and high-cost institutions will fail at an alarming rate. Endowments will shrink overnight. States will slash funding for state universities / research. Tuition will not possibly be able to come down fast enough, in those circumstances. Until then -- business as usual!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _A third of college students who earn a four-year degree graduate with no debt at all. Zero._

Frankly, that is extremely alarming. Only a third? It's strange how people can look at the same numbers and draw completely different conclusions.

Here's my take on the issue: The government inflated prices of education not unlike banks inflated house prices. All the loaners of student loans should start making provisions _now_ , and big ones at that. People are defaulting or taking a longer time to pay back than anticipated. At the end of the day, I anticipate nobody will act until it blows up and then the state (and thus the common people) will pay up every single dime of this debt - just another case of privatized profit and socialized losses, it becomes boring to watch this game.

I suggest a radically different form of funding education. I would start a pool for every branch of education and invite private companies to fund education and institutes they need (which is already happening at some scale). Then I would have the state multiply the collected amount of money by a number, say, 2 (or whatever the public agrees to and is reasonable), and pay that on top of the collected funds, and that is how much funding this branch of education gets. Maybe there's some minimum too. And I'd make tuition fees very low but still high enough to disincentivize just fooling around - <USER2> stipends would be granted to poor people who are doing well at school and show potential.

<comment><USER14> > _loaners of student loans should start making provisions now_

But it's vastly more difficult (i.e., nearly impossible) to discharge student loan debt. Even if it takes years and years, most students will be required to pay back what they borrowed. I don't think we need to be worried about the bubble popping, but rather the secondary effects that the weight of student loans will cause. For example, companies have a natural advantage negotiating with graduates carrying debt who need a job more urgently than those who have no debt.

> _I suggest a radically different form of funding education._

I'm slightly less radical, but along the same lines -- fund institutions, not students. Making students into consumers forces schools to compete on features & amenities (things students care about) rather than focusing on providing quality education at low cost. Public colleges don't need to be country clubs to provide an education.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, you're right. If the student was the customer, everyone would get perfect grades and uni would be an amusement park. The student should not be considered the customer.

That reminds me of a first year lecture of discrete mathematics that I took. The professor is pretty renowned and does a good job, but he's also incredibly strict and demanding, especially when it comes to exercises and exams. I still know pretty much all of the stuff we learned there and it's come in handy year after year i.e. in crypto and graph theory. Anyway, we could write anonymous feedbacks for this professor and some students really hated him. He read some of them to us and they contained things like "you are an a * * * ole" etc. I understand the frustration with him, it was one of the toughest courses, and it did cause suffering, but it was also a learning experience and the students left the course with newly acquired knowledge and skills. I'm pretty sure many people who were mad with him were even more mad with themselves and likely dropped out, because among the ones who passed, only few people hated him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yes, racking up $100K of debt may seem good because you now have a 6 figure job which is good for the economy. However, what they don't explain is why $100K of debt was needed, and not say $10K. Or why you shouldn't just take $1M of student loans out because wow you'd really be productive!

<comment><USER16> I think universities are addicted to visa students and that drives tuitions through the roof.[1]

Visa students don't require government funding, they just pay cash. And often those students, who come from the rich families of the entire world, money is no object, so tuition naturally rises to meet the price that they will bear.

Of course government funding for domestic students does not keep up with that price inflation.

Back in the late 80s, I paid for my Bachelors by working part time jobs, and I was a full time student. I don't think I could do that today, unless I worked nights and never slept.

[1] Canadian universities anyway, may also apply to all north american ones.

</comment></comment><comment> jorge-fundido When our federal government gets involved in something, the potential for corruption is too great - there's just too much money. We saw it with federally backed mortgages, federally backed student loans, and will see it with federally mandated health insurance. The intentions may be good but it's only a matter of time before opportunists screw it up.

The figures at the end of the article seem to be cherry-picked in a way to hide the full details. Instead of telling us what a quartile looks like, why not show the full distribution?

<comment><USER17> Why is the federal government more inclined to corruption than a corporation?

On the subject of corruption I can't recommend reading this highly enough: [https://www.amazon.com/Conman-Master- Swindler%C2%92s-Library...](https://www.amazon.com/Conman-Master- Swindler%C2%92s-Library-Larceny/dp/0767917375)

<comment> jorge-fundido I didn't mean to imply corruption strictly by the federal government. I meant more broadly that whenever there is a huge pool of money, many actors (individuals, corporations, government agencies) will do whatever possible to get a piece of that.

A con man selling a book spilling the secrets of his cons? Sounds like a con - I'm kidding (mostly). Reminds me of how self-help superstars peddle their wares.

<comment><USER17> The book is a wild, wild ride. He regularly sold "investments" that would ostensibly benefit the Nazis, and never did a mark make moral objections to the investment. Another striking aspect is the value that con men put on their props: there were cottage industries at the time to produce formal-looking documents and fake telecommunications equipment. The Sting was surprisingly accurate, it turns out; there really were many cons of that sort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe not in isolation. It has to be taken as part of a larger picture.

There is tremendous downward pressure on wages and has been for a long time due mostly to outsourcing, foreign competition, and automation. All those things are deflationary in general.

Central banks have tried to fight this via traditional inflationary monetary policy but it's not working. Since the pressure on wages is so deep and structural, those policies are just inflating other things. Chief among these are housing and education because these are financed with debt.

I think this is the wider picture. It's not so much a student loan crisis as a larger breakdown of the entire 20th century economic formula.

</comment><comment><USER19> Related:

"Credit Crisis: The Sky is not falling [2007]": [http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2007/10/mortgage- in...](http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2007/10/mortgage-industry- downs)

"Growing Foreclosure numbers don't spell doom [2007]":[http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndm...](http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070618005881&newsLang=en)

You can find lots more, I just did a cursory search.

</comment><comment><USER20> Another angle is to look at it from a business perspective.

Early on, Lending Club introduced roughly 10 categories of loans, one of which was "Student Loan".

In the first few years the risk models worked out pretty well for the other 9 categories of loans and they turned out to be pretty good investments from the viewpoint of the lender and roughly similar in return/risk profile.

Student loans were a disaster, with the interest mostly eaten up with defaults. They stopped making student loans.

People think abstractly that education is a good thing, but from the viewpoint of improving your job prospects it is a risky thing. If it wasn't for government guarantees and subsidization, however, student loans would not exist today except for people who don't need them. It just is not a good business (as a business) to make loans that have a high chance people can't pay them.

</comment><comment><USER21> Actually, this is a lot like the housing crisis. The banks lent money in excess of the value of the home to people that could not afford the debt. With the student loan crisis, the Federal government has been lending money to students assuming that the value of the education is equal to what the institution charges for it. This has resulted in severe tuition inflation and a massive debt burden.

I think a good solution both now and going forward is to:

1) Calculate the value of the education based on the Institution, the Major, and the Degree. We should be able to calculate this based on the Federal student loan information cross-correlated with IRS data.

2) Forgive all debt in excess of the value of the education

3) Only finance student debt up to the expected value of the education.

This will do a lot in terms of removing the tuition market distortion and in relieving the debt load.

<comment><USER22> So you ignore and refuse the well argumented conclusions of the book author interviewed in the article and instead give some arbitrary opinions because...?

<comment><USER21> Because, I am sure we could have found a mortgage expert in 2007 to assure us that there was no mortgage crisis.

In addition, the concept of federal government offering loans with no independent verification (which we could easily do) as to the value of what they are giving the loan for seems like a good way to create a bubble (see Fannie Mae).

I agree with the author that student loans are good in that it enables people who would otherwise have not been able to afford college to be able to get a degree. However, student loans are an issue that a major constituency in the United States think is an issue (see Bernie Sander's campaign). To dismiss that concern as just due to media scare tactics does not seem reasonable.

<comment><USER22> So your argument is that the author is wrong because somebody else might have been wrong for something that happened in the past.

Makes total sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What bothers me most about these discussions is that no one seems to advocate making college cheaper. The solution space always seems to gravitate towards finding more money. I do not see how that approach can sustain itself forever.

Ditto for health care.

<comment> jorge-fundido Agreed. As much as I personally would like to see a smaller federal gov't, I think that if the federal gov't is going to concern itself with something big like energy, health care, or education, then it might as well take it over completely. As much as that scares me, it's probably better than this perversion of a free market society that we currently have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, such a misleading premise. The majority of readers will come away with the simplistic conclusion that "there is no problem with student loans, unemployment among the educated, etc."

Music to NPR's ears.

<comment> jorge-fundido NPR is my go-to radio station for news but more & more it sounds like National Propaganda Radio, but maybe I'm just turning into a grumpy old conservative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am surprised this interview seems to ignore that the larger problem is coming from students who take loans out, but then drop out of the program before graduating, making it even harder to pay back their loans.

This is an interesting article in The Atlantic on that subject: [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/the- scar...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/the-scariest- student-loan-number/492023/)

<comment><USER22> I'm surprised you comment without reading the article. Not really though.

>The problem is that we have a lot of people actually borrowing small amounts of money, going to college, not completing [a degree] or completing credentials that don't have labor market value. They tend to be older. They tend to come from disadvantaged, middle-income families and they're struggling. [But] not because they owe a lot of money.

<comment><USER25> Yes but the interview seems to imply that this diminishes or somehow makes the case for the problem overblown. It says yes this is a problem, but doesn't really go into any specifics on why it's a bigger problem for those borrowers or that this is where the defaults are coming from. I guess I could have worded my comment better to say that I felt it wasn't given enough attention or depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In France if I broke my leg it's free To fix. I can go to university for 500€ per year. People of USA open your eyes not your assholes.

<comment><USER27> It's not "free". Someone is paying for it? It's either people whop didn't gain the benefit of either, or it's you later on, only instead of a transparent loan, it's opaque taxes so you don't realize you are paying.

<comment><USER28> Gov can still be considerably cheaper depending on the structure of the underlaying circuit, how much intrest does the gov charge vis a vis the banks, I'm sure for profit institution charge a lot more, leading to a higher fraction of income going into repayments, depressing overall demand, thus GDP, thus higher gov debt ratio. etc ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Certainly some people are struggling with student debt, and I don't want to look down on their struggle. From a macroeconomic standpoint, though, the Student Loan "Crisis" is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the Mortgage Crisis.

<comment><USER30> How many finance professionals were saying "I don't want to look down on struggling homeowners, but from a macroeconomic standpoint the housing loan "crisis" is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the early 2000's tech bubble or the S&L scandals of the 80's" in 2006?

<comment><USER31> AFAICT, pretty close to zero. There were people that were denying a problem even existed, and people portraying it as an enormous bomb poised to go off anytime, and very few people in the middle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can't help feeling this is somewhat orchestrated.

This author was an adviser to Clinton's campaign. Clinton has already said this is a problem, but the reality is that she will do nothing about it (for various reasons). So, it seems the best way to make that palatable to her base is to start a new narrative that says, "there is no problem".

Like a Jedi brain trick, her followers will parrot the same thing and repeat the cherry picked statistics in these talking points.

<comment> jorge-fundido Especially considering how this started under Bill Clinton's administration (see Title IV) [1]. I remember watching how proud he was of it [2][3]. Maybe the intentions were good but coupled with the repeal of Glass-Steagall and rise sub-prime mortgage crisis makes me wonder.

[1] [https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house- bill/2264...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house- bill/2264/text) [2] [https://youtu.be/b1TdC9g4XBQ?t=32m28s](https://youtu.be/b1TdC9g4XBQ?t=32m28s) [3] [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics-july- dec96-clinton_0...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics-july- dec96-clinton_08-29/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> a few points:

the same public unions that support clinton and sanders are the ones that created the "for profit" school debt problem. many union contracts offer mandatory pay raises for nonsense masters degrees pumped out online.

the government subsidizing student debt with artificially low interest rates has increased the size of the load as well as the cost of said education.

<comment><USER6> You do understand that a massive portion of this issue is private schools costing so much? Most private schools have nothing to do with the unions or politics you're talking about.

<comment><USER33> private schools cost a lot for two very important reasons: (1) consumers believe they're worth it and (2) said consumers can borrow money to pay tuition at extraordinarily low interest rates.

<comment><USER34> I think one of the biggest draws to private schools is they typically don't require admissions testing such as SAT, ACT, GMAT, etc.

Of course, when you hear "private school," many people think private high schools, which are typically superior to public, particularly in southern US regions. The different is these are "for-profit," which can easily be confused, particularly by someone right out of high school.

Finally large marketing expenditures and high pressure sales targeted at people who believe people are required, morally or legally, to be honest.

<comment><USER33> stanford, harvard, yale, university of chicago, mit, williams, amherst, princeton, penn, cal tech, ... all private schools that not only require standardized test scores, but prefer top percentile.

<comment><USER34> Replace "private" with "for-profit." I conflated the terms a bit. Many people mistake "for-profit" schools for private schools. For profit schools are perfectly fine with the ambiguity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The stats regarding the horrifying amount of student debt in this country speak for themselves. The stats regarding historically low levels of household formation and milestone purchases (home, car, etc.) among millennials also speak for themselves. This article is garbage.

</comment><comment><USER36> This feels like when bankers thought mortgage default rates wouldn't crack 8% back in 2007.

</comment><comment><USER37> The student loan "bubble" is essentially an attempt to paper over the lack of jobs and serves as a welfare program for youth funded (as are most government programs) with debt.

</comment><comment><USER37> Ha. Overblown. His wife must not owe 100K+ after being kicked out of law school like mine.</comment>


Sonos updates their Privacy Policy (again) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sonos.com/en-us/legal/privacy <comment><USER2> Any recommendations for a good WiFi-connected home speaker that doesn't require giving up one's privacy to use?</comment>


Building an ultra-responsive UI in Meteor with shared code between web and app - <AUTHOR> https://hansoftx.com/blog/building-an-ultra-responsive-ui

<comment><USER2> Cool</comment>


Using Fressian to exchange values between WebAssembly modules and ClojureScript - <AUTHOR> https://pkpkpk.github.io/wasm⥪fressian⥭cljs.html <comment><USER2> What are the performance characteristics of the value serializations?</comment>