The Man Who Single-Handedly Converted a Washed-Out Land Into a 1,360 Acre Forest - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebetterindia.com/10904/jadav-molai-payeng-forest-man-india/

<comment><USER2> How did "tree-hugger" become an insult?

> "The education system should be like this, every kid should be asked to > plant two trees," Payeng says.

Damn straight! That idea works in so many ways I can't believe we don't inscribe it on every school building.

<comment><USER3> I would change that to a garden. Kids should understand where their food comes from,how to grow healthy food (including animals), and how to prepare it. Either way, it's about the importance of being in touch with the growing planet. I fully believe the farm-to-table movement could do incredible things for the environmental movement.

"Tree hugger", as a pejorative, typically implies a person who appears to have lost a sense of balance in the environmental discussion. People aren't going to move back intro thatched roofed, dirt floored huts, and, when used as a pejorative, that is the inference being made. It's a case of using extremists to invalidate large groups of people. Typical human.

<comment><USER4> Planting trees and planting a garden call to disparate lessons!

Planting trees is about ecosystem conservation.

Planting and tending a garden is about understanding plant life cycle, the nitrogen cycle, /and/ where food comes from.

Unless the gardens you're thinking of planting self-sustain their nutrients, conserve (or even generate a surplus of) water, and have zero impact on surrounding ecosystems (fertilizer and pesticide runoff), they don't really teach anything about ecosystems other than how we can manipulate them for our gain (greedy or otherwise).

<comment><USER3> The problem with using a tree to try to teach these lessons is trees grow too slowly. I agree they don't teach exactly the same thing, but the end goal is to make kids aware that we need to be aware that our lives are intertwined with the health of the earth. Seeing the growth cycle at a level that kids can comprehend will do more for that than planting something that, once planted, effectively becomes little more than a piece of scenery to them.

The importance of water conservation, how we interact and effect the water cycle, air quality, and many other things can be taught more effectively using the much-faster growing vegetable garden, and, since the kids have a vested interest (they get to _eat_ what they grow), they are more engaged in these lessons.

I'm not saying kids planting trees is a bad idea, I just don't think it would be a very useful _teaching_ tool for internalizing the importance of conservation.

<comment><USER4> Some kinds of trees can certainly grow fast enough, especially if it's a multi-year curriculum that gets revisited regularly.

Empress trees grow 10-15 feet in a year.

A weeping willow will grow about 5.5 feet in a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having planted some trees myself as a teenager (under the supervision of my grandfather, a forest warden), I can tell you it is very rewarding to do so[1]. It is also a lot of work. The young pines we planted (bought from a tree nursery) needed protection from deer, who like to munch on them while they're small, from boars who destroy the bark by rubbing their itching hide against it, and from bark beetles who decimate entire forests if left unchecked. From humans they were protected legally.

[1] Here's a series of shots of an apple tree growing up: [https://plus.google.com/photos/114301087219148980063/albums/...](https://plus.google.com/photos/114301087219148980063/albums/5914915717001137681)

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, I took part in an environmental project when I was in High School to thin out a deeply overgrown area of conifers that had been planted 20 years prior as part of a tree planting initiative to reclaim some undeveloped farm land that belonged to the county and was next to a school.

We had to cut down about 10% of the trees and haul out half of the felled trees, chosen at random, and introduce a half dozen clearings about a 1/4 acre each. The intention was to thin it out so that wildlife could move around more easily in it and become a small wildlife sanctuary. Apparently it worked as the site is now a dedicated bird sanctuary.

But I do wish we could have transplanted the trees rather than just cut them down.

<comment><USER7> Transplanting a tree that has been growing for 20 years would generally require a substantial amount of digging!

<comment><USER8> And a non-zero risk of loss after replanting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This immediately brought to mind:

"The Man Who Planted Trees" the book which was adapted into an animated film that won the Acadamy Award for Best Animated Short Film and Short Film Palme d'Or in 1987

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_7yEPNUXsU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_7yEPNUXsU)

<comment><USER10> It's a really phenomenal film. It was shown a couple of years ago at SIGGRAPH's annual animation festival with John Lasseter (of Pixar) introducing it and saying it was one of his favorite films and a real inspiration to him.

Frederic Back (the creator of the film), was present as well, though not in great health. When he was brought on stage (I think after the screening), Lasseter had tears in his eyes.

Sadly, Back died at the end of last year.

 _We spent the whole day in silence, walking through his forest. It was in three sections, and measured 11 kilometres long and 3 kilometres at its widest. When I reminded myself that all this was the work of the hand and soul of one man, with no mechanical help, it seemed to me that men could be as effective as God in tasks other than destruction._

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Single handedly is a bit of hyperbole. To quote the man, "my family supports me unconditionally, they help me if more trees need to be planted."

We need to stop relying on this super man concept. Community creates change through support and encouragement, no man is an island.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is amazing. "...I knew I had to make the planet greener." Yes! I love how he saw a problem and just set out to solve it because he knew no one else would. He's a real hacker.

<comment><USER13> Most entrepreneurs claiming to "change the world" and "make a dent in the universe" with their silly little mobile apps have nothing on this guy.

<comment><USER14> To quote HBO's Silicon Valley: "Hooli is making the world a better place through minimal messaging transport layers."

This is a great inspiration to actually get out and do something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a Wikipedia page for the forest [0] and the man (Jadav Payeng) too [1].

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molai_forest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molai_forest)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadav_Payeng](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadav_Payeng)

</comment><comment><USER16> Now here's a glimpse of what's possible when it's an organized effort: [http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Macedonia_plants_three_mil...](http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Macedonia_plants_three_million_trees_to_revive_forests_999.html)

3 million trees in 1 day.

</comment><comment><USER17> As a human attempt this is breathtaking. Bringing back tigers, etc. Phenomenal.

Something troubles me - not specifically about this attempt but such attempts in general.

I live a few miles away from the "Meadowlands" in New Jersey - a good example of land thought to be useless and in the need of 'improvement' and yet it is rich enough to support wildlife within eyesight of NYC. People have drained it and dumped unmentionable crap in it. Cars and refineries pollute it. And yet it survives and provides much of the areas o2 and has other useful functions like providing a resting place for the dead bodies from the real life 'Sopranos'. I've seen deer and woodchucks by our datacenter and coyotes have been reported poaching dogs in the area.

"Unimproved land" I think they call it - marshes, wetlands, swamps and bogs. Sometimes we rush in to improve 'wastelands' that are not wssted land. Wetlands and tidal flats are the basis for life and there are more biomes than the visible 'pretty' ones with lions and tigers and bears...

A forest burns down and it remains an ugly, smelly blight - but it becomes a different ecosystem for a geological instant ( a few human generations...) But there is a human impulse to 'fix' it. Like we fixed Australia by introducing rabbits or the US by adding starlings and English sparrows. Our improvements often become problems in their own right.

It is hard to argue with building forests, though. There is no place I personally enjoy more. The forsets of the Catskills or the Adirondacks. Or the ones I grew up near in suburban NJ. WHen I lived in Korea - looking out at Buhkansan (largest mountian in the Seoul area) in the winter - I remarked how the mountain looked like a closely cropped head or hair. My friend informed me that was a legacy of the Korean War napalm (or whatever it was called at the time) was used to clear the mountains of hiding places. The trees were so even because they had been planted in the postwar years, so the forests I enjoyed hiking in were the result of a huge communal amount of human activity.

Again - mad props to this guy and the community around them. I suspect that he rescued land that was ravaged already by human activity as well as the mentioned flood. I live a few miles away from the "Meadowlands" in New Jersey - a good example of land thought to be useless and in the need of 'improvement'

"Unimproved land" I think they call it - marshes, wetlands, swamps and bogs. Sometimes we rush in to improve 'wastelands' that are not wssted land. Wetlands and tidal flats are the basis for life and there are more biomes than the visible 'pretty' ones with lions and tigers and bears...

A forest burns down and it remains an ugly, smelly blight - but it becomes a different ecosystem for a geological instant ( a few human generations...)

Again - mad props to this guy and the community around them. I suspect that he rescued land that was ravaged already by human activity as well as the mentioned flood.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, his friends created houses for themselves. He created a forest for everyone...

</comment><comment><USER19> As an aside. I just noticed that site features mostly inspiring and positive stories. The world definitely needs more news like those.

One good thing about the internet is that we can pick the kind of news that we like.

I refuse to listen to news mediums where fear and negativity are the main focus. The world is a wonderful place if we look at the right places. (Cofirmation bias anyone :)

</comment><comment><USER20> Willie Smits gave an interesting talk about a more systematic way of restoring a rainforest on TED: [http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest](http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest)

<comment><USER21> I want to believe in this so much, but I have huge doubts. Can someone cite some solid evidence that this works? Is Willie Smits continuing to do this in other places? Work like this sounds to me like it's just about the most important thing in the world, and it scares me to know just one TED talk, and a couple other references about it.

I wish this was the kind of thing that Al Gore, Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson drew a lot more attention to.

<comment><USER22> This guy's work is complete bullshit-- and has been debunked by reputable scientists. There is no independent scientific evidence for it. If it were legit, you'd know about it... [https://www.ted.com/pages/791](https://www.ted.com/pages/791) [http://awionline.org/content/calamity-wild-orangutans- borneo](http://awionline.org/content/calamity-wild-orangutans-borneo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I truly admire this man. I'm wanting to do a smaller scale similar effort on 150-ish acres of land I own. It previously was ravaged by forest fire (long before I bought it) and there are very few trees left. I've been trying to water the new saplings that are growing, but I haven't set up the infrastructure to be able to scale that yet. I really wish there was more help from local government on restoring forests. We have in the U.S. a program for setting aside land as a preserve and getting a tax break. I've tried to do that to help fund re-foresting the land, but no one seems to be able to point me to how to actually move forward with that process (you need a local conversation org to sponsor you, but the ones I talked were too big to have time for me). I feel like if we just provided more information and process then folks like me could re-forest a lot of land.

<comment><USER24> Find out what the native pioneer species are and start with those. They're typically fast growing things like bramble, birch, ... Once they get off they'll prevent soil erosion, top soil dehydration and dampen wind whilst adding organic matter to the top soil. After 5 - 10 years you can start introducing slower growing native trees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> For those who don't know, they made a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign on the story: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/59012691/forest-man- pos...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/59012691/forest-man-post- production)

<comment><USER26> The film just won an award at Cannes. [http://www.ampav.com/index.php/student- programs/cannes-emerg...](http://www.ampav.com/index.php/student- programs/cannes-emerging-filmmaker-showcase/2014-finalists-emerging-filmmaker- showcase-presented-by-american-express/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Makes me think of this story about Darwin:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-11137903](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11137903)

</comment><comment><USER28> This not an area so big, but it is good for those who think that only the government can preserve the environment (while, well, the government mostly destroys it).

</comment><comment><USER29> John Wamsley is another colourful character with a very hands-on approach to conservation.

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

[http://www.abc.net.au/site- archive/rural/legends/stories/7_1...](http://www.abc.net.au/site- archive/rural/legends/stories/7_1.htm)

</comment><comment><USER30> Truly inspiring. An unsung hero.

</comment><comment><USER31> emmm, his friends have built a house. He created a timber for all ..</comment>


The impact of syntax colouring on program comprehension [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ppig.org/sites/default/files/2015-PPIG-26th-Sarkar.pdf <comment><USER2> I've been writing code professionally for 20 years, and as an armatur for 30. I can parse code much quicker if it has syntax highlighting. If you don't, that's fine, but it doesn't mean your more experienced or somehow better than those that do. I always hate conversations about this because it always seems to come down to a dick measuring contest where everyone seems to think that more monochromatic the longer it is. It's not. Use what feels right to you.

<comment><USER3> I can parse code much quicker if doesn't have syntax highlighting... or so I thought until I tried a properly subtle colour scheme (offwhite with various _dark_ foreground colours, as it happens). I wonder how many of the colour- objectors really object to inappropriate colours rather than to their existence. Pale blue on white, bright green on white, etc.

<comment><USER4> I'm also in the light background, dark text camp, when it comes to code at least. I think Visual Studio (using the light rather than dark or blue themes) has the colours just about spot-on for me, especially in the 2015 editions where they seem to have softened the palette a bit.

That said, I'm completely the opposite when it comes to the command line. I think colour coding can add a lot (ls for example) but it has to be light-on- dark or not at all. Funny how that works.

<comment><USER5> How that probably works is that with this distinction, you know at a glance which windows on your desktop are editor windows with code and which are command lines (or possibly editors that have suspended to the background to go to a command line).

It's ... meta-syntactic-highlighting for your entire desktop! Different types of windows are colored differently, just like different kinds of identifiers in one window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been programming for 30 years now, I remember back before syntax highlighting. I had a bug that I couldn't track down - it took forever. I had an infinite loop that would only run 3 times and then exit.

Here was the problem:

      for (int i=0;i<3;++i) {
        /* Initialize important things.
        frozzleTheNozzle();
      }

      while (1) {
        /* Do ALL THE THINGS. */
        makeSureTheNozzleStaysFrozzled();
      }

Syntax highlighting prevents the entire class of bugs from happening (as do compiler warnings, but hey). I told one of the other guys I was working with, and he introduced me to emacs which had just gained font-lock mode.

<comment><USER7> The lack of syntax highlighting in your comment really illustrates the problem nicely. Took me longer than it should have to spot the problem!

<comment><USER8> Heh, I tried to scroll to the right to see the rest of the line. Swift's nested block comments would sort of fix the problem, but syntax highlighting would work with C.

I will say though that highlighting comments and strings separately from the code doesn't necessitate full syntax highlighting. I remember (and have saved somewhere) an article on syntax highlighting where only comments were highlighted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish we had more understanding of how effective different presentation styles really are when working with code.

For example, personally I much prefer quite mild syntax highlighting — depending on the language I might distinguish things like comments, literals, and maybe some routine keywords and punctuation that could be de-emphasized. I'd also choose colours that didn't jump out, but were distinctive enough not to confuse, say, a literal string with an identifier.

I don't see the attraction of colouring 67 different classes of code fragment in 67 barely distinct colours myself. On the other hand, many popular editors and colour schemes do this, so it would be interesting to know whether I'm missing out on something that might be helpful.

What I do find very useful is the kinds of context-sensitive highlighting that some editors will do, for example showing matching delimiters and maybe the region between the innermost ones, or showing all references to and any visible definition of the identifier under the cursor. Subtle highlighting is still preferable to in-your-face bold colours, at least for my taste, but I find these kinds of tools do help me to navigate and understand code more efficiently.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been experimenting with minimal highlighting using a theme I stole from jcs (mine (haskell, rust): [http://imgur.com/jNgBHpn](http://imgur.com/jNgBHpn), his (c): [https://i.imgur.com/PkNOjBZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/PkNOjBZ.png)) and I'm surprised how much I enjoy it.

edit: forgot to link to original post: [https://lobste.rs/s/9ruzgw/screenshots_from_lobsters_users_2...](https://lobste.rs/s/9ruzgw/screenshots_from_lobsters_users_2015/comments/e7v1d8#c_e7v1d8)

The dotfiles are linked in that post. It only really looks as pictured if you copy both the vim theme and the Xresources and use something that respects .Xresources like urxvt.

<comment><USER11> I prefer my highlighting to not so much highlight specific things but to partition the code into easily parse-able blocks.

The default --angry fruit salad-- syntax highlighting of most editors and even other people's themes are usually too much for me. This is what I use: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aerique/emacs-theme- aeriqu...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aerique/emacs-theme- aerique/master/aerique-dark-theme-1.png)

<comment><USER10> I dig it. Which font is that?

<comment><USER11> Terminus, I've tried out (and still try out) many fonts for programming but I always come back to this classic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Never mind the results, but 10 graduate students? That's a rather narrow margin of experience and small set in general.

<comment><USER13> n=10 is a small set. In addition, you don't know if there is a prior bias here. Say most of the 10 grads use syntax colors in their daily work. This is likely to perturb the numbers.

Figure 2 shows the plain samples have much greater variance, but does that translate to significance? Some analysis here would be nice, but with n=10 you don't have enough samples for this to be significant I'd wager.

Also, the test should have thrown in a color scheme which _nobody_ has ever used as a control. I think the choice of color scheme matters a great deal as well.

<comment><USER14> > Say most of the 10 grads use syntax colors in their daily work. This is > likely to perturb the numbers.

Wouln't you say that is representative of the general programmer population?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fascinating, but not surprising that the study concludes that the "effect becomes weaker with an increase in programming experience".

Maybe of interest is Hughes' discussion [1] of the different forms of syntax colouring. It was discussed on HN before [2].

[1] [http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2014/09/27/the-definitive- guid...](http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2014/09/27/the-definitive-guide-to- syntax-highlighting)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8378799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8378799)

</comment><comment><USER16> Been programming for over 30 years, I like syntax highlighting, along with good formatting.

I do say that there's good and bad highlighting, I will tweak the highlighting colors and appearance if I can, I find many highlighting schemes are more distracting than useful. And I' sure my preferences may not meld with others.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can we now remove the comment in .bashrc for every ubunutu install:

      # uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned
      # off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window
      # should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt
      #force_color_prompt=yes

<comment><USER18> This comment annoys me. I want a coloured prompt _so that_ I can focus on the output of the commands, which become neatly boxed by my coloured prompts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Having monospaced / proportional font test as a sort of control would have been nice.

I've been wondering what is the analogue of syntax highlighting for natural languages. Still experimenting with it, but most promising is simple keyword highlighting. I've written a Chrome extension that does this:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/highlit/cooahmcpma...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/highlit/cooahmcpmajfpnanjkdfiejkffphknnm)

Interestingly, keyword highlighting apparently helps some type of dyslexic people focus their attention on the text. With the web full of distractions, I've noticed similar effect myself. Keywords also seem to help skimming, when you're reading the text with a specific purpose in mind.

<comment><USER20> > what is the analogue of syntax highlighting for natural languages

Nouns begin with a capital letter in German, and used to be in Dutch and English until a few hundred years ago. Perhaps it was because nouns are generally spoken with the greatest stress of all words in an English sentence. Perhaps such capitalization is an analogue of programming syntax highlighting.

<comment><USER21> Sometimes long complex English sentences can be very confusing to me, especially in finding the verb in there. When two or three consecutive words have different grammatical meaning, and can be used in different grammatical meanings, it can become very confusing if English is not your mother tongue. In that case, color coding (or bold / italic / underscore) could help a lot. But for a word processor to do that, it has to understand grammar...

<comment><USER19> I've tried part-of-speech tagging and subjectively it doesn't seem to help much. POS taggers for English are a solved problem, so it can be done automatically, but for prototyping I tried marking up some text myself. Indeed what helped the most were the verbs (vs other parts of speech), but it still didn't seem to be worth doing.

Also marginally helpful was to delimit noun / verb phrases with 2 spaces instead of one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thinking about it one of the things that bothers me about Haskell is that there's so little syntax that one can't really colour it. Coupled with the lack of brackets or any other visually distinct symbols, a piece of code always looks like an undifferentiated mass.

</comment><comment><USER23> I personally find my syntax highlighting preferences change with mood and time. Mostly I find them useful. Sometimes I've found them to be tiring to look at, at which point I use monochrome[1] theme which is good compromise between no colors and many colors (i.e. 2/3 colors).

[1] [https://github.com/fxn/vim-monochrome](https://github.com/fxn/vim- monochrome)

<comment><USER24> For Xcode (Objective-C) I've recently started using the Salander theme, which looks kind of similar:

[https://camo.githubusercontent.com/6fb786753708404177aaa0a2f...](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/6fb786753708404177aaa0a2ff1248dd77cb9c46/687474703a2f2f6d69636861656c6d616e676f6c642e636f6d2f77702d636f6e74656e742f75706c6f6164732f323031332f30332f73616c616e646572322e706e67)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Having colors for different classes of code fragment just helps to reduce the amount of processing of the code in the brain. Seems to me that this is a win, at least it is for me.

In daily life I use a very colorful scheme (darcula on steroids) and just thinking about monochrome makes my head hurt.

</comment><comment><USER26> I started learning programming without syntax highlighting (on a monochromatic display), and actually find it distracting to read multiply-coloured text. In fact I tend to _close my eyes_ whenever I "mentally execute" code, as then I'm visualising variable values and output instead of the code itself.

Another article from the opposition, which I partly agree with: [http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/](http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/)

(Linus Akesson is what I'd consider a _highly experienced_ programmer, and the rest of his site is worth looking at for lots of other interesting stuff.)

<comment><USER27> Oh god that article, I was waiting for someone to post it. I don't mean to insult your opinion but I just find it cliche because it is _always_ posted in any discussion about syntax highlighting and it has some serious issues with false analogies. Comparing syntax highlighted prose to syntax highlighted code, equating typing on a keyboard to typing on a piano? Seriously? The author may or may not be a good programmer but that article stinks of BS.

It's nice to see that the comments section is still going strong, 8 years later.

<comment><USER28> > Comparing syntax highlighted prose to syntax highlighted code

This just makes me wish you could get syntax-highlighted prose. It's not necessary for languages you have a native understanding of, but think how helpful it would be for foreign languages. :/

<comment><USER29> Imagine how much more dense complex sentences could be if colors were used to disambiguate meanings, and yet still understandable!

<comment><USER30> Now I'm imagining a variant of Lojban, but where the colors have semantic meaning. It could be super dense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reminds me of Damian Conway that finds syntax coloring distracting, always wondered why. [https://youtu.be/aHm36-na4-4?t=10m23s](https://youtu.be/aHm36-na4-4?t=10m23s)

<comment><USER32> In the video, he shows the standard coloring for vim. That coloring is indeed flashy and more distracting than no coloring at all.

I tried having no syntax highlighting for a few months, and it was usable, but not as good as with syntax highlighting.

<comment><USER33> _" I tried having no syntax highlighting for a few months, and it was usable, but not as good as with syntax highlighting."_

A lot of the problems I have with Vim and syntax highlighting is using VT100 or badly configured graphics systems. Personal taste, one style I do use is the old Borland colours which came out with Turbo Pascal. Works on all the monitors I've got ~ [http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=92](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=92)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if these results are somehow related to a weird fact that dyslexics have far less troubles understanding the coloured text (even a transparent coloured overlay can be sufficient).

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder about the potential of syntax highlighting English.

<comment><USER36> Syntax highlighting works because colour components are preattentive i.e. your brain picks out hue, saturation, intensity/luminance differences in constant time. Size, proximity and orientation work too.

That's why some schemes work better than others: what you want to find quickly is key structural signals in the code. If you highlight comments strongly, say, it'll miss the point (unless your proof reading comments of course).

So, to your question, the value will depend on whether or not there are structural cues that it'd help sufficiently to highlight.

Interestingly we do do that to some extent already. For example, indenting and capitalising the start of sentences, indenting (and spacing) paragraphs, italics and bolding for emphasis. That sort of thing.

So using highlighting in the places we currently do could well improve what we already have. For example, colouring the first word in a paragraph or increasing the font of the sentence capital.

What would be fascinating to study would be if we could use it to help with word or sentence stress. I could imagine that, done carefully, this could help with learning languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't understand figure 5. The left and right images are not only of code that's not highlighted and that's highlighted, it's for two completely different functions. Of course eye tracking is going to be different.

Even though it's not really worth noting due to the first issue, the right example also seems to require more focuses (87 over 65)?

</comment><comment><USER38> Funny that nobody has mentioned unbalanced parenthesis yet... Too much color can be distracting, but catching paren structure at a glimpse has no price. Very interesting article, we need more of this 'measure, don't speculate' kind of science.

</comment><comment><USER39> Here's Douglas Crowford on coloring he'd like to see in his code editor:

[https://youtu.be/b0EF0VTs9Dc?t=899](https://youtu.be/b0EF0VTs9Dc?t=899)

</comment><comment><USER40> Next hypothesis to test: Does the existence of syntax highlighting enable less skilled programmers to write overly complex code?

</comment><comment><USER41> Note that experience has exponential speedup for completion time.

</comment><comment><USER42> From figure 4 we can draw the conclusion that the most experienced programmers shouldn't use syntax highlighting?

<comment><USER43> Note that that is a negative log, and so isn't saying the person was slowed down (which you may or may not have thought, but just verifying).

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang- nuts/hJHCAaiL0so/kG3B...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang- nuts/hJHCAaiL0so/kG3BHV6QFfIJ)

<comment><USER26> Actually they were slowed down:

"Thus, if a participant completed the plain version of a task in 60s, and the highlighted counterpart in 30s, the time advantage for that task is 60s/30s = 2"

The part of the range below 0 corresponds to time advantages < 1, i.e. it took _longer_ for the highlighted part than the plain one. Several times longer, if the results are to be believed (there's one around -0.7 and three at -0.5; that's a "time advantage" of approximately 0.2 and 0.3, or 5x to 3x slower.)

<comment><USER43> Huh. You win this round. FWIW, I actually get pretty seriously tripped up for a moment when I am staring at syntax highlighting that is unlike the syntax highlighting I have become overly used to...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Syntax colouring is for children.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dkZFt...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dkZFtimgAcM#t=15m58s)

Crockford is always right.

<comment><USER45> He's joking, his proposed "scope highlighting" still has syntax highlighting.</comment></comment>


Why the super-rich get richer - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2015/04/why-super-rich-get-richer.html

<comment><USER2> > _It 's not hard to understand what happened, although economists, as a > group, seem to be incredibly dense on this point. Computer technology > allowed radical increases in productivity._

Not sure it's that cut and dry, nor that the rise of computers could be the cause of such a sharp inflection point. Bretton Woods ended around 1971-73...In fact the real wage of nonsupervisory workers peaked in 1973[1]

[1][http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/opinion/01krugman.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/opinion/01krugman.html)

<comment><USER3> How is ending the "gold exchange standard" connected to the decline in labor bargaining power?

I buy your argument that the rollout of computers doesn't quite line up as it ought to if it were the primary factor behind wage-productivity decoupling, but I'm much less familiar with Bretton Woods so I'd appreciate any dot- connecting you can offer.

<comment><USER4> Workers' savings become worthless through inflation.

Voila! Wage slavery.

<comment><USER3> But savings != income. I can see the argument that eroding peoples' savings would eventually reduce their bargaining power, but on the graph the effect seems almost instantaneous.

<comment><USER5> Savings implies income if inflation doesn't eat it up (and then some).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If someone can provide a definition of rich and can show the majority of people meeting that definition of rich stay in that class for very long, I'd be interested in seeing the data supporting it. I have looked for years and always found the opposite whenever a dataset allowed answering the question.

For any reasonable definition of rich ( * ) (by total wealth or by total income, for example), and for any dataset from which I can check the claim "the rich get richer," I have found that the majority of those in that definition of rich do not stay in that class. So it seems far more accurate to claim the rich get poorer.

It's hard to find such datasets, but some that you can find that demonstrate this are (I don't care to chase them down, and my notes on it are not where I am sitting):

1) the majority born into the top quintile don't end up there (although the most likely quintile to end up in is the top). I think St. Louis Fed has studies on this.

2) the richest Americans, as measured by Forbes 400, demonstrate that the majority are first generation in that class. This you can check yourself quite easily.

3) Various tax studies show that people don't stay at the top for income.

Sure, a wealthy person rarely falls to zero, but once you fix a definition of rich and see how long people in that class stay at that definition, the majority simply do not last.

(*) if you define rich as the top 90% of people by wealth, which is not a very common way to define it, then the majority stay in it over time.

<comment><USER7> I think this is missing the point. It's not really important whether it's the same 1% that's getting richer. The fact that the income distribution between the top 1% of earners and the remaining 99% is as high as it is is still a huge problem. It's just not an efficient way for society to allocate resources.

<comment><USER6> I agree that is a problem.

However, many people assume the rich are some monolithic group, hence the maxim "the rich get richer," which most people take to mean a rich person gets richer, not most rich people fall from that class and different people enter that class with even more wealth.

Thus I commented on the fact (it seems) that rich people usually do not stay rich, for any reasonable definition of rich. Other people become rich.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Federal Reserve policies to ease interest rates and purchasing securities (via QE) have the effect of inflating asset prices.

Wealthy people are often paid with assets (executive stock/option grants), work in asset-managing businesses (hedge funds/PE), and/or hold more assets than the poor (business owners).

In my view, the Federal Reserve is mainly responsible for exploding income, not that technology doesn't play some role as well - but, if it wasn't for exploding asset values, VCs would not be as desperate to invest in crazy money-losing ideas to automate XYZ (causing unemployment elsewhere) that they can sell to a bigger fish.

(Interested to know if the Fed is a disputed explanation.)

It seems strange to me that we have such a simple root cause but complicated ideas for how to stop it, other than curtailing the Federal Reserve.

</comment><comment><USER9> I agree that productivity & cheap energy played a major role in the devaluation of the traditional worker but I find it highly suspicious that the blogger does not consider at all another remarkable phenomena that started in 1971: "free floating fiat currency" and the tremendous increase in the money supply. This amazing currency is "free" but chooses to float only one direction: devaluation. Maybe the increase in productivity was the perfect cover for the massive increase in the money supply and the masses had no feeling of high inflation while still paying the hidden tax.

<comment><USER10> Floating currency only matters when you buy stuff from someone else who deals in a different currency. Although you sort of right in that "globalization" could be a cause. That is, "why hire more workers at high salary when I can hire dirt cheap and ship the product here?"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization#Toward_standa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization#Toward_standards)

This leads me to wonder, when wages stagnated around 1970 in USA, did they start lifting in developing world?

<comment><USER11> > Floating currency only matters when you buy stuff from someone else who > deals in a different currency

The idea that the currency floats can also mean that the buying power consistently decreases. As the purchasing power decreases if you're in cash you lose wealth, even though on paper you're maybe even growing the number a bit.

If you own productive assets this is OK because you can increase the price of your outputs faster than your inputs. Meaning you can give people raises (but more slowly than the currency depreciation) and you'll still make money.

If you're an employee instead of an employer, though, you're paying the higher prices before you get the raise to be able to afford them.

In this way it's possible for the central bank to perform an effective (though non-obvious) redistribution of wealth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article title and the contents don't match up. If you're interested in how technology is and will be replacing most jobs we have now see "Humans Need Not Apply" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

I believe that we will need to make some structure that allows for people to work who want to earn more, and still support a considerable number of people who just aren't employable in the future. There don't have to be just winners and losers like this article posits, it isn't us versus them, and technology shouldn't be vilified.

<comment><USER13> >I believe that we will need to make some structure that allows for people to work who want to earn more, and still support a considerable number of people who just aren't employable in the future. There don't have to be just winners and losers like this article posits, it isn't us versus them, and technology shouldn't be vilified.

I believe what you're hinting at is the idea of "(unconditional) basic income". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)

Interest in this is rising, there are some scientific studies, and several pilot projects have been run around the world, with generally positive outcomes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> His second figure[1] shows his argument is nonsense.

The slope of increases in productivity remains constant on most of the graph, it just is that a certain point, wages stop going up. That is, the computer revolution did not change that slope, at least not until 1995-2005 (possibly from the internet).

Until the 70's, increases in worker productivity from technology were given to the worker as pay. After the 70's, it appears they were given to management and shareholders.

[1] [http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NEITJXBoBbY/VTY54JJX8gI/AAAAAAAADi...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NEITJXBoBbY/VTY54JJX8gI/AAAAAAAADiI/m_DQ4HrrylU/s1600/productivity.jpg)

<comment><USER11> Probably because decoupling the dollar from gold meant that it was possible for nominal wages to continue to rise, but more slowly than prices. Until then if you wanted to pay people less money you had to somehow literally cut their pay. You had to make them accept a smaller number on their paycheck.

After that, through the miracle of inflation, the numbers on their paychecks could continue to go up, up up! Just as long as those numbers are going up more slowly than inflation, you as a business owner are giving people a pay cut and they're not noticing it. Life is good!

Me personally, I think that's the cause of a lot of the inequality.

<comment><USER15> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-Inflation-by- year.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-Inflation-by-year.png)

Inflation existed before the decoupling, and has been low in the US since the early 80s. Nominal wage rigidity is important but the gold standard does not guarantee price levels or wage levels.

<comment><USER11> You'll notice that up through the 40s it was possible for inflation to go negative and for there to be deflation. That means that while prices would rise for a time, they would then fall for a time.

That made borrowing less attractive since there wasn't an implicit guarantee that you'll pay back the loan with money worth less than what was loaned to you. In other words, get $X buying power now, pay back $0.8X buying power over time. It's a slam dunk.

After the 40s (and the war) there was a brief flirtation with deflation and then by the 60s inflation was in full force. Eventually people realized this was happening and a few years later Nixon nixed (HA!) the gold standard here in the US.

Once that happened it became incredibly obvious that inflation, borrowing and not really paying for it was the new standard move if you had half a brain. Businesses got it very quickly. Most of the population in the US has yet to realize it, otherwise it would have been changed by now.

EDIT: Given the regular changes to the way CPI is calculated I'm not sure I entirely agree with the reported numbers. I suspect that they're actually a few percent higher, so inflation has probably averaged not 4% for the last 30 years, but more like 6-7%

1.04 ^ 30 = 3.24

1.07 ^ 30 = 7.61

If that were the case it would explain a lot of the inequality. If inflation is 6-7% and returns have been averaging 8% (this is what most pensions assume they can get and shoot for) then your real rate of return is a pittance, almost not worth mentioning. Might that also cause some hard to detect but definitely real inequality as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've finally come to understand why I care so little about income inequality. Income is not the only measure of wealth, I don't even consider it the most important.

I was hanging out at the bar the other day with this software developer from India. He had brought a puppy with him to the bar. While I was playing with the puppy and we were chatting, a girl comes up to us and wants to play with the puppy too.

His intentions became nakedly known when he kept saying over and over that "me and the puppy are a package deal." As I was leaving to head to the restroom, he starts going on about how he's "recruiting" for a boat trip in the Caribbean. When I got back she was gone, obviously unimpressed.

It got me thinking about the dating market. No woman I know has wealth anywhere on their priority list for men they want to date. That guy could have been telling the complete truth about yachting in the Caribbean and she'd have had the same reaction. Who wants to spend time with a boor even on a luxury yacht?

If he'd been legit Mr. Darcy, sure, I'm sure she'd have been eating out of his hand.

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

If I wanted to, I could fairly easily jack up my yearly salary by anywhere from $25-50K by finding another job. The reason I haven't done that yet is simply that the switching costs vastly dwarf the (slight) standard of living increase that the bump would afford me. When I look to move the needle, salary just doesn't look attractive. Just having one is the big win.

I hold that money is cheap right now precisely because capital is worth much less, relative to other kinds of wealth. Who is killing it right now? Apple. Samsung. Global commercial institutions. Finance has accomplished its goal of making everything fungible, now the only things left that are worth anything relative to anything else are precisely the things that finance can't replicate, like an amazing company started by an amazing genius.

So, no, capital accumulation is not worrying to me, because it's obvious to me that we live in a much richer world now than we ever have. Doesn't look that way on paper, but that's because we don't have a way of representing, in the numbers, the idea that money itself isn't worth what it used to be. Capital accumulation is exactly what would happen if everyone started subconsciously realizing that cash is no longer king. They'd place their investments elsewhere, leaving some poor sap holding the big bag of worthless paper.

<comment><USER17> You don't care in terms of looking at your own situation, sure.

But as a social problem for people less fortunate then you the problem is compelling.

Note that the problem is actually growing. If the gap keeps growing faster then your wage grows, it will be a problem for you too.

As for your anecdotal experience about women I have to say you're wrong. No women will ever call herself a gold digger that's why they don't tell you wealth is on their priority list. The truth is, it matters a lot. See below. The content of the link kind of doesn't fit with HN, but the the evidence fits as an anecdotal counterargument to your anecdotal experience with the puppy:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbYNAZxcWh4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbYNAZxcWh4)

<comment><USER16> So is it inequality we're debating over or just the fact that most of the world is poor? Poor people will remain poor no matter what level of inequality we have.

The real thing we should be tracking is social mobility. But we can't track that because it involves more than numbers. So we track inequality instead. And don't try to say one correlates with the other.

We need to understand inequality, not just measure it. One country's inequality is not the same as another country's. Which is another reason why I dislike the metric, it's all smoke, no fire.

> No women will ever call herself a gold digger that's why they don't tell you > wealth is on their priority list.

I don't ask women what their priorities are. I infer from the choices they make concerning dating.

<comment><USER17> >I don't ask women what their priorities are. I infer from the choices they make concerning dating.

I ask my friends straight up. I would say half of them lie, and the other half are honest. A lot of it depends how close I am to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU >Actually, think surgery. Many procedures (try 400,000 a year) are robotic now.

This doesn't put anyone out of a job currently and has absolutely zero in common with the ECGs, CTs, and and ultrasounds mentioned before. As far as I know, robotic cases require the same amount of personnel to perform. Typically the people you need for robotic cases have more specialized knowledge and additional training (sold by da Vinci I imagine), not to mention the technical people da Vinci needs to hire for maintenance which wasn't going to be supplied by the hospital anyway.

Cab and Uber drivers should be scared of driverless vehicles because there's a proof of concept that exists, but unless something has happened in the past 2-3 years, I really don't think a proof of concept exists for automated surgeries or automated support personnel for surgeries.

</comment><comment><USER18> When you have no money you work for money, when you have money it works for you. As time goes on the more it will make for you. So if you have 10,000 in a fund with 10 percent return it makes you 1,000 each year. So Over 47 years you will be a millionaire. This is then past to the second generation which then does the same then passes this to the third generation. Only once this cycle is broken will the poor and rich gap narrow.

</comment><comment><USER19> > According to Uber, the median wage for an UberX driver working at least 40 > hours a week in New York City is $90,766 a year. In San Francisco, the > median wage for an UberX driver working at least 40 hours a week is $74,191. > Does that sound like a plan for reducing income inequality? Or increasing > it?

I don't know. What are the median wages of the cab drivers that these UberX drivers are apparently putting out of work? The article doesn't say.

<comment><USER20> Uber is lying of course. Those figures are revenue. Subtract operating expenses of around 50 cents per mile and then you have real earnings or "wages."

<comment><USER21> And "at least 40 hours a week" is another subtle caveat. This obviously includes all the drivers putting whatever time they can into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lots of stuff happened in the 1970s. It's requires a huge leap of logic to say that computers are the cause... after all correlation does not imply causation. You need significantly more evidence to prove that computers are the cause of the growing wage gap.

There was a really famous book that was published recently called "Capital in the 21st century" by Thomas Piketty that summarizes the real reason:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2014/05/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2014/05/economist-explains)

The book is dense, but the logic and evidence is compelling. Basically it says that you need to look at more data, because there was ALWAYS a trend towards inequality that was temporarily reversed from 1930-1975, read below:

""Capital" is built on more than a decade of research by Mr Piketty and a handful of other economists, detailing historical changes in the concentration of income and wealth. This pile of data allows Mr Piketty to sketch out the evolution of inequality since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In the 18th and 19th centuries western European society was highly unequal. Private wealth dwarfed national income and was concentrated in the hands of the rich families who sat atop a relatively rigid class structure. This system persisted even as industrialisation slowly contributed to rising wages for workers. Only the chaos of the first and second world wars and the Depression disrupted this pattern. High taxes, inflation, bankruptcies, and the growth of sprawling welfare states caused wealth to shrink dramatically, and ushered in a period in which both income and wealth were distributed in relatively egalitarian fashion. But the shocks of the early 20th century have faded and wealth is now reasserting itself. On many measures, Mr Piketty reckons, the importance of wealth in modern economies is approaching levels last seen before the first world war."

The real reason for economic inequality is not technology, it is actually a feature of capitalism. In simple terms what is happening is that invested wealth grows faster for rich people then it does for poor people and this causes the gap to grow. See the quote below:

"From this history, Mr Piketty derives a grand theory of capital and inequality. As a general rule wealth grows faster than economic output, he explains, a concept he captures in the expression r > g (where r is the rate of return to wealth and g is the economic growth rate). Other things being equal, faster economic growth will diminish the importance of wealth in a society, whereas slower growth will increase it (and demographic change that slows global growth will make capital more dominant). But there are no natural forces pushing against the steady concentration of wealth. Only a burst of rapid growth (from technological progress or rising population) or government intervention can be counted on to keep economies from returning to the "patrimonial capitalism" that worried Karl Marx. Mr Piketty closes the book by recommending that governments step in now, by adopting a global tax on wealth, to prevent soaring inequality contributing to economic or political instability down the road."

I'm no economist but according to my knowledge this is the prevailing theory in academia today.

<comment><USER22> I recently saw the documentary We're Not Broke about how most (if not every) multinational do tax evasion in America. It's being claimed that actually most politicians there know what's going on and know how to solve it (tax reform) but they simply can't (or don't) do it because "business doesn't want that". So, back to 'patrimonial capitalism' it is for the U.S.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What this article suggests is possible in a world with no competition. I don't think we can say this of most of the markets. And not only there is competition but there is international competition.

</comment><comment><USER24> Globalization is Zero sum;

</comment><comment><USER25> Misleading as I pointed out in a previous comment ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9418512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9418512) )

"the super-rich" is different groups of people from year to year.

</comment><comment><USER26> Diversification.

</comment><comment><USER27> Compounding interest? Not a very compelling headline.

<comment><USER17> dude he says computers and efficiency in labor are the cause of wealth inequality. Not the real reason: compounding interest.</comment></comment>


CCPA: Everything you need to know about California's new privacy law - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/ccpa-everything-you-want-to-know-about-californias-new-privacy-law/ <comment><USER2> "After the California legislature passed CCPA, several major tech companies told federal lawmakers they would like to see one privacy law that covers the whole country."

While privacy laws are good, they are used by big companies to keep out the competition because small companies can't keep up with all of the regulations and don't have the resources to fight in court.

It seems like we are going to have a future that consists of big companies and governments..where the regulations required to run a company are so great, you need to have extremely deep pockets.

I don't really think this is the future we want.</comment>


Is the Switch the second console this generation to run FreeBSD? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/837481011508195329 <comment><USER2> No. The Vita also has FreeBSD listed in its OSS page because it used a lot of the network stack. That listing doesn't mean anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it or is it just a <tree.h> header from FreeBSD copied to the source code?

<comment><USER4> sys/socket.h is the most likely culprit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Huh, looks like they're still using the netfront browser (and it's webkit internals).

[https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/)

Yay for exploits!

<comment><USER6> Ah, just like the 3DS.

Developing for ancient WebKit is always fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Correction:

* Nintendo Switch is running software from the FreeBSD Kernel

</comment><comment><USER8> Title is misleading, it's not confirmed that Switch runs a FreeBSD base OS yet.

</comment><comment><USER9> Which brings an interesting question, what are the techniques to get to know what OS a system uses? I know nmap can send specially crafted packets to get a fingerprint of the networking stack. Is there something else?

<comment><USER10> You can dump the disks, ROM, or firmware updates and look for known strings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Did they confuse "Free BSD Kernel" and zlib? Jean-loup Gally and Mark Adler are the zlib authors, and don't really have anything to do with FreeBSD.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reading the comments I'm now thinking it would be awesome to have a Switch and access my few Steam games (they run on a low powered comp) on there.

<comment><USER13> Do what? Are you saying the Switch has a Steam client?

<comment><USER12> Nah, someone was just speculating about hacking/cracking it and installing the linux steam client. Sorry to get your hopes up.

<comment><USER14> Honest question, how did they expect this to work? There is no Steam client for ARM and even if there was, there are no ARM games on Steam anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't it a reskin of Android?

<comment><USER16> That's been speculated, but there's no evidence for it. It uses a very similar chipset to Nvidia's Android-based Shield, which is where the rumor comes from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do not think based on FreeBSD. Most likely Linux kernel and decent chance Android.</comment>


Show HN: Functional programming on Perl 5 - <AUTHOR> http://functional-perl.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author. I have just released the first alpha. I've been programming Scheme for close to a decade now after about the same amount of time using Perl, and I've written this to be able to like programming Perl 5 again, when I have reason to use it. It works pretty well for me for that purpose, although I guess I'm biased.

I guess the layout is pretty old-fashioned, and I might have too much text; I'm trying to cater to people who are not used to functional programming yet, but I'm not sure I'm achieving that. I guess it's also a rather difficult sell when many Perlers prefer to use the upcoming Perl 6 instead, and others decide to leave for a more proper functional programming language implementation.

I'm rather proud that I've managed to base lazy sequences on lazily evaluated linked lists, i.e. based on purely functional principles down to the cells, instead of using iterators as many function libraries for sequences for non- functional languages (like JavaScript or C#) do. Not sure how much it matters in practice, but at least you can write lazy sequences with this the same way you do in Haskell (see fibs and primes examples).

There are some good points doing FP in Perl 5 compared to some other non-FP languages (you can do optimized tail-calls pretty cleanly), and some bad points (you have to care about memory handling in some places). I've got ideas how to improve on both fronts but that will depend on the uptake of the project.

<comment><USER2> > I guess it's also a rather difficult sell when many Perlers prefer to use > the upcoming Perl 6 instead

That is definitely not a thing.

Also, i recommend putting it on cpan. It's perfectly fine to put alpha modules on there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I'll look into that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another interesting book in this same functional perl genre is Higher Order Perl, available free online here: [http://hop.perl.plover.com/](http://hop.perl.plover.com/)

Edit: I see now that it was mentioned on the page. Consider this comment another recommendation then. If you are interested in perl and functional programming, check this book out!

</comment><comment><USER4> General question: what are some pros and cons of Perl compared to other languages like Python, Ruby, Java, Clojure, Haskell? What makes Perl unique and people so enthusiastic about it?

<comment> vezzy-fnord It reifies the process of munging and pattern matching on text streams in a way few other dynamic languages do. Perl 6 particularly so with grammars (similar to lex) as a first-class construct.

It's more appropriate to compare it to SNOBOL and AWK.

<comment><USER5> Yeah let's compare Perl with AWK lol

<comment><USER2> You may find it funny, but one of the motivators for Perl being made was to get a better awk, which is why it's highly compatible with awk syntax.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Making Of: Dust - <AUTHOR> http://johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust <comment><USER3> It's amazing how popular dust then dust2 have remained throughout the lifetime of CS.

The underpass being isolated from the rest of the map was a feature in my opinion because it gave noobs a space where they only had to worry about what was directly in front of them. It wasn't optimal gameplay but new players liked it.

Dust2 pioneered what is basically the standard competitive layout - <USER2> bombsite with one entry for the Ts, one with two entrances (a short but dangerous way and a long but safe way) and a middle part that both sides fight for control of.

Essentially every popular map since is a variation of this kind of layout.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article (in older forms) has been floating around for a very, very long time on Dave Johnston's website. I remember it inspiring me to work harder on my own attempts at level design but also that there's a top tier skill (and level of commitment) that I eventually realized to never reach. It's mind- boggling to see how many considerations go into making a great (not good, _great_ ) map, even in much simpler times before true photorealism. Yet even then you can never predict how well it will work out in the end. It's a really interesting discipline between game design, architecture and understanding the technical details of the underlying engine.

<comment><USER5> To be honest, I often feel like maps in competitive games become popular for seemingly no reason at all. As a long-time CS player, dust and dust2 have always felt rather stale to me. I've always found the dynamic, multi-level combat of maps like assault and office to be more fun. Fortunately, I've been hearing a lot more people piping up in favor of traditionally unbalanced maps like nuke these days!

(What's annoying is when people try to attribute a map's popularity to its design. I've heard some people say that fy_iceworld is a brilliantly designed map. Seriously.)

<comment><USER6> Iceworld is brilliant design relative to what it set out to do - strip away the context and provide an arena to practice your aim. The only thing it doesn't do is provide elevation (other than if you or someone else jumps on a center wall, but that's asking for trouble), but other than that you've pretty much got everything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The passage from underpass to central hallway described in the rejected idea section is used in the CSGO map de_shortdust: [https://youtu.be/rrXeowmXLMc?t=6m6s](https://youtu.be/rrXeowmXLMc?t=6m6s) Of course, the gameplay mode used with that map is different from one de_dust is designed for.

<comment><USER8> And it exists in the CS:GO version of de_dust as well, though it's on the 'off' side of underpass. You then have to cross the ledge above Underpass into the hallway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> After blowing so much of my youth on dust and then dust2, this was a very cool read.

</comment><comment><USER10> > I was still stuck. It's at times like these where working without an initial > design can prove extremely difficult. You look at what you've got, and > struggle to see where to take it, knowing that each step in one direction is > a step away from a solution in another direction - and you don't know which > way is going to turn out better. It can be tough knowing what to do next, > and sometimes you question whether you should scrap everything and start > again

As someone who makes music for fun, this definitely resonates with me.

</comment><comment><USER11> > "Rejected: a staircase joining the underpass to the central hallway."

I always felt like there should have been a staircase there. I'll trust him that it didn't play as well, but it just seemed like there should have been another way out of the underpass.

<comment><USER12> >it just seemed like there should have been another way out of the underpass

In the CS:GO version of Dust there is actually a staircase leading out of underpass, though not directly into the central hallway.

<comment><USER8> IMO it makes the map a lot better - previously it was too hard to get out of Underpass and it was too far away from the rest of the map to be useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >The underpass being isolated from the rest of the map was a feature in my opinion because it gave noobs a space where they only had to worry about what was directly in front of them. It wasn't optimal gameplay but new players liked it.

I only played the game briefly and very unsuccessfully back in the day. Is this what they call camping? I never understood that concept, it seems like basic common sense for shooting others while not getting shot, both in real life and in the game.

<comment><USER3> Underpass with an AWP (a powerful sniper rifle) is one of CS's classic camping spots, so yes.

People get mad about camping, because it's a passive, "cowardly" play style, or "cheap".

I think calling someone a camper is just a way of trash talking and blaming them for your own loss. Kind of like the endless accusations of "hacking" (using cheat programs) or "smurfing" (a player playing with and dominating lesser skilled players just for fun).

In games deathmatch or team deathmatch (Quake et al):

• Hiding somewhere and trying to kill people as they run past (camping)

• Staying near a powerful item waiting for it to respawn instead of actively chasing down your enemies.

• Staying near player spawn points to kill them as soon as they come back to life. (spawn camping / killing). A lot of games give a short period of invulnerability after spawning (spawn protection) to prevent this.

In Counter-Strike:

• As the offensive team, staying at your base instead of attacking and trying to accomplish your objective (spawn camping). CS:GO gets around this by punishing the offensive team for letting the timer run out.

• Not trying to help your team, and instead just hiding somewhere and trying to kill people as they come looking for you. It's dull watching someone in a 15 v 1 hiding in some ridiculous place while the timer runs down. However, this is an accepted tactic in a hopeless situation in competitive CS (saving), mainly because of the short timers and importance of economic management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A very interesting read. I was always interested in how popular maps are designed. I think their development is quite similar to that of open source projects.

</comment><comment><USER15> Fascinating read. Does anyone know how Dust II came about?

<comment><USER16> You're in luck. There is a similar post about Dust2 : [http://johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust2](http://johnsto.co.uk/design/making- dust2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I absolutely love dust but then he also made the sequel cobblestone which was one of the most frustrating maps ever created!</comment>


How to Make a Bulletproof T-shirt - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/tech/t-shirt-body-armor-tank.html <comment><USER2> I'm disappointed. I was all ready to make at bulletproof shirt. These instructions are not easy to follow at all. Anyone have a good recipe for "black solution of boron"? Also, my oven apparently does not go to 1000. Disappointing indeed.

<comment><USER3> "black solution of boron" is a bit ubiquitous. But there are enough forms of boron readily available on the market that several "likely candidate" test batches could be produced easily. And your oven will go to 1000C, just not your conventional oven. Your microwave oven will hit 1000C and beyond, you'll just need to tape off the air vent and use a refractory of some sort. I've use silicon carbide and ceramic weave to melt copper in my microwave. It's melting point is just north of 1000C. So cheap walmart T's + boron + a freecycle microwave and you could be on your way to a kickass new startup. Let me know when you start the seed round.

<comment><USER4> I would like to invest in this startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _After an hour, the strips were removed from the solution and baked in at oven at more than 1,000 degrees Celsius_

Am I the only one that thinks this would not be out of place in a comic book describing a hero making his costume?

</comment><comment><USER6> What good is a highly flexible bullet-proof material if it stops the bullet somewhere inside or on the other side of your body?

<comment><USER5> Watch the first video starting at about 1:10. From my understanding the material could have two properties -- being both soft and pliable, but also becoming hard as a board instantly upon impact as from a bullet.

<comment><USER7> So it's like a Newtonian fluid? Didn't the mythbusters shoot a corn starch solution to find out if it can stop bullets? It could not, but maybe this thing can?

<comment><USER5> I think what they are saying is that it can go from having properties of Newtonian fluid (like water) to something as stiff as a board under magnetic influence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"We expect that the nanowires can capture a bullet," said Li._

TIAS?

(Google doesn't seem to know TIAS, it's "Try It And See"?)

<comment><USER9> It seems a bit premature, indeed. Disappointing journalism.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, crappy science/tech journalism strikes again. With a little effort the writer and editor could have made the article and title just as engaging, without the misleading hype.

From my understanding the weave also plays a big role in bullet resistant fabrics. ...and yes, catching the bullet on "the other side", while not ideal can still save your life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> By Eric Bland | _Thu Apr 1_ , 2010 07:00 AM ET

<comment><USER12> March 17 mention:

[http://news.softpedia.com/news/Cotton-T-shirts-Could- Become-...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/Cotton-T-shirts-Could-Become- Bullet-Proof-137689.shtml)

Xiaodong Li's CV (PDF format) mentions the paper (#147 in his list of publications):

<http://www.me.sc.edu/fs/pdf/Chris_Li.pdf>

Seems to fit in with the rest of his research, as well. It could be an April Fools Day prank, but there's enough out there to make me think it's not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Or, per the recent Mythbusters (another Discovery production), you can cover every square inch of your torso in three phone books.

This may be less practical, but some evidence suggests it could work.

<comment><USER14> And unlike T-shirts and boron, phone books show up on my porch unbidden.</comment></comment>


Zuckerberg's Big Facebook Mistake - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2012/07/27/mark-zuckerbergs-big-facebook-mistake/

<comment><USER4> The IPO has thus far been a disaster for overy eager investors and maybe that's where the hate from Forbes originates, but the notion that it changes much for Zuckerberg himself is laughable.

"[Facebook] still needed money", is just so wrong. The IPO was about Zuckerberg and close colleageaus being able to cash out a little bit and overcoming the shareholder limit.

I highly doubt it has any impact on his plans for facebook. A pretty poor assesment by a publication like "Forbes"

</comment><comment><USER5> The mistake, if it turns out to be one, was not in shunning capital markets, but rather, building a business that required capital on a scale that only the capital market could provide.

<comment><USER6> Quite. I think the whole article can be abbreviated to "Facebook large but not very profitable".

<comment><USER7> Which hasn't been news for years in the first place.

Way to go, Forbes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> an IPO is an IPO - aside from all the hyperventilating over share price over these first few weeks, Zuck and Co now have raised the capital they need. Let's see how things are in one year. Facebook's long term prospects will be built on the quality of their products, not the jitters of the short term investor.

<comment><USER9> totally agree with you. One major point of that article was that, had Facebook IPO'd sooner, it would have been better off with the discipline that comes with being a public company. Baloney. I can think of a ton of companies that have manipulated their way under the watchful gaze of Wall Street. this follow up post makes some great counter points:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/07/27/post- ipo-f...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/07/27/post-ipo- facebooks-bigger-mistake-would-be-obsessing-about-wall-street/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I stopped reading here: "The roadblocks he faced in building the world's biggest social-networking company were tiny, like an overdramatized civil lawsuit" and also wished for a "downvote" button. This trivializes what it takes to build a multi-billion-dollar company—any multi-billion-dollar company.

</comment><comment><USER11> When it came to monetizing search, Google was lucky in that someone else already figured out how to do that (GoTo.com). No comparably effective model exists for monetizing high traffic websites (social media or otherwise), despite many attempts over the past two decades. Not even close.

If Zuck took Facebook public 5 years ago, they would have gotten much less money, and they would have been distracted by investors calling for them to focus on building out that business model rather than attracting users - <USER3> Zuck may have lost controlling power in the company (less money + less users = less leverage for Zuck).

<comment><USER12> >If Zuck took Facebook public 5 years ago, they would have gotten much less money, and they would have been distracted by investors calling for them to focus on building out that business model rather than attracting users - <USER3> Zuck may have lost controlling power in the company (less money + less users = less leverage for Zuck).

Would this be a bad thing? The entire reason that Facebook needed to go public was because they needed the money to pay off their investors.

<comment><USER13> That's not why FB went public. They went because they had to...

<comment><USER14> Going public wasn't required by their investor count, but they would have had to have audited financials, so the benefits of remaining private would have been reduced anyway:

<http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Facebook-need-to-go-public>

<comment><USER15> Facebook passed the 500 shareholder mark back in 2008 and got an exemption.

I've had no luck finding out why they then had to observe the rule by 2012 though.

<comment><USER16> Passing the 500 mark means you have to hand in SEC filings, nothing more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a little hyperbole and overly simplified statements in here but this article really hit the nail on the head. Zuckerberg missed the most explosive part of his curve to go out by waiting so long. He took onboard investors who did not push the company - they knew they were good for a great exit no matter what. Now he's going to end up with low morale and scrambling to mature the platform.

He danced with the Devil and right now the Devil is up on points going into the 7th round.......

</comment><comment> momma-joe You can have the greatest product in the world, if you don't make money from it the company is worth zilch! stepping out of SV shows these companies what the real world is. You can take that to the bank.

<comment><USER18> Sure, Facebook had a billion dollars in revenue last quarter.

<comment><USER19> Only half of it was profit though: [http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/267151/economy/finance/...](http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/267151/economy/finance/facebook- reports-157m-q2-loss-operating-profit-of-515m)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Mistake?

For Facebook investors perhaps. But not for Zuckerberg. He gamed the IPO system like a champ, extracting far more hard cash from investors and financial institutions than he should have been able to based on the fundamentals of his company.

Consider. Here's this company that is nominally a "publicly traded corporation" that still has over 50% of the stock in one person's hands, Zuck. And it's sitting on a pile of many billions of dollars of cold hard cash (representing well over a decade of potential accumulated profits at present levels). All of the early investors and employees have cashed out to the tune of millions or even billions per person. Meanwhile, Facebook is using its corporate cash hoard to buy up competitors and fill out the empire.

They played this game remarkably. They played the banks, they played the financial analysts, they played the investors. They've got theirs and they are far more secure of a company than they were before the IPO.

</comment><comment><USER21> Facebook is making money and has a giant warchest from the IPO.

The main risk of being public is to employee morale, but the right internal culture/messaging, and (occasionally) option-repricing/reissuing can manage that.

<comment><USER22> Most FB employees have RSUs, not options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Where was the content here? What was the point of this article? It's a bunch of cobbled together nonsense with no logical flow.

Pardon someone grumpy to be up early on a Saturday, but please don't post things that make no damn sense.

</comment><comment><USER24> It my be just me, but did anyone else sense a lot of Wall Street/banker/etc. "Heh, look at those adorable little web people, trying to _do_ something?"

To wit: Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy.

Honestly? Isn't that a bit self-congratulatory? How about places like Barclays --can they evade the discipline?

</comment><comment><USER25>
      The roadblocks he faced in building the world's biggest
      social-networking company were tiny

Nathan Vardi is just completely ignorant. I'm surprised to see something so colossally stupid in Forbes. Say what you will about them, Zuckerberg fended off dozens of competitors (ranging from Myspace to Apple's Ping to now Google itself) to rise to world dominance. Facebook didn't just "happen".

<comment><USER26> I don't know why you are surprised. Forbes is not a reputable publication. It's "People Magazine / US Weekly" for people in the business world. It's not Bloomberg News.

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=for...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=forbes&sortby=create_ts+desc)</comment></comment>


Shopify permanently moves to work-from-home model - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/shopify-pandemic-staff-ottawa-1.5578614 <comment><USER2> Going to save a bunch of $$$ on rent I guess.</comment>


Puppet shipped with Solaris 11.2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zach.st/2014/05/18/puppet-on-solaris-112.html?utm_content=news38bd&utm_medium=social&utm_source=news.ycombinator.com&utm_campaign=ny

<comment><USER2> It's a pity that all the hype goes to Puppet, while CFEngine gets very little attention.</comment>


Why you should be afraid of a smart toaster - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150216-be-afraid-of-the-smart-toaster

<comment><USER2> You should post the actual article rather than a URL to a list of articles which include the one in your title. It's in the posting guidelines, which you can find linked at the bottom of this page.

"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

The article: [http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2015/02/we-give- doors-a...](http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2015/02/we-give-doors-and- toasters-sentience-we-should-decide-what-were-comfortable-first)

It was a good read, and it highlights well all of the concerns I've tried to express to family and friends about "smart" things.</comment>


Chakra UI Vue – Build Accessible Vue.js Apps and Sites with Speed  - <AUTHOR> https://vue.chakra-ui.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Vue.js dev fam!

I'm excited to bring you Chakra UI Vue!

Over the last few months I've created a component library that ships with accessible UI components whose goal is to make building accessible Vue apps and websites fast and fun! This project was inspired by the React version of Chakra UI by Segun Adebayo.

Documentation: [https://vue.chakra-ui.com/](https://vue.chakra-ui.com/) (Includes some live examples you can edit.)

Github Repository: [https://github.com/chakra-ui/chakra-ui- vue](https://github.com/chakra-ui/chakra-ui-vue)  Demos: \- Vue: [https://codesandbox.io/s/chakra-ui-vue- starter-2sy0g](https://codesandbox.io/s/chakra-ui-vue-starter-2sy0g) \- Nuxt: [https://codesandbox.io/s/chakra-ui-nuxt- demo-f8tq4](https://codesandbox.io/s/chakra-ui-nuxt-demo-f8tq4) \- Gridsome: [https://codesandbox.io/s/chakra-ui-gridsome- demo-038c9](https://codesandbox.io/s/chakra-ui-gridsome-demo-038c9)

The core features thatChakra UI Vue has to offer are:

1\.  Accessibility All UI components are WAI-ARIA compliant out of the box and can be adjusted as needed.

2\. Constraint Based Design Chakra UI Vue components play well your design system tokens based on the Theme UI specification.

3\. Composition All Chakra UI Vue components are built on top of composable UI primitives that consumers can also extend. A lot of the components also export compound components to allow you to change their UI layouts easily!

4\. Style Props Yup! You guessed it. Chakra UI Vue is built on top of fast CSS-in-JS tools. This allows Chakra's components to accept style declarations as props. You also get some really cool shorthands so your mac keyboard lasts longer Using style props to style your components :)

5\. Dark/Light mode support Most Chakra UI Vue components are are dark-mode compatible out of the box. With a simple function call you can toggle between dark and light modes easily.See Dark/Light mode demo here on Codesandbox.

6\. Nuxt.js support Nuxt.js is a Chakra UI Vue first class citizen. Check out the Codesandbox demos and the docs to see how to quickly get started with Chakra UI + Nuxt.js! Check out the Chakra UI Vue Nuxt Demo.</comment>


Arresting development?: no arrests or charges for cybercrime events in the UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2016/02/12/arresting-development/ <comment><AUTHOR> Slightly editorialized to get a more descriptive title. Moderators, if this is undesirable please do change it and/or inform me.</comment>