Preparations companies are making for Brexit - <AUTHOR> https://threader.app/thread/1061554026284834817 <comment><USER2> It's sad that the discussion of Brexit and EU-related matters in general always revolve around perceived economic issues.

Sure, a healthy economy is important for everyone, but the long-term goals of EU have always been to create a unity of countries with largely shared values to prevent future wars (incl. trade wars and cold wars) and to increase collaboration in all cultural, scientific and social matters. To grow together instead of alienating more and more until a new war breaks out, like it _always_ happened in Europe's past in almost every century.

And now it's all about the money...

<comment><USER3> Money is very important to people who don't have much money. If you are a plumber whose wages are going down and down because the market is being flooded with cheaper Eastern Europeans, you know who to blame. Of course I don't expect HN users who are sitting on a pile of money in SF or London to ever understand this.

<comment><USER4> Or are Brit plumbers simply overvalued and Eastern Europeans represent the true value of plumbing? I'm not sure if I should put a /s here or if I actually believe this.

<comment><USER5> That Brit plumbers are more expensive does not mean they are overvalued. It means they are not cost effective, and that means they'll get less jobs. You can only be overvalued if anyone is actually paying you for your job. The reason that they're expensive is that cost of living is too high.

So the real question to ask is, do British plumbers expect a too high quality of life?

<comment><USER6> Anything has to be overvalued because there wouldn't be benefits then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I believe that the title sounds more dramatic than the story actually is. A shifting regulatory environment is unpleasant, but not unusual for companies of certain scale, or certain industries. Ask any internationally operating bank.

<comment><USER8> On the other hand, good to hear about. Our team had 8 Europeans (including me), and while 6 of them left after Brexit (including me), I know a few people who are still on the fence. Life has largely gone on as normal, and the lack of talent has driven compensation up * . But unless you're a contractor making hay while the sun shines, it's good to keep things like this in mind.

* also helps that a lot of business expenses, such as hardware, are USD, so GBP losing value hasn't affected dev salary budgets much

<comment><USER9> >also helps that a lot of business expenses, such as hardware, are USD, so GBP losing value hasn't affected dev salary budgets much

I don't quite understand, wouldn't a falling GBP make expenses higher?

<comment><USER10> If you are paid in USD, and expenses are in USD, then the GBP salary budget looks better.

<comment><USER8> Right, a lot of multi-national budgets are USD, so even if you aren't directly "paid in USD", that's what the beancounters see.

And of course, you can always simply pass on the price increase to the customer, e.g. [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/24/microsoft_price_ris...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/24/microsoft_price_rises/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a bit pedantic, I know, but you mean the UK, not England.

It's the UK that's leaving the EU, not just England.

<comment><USER12> That kind of depends on how the political process plays out north of the border where 65% (or thereabouts) of the population voted to remain within the EU.

<comment><USER13> Can't remember the percentage, but I do remember that _every single polling area_ in Scotland voted remain.

<comment><USER14> That's because they a) voted based on their rivalry with the English, b) think they'll do better as a tiny independent country within an EU where the big dogs do whatever they please (or, rather, a single big dog with its satellites, even France plays by their agenda).

<comment><USER15> Utter rubbish.

<comment><USER15> Why bother countering a baseless (and bitter and resentful) assertion with an argument?

It reminds me of the brexiter voices in England who are furious with Ireland for having the temerity to stand up for what the UK has already agreed on - the NI backstop. It's a chauvinist sense of entitlement and over-confidence that has to some degree led to the brexit mess.

<comment><USER14> > _Why bother countering a baseless (and bitter and resentful) assertion with > an argument?_

What exactly is "baseless"?

That Scotland has a long-term rivalry with England? Last time I checked, 45% voted in favor to break up with England in the Scottish referendum -- does the 55/45 result point to some friendly buddies?

Or that Germany has disproportionate control of EU policy to its population/economy? That's a lively matter of scholar and political debate in the Eurozone, not some "baseless" opinion.

(By the way, do you know that EU project (with its ECSC predecessors) was started with the explicit -- and openly stated -- goal of constraining Germany, from people that have actually lived the damage its national ambitions have done twice in the continent e.g. [1])

[1] [https://carleton.ca/ces/eulearning/history/moving-to- integra...](https://carleton.ca/ces/eulearning/history/moving-to- integration/the-european-coal-and-steel-community/)

<comment><USER16> Your argument is baseless because you are leaping to there being some connection between a "rivalry" and the brexit referendum results.

In fact, even if you look only at people who voted "no" in the Scottish referendum, the great majority of them were Remain voters in the brexit referendum. For "yes" voters there was actually less of a Remain majority than for No voters. So much for your theory of rabid Scottish nationalism and England-hatred causing the result!

There's some irony in you complaining about the EU being dominated by bigger countries, while expecting Scotland to just "like it or lump it" when it comes to decisions made by England in the UK.

At least in the EU you have a veto - in the UK? No such luck.

<comment><USER15> I think they project their worldview onto the EU. The UK is a collection of countries where the large country decides what happens. So therefore the EU is painted in the same cynical terms. That's not to say that large EU countries don't have more clout, but the EU is not a Franco-German empire as some like to imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the financial industry the primary reason London has become extremely unaffordable for normal people?

Is it possible that the negative economic effects of Brexit will have positive cultural ones, by lowering prices and allowing for more non-financial workers to live there?

<comment><USER18> It's not the primary reason, but it's a factor.

Low interest mortgages push up what people can afford, which contributes too.

But the housing crisis is fuelled almost entirely by investors, and seemingly many of those are foreign. They buy property in London because it's a relatively safe investment, recently it's been very high yield as the supply is nowhere near reaching the demand.

<comment><USER19> Also planning laws; if ~8 story blocks of 3 bed flats were built the dynamics of London's market would be completely different. These would be ideal for families and the density & low construction cost per unity would mean that the supply of family homes in the market would seriously improve. As it is apartments in London are almost exclusively 2 bedroom where one of the bedrooms is small. This is ok for a family with a baby, but untenable (by law) for a family with two kids over 8/9 (can't remember) who have a biologically different gender (no judgements from me - I just believe that this is UK law as currently written). This creates pressure in the housing market for single dwelling footprints - which are mostly used and poor by modern standards (but mind-blowingly expensive).

<comment><USER20> There are no laws in the UK around children sharing bedrooms, regardless of any characteristic of theirs. Source: [https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing- abuse/child-protection-s...](https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child- protection-system/legal-definition-child-rights-law/bedroom-sharing-moving- out/)

<comment><USER19> Odd - I thought that there were; I stand corrected.

In any case I think that a three bedroom apartment is viable for a family, whereas a two bedroom apartment where one of the bedrooms is very small isn't really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am a European living in the UK and personally I have not even thought for a split second to leave the country because of the referendum. Doesn't matter to which British person I speak to, they are all extremely welcoming and polite. I have never felt unwelcome (even though I have Polish heritage and apparently Polish people are not welcome in the UK - at least if I believe the mainstream news).

It's not a very popular opinion, but given that my wife has an ethnic background and we travelled to many other European countries the only racism we faced was outside the UK.

Also I really don't like how everything is measured by GDP. Yes, economic growth is important, but that is just a number and doesn't express how much ordinary people benefit from that growth. I think we should start measuring how well a country does by quality of life. What is it good for if banks and financial institutions yield big profits year on year and meanwhile ordinary people are being pushed to the borders of the city, can't get a doctor's appointment for weeks, are stuck in overcrowded public transport for hours every day and struggle to get a spot in a nearby school for their children.

The main issue with free movement in the EU is that it is easy to move 1 million people across a border in one year, but it is a lot more difficult for a country to build the necessary infrastructure (train lines, schools, hospitals, etc.) to comfortably accommodate an influx of migrants year for year. It only makes sense for each European country to be able to have some control of the numbers. Integration is as important as immigration and integration requires additional resources which a country has to have available. I am not saying that this is the main problem with migration, but there is so many factors that get completely ignored in this debate that I am simply sick of reading news articles which only focus on a very narrow narrative to push their own political agenda.

Brexit is a complex issue and only time will really show if it was good or bad for the UK and the people living here.

<comment><USER22> The UK for me was also the least racist environment in Europe, agree. Never felt unwelcome and people genuinely seem to be polite and in good faith.

That said, I don't enjoy my right in the UK being a negotiation chip and that my future business or employment in the UK will no longer be based on my qualifications but on my paperwork I have.

It's quite likely that maybe sometime in 2024 when I apply for a position in a company I would not be considered because they wouldn't like to deal with visas and work permits. Even if I happen to be hired, what happens when I get old or economy stumbles and I need the benefits that native employees enjoy? All these things are now under negotiation and may or may not be provided depending on the deals the politicians negotiate.

I don't like the non-meritocratic system. Maybe it's better to live somewhere where I have equal rights with the locals and sell services to the UK and pay visits to this lovely country. The nicest thing about unregulated professions like those in IT is that you can work anywhere in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Any known list about migration of tech jobs from London, what EU cities will now be more interesting for software engineers? Im still in Dublin, but on lookout for some other city/country because of crazy prices in Ireland (rents going up much faster than salaries), and stability (not sure how will Ireland handle Brexit since it depends on UK for lot of import/exports).

<comment><USER12> This is just anec-data but from a friend who has spent a lot of time in London this year. It appears that the EU nationals are leaving in droves. As a result many IT departments are becoming seriously understaffed. So there may be a boom in jobs for UK nationals or the companies may be forced to go where the employees are and move to an EU country instead.

<comment><USER24> > It appears that the EU nationals are leaving in droves

EU nationals in low-skilled jobs left in droves. UK is very lenient to give visas to skilled immigrants of any country in the world.

<comment><USER8> > UK is very lenient to give visas to skilled immigrants of any country in the > world.

That doesn't seem quite right. Getting a visa isn't harder than Australia or the US, but they don't just hand them out willy nilly. I know a few Americans in the UK who find it very hard to even change jobs. Again, that's always a risk until you get permanent residence, but it's hardly lenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Inaccurate title

It's a list of the preparations that companies are making.

<comment><USER26> Most of that list is about relocating operations/funds outside the UK or cancelling plans to move them to the UK, and the title reflects that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A lot of garbage in this list, including company extending with no relation to Brexit and regular asset moves.

Just remind me when I saw my company listed in a major newspapers for leaving the UK, even though we were not. Journalists would say anything to get some clicks.

<comment><USER28> Yeah that was my first thought. If they were honest they would compare the numbers from a different year before Brexit. For every 10 companies leaving in 2018 if only one did in 2014, then sure you can say Brexit is causing a large outflux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wouldn't be shocked to see a more favorable tax environment set up after Brexit to encourage financial firms to stay in London. Its pretty important they do as financials make up a huge chunk of the economy.

<comment><USER30> They already plan to cut corporation tax down to 17% and possibly further later on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Most companies are well known to be super short sighted, especially large ones. If it makes sense to get out of the UK to make the next quarter targets they will do it. Not surprising one bit.

<comment><USER32> Moving countries is not that easy though. Leaving the EU means loads of additional paperwork vs now. You need someone who understands and is legally responsible for VAT. You didn't need that before. You need to know how to fill out all kinds of custom forms. There used to be a large amount of custom agents for that, you don't have them in the amount you need because they weren't needed for decades. Loads of companies won't know what to fill out.

BBC went to the Swiss border to transport an exhaust from Switzerland to UK via Germany. Although this has required loads of documentation for many years the custom agent in Switzerland mentioned there's problems with the documentation in about 20% of the cases. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hWQ0T10v6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hWQ0T10v6Y). The terminals/crossings aren't designed for that! There's not enough space for 20% of the trucks to wait an additional 2 hours.

<comment><USER33> It's not that hard though, in the past when working for folks importing from China it wasn't too hard to do.

Most of the work was picking a commodity code for your imports/exports but you would have been doing that anyway for Intrastat reporting.

For direct to consumer sellers above the VAT thresholds (€35,000 or €100,000) the new regime will arguably be simpler as they no longer need to register in each market but can register with a single authority.

I suspect the Irish VAT office is about to get a lot busier.

<comment><USER32> You only took one bit and responded with a "it's not that hard". Please explain in detail to all the things I mentioned, not just one.

Regarding your experience: it's unrelated. I mentioned loads of businesses didn't have to deal with this for decades. They're not known, didn't apply to be registered, don't know what to do, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It sad for the UK, but maybe it can at least serve as a warning example to what populism leads.

</comment><comment><USER35> Honestly, who cares? Even if my country suffered economically from leaving the EU I would still vote for leaving.

I don't think the UK will suffer economically, at least not more than many countries that still is in the union but just have a bad economy in general.

</comment><comment><USER36> I suppose it can mean more opportunity to pick up slack.

</comment><comment><USER37> So, mostly banking and insurance companies then. Is this really such a big deal?

<comment><USER38> The UK economy is disproportionately based on global finance, so it's a bigger deal than it might be somewhere else.

<comment><USER31> There is more than 50 companies in the UK. what should be news is companies that are not moving at all and staying in the UK during the storm.

<comment><USER8> It's cherry-picked, although I'm sure some more companies are thinking along these lines, but aren't as vocal.

A list of big companies that have committed to staying would genuinely be useful. I doubt you'll find many, since saying something like that before there's a clear deal is a bit irresponsible, like a blank cheque.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Edwin Hayward is a mega-remainer, I've seen him on social media, so the chance of this being a balanced piece is zero to none. Presumably seapunk is also. I work in a company that is largely foreign, and no one has left because of brexit. This is project fear.

<comment><USER40> It's just a bunch of facts on a specific subject: "companies leaving UK because of Brexit". How would you "balance" a list of facts to make you happier and avoid what you call "project fear"?

<comment><USER39> Can't believe you actually asked that. How about a list of the opposite?

<comment><USER40> List of companies that are _not_ moving outside of UK after Brexit? Sounds pretty useful. Go for it, compile it. The author was apparently interested in those that are moving out, though, but you are free to create a "list of opposite" if you think this is more interesting. Or, even better, perhaps you want to create a _list of companies that are moving to UK because of Brexit_? I would really like to see it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Training African Coders or Stealing Our Jobs? - <AUTHOR> http://onja.org <comment><USER2> Interesting.. Seems there is large support in favour of outsourcing actually -

[https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/our- work/initiatives/d...](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/our- work/initiatives/digital-jobs-africa/)

This also seems like an awesome way to promote CSR in an organisation!

</comment><comment><USER3> A... certain amount of editorializing in that title.

</comment><comment><USER4> Saw this elsewhere. Seems to be gaining traction.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice website mate!

</comment><comment><USER5> Great idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good cause!</comment>


Antiaging protein is the real deal, Harvard team claims - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/10/antiaging-protein-real-deal-harvard-team-claims <comment><USER2>
      Harvard stem cell biologist Amy Wagers, cardiologist Richard Lee of the
      Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and their
      colleagues claim that a specific protein, GDF11, may explain young
      blood's beneficial effects. They have reported that blood levels of
      GDF11 drop in mice as the animals get older and that injecting
      old mice with GDF11 can partially reverse age-related thickening
      of the heart. In two papers last year in Science, Wagers and collaborators
      also reported that GDF11 can rejuvenate the rodents' muscles and brains.

Seems Elizabeth Báthory was onto something: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Báthory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Báthory)</comment>


Kickstarting Open Source (Why we tipped $10k into Rails.app) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bugherd.com/kickstarting-open-source

<comment><USER2> Kickstarting open source...on an operating system that is not.

<comment><USER3> It's really tough to persuade people to try something different by hammering away at them with dogma. Neil deGrasse Tyson sums this up very well: <http://youtu.be/-_2xGIwQfik>

<comment><USER2> Who is being dogmatic?

More importantly what does that video have to do with pointing out that OSS would get a bigger "kickstart" if the project was not limited to a closed OS?

Is it harder to install Rails on osx than ms-win?

<comment><USER3> Perhaps I read into it, but your statement definitely came across as loaded and seemed to imply that an open source project aimed at a closed platform somehow had less merit than one aimed at an open source platform (I interpret that as dogmatic).

The video merely points out that one should try and understand the motivations and rationale of others before arguing the merits of your point of view. That someone would try and make the lives of developers on any platform easier, I think, is a good thing. I would have hoped that it would encourage other developers to try and do the same on other platforms.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ECMAScript 5 compatibility table - <AUTHOR> http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es5/ <comment><AUTHOR> Amazingly, none of the browsers listed (Edge is oddly missing) support the full ES5 standard. Date handling is the only remaining issue in major browsers.</comment>


Please, everyone, put your entire development environment in GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/put-your-dev-env-in-github/?__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> I like Docker as a means of deploying software. I don't like it as a development tool. Way too much cognitive (and resource-intensive) overhead.

The solution is to use tooling that doesn't suck. I use RVM for Ruby, NVM for Node, Yarn, etc. and I very rarely run into problems…and I'm juggling multiple client projects on multiple servers all the time. If you're constantly running into dependency hell, you might want look into a more automated way of managing your language/framework/library versions.

</comment><comment><USER3> The gist of the article is that setting up software to build/run/deploy is difficult. And it absolutely is.

Nobody wants to play version whack-a-mole trying to set up a project. I am not a Node guy at all, and the other day at work I had to make a few changes to an internal UI, all which required a working npm environment. Sure, no problem. Except that I had to try 3 different versions of node to avoid a cryptic error message, due to I think fsevent (which isn't even required for running the project, just building it) just to get npm install to work.

Docker has great benefits in that it really forces a developer to encapsulate all of its dependencies in one place.

There is definitely a large amount of binary bloat with this, which is unfortunate but I suppose we are back to the static vs dynamic linking argument on that.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Since you aren't really using VS Code locally, your extensions aren't all > installed automatically.

It sounds like he's doing IPC to some kind of headless editor updating files inside the container, which would lead to a bad habit of ignoring all the platform's tools that his IDE doesn't know about. I'd much rather script builds and tests inside containers (if the runtime has enough packaging issues to need them) but keep the source out where I can fully use everything I've learned.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really like this idea, although I'm still working my way through being able to create the right dockerfiles and etc for a given situation.</comment>


Show HN: Using Scala on Android with Intellij IDEA - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yareally/android-scala-intellij-no-sbt-plugin

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't consider my submittal to be any sort of complex project (really more of a guide to doing something far easier than normal), but there's probably a fair amount of us that would love to have a working, stable Android Java alternative that's also free to use and integrates well. I thought I would share this for anyone that felt the same way as I do about having to always use Java. I searched Google extensively for someone getting Scala to work without some sort of external SBT (Scala Build Tool) plugin that requires you to type out commands and renders some of the features of Intellij (like debugging) unusable.

I couldn't find any such solution, so I just tried building it without any sort of external workarounds. Did not work of course, since Scala is too large for the Dalvik Compiler. However, ProGuard reduces the size to something manageable and is built into Intellij, so enabling that + telling it not to obfuscate the sources, allows you to build in the same manner you would with Java in Intellij and lets you focus on what matters--the code :)

I'm not a Scala expert by any means yet--I've only really delve into it the last week or two after previously seeing fellow developers mention on HN that it was a viable alternative to Java on Android. They were right and I'm glad I tried it. I've had prior experience with functional languages (F# and some Haskell) and the similarities of Scala to languages such as Python and C# make it pretty easy to dive into if one is familiar with any of those. Having prior functional experience helps with the learning curve of some of the powerful features, but not necessary. Since Scala is a imperative/functional hybrid, you can work with either paradigm (or both).

So far, I haven't had any issues using Scala on Android. Works for me as if I were using Java, which is awesome. Plus, Intellij lets you use both in a project without issues and will automatically convert from one language to the other (but generally takes some rewriting to get it more optimized for Scala since it has many additional features).

Feel free to ask any questions though or I'm sure there's some with more Scala experience than me that can answer some language specific things much better than I can.</comment>


The first thing that should be shown in any Trigonometry class, done in Canvas - <AUTHOR> http://www.humblesoftware.com/demos/trig

<comment><USER2> Something similar:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pi-unrolled-720.gif>

</comment><comment><USER3> Super, super awesome. Just a few niggles:

\- The pi marker on the x axis stays fixed. As far as I can tell it doesn't really refer.

\- phi is increasing, but the construction of the graph makes it look like phi should be decreasing. Seems like the circle should be on the right, with the line moving leftward and the phi values marked on the x axis receding in that direction as well.

\- I'd like to be able to drag the graph around.

No one likes a whiner, so I tweaked a bit: <http://doormouse.org/trig>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You are getting sleepy... very very sleepy.

Seriously, I started feeling drowsy watching that.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always loved watching that relationship.

Once you've added cos & tan and you can go home early, trig's done!</comment>


Can We Predict the Price of Cryptocurrencies? - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169556 <comment><AUTHOR> "...unlike traditional fiat currencies, cryptocurrency is technology — and thus, price depends on innovation potential... improving the underlying software of a cryptocurrency leads to predictable increases in its price."

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI --

Jean-Philippe Vergne will present his research in a presentation with the same title at the 4-year anniversary of the Bitcoin Wednesday Conference in Amsterdam on 5 July.

See:

[https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/speakers/jean-philippe- verg...](https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/speakers/jean-philippe-vergne/)</comment></comment>


The Remarkable Results of Teamwork - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/11/04/it-takdisassemble-then-reassemble-a-jeep

<comment><AUTHOR> One neat observation is that a lot of the time a team member's job is to stand there and unobtrusively wait for another team member to finish what they are doing.

I also like how there was no 'dance in the end zone' when it is all done. With minimal fuss, they did the job and then unobtrusively drove off when it was done.</comment>


Internet via overhead lighting - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101227/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_internet_via_lighting/

<comment><USER2> > The lights will transmit data to specially equipped computers on desks below > by flickering faster than the eye can see. Ultimately, the technique could > ease wireless congestion by opening up new expressways for short-range > communications.

How much faster? My dad built a new type of ballast to reduce flickering because it absolutely drives dyslexics up the wall. Plug in a flicker-free light, and suddenly a lot of dyslexics can read without anywhere near as much trouble, people's headaches go away, and the light looks better, too - although that's my subjective opinion on the last point there.

I'd rather run an extra cable and not get a migraine at work.</comment>


New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ <comment><USER2> I'm kind of confused about the premise. According to the author, from 2000-2018 atheism went from being 15% of Americans to 25% of Americans. Isn't that a huge, growing phenomenon?

It doesn't seem so much that "new atheism" failed. It seems more like it convinced so many people, the ideological battleground has shifted.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is some top level apologist drivel. While the term 'athiest' certainly hasn't aged well, the concept, has. There are more athiests than ever. The question is really, what does the loss of the church as an adhoc community center mean moving foreward? How can we divorce dogma from compassion in service to humanity?

</comment><comment><USER4> God bless this man.</comment>


CoffeeScript is Afrikaans JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://logicalfriday.com/2012/02/07/coffeescript-is-afrikaans-javascript/

<comment><USER2> Like HAML before it, coffeescript is more like 'piglatin with shortcuts' to me, i.e. you have to mentally make a transformation on the javascript you were going to write while simultaneously stripping away unnecessary crud.

This is somewhat analogous to the stage in learning a spoken language where you're mentally translating (rather than just articulating directly in the target language). Unlike a spoken language however, in haml/coffeescript this phase only needs to last about an hour, instead of months or years.

P.S. I have a pet theory that bi-linguals are more 'intuitively comfortable' with what I call 'transformation' languages like HAML and Coffeescript, probably because they're used to cross-compiling their own speech while learning their second language. Not based on any scientific research but it appears to play out in my current office.

<comment><USER3> Well, as a linguist and hapa I don't fit your mold very well. I don't like HAML particularly, and I prefer explicit block scoping a la JS and Ruby rather than CS and Python. I do like CoffeeScript though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An underappreciated benefit of computer programming "languages" is how human begins use them to communicate with other humans. Once you get two or more programmers working on a project, they have to be able to write code that the other programmer can readily understand. Programming languages advance this goal to varying degrees; assembly does it poorly, and so does obfuscated C or Perl. CoffeeScript, on the other hand, seems to have borrowed language features that enhance this human-to-human communication ability: significant whitespace, easily comprehensible object models, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting comparison. I speak Afrikaans in the office every day (although it's not my mother tongue) and I do appreciate the simplicity of the language. It's also really cool in the same way Klingon is cool, i.e. some things can only be said in Afrikaans.

I must point out that the language itself is not as simple ("kitchen dutch") as the author makes it out to be though, in fact it's in my opinion just as sophisticated as dutch - albeit with slightly simplified grammar and spellings.

</comment><comment><USER6> This sort of analogy doesn't go very far for me because spoken languages evolve organically and continually in ways that computer programming languages do not. My compiler/interpreter doesn't meet me half way when I make small human-comprehendible changes. Even spoken languages that are engineered grow and change in-use.

</comment><comment><USER7> I suppose it depends on your mother tongue.

 _KoffieSkrip is nie eintlik 'n Afrikaanse Javaskrip nie._

Afrikaans has a few quirks and oddities that would make it seem strange to English speakers. For example, the Afrikaans sentence above means "CoffeeScript is not actually an Akfrikaans Javascript". But to someone who is unfamiliar with the language, the structure might imply a double-negative ("CoffeeScript is not actually an Akfrikaans Javascript not").

<comment><USER8> As far as I understand, a few languages use the double negative (also called negative concord); main suspect in this case would be French influence of Afrikaans through the Huguenot settlers in the Cape.

<comment><USER9> Middle Dutch also had the double negative (en/niet).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure I understand why CoffeeScript should be easier to understand for a backend developer than JavaScript?

<comment><USER11> Perhaps the author meant for those who know Ruby:

\- @ for instance variables

\- #{} interpolation

and Python:

\- for comprehensions

\- significant whitespace

<comment><USER10> Those are syntactic sugar. If your devs have trouble understanding JavaScript because of this, I suggest your devs aren't very good.

<comment><USER12> I don't think all features are "just" syntactic sugar:

[http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/04/writing-programs-for- peo...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/04/writing-programs-for-people-to- read.html)

Everyone parrots the line that programs should be written for people to read. I agree, and that's exactly why I use CoffeeScript: All of the devs in our office read and write JavaScript fluently, but code written in CoffeeScript is easier to read than code written in JavaScript.

<comment><USER13> > but code written in CoffeeScript is easier to read than code written in > JavaScript.

To be fair, that's a personal preference as well. For e.g. some people prefer reading code with symbols (&&, ||) than English keywords (and, or). Also, I have seen people from a C/C++ or Java background find JS easier to read than CS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Simple grammar ... verbs do not conjugate differently ... This made me > wonder about all those complicated grammar rules

It reminds me that Japanese has a very simple grammar regarding verbs.

There are very few, clearly identifiable groups based on suffix (I seem to recall it's three groups ~u, ~iru/~eru and irregulars), they are basically invariable, and have only two tense, past and present (plus each having a negative form). Time is more often than not purely contextual. Going even farther, subjects and objects are often omitted altogether,adding to the context you have to maintain. Also, there are only two irregular verbs (kuru and suru).

It's a bliss when you talk to someone and only a few words can bear a lot of meaning (no S) thanks to the context. At some point it feels like perl :-)

Now you might think that japanese got it right but then you learn to count stuff and holy cow you're in for a brainfuck as numbering things vary depending on _what_ you're counting. Yay. But if it was too easy it wouldn't be so charming :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> _It can help Ruby developers to get going with Javascript because of its similar syntax, and it takes care of some of the bad parts in the language_

I've been watching the coffeescript bandwagon pick up passengers for a while now, but I simply am not convinced that creating a 'language' to simplify or 'improve' another one is a smart thing to do. Maybe on a team that has all Ruby developers this could fly, but now you make it hard to add pure javascript developers to your team without them first getting caught up on your way of doing things.

And then to make things even more tedious, you make it compile to original javascript, an interpreted language. It just reminds me of how Rails initially tried to bake ajax into its way of doing things initially (and has since stopped ... but now we have to support that mess). If the top devs in our field are using it, then there's got to be some merit to it ... but I gotta say, it really doesn't seem all that clever to me.

</comment><comment><USER16> I spoke only Afrikaans for the first 6 years of my life. The simplification still affects me when speaking English, mainly the examples mentioned in the article, especially with regards to tenses. I still sometimes make mistakes with 'do/does', 'was/were', etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the analogy but I don't think it's correct. CoffeeScript is not a simplified JavaScript. On the contrary. It adds more syntactic and semantic rules.

</comment><comment><USER18> Ek dink nie so nie, boet.

</comment><comment><USER9> The analogy is good, but there are parts of Afrikaans which are more complex than Dutch. Conjugating an adjective or negating a sentence, for instance. Are there parallels in CoffeeScript?</comment>


Half-Life 3 and Left 4 Dead 3 were both scrapped because Source 2 was unfinished - <AUTHOR> https://www.destructoid.com/stories/half-life-3-and-left-4-dead-3-were-both-scrapped-because-source-2-was-unfinished-596899.phtml <comment><USER2> Steam's success as a platform masks the very real problems at Valve. When you have an infinite money printer, you can't even tell that you haven't delivered any quality products for years.

Steam itself seemed to be in maintenance mode with very little love until the last two years (when real competition emerged).

Valve seems like the kind of place with constant power struggles and office politics, even more so than a traditional org.

Separately, why are they still bothering with Source 2? Their competition is technically superior in pretty much every respect.

<comment><USER3> I can't speak for many technicalities between existing engines and Source 2, but from the bit I've been playing in Alyx, it seems to be more optimized than any other engine I've ever seen, especially with VR. It's multithreaded across 3-5 cores, and runs better than a lot of games that look worse. I have no doubt that Source 2 offers performance (especially in VR) that existing engines cannot easily match.

<comment><USER2> VR is essentially an irrelevant niche in the AAA industry. It hasn't caught on, there are no killer apps, and the majority of VR headsets are sitting in the corner of people's rooms collecting dust.

Alyx has 2,000ish concurrent players at this point, while Left 4 Dead 2, a 11 year old game, has over 17,000.

<comment><USER4> Alyx, Beat Saber and Superhot are all killer VR apps and I bet you'd agree if you played them yourself.

You're being incredibly dismissive of the tech in an unconvincing way. Being fortunate enough to own a rig and hmd to play VR with, it's clearly hit a turning point with Alyx.

Does that mean it's going to become the next iPhone tomorrow? No. The biggest hurdle in terms of adoption is lowering prices. Next is reducing motion sickness and researching what makes a VR game fun and immersive. We now have teleport locomotion systems and 144 Hz refresh rate that don't make us as motion sick. And Valve has now learned how to make these games incredibly fun, immersive and with an absolutely fantastic story.

It's an utterly unbelievable experience.

To your last point about player counts, yeah they're low. But it doesn't make any sense to compare a single player game which is played once or twice and it _definitely_ doesn't make sense to compare a 60$ game that minimally requires very cheap hardware to a 60$ game that requires about a 600$ PC and a 250$ - 1000$ VR headset.

VR isn't going to die again. It will take time, but it will definitely become mainstream in 10-15 years. And while for some reason you seem to see Alyx as a failure, I see it as the spark that ignites the VR revolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am happy there's the epic store as it seems to be the only thing to get Gabe and his cronies off their asses and start finishing games again.

Source 2 engine has nothing to do with why they scrapped like 4-5 games, it's because why finish anything when you can just collect 30% on steam. It must've been like an adult daycare at valve for the last 7-8 years with no actual work needed to be finished.... Are they hiring?

<comment><USER6> With how often Steam asks to restart for an upgrade I'm pretty sure that's where all that engineer time is going. I generally have no idea what changed after an update, though.

<comment><USER5> Did you notice that the new steam interface came after epic store started getting free games every month?

I have no idea why people are so against the epic store. I have to start believing its steam marketing team at work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At a company where people work on whatever they want, there's probably a lot of reasons why projects might not be "finished."

</comment><comment><USER8> > "top secret project"since 2018 and there's no information as to what it > might be.

Honestly, I really hope this is a Portal getting the Alyx treatment. That would be my dream VR game, even if I did have to take unhealthy amounts of dramamine.

<comment><USER4> I believe there's an interview with the Alyx devs where they explain that a Portal game in VR wouldn't work as that game involves a ton of flying around with momentum in heavy use. A common solution for motion sickness in VR is teleport based locomotion. I don't really see how Portal could work with teleport locomotion.

There's also the issue that the appeal of portals being quite mind bending is satisfying on screen but it's probably rather jarring to go through a portal on a wall and instantly begin falling quickly to the floor. Alyx had issues with falling as well which is why you sort of float slowly when you fall off a ledge.

On the other hand, while I think it's impossible, Valve would be the company to pull it off.

<comment><USER8> > ...motion sickness in VR ...

Thus the dramamine :) .

That being said, I agree with everything you've stated. I don't really see it being doable, but it's Valve we're talking about so who knows. I just know what's wishful thinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know the number of developers at Valve that work on Steam vs on games?</comment>


Google drive media player - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
I've always wondered if there was a web application which allowed one seamlessly play media files stored in Google drive as a playlist.  So after unsuccessfully searching for such application over the past few months, I decided to create one and here is the result. please share your thoughts.
http://drive.aroscompany.com/gmbox/gmbox.php <comment><USER2> What about Google Music?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm based outside the U.S</comment></comment>


Insects and Entropy - <AUTHOR> http://tomayko.com/writings/insects-and-entropy <comment><USER2> I have a similar story to tell. As an undergrad in a course of robotics, we had to program a wheeled robot and all the robots would be place in an environment with obstacles. The robot should avoid crashing with the obstacles and the other robots. Extra points if the robots moved smoothly.

Me and my friend implemented a very simple algorithm. All the sensors measured distances to objects, and to every reading we would assign a vector whose direction oppose the one of the sensor and length, inversely "proportional" to the distance. Add all the vectors and move in this direction with a speed proportional to the length.

This turned out to work very well to avoid static obstacles and other robots. Most students implemented finite state machines. They crashed quite a lot and their movement was very clumsy, which I suppose was due to the fact that the transition of states was not very smooth.

To be fair, our success was a combination of luck and laziness too. If we had more time, we would have implemented a FSM too.

<comment><USER3> Weird so many people went for FSMs. You would have thought that a simple literature search would have brought up all sorts useful nuggets. Given the scenario you describe - no goal other than avoid collisions, the scheme you implemented is basically a simplified potential field approach.

All that being said, I can appreciate the core of this story. I spent my final year implementing, testing, and optimizing D _-Lite for a robot (basically a fancy incremental version of A_ ), only to find out that in the end, given our sensor performance, the stock A* planner that came with it did almost nearly as well. Oops.

<comment><USER4> You need spaces after each asterisk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The story is not that far fetched. Decades ago (I think) there was a computer simulated game designed to play out what is called the Prisoner's Dilemma hosted by professor Axelrod. And the winning program? It was the simplest one, which the author had named Tit-for-Tat.

<comment><USER6> Oh, but Tit-for-Tat didn't win because the other programs crashed.

<comment><USER7> Very true. It won because it tapped into a simple but persuasive idea about interpersonal dynamics -- only be benevolent if your opponent is benevolent. It succeeded with this simple strategy against much more complex schemes.

<comment><USER6> Oh, just the opposite: tit-for-tat starts out benevolent and only retaliates when the opponent `cheats'. And tit-for-that is also quick to forgive.

Grim tit-for-tat, that keep punishing after the first transgression, and a tit-for-tat variant that starts out malevolent in the very first move (but then copies the opponent) did markedly worse than straight up tit-for-tat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I do not deny the importance of the KISS moral of this story. However, there is also an important meta-moral from putting this story in a larger context: what lessons about feasible complexity you draw from your insect-themed programming contests may depend strongly on whether people like the dunkosmiloomump team happen to be participating.

(See [https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi- bin/contest/resu...](https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/cgi- bin/contest/results.php) .)

(The winning entry was elegant, complicated, and effective. I was Busman Holiday Club in that contest. I was reasonably pleased with my moderately complicated moderately effective entry, but even allowing for small team and shorter lightning-division timescale, the performance of my design falls rather short of theirs, and the junkyard rat design aesthetic of my entry falls rather short of the ballerina-by-day-ninja-by-night polish of that team's work.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Same with website design. Sometimes plain old HTML beats the fancy CSS design with lots of moving parts.

</comment><comment><USER10> _The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness._

\- An excerpt from "Stranger" by Albert Camus

</comment><comment><USER11> What does this have to do with entropy?

<comment><USER7> The insects that crashed, or contained logic errors, or that cornered themselves, had high entropy. The "dumb kid's" insect had low entropy.

Think about it.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I understand how it was meant. But it's completely useless to use a mathematical/physical term with a very well defined meaning which does not apply in that context. It would have been better to use "complexity" instead. I feel "entropy" was only used for link bait reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Occam's razor at work. The simpler the logic, the more likely it is that it does not contain unexpected faults than a system which has more complex logic.

<comment><USER6> The article claims that the kid's program contained lots of dead code.

<comment><USER13> Precisely, it could have been made simpler yet (trimming the fat) becoming a yet more perfect program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, the moral of the story is that your code should do one thing and do it well.

<comment><USER6> I think the moral is that in this case reliability wins. (And in this case, strapping a shell loop around your program that restarts it every n seconds would have worked.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That dumb kid's name? Albert Einstein.

<comment><USER16> Or Bill Gates. Or Steve Jobs perhaps.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can't I visualize myself walking through a doorway? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Because you're blind and have lived outside your whole life?

</comment><comment><USER3> Come again?</comment>


Should e-Books Be Copy Protected?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/technology/personaltech/17pogue-email.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess the subject here can be replaced with any other sorts of digital downloadable products lile mp3, music, movies and videos.

There doesn't seem to be any harm. Those who are already thinking of buying it would continue to do so, and those who have no intention will just go for the pirated version anyway. It's not as if the content can't be found on any other websites other than the publisher/distributor.

<comment><USER2> _Those who are already thinking of buying it would continue to do so_

You sure about that? Sure enough to bet your livelihood (if you are an author, or a publisher)?</comment></comment>


Tesla Model S can be used as a boat in a pinch, Elon Musk confirms - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/06/tesla-model-s-floats-boat-video/ <comment><USER2> dupe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11937521](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11937521)</comment>


The Existential Consequences of Lab Errors - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/end-times-h5n1-genetic-engineering-lab-errors.html <comment><USER2> Am I alone in seeing the "slate.com" domain and deciding not to bother clicking?

<comment><USER3> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i worked in an HIV research lab for three years. we were trying to find a vaccine.

in the lab, many of the things we did might have been considered "gain of function" research because we were artificially creating viral particles which had properties which we either assumed were already in the wild (but we had no sample of) or directly scientifically fruitful to explain some facet of the disease. the chances are good that the viruses we made would be somewhat more dangerous to a person than a wild type virus, but really we did not care about that beyond the confines of the cell culture dish.

to be honest, the added threat of the viruses we made was never something on our mind because with a virus like HIV, the risk of a containment breach and exposure that goes beyond one person is very very low. after all, HIV isn't airborne, and if you notice you've been exposed, you can get treated quickly and not contract the disease. for the sake of reference, to work with HIV, you need biosafety level 2+ facilities.

for something like influenza, however, i cannot possibly imagine working in conditions more permissive than biosafety level 3, even before performing gain of function research. maybe a construct which could lend some additional peace of mind would be to force gain of function research with highly infectious and easily aerosolizable diseases to use a higher biosafety level than default. it'd make the research go much slower and be far more expensive, but it's an additional barrier to the public being exposed -- which is already very unlikely.

<comment><USER5> I should add, HIV is generally considered so safe that many labs use it (in a "deactivated" form) as a vector to move genes into mammalian cells. See 'lentivirus transfer plasmid'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://outline.com/ytrwVX](https://outline.com/ytrwVX)</comment>


There Are "Weinsteins" Lurking in Every Profession – Including Tech - <AUTHOR> https://code.likeagirl.io/there-are-weinsteins-lurking-in-every-profession-including-tech-d833d7d92758 <comment><USER2> It seems clear from general societal trends and the specific informative example of the clergy abuse scandal that the durable rate of offending in the general population is around 5%, and that the distribution follows a long tail, i.e. most violence and also most sexual violence is perpetrated by only a tiny subset, with the vast majority of offenders being only incidental.

So, I would expect that in any population examined, you'd see about <1% or so of a really significant core of unrepentant, repeat offenders committing a large majority of the reprehensible acts, and I would expect to see this durably despite any level of intervention or harm mitigation.

Where intervention really matters is in the ~4% who transgress on an incidental basis, and small changes in culture and education can make a large difference there.

We just need to set clear standards that establish what is or is not acceptable, educate people about how to avoid being an abuser, and have significant consequences for that abuse. Part of that is pretty simple openness, discussion, and recognition of the problem; and part of it requires creating systems that can protect and evaluate reports of abuse without endangering the victim, which is a more difficult task.

<comment><USER3> Ehh, I think it is the opposite. The un-repenting abusers who engage in repeated abuse, are only getting away because the people around them are letting it happen.

An abusers might be able to get away with something unnoticed a couple times, but sooner or later word gets around, and it becomes an open secret that this person is an abuser.

And if everyone around them knows that this person is an abusers then they need to start doing something about it, and everyone needs to stop enabling the serial abuser.

Obviously education doesn't work on the abuser, but it works on everyone around them, so that they know what to look for, and can stop them before things get out of hand.

<comment><USER4> With Weinstein, he was a successful serial abuser because he had both carrot and stick. His power meant he had leverage on everyone around him who might speak out, and his money and connections meant that he could buy silence if that didn't work.

I believe that this happens on a smaller scale with other serial abusers, they seek out situations where they have leverage so it's harder for someone to speak out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know it is very difficult for victims of such aggravated harassment to name "the guy", but it has to be done. If this man had gone up and punched her in the face, he would have been lead out in cuffs and everyone would know who he is. Why is it any different with people that grope someone? Yes with things that are more on the fringe of what some people would consider harassment, perhaps the person should be informed that this makes someone uncomfortable and not put on blast, but something as blatant as groping someone should be treated no different than physical assault.

When more people come forward with this just as they would if they were assaulted, the "Weinsteins" will be not able to operate.

<comment><USER2> It's really not that simple. Part of the violence that abusers use to abuse is the fact that they are inherently protected by the way that reporting affects victims.

We need to change the structures around reporting abuse before we can expect more victims to report abuse. It's really that simple - when you can't trust HR, your coworkers, the public at large or the police not to provide cover or justification for abuse, it's very difficult to report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who is "the guy"?

<comment><USER7> Why does that matter?

<comment><USER8> What, really?

Weinstein had anecdotes floating around by word of mouth for decades. Maybe if some of those had been collected anonymously in a public forum, action would have been taken sooner.

<comment><USER9> Not just w.o.m. anecdotes, multiple police investigations that went nowhere

[http://www.google.com/search?q=harvey+weinstein+abuse&dcr=0&...](http://www.google.com/search?q=harvey+weinstein+abuse&dcr=0&biw=600&bih=843&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1990%2Ccd_max%3A1%2F1%2F2017&tbm=)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Amazing how many times this post has gotten flagged. #methinksthebrosprotesttoomuch

<comment><USER11> We've turned off the flags, but we all need to take extra care to comment civilly and substantively so that we have a chance to discuss the actual issue. Users often flag stories like this because they're anticipating flamewars and not at all because they disagree with the content of the article.

<comment><USER12> I think it's a bit uncool to "turn off the flags" here. I flagged this specifically because I am tired of the incessant flamewar that will surely happen in here.

<comment><USER11> When moderators do this we compensate by giving the thread specific attention to attempt to prevent such flamewars as best we can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It amazes me that articles like this get flagged so quickly. At risk of going too meta, it makes me curious how flagging/vouching gets weighted.

<comment><AUTHOR> So far it has been flagged and unflagged 3 times! We are back to flagged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's a very old story with a good, old solution: The girl/woman carries a hat pin, quite sharp, about 6 inches long, has ready access to it, and is willing and able to use it.

<comment><USER8> Thinking about how a friend of mine was assaulted at work by her boss, who was a very powerful person at her place of work, I wonder how it would have played out if she had stabbed him instead of punching him in the face. I don't think he would have been deterred by a hat pin, no more than he was deterred by the threat of ruining his career by assaulting his employee. (It is clear this was not his first rodeo)

In the stabbing scenario, he probably would have filed charges, and the police would have taken his side when he claimed she was an unhinged employee.

<comment><USER14> If he was close enough for her to stab him deeply with a six inch hat pin, then that is evidence that he was too close, and the obvious reason was that he was attacking her.

Typically a six inch hat pin stab will be more effective than a woman's punch in the face.

According to Mom, the hat pin solution is what was common and effective. I'm sure they thought of alternatives.

The attacker would be reluctant to take a hat pin stabbing to the police because the woman might file charges of the attack.

Of course, now a woman can carry a voice recorder of some kind where she screams "No. Stop". Then if the police get involved, she wins. If she gets fired, then with the recording she has a wrongful termination suit.</comment></comment></comment>


Portugal gets own Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://euobserver.com/9/32156

<comment><USER2> I'm skeptical about this. The city I live in has declared itself as the 'IT City of the North' a few years ago, but still most IT jobs are in the West of the country. You don't become a Silicon Valley by declaring yourself one. It's a political pipe dream. This new city in Portugal leaves the same taste in my mouth: lots of fashionable marketese (what does 'being green' and 'carbon neutral' has to do with being succesful in IT?) hot air and vapourous ideas. Let's see where it is in a few years from now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like they are ignoring Jane Jacobs. Her four rules for a flourishing city area: the area must serve more than one primary function, and preferably more than two; most blocks must be short; the district must involve mixed aged buildings; and there must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people.

<comment><USER4> By those rules, Silicon Valley is not a "flourishing city area".

Let me guess - Ms Jacobs wants to "encourage" those factors by various means.

What would the Portugese rather have, a "flourishing city area" or a job and technology producing area?

In other news, black families are leaving "flourishing cities" [http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-08-10/bay- area/17121007_1_af...](http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-08-10/bay- area/17121007_1_african-americans-black-families-public-housing) . See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%20flight> .

In that, black families are like other families - [http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/03/san-francisco- becomi...](http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/03/san-francisco-becoming- child-free-zone-youth-population-declines) .

Some people prefer urban. However, a lot of people don't. The urbanists are merely one group who hasn't figured out that when an argument suggests/implies behavior that doesn't happen, the argument is wrong, no matter how appealing the proponents find the conclusion or proposals.

<comment><USER3> Silicon Valley isn't a city. San Francisco is. I don't know whether Jacobs wanted to encourage such factors --- she turned city planning on its head with her book in 1960, and it was a data-driven book, while the orthodoxy at the time satisfied "The urbanists are merely one group who hasn't figured out that when an argument suggests/implies behavior that doesn't happen, the argument is wrong, no matter how appealing the proponents find the conclusion or proposals."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It takes a lot more than 10 billion euros of infrastructure to create a Silicon Valley. Else, China would have about ten of them by now.

<comment><USER6> It sounds way too artificial. They don't even have any universities of note in a radius of, what, over hundreds of kilometres?

<comment><USER7> It really depends on what you consider an university of note, if you set the bar really high you can raise that to a thousand kilometers. Is there any engineering university of note in Portugal or Spain?

That said, there are more than acceptable universities around and with really good traits like Universidade do Minho and the Porto's university.

I'm portuguese but from the south, formed in the engineering university with most tradition in Portugal, Tecnico (IST), do you know it?

But it also sounds too artificial too me, maybe they are there for the landscapes, for the Porto wine and the 'francesinhas' (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesinha>).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For a bunch of smart, wealthy people, they really don't grok emergent phenomena. The Silicon Valley ecosystem, like so many things, is a product of human action, but not of human design.

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets....](http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> What are taxes, non-disclosures, non-competes, and angel investing rules like in Portugal?

<comment><USER10> It would depend on which politician you have in your payroll or influence network. If don't have any, get ready for a slow, agonizing, unintelligible maze-like process through twisted Portuguese law, local authorities, government authorities, back to local authorities, different local authorities, back to central government, eventually a little showdown on the court, more laws, and finishing realizing you could have saved a lot of time (and money) and accomplish exactly the same by just ignoring any kind of regulation, and being prepared to pay the fines for doing it.

This is an exaggeration of course, but you're bound to experience this someway, one way or another. Everybody does, no matter what they're trying to do. As for what you specifically asked, I don't know. But I'd like to as much as you...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like that new Silicon Valley they were building outside Moscow, or the one they built in Malaysia, or the high-tech cluster outside Kathmandu, . . . you get the point.

</comment><comment><USER12> I seem to possess a bias against cities that doesn't grow organically.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm in Lisbon and nobody I asked today had ever heard anything about this. Given the economic climate (2% fall in GDP forcast for the next year or so) I'd be really surprised if it was possible to raise the funding for this. As others have pointed out Silicon Valley has very little to do with location so recreating it is rather fanciful at best.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just like startups, anything that displace the silicon valley would probably not be like silicon valley. It'll be something else probably...

<comment><USER15> This is something else actually. It's intended to be an utopian sustainable smart city. I don't think they call it the "Silicon Valley of Portugal" because of the projected startup ecosystem, but for the hi-tech aspect.</comment></comment>


Exceptions vs. the Result Type in F# - <AUTHOR> https://danielwertheim.se/exceptions-vs-the-result-type-in-fsharp/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. I enjoyed the read, and I see what you mean re: exceptions vs. a domain error in ROP style paths.

I personally try to have my exceptions be just that, exceptions. If I can forsee something 'going wrong', I just make a domain error DU instance and handle it. Bonus points that the compiler says 'Hey you forgot this'.

Handled exceptions are like the short sale of program flow. You may not be foreclosed on (fatal error terminate execution), but it drops the hammer on your ~credit~ codebase (user interruptions, failed operations, maintainability headaches). Intentionally using exceptions in the domain types instead of putting up guard clauses and/or Failure result types is not something I'd recommend.</comment>


Speak Good English Movement - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_Good_English_Movement

<comment><USER2> Well, having worked with many Indian firms, I can say, India too needs this Movement</comment>


Why people resist cost-free health - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csHDDQirde8 <comment><USER2> There is no such thing as cost-free health. You pay for it though taxes.</comment>


How to Regulate the Internet Without Becoming a Dictator - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/18/how-to-regulate-the-internet-without-becoming-a-dictator-uk-britain-cybersecurity-china-russia-data-content-filtering/ <comment><USER2> If people wish to subscribe to an authoritarian internet model, then they should be free to do so. If people wish to subscribe to an open Henry model, then they should be free to do so. This means that by default the internet should be open, because you can build an authoritarian system inside an open system, but you can't do the reverse.

The UK's model is censorship. The open part of the UK's model is due to practicality - they can't filter and punish everyone that breaks their rules. Your country has a problem when a retweeting a limerick on Twitter leads to a half an hour police interview and is recorded as "a hate incident" even though nothing illegal happened. [1] So the idea that the UK is "a supporter of a global and open internet, which depends on principles of free speech" sounds like hot air to me.

> _The U.K. strategy calls for the filtering of data rather than content, > which is a crucial point of differentiation. Data in this case refers to 1s > and 0s ("machine-readable" code), while information refers to what the data > means to humans._

But if you filter data then you necessarily also filter the content or "information", so the comparison to China makes the UK actually sound worse even though it isn't.

[1] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man- investigated...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated- police-retweeting-transgender-limerick/)</comment>


Finite Field Arithmetic, Chapter 2: Logical and Bitwise Operations - <AUTHOR> http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2026 <comment><USER2> Loper-Os is a really interesting project and Stanislav is an endearingly stubborn idealist. Though that way of writing can be off-putting to some, I find that voices from the extreme ends of the spectrum can be informative of where we might be going wrong / right (Stallman, Terry A. Davis)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1271662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1271662)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657)

<comment><USER3> > "I find that voices from the extreme ends of the spectrum can be > informative"

Yes absolutely. I'm drawn to people with strong opinions, if they appear to be formed in good faith, and especially if they differ from mine. Best way to learn and stay plastic.

<comment><USER4> >Best way to learn and stay plastic

Yeah!

That's why I read Nassim Taleb's twitter feed, even though he can be very obnoxious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The "bignum" arithmetic libraries currently in common use were, near as I can tell, all and without exception written by NSA assets and their various "useful idiots". The conclusion is difficult to avoid, given as every example known to me suffers from one or more of the following ills..._

:popcorn-emoji:

<comment><USER6> In case anyone is confused, the reference here is actually on this page: [http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1913](http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1913)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for this ! Nice use of Ada and language restrictions. That was fun to read. Modular types, intrinsics, preconditions... The code looks clear to me. The writing style is fun :-D

If he wants to go the whole way on correctness (and bravado...) someone should introduce him to Spark2014...

<comment><USER8> Author of linked article speaking.

SPARKization is already in the works; can't really consider disabling bounds checks without SPARKistic proof of guaranteed nonoverflow.

Being saved for the end of the article series, however; introducing it from the beginning IMHO will pointlessly clutter the tutorial.

<comment><USER7> Good ! Formal methods to remove runtime checks, love it. Best solution to the security tradeoff (correctness vs. speed)...

I really look forward to the rest of this series. You're right to do it at the end, but you could have added even more restrictions to your Ada just by setting with Spark_mode => on. :-D. No pointers, functions with no side effects... I like the idea to start with all those restrictions and remove them one by one after thorough analysis if needed.

I'm also curious how you're going to guarantee constant-time execution. Maybe I missed it (sorry) in the first 2 parts...

Are you going for just the absence of runtime errors ? Or full functional proof (specification in Spark2014) ?

Anyway, thanks for the article series.

<comment><USER8> > could have added even more restrictions to your Ada just by setting with > Spark_mode => on

Tricky, because Karatsuba requires recursion, which is forbidden in full-bore Sparkism. ( Granted the boundedness of the recursion is proven trivially. But Spark doesn't know this, and there is afaik no mechanism for forcing it to grasp even a very simple recursion.)

> No pointers, functions with no side effects

If you read the article carefully, you will notice that there are "destructive" functions, i.e. ones that modify an argument ( "in out" param . ) There is not an easy escape from this ( if you can think of one that doesn't drop performance into total uselessness, please post it in the article comments. )

> how you're going to guarantee constant-time execution

The same way one guarantees an absence of div0 : no use of the DIV instruction. Analogously, in this case -- no uses, anywhere, for any reason, of a conditional jump instruction with secret data as operand; and no use of computed jumps (no tables) , at all. The story ends with the obvious: disasming and audit of the compiled binary, to verify that the compiler did not surreptitiously insert any.

Interestingly, there are braindamaged CPU archs that will manage to leak secrets anyway. One such is PPC -- it has a nonconstanttime MUL instruction. There are two possible cures -- 1) if you have one of these, throw it out 2) replace the base case multiplication routine (appears in Chapter 4) with the much slower Knuth/Egyptian algo that does not use the CPU's iron multiplier. AFAIK there is no 3rd cure.

Braindamaged CPU (ones where MUL leaks, or which lack a barrel shifter -- e.g. Celeron and where SHR/SHL leak) have to be detected empirically, there is not a mechanical solution to this. The best thing to do is to simply not buy them. And warn others not to buy.

> Are you going for just the absence of runtime errors ?

The aim is Fits-in-Head correctness. As in, no shred of possible doubt re: correctness remains in the intelligent reader after reading. Mechanical (Spark) proof is of secondary interest -- it is to demonstrate that the somewhat performance-taxing bounds checks are not required, get some speed back.

> thanks for the article series

Stay tuned, these will be a Friday/weekly thing. And I recommend to share your future comments in the comment section on my WWW. I do not read the HN forum very often these days.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for answering in detail.

Just a misunderstanding I want to dispell for future readers : I was talking about _functions_ with no side effect (Spark allows in mode only) and not _procedures_ (where Spark allows all in, out, in out modes). Sorry I wasn't precise enough.

Ada2005 added 'out'/'in out' modes to _function_ arguments (???) and I was refering to this...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Word of warning: one of the sites linked by the article has a _very_ NSFW header image.

</comment><comment><USER10> Different goal, but if you read this and are wondering _what_ finite field operations are, and _why_ they are important --- at least in part --- then a series of articles I am writing might be of interest:

[https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/1065.php](https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/1065.php)

</comment><comment><USER11> He reminds me a bit of this guy:

[http://templeos.org/](http://templeos.org/)

Smart as hell, working on a totally unique operating system, but sorta crazy.

<comment><USER12> I know, I know, you said "a bit", but there's such a gulf between "a bit eccentric" and "literally suffers from schizophrenia" (my understanding of Terry Davis's situation) that I'm not sure they should be compared like that.</comment></comment>


Clusterfuck for PayPal Germany in Progress? - <AUTHOR> http://stopmebeforeiblogagain.com/paypalclusterfuck/

<comment><AUTHOR> German law basically dictates that if you tell someone they won a prize, you have to give them that prize, no ifs or buts:

§ 661a Gewinnzusagen Ein Unternehmer, der Gewinnzusagen oder vergleichbare Mitteilungen an Verbraucher sendet und durch die Gestaltung dieser Zusendungen den Eindruck erweckt, dass der Verbraucher einen Preis gewonnen hat, hat dem Verbraucher diesen Preis zu leisten.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but there is also §119 BGB, disputability due to an error (not correct translation). [http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/119.html](http://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/119.html)

If it was a technical mistake (which it seems it was), Paypal should be able to avoid payment (again, not a lawyer. But yes. A clusterfuck (and one with the potential of much lulz).

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll see how it turns out. Bring popcorn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> PayPal Germany confirms as mistake [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fnetzwelt%2Fweb%2Fe- mail-panne-paypal-verschickt-500-euro-gewinnbenachrichtigung-a-904399.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another German legal blogger chimes in on the gaffe: [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lawblog.de%2Findex.php%2Farchives%2F2013%2F06%2F07%2F500-euro- von-paypal-schn-wrs%2F)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TNW broke the story in English [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/07/paypal- accidentally...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/07/paypal-accidentally- sends-out-emails-telling-users-theyve-won-500-but-they-havent/?fromcat=all)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR PayPal Germany seems to have sent mass-emails claiming German customers have won 500,- EUR when they have in fact not. Kaspersky Labs have verified emails as legit, coming from PayPal.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Mental note to self: Never ever use "clusterfuck" in title when posting to HN ever again. Karma mod trolls do not approve.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Let's asume 500.000 PP-Users got this message - legal will force PP to pay out - this is a 250 million EUR gift :D</comment>


Ask HN: How can self hosted apps(browser) converse with no central medium? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently working on some open net tools. One last piece of the puzzle for me to bring my proof of concepts to life is to get social network apps hosted across multiple domains, to talk to each other.
The scenario is this:
Person A and Person B host their own versions of an open source version of twitter on persona.com and personb.com respectively. Each person is currently logged into their own app and are happily "tweeting". Person A discovers person B's site and sees a tweet they'd like to reshare. Upon clicking reshare, Person A's app should make a request to Person B's app saying "I'm resharing". Person B's app would respond saying "ok. here's the tweet you are resharing along with other meta info. I just increased my reshare count to 1". Obviously this would happen over an open standard API.
The kicker here though is, when person A clicks reshare on person B's site, how does the browser know that persona.com should initiate a request? How does it get the token from person A (so that no one can manually craft their own requests to get person A to reshare) and say "fine, it's person A who wants to do this reshare"?
Right now I'm stuck at the point where it feels like some central medium has to be watching over both sites so the intermediate request would go to central server saying "hey, this token (no idea who it is) just said it wants to reshare person B's tweet". The central server would match token to person A, and say "hey persona.com, you need to do a reshare on this tweet" from which point all would function as normal.
I desperately want to remove the central server but current protocols just don't seem to allow for it. Funnily enough, this would be simple on a mobile/desktop app. But on a browser app I'm completely stuck. Once person A leaves persona.com, the browser has no way of knowing that it should contact persona.com with a token when reshare is clicked.
Is a central server really the only way to go about this? <comment><USER2> A few ideas from a quick brainstorm, none of them are perfect, but neither is the centralized server solution:

1\. Bookmarklet - In a similar vein to the way some password managers work you could construct a bookmarklet that the user can click on to make a site do the right thing - there are some security configurations depending on your threat model - however this does require user interaction.

2\. Browser plugin - like #1 but obviously with the pain of writing and maintaining a browser plugin.

3\. Bake the site determination into the flow - so instead of a 1-click retweet it becomes a 2-click retweet with the second step requiring the user to provide the site where they want to retweet - again some security implications and breaks the regular flow (although you could get around this by doing it once and storing the value in a cookie)

4\. Have a local app listening on a specified port (so retweets get POSTed to 127.0.0.1:7000 for example) and then from there onwards - requires extra setup, makes the system less portable (can't just throw it on a hosted server). Like #2 but more annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Number 3 is pretty good honestly. It might be the best option in fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Make persona.com an oAuth provider. Force person a to authenticate with persona.com when they click the reshare button. Once authentication is done, personb.com knows that it has to talk to persona.com. Then call the reshare API on persona.com.

This will be a multistep process for the first reshare, but once person a is logged into persona.com and has granted access to personb.com then should be a seamless single click experience.

This provides the added benefit that only person a can reshar on persona.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking of this. It's not a great experience, but it might be the only pure browser based options that will work. Along those lines I thought:

Person A clicks reshare. Gets asked for url. Person A types in persona.com. Immediately a window pops up which is persona.com/reshare?s=personb&id=4 or something along those lines. This is similar to what happens if you click retweet or fav on an embedded tweet right now. I'm actually ok with this workflow even if it's clunky (you have to click reshare twice to do a reshare). I just wish there was a better way to tell personb.com to automatically recognise that persona.com is associated with resharing.

<comment><USER4> Make the usernames "firstname.lastname@example.com".

If the user is already logged in the button will act normally. If its not you simply ask them to log in. If they use firstname.lastname@example.com on personb.com, handle that in the login code and start the regular OpenID flow with persona.com to authenticate. personb.com is now allowed, on behalf of the user, to reshare this content on persona.com, and sends the data directly to an endpoint there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you just have person A supply to personb.com the path to person A's sharing service (in this case persona.com) and craft share links to person A's sharing service pointing to the content from personb.com you want to share?

Let's say:

Share endpoint /share?content=URL

Content endpoint /content/ID

If personb.com knows that the client shares from persona.com/share, it can craft its share links as (excuse the escaping)

        <a href="https://persona.com/share?content=http://personb.com/content/5

When person A follows the link, they get sent to persona.com, authenticated using their cookie, and then the persona.com web service follows the content URL to fetch the content to share.

This seems to address your core use case as well as your stated kicker (you can't craft a request to get person A to reshare something they don't want to since persona.com/share can auth person A and confirm the share).

This is all essential how Facebook, G+, Twitter sharing all work, except you don't pass to your content site the share endpoint because it uses canonical endpoints built in.

<comment><AUTHOR> This would be the ideal workflow because it's non platform dependent (works on desktop and mobile browsers with no additional steps). The question is, how does the browser tell personb.com that the reshare point for the current visitor (person A) is persona.com.

Struggled with this since there doesn't seem to be a way for the browser to set a value that's writable by one site but readable by any site

<comment><USER6> I don't think you can make something like this fully distributed with current web technologies, but one solution would be to use a centralised domain for identification.

When Person A signs up / logs in their instance includes an iframe at personident.com which sets a cookie saying their instance is persona.com.

When they visit Person B's site the include an iframe for the share endpoint at personident.com. That knows about persona.com, so displays a button to share to their instance.

Iframes may sound nasty but this is how all the social sharing buttons work at the moment. I think the code on personident.com could just be JavaScript, so hosting would be easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It sounds like you are implementing a distributed social network. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network)

There are quite a number of open source projects trying to solve similar sounding problems. Perhaps you could look at these projects for inspiration? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking)

Many of the projects are purely "protocol" projects, which you may be able to leverage to achieve what you want without having to implement it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems like you are working towards a "everyone put their social stuff on their own site" model, which really lines up with the indiewebcamp ideal. I would recommend looking at [https://indiewebcamp.com/webactions](https://indiewebcamp.com/webactions), as it's almost exactly what you are looking for, and requires little to no browser support at all, just the ability to register a url as a handler for a protocol. Biggest issue is just getting all the different sites to have support for webactions. The other bit you need is [https://indiewebcamp.com/indie-config](https://indiewebcamp.com/indie-config)

</comment><comment><USER9> You need to maintain state related to which is user's own version of website and which is not.

This state needs to be accessible to all versions of your apps.

As far as my knowledge goes, it is not possible without a central medium. You can either maintain it in a remote server or in a master_domain cookie, to which all apps can redirect, to read current state(similar to SSO).

The second approach is not that clean and you would still need a central server, I would prefer first approach only.

Sharing states/cookies across domains is not supported by browsers due to security concerns. So doing it completely in browser is not possible at moment.

</comment><comment> yoz-y If your network is to be used by technically more savvy people you could use this approach:

On personA site there would be a field which accepts a 'reshare' code when the user is logged in.

Clicking on the reshare button on personB site would (by default) display a reshare code. This code would contain information such as personB URL, id of the post etc.

Pasting the reshare code into personA site would result in a (backend) communication between personA and personB sites to sort stuff out.

When using reshare function for the first time on personB site, the site would propose to enter the URL of 'your own' server in order to transform the reshare button functionality.

Once personB site knows the url of personA, it would transform the reshare button so it actually constructs an URL in the means of personA/reshare/from/personB/reshare-code.

Since the user is presumably logged in (with cookie/local-storage token) to personA, this would redirect him to personA, the backend of personA would eat the reshare-code and could offer a dialog asking for confirmation of a reshare. Once validated it could ping personB site that the resharing was complete.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Due to the 2000 character limit I couldn't add the following:

I'm sorry if this comes across as a question that belongs on Stack Exchange. It's a genuine problem that I've been putting off for the last two years, and I finally need to address it. IRC's and other resources have all eventually pointed me in the direction of central servers. I even tried using custom url prefixes like "reshare://" but the experience is terrible since any site can attempt to set the protocol handler for reshare://. Imagine browsing to a random site (like a torrent seeder) that tries to hijack the reshare:// protocol. So currently stuck. Would appreciate any feedback and thoughts on this.

Thanks :)

<comment><USER10> I don't think you should be so quick to dismiss custom protocol handlers. To me that's the correct way to do this. Browsers are responsible for not letting handlers be hijacked. It's already used widely for mailto links. Firefox: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web- based_protocol_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web- based_protocol_handlers) ; Chrome (needs _web+_ prefix): [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2011/06/Registerin...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2011/06/Registering- a-custom-protocol-handler?hl=en)

There is cross-domain local storage but it involves a central server and iframes, [https://github.com/zendesk/cross- storage](https://github.com/zendesk/cross-storage)

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you! This definitely seems to open up a path that I can look into. As for custom protocol handlers, their experience is pretty messy. But well, try and use what you've got eh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> AFAIK this is the kind of thing Web Intents was meant to facilitate:

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

Too bad it seems to be dead.

<comment><AUTHOR> yep. when I stumbled on this I was all yeyy. Then I saw the status and was all "sigh". That led me to custom URL protocols which turned out to be a deadend

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, in a distributed twitter everyone is primarily writing to their own server. "Retweets" are just a different kind of content. Notification of the originating server that you've found something interesting should be an optional nicety, not a critical feature. Chances are most sites won't support that feature anyway (to easy to abuse for spam).

</comment><comment><USER13> I prefer a Human at the other end</comment>


Geoff Hinton AMA – Deep Learning's Biological Inspiration - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2lmo0l/ama_geoffrey_hinton

<comment><USER2> The AMA highlights one of the deficiencies of Markdown. Prof Hinton has attempted to number many of his responses to the highest rated thread, but they're all coming up as 1. 1. 1. 1.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm having trouble understanding why the success of pooling would be deemed unfortunate. Max-pooling or average-pooling are essentially learning something about a pair of contiguous features: while max-pooling saves only the most prominent/largest value, average pooling compresses information using the mean. Saying this is unfortunate from Hinton's standpoint amounts to saying that it is very unlikely to see any sort of pooling behavior at the level of neuronal populations. At a physiological and psychological level, what would pooling equate to?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the intuition behind max-pooling is that it says "something is in this local region", without overly specifically saying where it is. Intuitively, a human may detects an edge or intense bright light, but not care so much about precisely where it is in the field of vision. After many successive layers of max-pooling, however (if the pools are not over-lapping), even somewhat course information about locality is lost.

I believe Hinton objects to this gross loss of spatial information for two reasons: 1) Humans don't lose so much spatial information, and Hinton would like his models to ultimately capture a neurologically plausible computation. 2) It may not be necessary for object detection (Imagenet), but it would likely be important for more sophisticated tasks.

<comment><USER4> He also 'did not like' Support Vector Machines, back when they were the best method for image recognition. His reason was that SVMs were a 'dead end' \- they were not a step on the path to human-level image recognition. His argument now seems pretty valid.

I think he is saying the same thing about Max Pooling. Just my guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >I guess we should just train an RNN to output a caption so that it can tell us what it thinks is there. Then maybe the philosophers and cognitive scientists will stop telling us what our nets cannot do.

I wonder if he knew about the Stanford paper that demonstrates this? Or if he just guessed this would happen.

[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/)

<comment><USER6> Or knew about the Google paper demonstrating this?

[http://googleresearch.blogspot.ca/2014/11/a-picture-is- worth...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.ca/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth- thousand-coherent.html)

Or the Toronto one? [http://deeplearning.cs.toronto.edu/i2t](http://deeplearning.cs.toronto.edu/i2t)

Two institutions he is affiliated with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Url changed from [http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/12/geoff-hinton-ama-neural- net...](http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/12/geoff-hinton-ama-neural-networks- brain-machine-learning.html), which points to this.</comment>


Uber just emailed riders to tell them, "We have fallen short" - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/Uber-just-emailed-riders-to-tell-them-We-have-fallen-short/articleshow/59186362.cms <comment><USER2> Bahahaha. "We have fallen short" maybe be one of the biggest lies in tech we've seen in a long time.

If "falling short" means engaging in some of the most heinous and repellent business activities and personally disgusting behaviors and attitudes then I guess they "fell short".

They did that stuff because THAT'S WHAT KIND OF COMPANY THEY ARE AND THE KIND OF PEOPLE THAT ARE not because they made some poor decisions.

</comment><comment><USER3> > After a report of inexcusable workplace harassment surfaced earlier this > year

A lie of omission to tell us how they've changed...Interesting choice. Omitting the sexual nature of said harassment report is hardly contrite.</comment>


The unexotic underclass - <AUTHOR> http://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/

<comment><USER2> Why is web/app devlopment responsible for fixing all of society's problems? Most of the problems the author mentioned have more to do with civic education and a politically weak middle class. How many of the smartest engineers are toiling away for Oil companies? Arent't they supposed to be fixing the world with their super powers? 20 something developers are just a lucky bunch, right time and right place, and god bless them for it. If the world could, it would outsource and marginalize their livelihoods, like it has for so many others (and it most likely will at some point, booms and busts). Most are wondering if they'll even be in same career past 40. Seriously, let it go, they really don't have it THAT good.

<comment><USER3> Web/app development is not responsible for this. People are. One way to move the needle would be to _not_ go into web/app development, instead starting something that directly serves people who have the problems in the article. It could be as boring as enterprisey CRUD done right. A medical network for health professionals and users. Physical products. Face to face services, where technology is not the point but merely the tool.

<comment><USER3> Here's an example: digital music for prisoners.

[http://www.spin.com/articles/prison-jail-music- mp3s-access-j...](http://www.spin.com/articles/prison-jail-music-mp3s-access- jpay/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is easy to see how the exotic underclass can be helped by an entrepreneur: they are technologically behind in one way or another. Someone can create technology tailored to their needs and solve their problems.

By comparison, problems facing the unexotic underclass are generally much more difficult to solve through technology. Most of their problems are sociological, economic and political in nature.</comment>