Design for Living: What's Great about Goethe? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/01/design-for-living-books-adam-kirsch <comment><USER2> "Art is long, life is short, judgment difficult, opportunities fleeting. Action is easy, thinking is hard: acting after thinking, uncomfortable. Every beginning is joyous, every threshold a point of expectation. The boy stares in wonder, impressions condition him, he learns in playing, seriousness takes him by surprise. Imitation is natural to us all, but what to imitate is not easily ascertained. Rarely is the best discerned, still more rarely appreciated. Height attracts us, not the steps upwards; with the mountaintop in our eyes we linger lovingly on the plain. Only a part of art can be taught, an artist needs the whole. Those who know only half of it, are always confused and talk a lot; those who have the whole, act and talk little, or long afterwards. The former have no secrets and no strength, their teaching is like freshly baked bread, tasty and satisfying for one day; but flour cannot be sown and the fruits of the grain should not be ground. Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not made clear by words. The spirit in which we act, is what is highest. Action can only be grasped by spirit and portrayed by spirit. No one knows what he is doing when he acts rightly, but we are always conscious of what is wrong. He who works only with signs, is a pedant, a hypocrite or a botcher. There are many such, and they get on well together. Their gossiping impedes the student, and their persistent mediocrity alarms those who are best. The teaching of a real artist opens up sense; for where words are lacking, action speaks. A true pupil learns how to unravel the unknown from the known, and thereby develops toward mastery."

</comment><comment><USER3> For English-speakers unfamiliar with famous Germans, I mildly recommend The German Genius. This book was written in 2010. It covers the last 200-300 years of famous Germans and their contributions to science, the arts and politics.

While it's an awesome book and a really good introduction to Germany, I can only "mildly" recommend it because it's 800 pages of short biographies. It took me 6 months to finish. It's a bit of a slog.

</comment><comment><USER4> I want to highlight a short and serene poem which Goethe "probably wrote [...] onto the wall of a wooden gamekeeper lodge on top of the Kickelhahn mountain where he [...] spent the night." [1]

It feels especially poignant these days, even haunting.

(If you want to hear it in German, Schubert turned into a "Lied" [2]).

Wandrers Nachtlied ("Wanderer's Nightsong")

        Über allen Gipfeln
        Ist Ruh,
        In allen Wipfeln
        Spürest du
        Kaum einen Hauch;
        Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
        Warte nur, balde
        Ruhest du auch.

        O'er all the hilltops
        Is quiet now,
        In all the treetops
        Hearest thou
        Hardly a breath;
        The birds are asleep in the trees:
        Wait, soon like these
        Thou too shalt rest.

        (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer%27s_Nightsong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer%27s_Nightsong)

[2] for example [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SBTUcVxqEEA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SBTUcVxqEEA)

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting fact about Goethe: as The Sorrows of Young Werther became widely popular it inspired surge in suicides among young men. Suicide became a fashion in those days.

This is called The Werther Effect: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide)

If you read 17th - 19th you may sometime come across suicide being referred to as in/out of fashion. Apparently it had cycles.

<comment><USER6> I was introduced to Werther too early in my German literature studies, which turned me off to Goethe.

Big mistake. Foreign students of German literature should read all the Goethe they can get their hands on.

<comment><USER7> I read a lot of Nietzsche, who raves about Goethe as a representative of the latter half of N's Dionysian/Apollonian dichotomy—and in later works becomes the symbol of synthesis between the two.

Similar to you, I kind of ignored N's great characterization of Goethe due to Werther, but only because I thought Goethe was a one-hit wonder pop- philosopher novelist when I first started hearing the name. I was honestly confused about how Werther could represent so much of N's philosophy! And then I read about its author and found one of the most accomplished individuals in the 18th/19th centuries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read a buttload of Goethe in high school in Germany, we were always rolling our eyes when every year we'd go through another one of his plays or poems. Admittedly, a lot of his stuff is quite good though. I really like "Die Wahlverwandschaften" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_Affinities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_Affinities)), it sounds dry if you read the summary but quite an entertaining read. I don't know how good the translation is.

I don't really get poetry in general but somehow in song form it works really well. I LOVE a lot of the songs from the 19th century, somehow the overwrought lyrics are perfect in that form.

<comment><USER9> > I don't really get poetry in general but somehow in song form it works > really well.

Just to point out, songs _are_ the general case of poetry. They're much, much, much, much more common than nonmusical poetry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny to see this on HN - I recently stumbled across the book mentioned in the article trying to find a good English translation of Wilhelm Meister. The Essential Goethe is the only good English translation of Wilhelm Meister, Egmont, and Iphigenia that I have found, and they are all worth reading. That it includes Faust and Werther is almost a shame as both of those are widely available in English. The Essential Goethe is basically a selection from a much larger (12 volume) Princeton translation, and I wish they had included more of the lesser known fiction works (and less of his science essays). In any case, I highly recommend it - Goethe is definitely underappreciated in the US.

<comment><USER11> Indeed, years ago I heard about Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and was amazed at how difficult it was to find an English translation of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> He was also an accomplished scientist who contributed to our understanding of color: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe#Sci...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe#Scientific_work)

<comment><USER8> In his time as today scientific consensus is that Goethe's work on color was that of a poet and not of a scientist. My sense is that Goethe wanted to be a kind of DaVinci, trying his hand at everything from poetry, fiction, drama to painting and dabbling in science. Personally, I think his fiction is pretty great but as an optics guy I'd rather he stayed away from that field.

<comment><USER13> > as an optics guy I'd rather he stayed away from that field.

What harm did he do?

<comment><USER14> His color theory is quite flawed. Keep away from it if you don't want to waste your time. He was a much better poet than scientist.

<comment><AUTHOR> It isn't flawed per se, it's simply focused more on human perception than a scientific analysis of light itself.

 _Goethe 's book provides a catalogue of how colour is perceived in a wide variety of circumstances, and considers Isaac Newton's observations to be special cases.[3] Unlike Newton, Goethe's concern was not so much with the analytic treatment of colour, as with the qualities of how phenomena are perceived. Philosophers have come to understand the distinction between the optical spectrum, as observed by Newton, and the phenomenon of human colour perception as presented by Goethe._

 _... his aesthetic approach did not lend itself to the demands of analytic and mathematical analysis used ubiquitously in modern Science._

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

Wittgenstein also wrote an interesting book about it:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I highly recommend a dive into Wikipedia re: Goethe, all sorts of interesting views and people are connected to or inspired by Goethe and Goethe's view of science; Rudolf Steiner, Francisco Varela, Gregory Bateson and Evan Thompson to name just a few worthy names to search for.

</comment><comment><USER16> What's great about Goethe? Lots! Here's my personal favorite from "Italienische Reise," his memoir of travels in Italy. It describes his intellectual awakening through study of the art of Italy, especially Rome.

> Ich habe viel gesehen und noch mehr gedacht: Die Welt eröffnet sich mehr und > mehr, auch alles, was ich schon lange weiß, wird mir erst eigen. Welch ein > früh wissendes und spät übendes Geschöpf ist doch der Mensch!

I have seen much and thought still more: the world is opening up more and more. Even all those things I have long known are finally becoming part of me. What a creature is man: So early to gain knowledge, so late to use it!

</comment><comment><USER17> He was the latest modernist , for God sake he wrote Faust plays, meet with Schopenhauer and inspired many

<comment><USER18> what do you mean by latest?</comment></comment>


Out-Pirating the Pirates (2008) [audio] - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestory.org/stories/2008-09/out-pirating-pirates <comment><AUTHOR> Some folks may not have 50 minutes to listen. Here's a print interview with Max Hardberger:

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/14/max- hardberger...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/14/max-hardberger- sea-captain-pirates-seized)</comment>


The worst CEOs in corporate history - <AUTHOR> http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk/the-entrepreneur/business-leaders/2540261/the-worst-ceos-in-corporate-history.thtml <comment><USER2> This is obviously a click-bait article, but did get me thinking.

Laughing at failure isn't good, but talking about it more is. Apart from CEO compensation, which I still find ridiculous, I find the difficult question is "were they doing their job?" Not if they were doing it well, but were they doing what is usually expected of a CEO?

Hindsight is 20/20, and it seems to me a lot of failure and success can be luck. So is there anything other than calling the market/future wrong that makes these CEOs bad? E.g. with Miller, shutting down the acquisitions seems like the quickest way to dissatisfy devs, and I'd argue an awful idea in any case.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's not of great quality.

E.g. it might have emphasized how much COMPAQ's PC quality dropped during that period, e.g. two computers with the same model number and consecutive serial numbers could have significantly different insides, which was a nightmare for people trying to prepare for Y2K. So why continue to pay COMPAQ prices for worse than Dell quality? (As I recall, Dell maintained a higher degree of commonality in their PCs, although peripherals were just as or more mix and match.)

Chasing after something different while gutting your core business is a common failure mode. Apple was said to suffer from this to a degree in the period mentioned, as was implied from the mention that Macs weren't selling that well. The Apple II side of the company was not happy about being a neglected and scheduled for termination cash cow.

As for Mayer, she just seems to be terrible at managing people in general, not just devs. Besides really notable things like the meat axe taken to all remote workers while setting up a nursery adjacent to her office, Tumblr's failure as a successful acquisition is said to be in large part due to the precipitate folding of its sales organization into the general Yahoo one, which had no idea how to handle its rather different market.

And wasn't development neglected as well? One common fate of acquired units, which I've seen first hand, is that their technical development plans get canceled when they inevitably lose budget allocation battles to much more politically powerful incumbent units in the company.

So, I say that unless a company has developed a skill at doing this, which Cisco was said to have a long time ago, despite losing all that wonderful synergy and eliminating duplicate cost centers, integration of a new company that's successful into your company should be done with extreme care and without rushing. "Successful" to distinguish from e.g. acquihires where acquiring a successful team, but little or none of their previous products or services, is the goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article makes us learn a thing on what not to do when we run our business even in a small scale.

</comment><comment><USER5> This list is incomplete without Carly Fiorina.</comment>


Gmail Snooze with Apps Script - <AUTHOR> http://googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2011/07/gmail-snooze-with-apps-script.html

<comment><USER2> App Script looks nice. Does anyone who's been hacking with it know if it should be easy to implement these other features I've been wanting:

Re-Ping: Add an additional field when composing an email that causes the email you're sending to appear in your own inbox in a given number of days if there's been no reply. (It prompts you to re-ping the person if they don't respond.)

Auto-expire: Type "eN" and the message will be automatically archived in N days. This is roughly the inverse of Snooze. Alarm clocks sometimes call this a Sleep feature where you can have the radio play for a certain amount of time and then automatically turn off. Here, if you get an email about some event in a couple weeks you can say "auto-expire 14" and it will stay in your inbox for 2 weeks, and then silently, automatically go away. It's not that it takes much more time to clean up no-longer-relevant emails from your inbox once in a while. But when you get the email is when it has your attention. If you decide to leave it in your inbox you might as well schedule the archiving you'll have to do in a couple weeks anyway.

More about the above features (plus Snooze) here: <http://messymatters.com/email>

<comment><USER3> Auto-expire should be very easy, it's fairly similar behavior to snooze. Re- ping might be a few more minutes work, but app script does expose every thing necessary for these. The only problem is that GAS can be very very slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a similar (and email provider-agnostic) result, check out <http://followup.cc> \- it runs my life, and is the first service in which I've outgrown the free tier and been excited to pay for more access to.

</comment><comment><USER5> App Script just sort of showed up one day. How long have they been working on this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Early 2009

[http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/08/launched- google...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/08/launched-google-apps- script.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm personally a big fan of <http://www.boomeranggmail.com/>

<comment><USER7> boomerang is going to start charging a pretty hefty subscription fee ($5/um personal and $15/u/m business). this script is well timed.

<comment><USER6> They already did and I was very happy to pay for the personal account. I get tremendous value from them.

<comment><USER7> we are a 20 user organization. at $180/y/person, that's $3,600/year to have boomerang for my organization. google apps costs us $1,000/yr at $50/y/person..

<comment><USER8> We do offer group pricing for companies with more than 5 users. All you have to do is email us at sales at baydin.

<comment><USER7> why not publish group pricing on your website?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As usual, HN teaches me about stuff I never heard about. Do you guys regularly use App Script for your projects?

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been waiting for this feature for years. I hope they fully integrate it.

Great name.</comment>


Thirty Years of Mac [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/30-years/ <comment><USER5> More 30 like years of personal computing...just dub "Mac" for "PC" and it's wouldn't be inaccurate except for the smiley faces.

Just because _these_ artists and engineers are talking about a Mac does not make their functions exclusive to the platform. Also, going back 30 years you have to endure some turd-Macs along the way (some brilliant ones too). Many jokes were had at the expense of our Mac brothers in the late mid to late 90's (even early 00's) about their platform of choice as we ran circles around them in gaming, graphics and pretty much any other benchmark besides money spent.

It's not the case now (switch to Intel changed that) but I would love to see a similar piece in praise of the PC. And no I don't mean just Windows, I'm talking about the generic term. Computers are awesome, let's not fall in love with a corporate brand and think it's fundamentally something different when it's not.

<comment><USER6> I think you missed the point. 30 years from today (January 24th, 1984) is celebrating the release of the original Macintosh, which was the first modern personal computer. Of course there have been "bad Apples" along the way — the Apple computer line _sucked_ during much of the 90's, as you pointed out.

But the simple fact is that Apple's original Macintosh was the definitive introduction of modern personal computing to the general public. It's not an arbitrary "30 years of personal computing"... it's commemorating a watershed moment.

<comment><USER7> It is most certainly not a fact that the "Macintosh was the definitive introduction of modern personal computing to the general public."

The Apple ][ was more popular by far than the original Mac, and even so it wasn't the _first definitive PC_. I remember seeing a lot of Commodore PETs around when I was young... way more than Macintosh.

<comment><USER6> I was using the term "modern personal computing" to refer to a computer using what would become the standard cross-platform interface for computers: the desktop metaphor[1].

While the Apple II and the Commodore PET were undoubtedly very popular and did put computers into the hands of home users, they really were not "modern" computers. To quote the Wikipedia article I referenced above:

 _" The first computer to popularise the desktop metaphor, using it as a standard feature over the earlier command line interface was the Apple Macintosh in 1984. The desktop metaphor is ubiquitous in modern-day personal computing; it is found in most desktop environments of modern operating systems: Windows as well as Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix-like systems."_

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's all I can add to this short movie: [http://m.cdn.blog.hu/ap/appleblog/image/doghouse- comic.png](http://m.cdn.blog.hu/ap/appleblog/image/doghouse-comic.png)

(I am happy to be downvoted for the joke, so just keep going :) )

<comment><USER9> I haven't seen a sleeve or cover that addresses this very fact.

<comment><USER10> You have now: [http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/x/www.trendhunter.com/cdn....](http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/x/www.trendhunter.com/cdn.trendhunterstatic.com/thumbs/ipad- toilet-paper.jpeg.pagespeed.ce.eO9G5LJuUg.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised by all of the hate on this thread. This is clearly a tribute for the faithful... not the uninitiated. Sure, there's some level of marketing to it - but I think it was meant more as a piece of appreciation for current longtime users than it was meant as a switcher style campaign. A "keeper" campaign as opposed to a "switcher" campaign.

<comment><USER12> I agree completely. I also think its a subtle(?) affirmation of Apple's commitment to the Mac and the Mac OS as a separate entity - separate from iOS, that is.

It is also really, really hard for those of you too young to have been there for the Mac's introduction/launch to understand just how amazing this piece of tech was in comparison with the popular alternatives at the time.

It was so unbelievably alien and so intimately familiar at the same time. I am a long time gadget/tech lover and there has been no single event that I remember with such vivid clarity.

Also, there is no single piece of tech that I have ever wanted to own so badly. I actually switched careers (design/illustration > programming) so that I could afford to buy one!

I think it's okay to have a moment like this for the faithful. Yes, it's a bit indulgent, but it will be over in a day or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For people who don't know it yet:

"Folklore.org: Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh, and the people who made it"

[http://www.folklore.org/](http://www.folklore.org/)

I don't own a single Apple device, but I still find the stories fascinating. It makes me wish I could've worked with those engineers.

<comment><USER14> There's always a new frontier.

Today there are new people somewhere trying to do something that seems difficult, maybe impossible, and certainly rather pointless to the outsiders looking at it from the comfort of the establishment's balcony.

I'm pretty sure it's easier to look for those people today than it was in 1980, when you still needed to be physically in the right place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not sure if it's just me but I find this video remarkably uninspiring. It just seems to lack real content?

Now I'm more than willing to accept that I'm not the exact target for this video, and that the subject matter of the following video makes it a slightly unfair comparison, but the contrast to the quality of the Steve Jobs tribute video is vast: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y2WpieYRks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y2WpieYRks)

The latter video literally takes my breath away.

<comment><USER16> I burst out laughing at "truly worldwide democratisation of creativity". Yes, that expensive personal computer, intentionally aimed for most of its career at media and education in western markets. That was a bad bit of copy.

And, more the fault of my mind than the copy, but "a tool for exploring new fields [that I otherwise couldn't]" \- the same could be said of a machete. :)

<comment><USER17> > _I burst out laughing at "truly worldwide democratisation of creativity". > Yes, that expensive personal computer, intentionally aimed for most of its > career at media and education in western markets._

Expensive compared to what? Because to do the things you can do with a $1000 PC, you needed $100,000 or more before depending on the field.

Your personal typesetting engine? 128-channel audio recording? With effects? Video editing? Bitmap editing? CAD?

Those are all things that existed only for high end workstations or specialized devices before the personal PC, and the Mac played a huge role in the development of this (it will take years for Windows to catch up.

Democratisation doesn't mean it also magically broke poverty barries.

<comment><USER18> You do realize most of those features didn't come from the Mac?

Apple ripped all of the features you describe straight from the Amiga. It could barely do sound because Apple Corps kept suing them for trademark infringement.

It's nice to look back at the Macintosh's history with rose-colored glasses. Unfortunately, it isn't true, nor is it even remotely indicative of the technology at the time.

<comment><USER19> The history of both desktop publishing and image processing, at least, is _very_ intimately tied to the Macintosh via Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe Photoshop, respectively. There really wasn't anything like them before they shipped -- there were typesetting programs like TeX and "paint" programs like Deluxe Paint (and for that matter, MacPaint!), but TeX and competitors used a much more arcane non-GUI paradigm and, as good as Deluxe Paint was for what it was, it was _not_ designed for the kind of image retouching work that Photoshop could do out of the gate.

I see comments sneering about the "democratization" claim, and while I wouldn't have chosen that word, it's worth keeping in mind that Pagemaker and Photoshop enabled Macs to rival $25K+ dedicated, single-task workstations of the day. They really did revolutionize industries. And they both started their lives as Mac exclusives.

I liked the Amiga, too, and it really was ahead of its time in certain respects, most notably video processing. And it kicked the Mac's ass for years in anything relating to multitasking. And it really did revolutionize video production the same way the Mac revolutionized DTP and image processing. But let's not go overboard and claim that everything the Mac was doing by 1986-87 was somehow "ripped off" from the Amiga. The Amiga certainly got capable layout and image software, but that software wasn't creating markets the way the Toaster was -- or the way Pagemaker and Photoshop did.

(As for sound, well. There's no one hardware/software combination that strikes me as a real paradigm shift in the music sequencing or recording field, certainly not in that era; cheap MIDI interfaces drove that across _all_ platforms. Apple didn't make sound _software_ back then but that certainly didn't mean the Mac wasn't used extensively for it with third-party tools.)

<comment><USER20> Comparing TeX to desktop publishing is pure category error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you're interesting but perhaps never got the chance to use the original 1984 Mac OS, then you might want to check out this in-browser emulator port I put together:

[http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/](http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/)

In some ways it's quite remarkable how little has changed.

<comment><USER22> That version seems to be from 1991, when I first starting using Macs in school. Don't supposed you could put Think Pascal on it? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Everyone is using this one system" \- you're still not fooling anyone Apple.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers)

<comment><USER24> This is true for creative industries (which the video is all about). Most design studios, musicians, 3D artists, etc, use Macs.

<comment><USER14> Certainly not true for graphics, 3D and video. Windows is the majority platform for apps like Photoshop, Maya, Premiere, Avid Media Composer...

(The illusion that all designers are on Mac is probably because HNers don't often meet the ordinary designers who have a boring corporate job or are struggling freelancers somewhere far away from San Francisco.)

<comment><USER25>
      The illusion that all designers are on Mac is probably
      because HNers don't often meet the ordinary designers who
      have a boring corporate job or are struggling freelancers
      somewhere far away from San Francisco.

Out here in the midwest, every design freelancer I've known has had a Mac, without exception. Every small-biz graphic design studio or ad agency I've come into contact with has been a Mac shop.

3D artists, however, have been just as consistently Windows-based. I've never met a single one of them with a Mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's the list of people and things featured:

\- 1984, original Macintosh

\- 1985, Jon Appleton, pioneer in electro-acoustical music and key figure in the development of the digital synthesizer

\- 1986, April Greiman, seminal figure in the New Wave graphic design movement

\- 1987, Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research

\- 1988, Ahn Sang-soo, pioneer in Korean typography

\- 1989, John Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop

\- 1990, Craig Hickman, creator of Kid Pix

\- 1991, John Maeda, artist and pioneer of motion graphics

\- 1992, David Carson, graphic designer and art director of _Ray Gun_ magazine

\- 1993, Robyn and Rand Miller, creators of Myst

\- 1994, Hans Zimmer, composer

\- 1995, Dave McKean, comic book artist and filmmaker

\- 1996, Tinker Hatfield, Nike shoe designer

\- 1997, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, creators of _Wired_ magazine

\- 1998, Alex Townsend, creator of the Computer Bus that helped bring computer access to Manx schools

\- 1999, Moby, electronica artist

\- 2000, Nick Knight, prolific fashion photographer

\- 2001, Takagi Masakatsu, musician and filmmaker

\- 2002, John Stanmeyer, photographer for _TIME_ and _National Geographic_ magazines

\- 2003, Philip Jackson, founder of Sportstec that makes sports analysis software

\- 2004, Noemi Trainor, principal of Mexico's Varmond School which is spearheading a digital-first educational program

\- 2005, Jürgen Mayer H., architect

\- 2006, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, co-creators of the _Radiolab_ podcast

\- 2007, Nicholas Felton, prolific graphic designer known for his "Feltron Annual Reports[1]" and supposed progenitor of Facebook's timeline

\- 2008, Es Devlin, prolific costume designer

\- 2009, Dr. Pardis Sabeti, pioneer in genetics research and bioinformatics

\- 2010, Dr. Maki Sugimoto, surgeon who uses 3D printing to model patients organs to help prepare for surgery

\- 2011, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, co-founders of Codecademy

\- 2012, Daito Manabe, artist who specializes in electronic and holographic installations

\- 2013, Éric Fournier, Sakchin Bessette, and Dominic Audet, co-founders of Moment Factory

\- 2014, the new Mac Pro

[1]: [http://feltron.com](http://feltron.com)

<comment><USER27> 25 men. 3 women. 2 machines.

<comment><USER26> > 25 men. 3 women. 2 machines.

Not that it's significantly better, but there are 5 women, not 3: April Greiman, Jane Metcalfe, Noemi Trainor, Es Devlin, and Dr. Pardis Sabeti. However, they did choose Rosetto instead of Metcalfe for 1997's main photo, so there's a case to be made for 4 (though Metcalfe is in the photos when you scroll down).

<comment><USER27> I counted 3 times. Men are bad at math. :) Or recognizing faces.

<comment><USER28> All the people OP mentioned are there, all 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I was a little kid we had a Mac II and a Mac LC. I spent so many hours with them... The software I used and the machines themselves inspired so many interests. The computers themselves eventually became a life long passion.

I've heard of Commodore users having that affinity for C64s and Amiga owners and a few other manufacturers... I've never heard a person say they fell so in love with their Compaq Q2150... There's something special about the Macintosh. I think it's that it's so clear that the manufacturers really cared about the user experience that they inspired the same in the software developers for the platform.

</comment><comment><USER29> Forty Years of Unix!

I love writing in C and compiling on OS X, Linux and FreeBSD with the same Makefile!

<comment><USER30> Actually 45 years...

<comment><USER29> First production unix system: 1972. I counted from that.

<comment><USER30> Fair point although it was 1971 running a nroff typesetter at Bell Labs.

First external to Bell Labs deployment was in 1972 though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Art, art, art... Why can't they show programmers in an ad for once? Apple you can come film me at any time.

<comment><USER32> INT. VOID_'S ROOM - <USER2>

CLOSEUP OF FINGERS TYPING

VOID_0 I love Macs because they have the unix core, so you can compile anything written for linux servers natively without using a virtual machine.

CLOSEUP OF CODE BEING TYPED

CLOSEUP OF TERMINAL COMPILING CODE

VOID_0 So yeah, that's pretty neat I guess. I mean it's not that flashy or anything, I'm really just using it as a fancy text editor. The build quality of these things is pretty good. All my friends are doing the same thing on cheaper linux computers, but I don't like those as much.

<comment><USER31> Awesome, Hollywood is waiting for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Beautiful site, nice memories and all, but I find this a bit worrisome.

The Mac's 25th anniversary went by rather unremarkably under Steve's management, if I remember correctly. He famously gave the Apple's museum to Stanford as soon as he returned.

A company as old (for this industry) and successful as Apple must always look relentlessly to the future in order not to fall too much in love with its own accomplishments to prevent it from reinventing itself.

<comment><USER34> It's just marketing fluff. Don't worry about it.

<comment><USER33> I'm not alone it seems:

[http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/24/apple- mac-30](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/24/apple-mac-30)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Oh god the surgeon with the scalpel in one hand and the ipad in the other. Time for glass methinks.

</comment><comment><USER36> "Download QuickTime to view this video". No thanks.

<comment><USER37> All they are trying to say is they don't want new customers.

Either you are inside their walled garden, or out (the better place for me).

<comment><USER16> No quicktime here, video loaded first time, after that it won't load when I'm on the timeline page clicking 'watch video'.

Where's my captive frontend dev to explain this to me when I need him?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's interesting (based on the poll "tell us about your first mac") that the Programming category essentially disappears in the early 90s.

This roughly corresponds to the decline and near extinction of the Mac. Having programmers leave your platform is a very, very bad thing.

<comment><USER39> Or you could read it as programmers being only subset of all people and computers were finally becoming mainstream enough that the ratio began to reflect that?

<comment><USER40> No, because the parent poster is right. Look into the history of Apple in the '90s, how Jobs came back, NeXT etc.

<comment><USER39> I wrote extensively for a number of sites and magazines about NeXT technologies in the mid to late 1990s, I can give you chapter and verse on the history.

The number of developers increased in absolute terms just as they did when the iPhone came out, but the ratio of developers to regular users didn't, because the technologies mainstreamed and the sales to regular users were very high.

Back in the pre-acquisition NeXT days, the ratio of developers to users was incredibly high because overall sales weren't that great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How come people talk about 30 years of Mac but no one talks about 25+ years of Windows or Linux for that matter.

I saw numerous blog posts of parroting this advertisement, even in my morning daily commute news paper.

<comment><USER30> This is normal.

They are the poster boy for a corporation despite having screwed up incredibly so many times over the years, nearly fallen off a cliff and treating their customers like crap ( _" you're holding it wrong"_ for example) and still only maintaining a minority market share on the desktop and handset market. Also they have several system architectures and complete API rewrites over the years that mean their client-base rewriting the entire universe every time they move the goalposts.

For comparison:

MSDOS is 32 years old. Stuff still runs from day one.

Windows is actually 28 years old. Stuff still compiles from day one (windows' original API isn't much different to today's windows). Stuff still runs from circa 1995 on current machines.

Unix is 45 years old. Stuff still compiles and runs from circa 1974.

<comment><USER42> Windows is incredibly hampered by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility. There's a _ton_ of ugly stuff that could have been jettisoned by now if it wasn't for the need to support some program written in 1990 for the windows 2.0 API.

I agree there are many benefits to backwards compatibility, and in some cases it is warranted (though these days you can use virtual machines to achieve much the same goals). Apple made a different choice, and their platform is all the better for it. I _like_ that they deprecate things and don't keep us held back by ancient technology.

<comment><USER43> Do you have any specific examples of how its "incredibly hampered"?

<comment><USER42> The most extreme I can think of was one reported by Raymond Chen on his "The Old New Thing" blog which I can't find the specific link for, but is discussed in an article by Joel Spolsky:

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html)

To quote:

"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."

<comment><USER43> You picked a particularly poor example. The application compatibility layer does not incredibly hamper the OS whatsoever. First of all the ACL is only active when known executables that have problems with the newer versions are running. As an educated guess it would not take more than a millisecond to ID the .exe. Secondly what the ACL does is fairly benign - what it amounts to in simple terms is that it simply uses a different code path for a very narrow set of functions. The cost associated with loading an 'extra library' is so marginal that you would find it hard to measure.

<comment><USER44> Plus if you don't think _every_ consumer OS does this to a certain extent, you're uninformed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Please add [video] or something to indicate autoplay to the title - I just blared out the music to my office! I normally put in headphones before clicking on videos...

<comment><USER17> Or you know, you could keep the volume down at all times.

Besides HN links, where one might indicate "autoplay" there are also popup pages that play music and tons of other sources of unwanted audio.

<comment><USER45> I do normally, but I forgot this one time. and I didn't expect it to make noises, because it didn't say [video] and I have adblock et al.

I have seen it on some posts before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The video captures the essence of what apples users intend to do, well almost.. Apple speaks of stories of creativity and flexibility - also mentions you never know "how users are gonna use this in the future".. So why the hell does apple play this game of closed autocrat and keep the creativity out of the hardware buffs who want to tamper with their macs.. I am happy with Linux :)

</comment><comment><USER47> Back in August 2010, coughed 80% of my cash on a 15" MBP when i started to freelance because a) had the cash at the moment b) wanted a reliable machine and a motivation boost for the rough times ahead, which i eventually upgraded to 8GB non-Apple memory and SSD disk (replacing Superdrive with the old HD).

It's Jan 2014, still my power horse and going rock solid, i'm quite happy.

</comment><comment><USER48> Hey! Those floppy icons are from Mini vMac! This could be seen as Apple condoning the emulation of their products and software...

[https://www.apple.com/v/30-years/a/images/1989/closeup.jpg](https://www.apple.com/v/30-years/a/images/1989/closeup.jpg)

<comment><USER49> And that picture is "Road to Point Reyes", created in 1983 by the Lucasfilm division that eventually became Pixar. [http://alvyray.com/Art/PtReyes.htm](http://alvyray.com/Art/PtReyes.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I remember my first contact with a Mac: Power Macintosh 9600. I was so in love with it that I used it until G4 Powermac was released. I hacked it so much that reseting the machine and power on was lighting fast as well running many apps. I loved all, then switched to a Powermac G4 Cube.

</comment><comment><USER51> I like the video a lot and am glad Apple continue to make these kinds of high budget videos, but it started out with the claim that in '84 a computer with pictures and not the size of a mainframe was something new, but I had been using a zx81 for 3 years by then, drawing pictures, writing games and playing "music" (albeit very CTFTPA)

I found this also annoying reading iWoz, it was as though there were no other computers out there at the time, but the Tandy Trash80, the Pet and Sinclair's computers were all doing very nicely when Woz was "inventing" the computer.

</comment><comment><USER52> Jon Appleton was my professor at Dartmouth's Electro-acoustic Music Program. He's a great composer, professor and person who cares about his students.

</comment><comment><USER53> It is interesting to see that the gaming circle has decreased considerably in size over the years from 1984 to 2013 and has almost disappeared now.

What could be probable reasons for the same?

I'm referring to the 'What they did with it" section in Your First Mac page ([https://www.apple.com/30-years/your-first- mac/](https://www.apple.com/30-years/your-first-mac/)).

<comment><USER26> > It is interesting to see that the gaming circle has decreased considerably > in size over the years from 1984 to 2013 and has almost disappeared now.

>What could be probable reasons for the same?

The circles for each year are generated off of the results from the three- question survey Apple is conducting on that page (click the "Tell us about your first Mac" button below the lede). The questions are:

1\. Which Mac was yours? (which determines the year)

2\. Where were you? (which ostensibly determines which localized site your responses will count towards)

3\. How did you use your Mac?

So the size of the gaming circle in a particular year is determined merely by the number of people who filled out that survey, self-reported that they bought their first Mac in that year, _and_ said they used that first Mac for gaming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I like Mac. I'm typing this comment on a Mac. My first computer was an Apple IIc, before there even was a Mac.

But sheesh, this ad is schmaltzy even for me!

</comment><comment><USER55> This video seemed to celebrate the software that ran on the machines more than the actual hardware itself. I get that they are trying to market the emotion behind the experience but I almost feel as if the emotion they are conveying is misplaced here.

The actual photos and stories following the video are MUCH better and I enjoyed taking a trip down memory lane. :-)

</comment><comment><USER24> Weird. It's the first time I see an Apple use an actual webfont instead of pictures—and it won't load for me.

<comment><USER56> Same here. Some refreshs did the tricks though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> The video felt more like a demonstration of software that works on Macs rather than 30 years of Mac hardware to me.

</comment><comment><USER58> No Mac SE? No clip of the "1984" SuperBowl ad?

</comment><comment><USER9> If Apple would still build Macs with soul (i.e. anything before 2002) it wouldn't need a campaign to tell how great they are.

<comment><USER16> The new Mac pro is something beautiful and unique.

<comment><USER9> Too fast, beautiful and perfect to be called a true Mac ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> 2006 MacBook

It still sort of works but the plastic is all broken off. I should probably throw it away, it was beautiful though.

<comment><USER60> Older macs were more robust. I think this is one reason of the failure of apple against microsoft: when you have a computer that enables you to do your stuff without problems or failures, you do not need to replace it by a new one. Microsoft has understood how to earn a lot more money by selling half broken products that people want to replace by better ones. Maybe, this was not intentional.

btw, this post is risky for my karma, but I am always suprised to see very old mac still frequently used.

<comment><USER61> Microsoft isn't responsible for terrible OEMs.

<comment><USER60> You think so ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> In case anyone is interested, here is the music in the background of the video:

0:18 -- Air Review - <USER3>

1:10 -- Moderat - Bad Kingdom

1:56 -- Air Review - <USER4>

</comment><comment><USER63> Chrome + Windows can't handle the fonts on the website after the video ends

<comment><USER64> But soon, the peril will be over [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I am not asking all the names but who are those people behind the various macs?

<comment><USER26> > who are those people behind the various macs?

If you scroll past the video to the timeline, then click on any of the sections, it'll expand and say who the person is and what they did.

<comment><USER65> I just right arrowed through the whole series of pictures. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Apple has managed to link so many strong feelings to computers.

</comment><comment><USER67> Yeah, Apple, among many other companies, helped usher in a new era of personal computing, but most of the use cases in this video can be achieved with a generic Wintel setup.

<comment><USER68> that's true now, but it wasn't at the time (1984).

apple didn't invent a lot of the technologies they're famous for - the mouse, the windowed GUI, postscript, desktop publishing, etc. they did, however, make it accessible. they took it from the research labs - PARC especially - and let us mere mortals use it.

i recall in the late 80s going in to my dad's engineering offices in middle school to type up papers and have them laser printed. that was revolutionary, a truly transformative moment in computing. it took MS quite some time to come to parity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> am I crazy, or is that a touchscreen MBP at 2:19?

</comment><comment><USER70> Good Advertisement</comment>


Upgrading the OS X Dock - <AUTHOR> https://www.bytedude.com/upgrading-the-osx-dock/ <comment><USER2> Sorry "dude" but you lost me at " you don't actually know what you want".

 _You_ can't possibly know what _I_ want.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the core competencies of a good junior front-end developer?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to switch careers from product management to more of a developer role. I feel a little lost when looking at the mountain of things front-end developers should know. I would love any direction into what more experienced hackers feel and junior dev should know.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> This may help:Front-end Job Interview Questions([https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer- Interview...](https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview- Questions))

</comment><comment><USER3> HTML, CSS, basic javascript (jquery and such), basic versioning.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.amazedsaint.com/2012/11/changing-times-for-web- de...](http://www.amazedsaint.com/2012/11/changing-times-for-web- developers-6.html)</comment>


CoffeeScript hits 1.0 -- Happy Holidays, HN - <AUTHOR> http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#top <comment><AUTHOR> Things have come a long way in the past year, since this conversation:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014080>

Some of the interesting recent features include executable class bodies, extended regular expressions, functions with default arguments, and YAML-style object literals.

Thanks for all the great suggestions and patches (almost a thousand Github issues, with many thousands of comments). The language has been very much a community driven project, and hopefully it reflects some significant part of the hard-earned wisdom of JavaScripters.

<comment><USER2> This rules! And thanks to everyone in #coffeescript for answering my stupid questions as they come up :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The war on curlies is over, curlies lost.

Good to see new languages improving upon syntax, readability is key and a great way to gain adoption. As Norvig said, it is easier for him to explain an algorithm in python than any other language. Well, now CoffeeScript has just passed that test too.

Brendan Eich is also adapting many good things from CoffeeScript to JS.next, validating the point that coffee, in its short life, has been able to influence other great language designers.

And that says a lot about CoffeeScript and its potential.

<comment><USER4> The page says, "Objects may be created using indentation instead of explicit braces, similar to YAML. "

 _Similar_ to YAML? What exactly does that mean? Is there someplace that explains the specific indentation rules?

The indentation rules of YAML are massively borked; it's not enough that something be indented, it has to be indented a very specific number of spaces. As opposed to, say, Haskell's more sane off-side rules.

<comment><USER5> I'm afraid that's not correct. You can use arbitrary number of spaces to indent a block in YAML[1]. It does't matter if it's 2 of 4 or 17.

The only limitations are that it must be greater than the indentation of the parent node (obviously), that all siblings must have the same indentation and that tabs are not allowed.

Are you sure you're not mistaking this with HAML? It's a bit stricter with the indentation requirements.

[1]: <http://www.yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2777534>

<comment><USER4> "I'm afraid that's not correct. You can use arbitrary number of spaces to indent a block in YAML[1]."

Well, shit.

Thanks; how did I miss that?

"Are you sure you're not mistaking this with HAML? It's a bit stricter with the indentation requirements."

Oh, that I know. One reason I avoid it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations Jeremy et al.

CoffeeScript has been and will continue to be a tremendously powerful catalyst for change in the JavaScript community.

CoffeeScript has successfully: advanced our organisations attitude towards JavaScript on both the server and client; rendered working with complex systems -- such as node.js and WebGL -- a breeze and allowed us to focus solely on the real problems at hand rather than quirks in a language.

Everyone who has contributed in any way whatsoever, or even only just toyed with CoffeeScript should feel privileged to be part of the fantastic community surrounding the language.

Thankyou for the great gift that is CoffeeScript 1.0 this Christmas.

</comment><comment><USER7> Has anyone written a reverse CoffeeScript compiler that compiles legacy js into cs? Seems like it would be a great tool for starting off refactoring of big js files, or if you simply wanted to adopt cs as your standard.

<comment><USER6> <http://mindynamics.github.com/js2cs/>

It is not without its cavets, though, with a little work it could be brilliant.

Alot of things that are in CoffeeScript simply are not possible in JavaScript; given there is no 1-1 relationship between CoffeeScript and JavaScript constructs.

<comment><USER8> thanks! it means a lot to me. :)

i made this a couple of months ago as an experiment on someone's suggestion and ended up getting REALLY far. only current caveats are that some hacks are used (of course).. and CoffeeScript 1.0 is not supported. I have been busy and I don't know what kind of updates that will take right now. I have been meaning to get around to it of course, but for the mean time I put the demo up there. The source is of course open, it's written in JavaScript. Have a look in App.js. It's a recursive AST walker. If you do manage to patch it you can send me a pull request on github. The code is relatively clean and easy to read. It should also serve well as a learning tool to see what the symbols of CoffeeScript are.

Danke for the mention!

-jsilv

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's pretty clear that jashkenas is the Chuck Norris of Javascript.

<comment><USER10> For the last week I've been using CoffeeScript along with Backbone.js & Underscore.js (all backed by jashkenas) and it's given me a much greater appreciation for the power of javascript.

There is some clear talent behind these projects.

<comment><USER11> It's amazing how much more I like Javascript under the guise of CoffeeScript. JS got a lot right, and when you get rid of (most) of the wrong, it really shines.

Here's hoping for a larger community adoption!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The best new language of the year 2010. Thanks jashkenas!

</comment><comment><USER13> Newbie question: How is CoffeeScript typically used? On a web server running node.js? In the browser after including CoffeeScript the way you might include jQuery? Either? Some other way?

<comment><AUTHOR> Anywhere you might use JavaScript. For building web sites, working with canvas, doing servers with Node.js, or scripting the JVM with Rhino ... for example:

A Riak client: <http://riakjs.org/>

A canvas sketch: [http://jashkenas.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/buddhabrot/buddhabrot...](http://jashkenas.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/buddhabrot/buddhabrot.html)

A string scanning library: <http://sstephenson.github.com/strscan-js/>

An in-browser tank game: <https://github.com/stephank/orona>

A Node.js-powered Rack server: <http://josh.github.com/nack/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great work Jeremy! I've been using CoffeeScript extensively for an upcoming project, and having written 1000+ lines of it so far, I'm loving it!

<comment><USER15> Now if someone made a Cappuccino like framework on top of CoffeeScript instead of Objective-J I'd be in heaven :)

Out of curiosity, what are you making?

<comment><USER6> We are developing an open-source MMO on node.js and WebGL - <http://github.com/feisty>

<comment><USER16> Is there something I can do to get involved with this project?

<comment><USER6> Absolutely...

I am "pyrotechnick" on Skype/Twitter/Facebook/Google Talk

We would love to hear from anyone who can contribute anything to the projects. Or who is interested in an alpha/beta

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congrats to the team! I've been using CoffeeScript together with underscore.js, backbone.js and of course jQuery. Together they make functional style programming and building MVC pattern so much easier. Thanks for building such an expressive language.

</comment><comment><USER18> Thanks for this Jeremy and everyone who contributed. I've held off really coming to grips with javascript because I found it ugly and full of too many gotchas. But Coffeescript has got rid of all those excuses!

<comment><AUTHOR> Satoshi Murakami deserves a large portion of the credit for the changes leading up to 1.0 -- his Coco dialect of CoffeeScript has been a strong influence on the features and optimizations that happened this fall.

<https://github.com/satyr/coco#readme>

<comment><USER19> I thought I have a pretty good handle on CoffeeScript, but Coco's README confused me. Can someone explain the reasoning behind Coco's features? Can't seem to discern their purpose.

<comment><USER20>
      # Fix things CS goofs.
      # Add things CS lacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Been holding this one back for awhile, but: Are there any talks, plans or otherwise on incorporating other languages for client-side scripting? I'd really just like to get away from JS in general :(

<comment><USER6> There are yes. I'll try to dig them up shortly.

IMHO it will never happen in the sense you imagine it but we'll see.

In the meantime you may want to check out emscripten (<http://code.google.com/p/emscripten/>). It is a JavaScript backend for LLVM which ultimately leads to the same functionality as having other languages on the client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congrats on the release! Here's hoping for a CoffeeScriptConf in 2011

</comment><comment><USER23> Who was responsible for that rad new CoffeScript logo / when was it added to the site? Coffee-cup and typography look awesome! (Also, love the language).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ramesh (<https://github.com/rampall>) just contributed it this week. Great timing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looks awesome. I've never used it, nor much JS, but now I'm going to write something in it or about it. Cheers

</comment><comment><USER25> Would people be interested in a Ruby-oriented project like this? Say, tiny.rb ported to use Javascript? (Some Googler already has a Lua-esque VM for tiny.rb as her 20% project.)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a number of existing projects that compile a partial Ruby into JS:

* <https://github.com/superchris/rubyjs>

* <https://github.com/jessesielaff/red>

* <https://github.com/tlrobinson/cappruby>

I'm afraid that Ruby semantics don't align too well with JavaScript semantics. Things as basic as numbers, method dispatch, and variable scoping don't work the same way. Either you end up with perfectly valid code written in one that doesn't run on the other, or you have an extremely slow Ruby interpreter implemented on top of JavaScript.

This is the main reason why CoffeeScript tries to stick as close to JavaScript as possible.

<comment><USER25> Perfectly valid code that runs in one and not the other is fine, so long as context switching can be minimized between browser and server. (It's still a switch, but smaller.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thanks Jeremy! I think CoffeeScript is a wonderful replacement for JavaScript, it made client side code so much nicer to write for me. Been using it since 0.7 (?).

</comment><comment><USER27> Thank you for CoffeeScript (changed my life!), and a very Merry Christmas to you!

</comment><comment><USER28> Good job guys. I've just started using this in my side projects. Excited!

</comment><comment><USER29> Congrats, Jeremy. Hope you have some well earned rest over the holidays.

</comment><comment><USER30> should be possible tecnically having a coffescript for php?</comment>


Google co-founder Sergey Brin urges US to act over China web censorship - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/24/google-china-sergey-brin-censorship

<comment><USER2> This is disappointing, especially the dig at microsoft given that until recently Google was doing the exact same thing.

I'm all for making a stand against censorship in China, but google is not the right party to make that call. They've been part of it themselves, and only after the relationship soured because of 'break-ins' did they change their strategy on this.

This is just google trying to use the media to put pressure on China so they can stay in the Chinese market without having to go through with their pull- out, and using it to make their competitors look bad as well. And that's coming form someone that has declared his house and office a microsoft free zone.</comment>


Don't bother counting those stars - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexhultman/Don-t-bother-counting-those-stars <comment><USER2> When you say "You cannot pay your playboy subscription with GitHub stars" are you trying to say (i) you are a bro? or (ii) you don't know you can get porn for free on the internet?</comment>


Almost half the jobs Americans thought were safe will soon be done by robots - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/127454/almost-half-the-jobs-americans-thought-were-safe-will-soon-be-done-by-robots/ <comment><USER2> This notion that technology is responsible for inequality and unemployment both now and in the future has been making the rounds lately, but it has got to stop. So much about this is just flat out wrong, but just as bad is that it helps the real villains shift the blame. Technological progress has been making low-productivity jobs obsolete and replacing them with high- productivity ones at least since the Industrial Revolution. In theory that's a good thing since productivity growth is the source of societal wealth that is supposed to raise living standards. The reality sometimes falls short of the theory, but only because wealthy elites try to capture the gains for themselves. Stop falling for the misdirection about "the robots taking our jobs."</comment>


Running a South Pole data center - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/coolest-jobs-in-tech-literally-running-a-south-pole-data-center/

<comment><USER2> My grandfather visited Antarctica in '58-'59 as part of an initiative called something like "International Year of Science." After his second year at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he traveled to Virginia and hopped on a ship.

That ship eventually traversed the Panama Canal, crossed the equator, stopped over in New Zealand, then proceeded south to Antarctica. From there they then traveled north to Melbourne, then headed west. Apparently they had engine trouble and had to stop in Perth as well. From there the proceeded to stop in Durban and Montevideo before returning to Virginia. It was a long trip...

The kicker is that he had the foresight to buy film cameras (one color, one BW) before this and filmed a bunch of stuff. A couple years ago, while preparing for a move, my grandmother found a box with reels and reels of footage, unlabeled and not in any particular order. She took it to a film processing shop, and together with people there, they pieced together a probable timeline and spliced together ~90 minutes of interesting footage out of heap and digitized it. So now I have a DVD with some pretty cool footage of that trip. Elephants, albatross, icebergs, heavy machinery down in Antarctica... that must have been an amazing trip for a guy who grew up in small-town Illinois.

My family still has the coat and rucksack he was issued, with his name on it and a pretty cool seal/patch.

After that, my grandfather went on to do a bunch of other kickass things, like found a couple engineering startups in Boston in the 60s, with varying success: flip a couple, get screwed by some shady folks... the works.

Partly because of his story, I'm heading down to Antarctica early next year, though not on anything quite so cool: just taking a two-week cruise, but I'm excited to be retracing his steps in a way.

<comment><USER3> I would love to see this video. Would you and your family be willing to put it up on Vimeo, Youtube, or some video hosting (self-hosting too) service. Maybe edit it down to the highlights or something.

Or maybe since you're doing your own trip down there you can put together a video of your trip, spliced with your grandfather's trip.

Just some thoughts

I want to travel some more.

<comment><USER2> I've been meaning to do that and of course never got around to it. I plan to review the video before I head out there, so I'll be in a good position to put it online. Contact me via email (in profile) and I can send you a ping when I do.

<comment><USER4> I have also emailed requesting a ping. I imagine many people here would be curious to see it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Opportunities like this provoke an incredibly intense response in me. I would drop almost everything to go work and live in Antarctica for 6-12 months, and searched fruitlessly for available jobs when I finished my undergraduate degree a few years ago. I'm not qualified for the position they talk about in this article, and I have a pretty good career path and professional responsibilities I can't just abandon now, but the pull remains strong.

Something about unique circumstance and desolation in particular just hits me in a particular part of my brain.

One of the most surreal and powerful moments in my life was pulling over in the middle of complete desolation in northwestern Namibia to wander the desert in the middle of the night. It was lit by a full moon, and the entire world was this shade of soft, ethereal purple I hadn't seen before and probably never will again. It was illuminating this tremendous expanse of landscape sparsely populated by utterly alien flora. In some ways it just felt right to be as utterly alone as I could be, in an alien situation I couldn't have imagined even 6 months prior.

<comment><USER6> A few years ago I saw this position opening and immediately applied for the same reason, it sounded like an incredible adventure. I was rejected as I should have been... unfortunately I'm a developer not an IT professional. Maybe someday they'll have an opening for an embedded developer and I'll get to spend a winter in Antarctica...

Edit: I looked through my old emails and I applied for the UNIX Systems Administrator position on April 25, 2012. I must have done it after reading this exact article!

Edit2: This is the original job description: [https://web.archive.org/web/20120609030319/http://icecube.wi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120609030319/http://icecube.wisc.edu/jobs/show/unix_sysadmin)

<comment><USER7> $52K/yr. That's really crap pay, especially when you consider that it's a contractor job with a 12-month option-to-renew.

<comment><USER8> Last time I looked into it you don't pay for room, board, food, cold weather gear, or the flight down/back. So in reality your take home pay and savings are fairly high.

<comment><USER9> Not everyone is a single male with no wife or kids. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to work at UW Space Science and Engineering Center, which did lots of remote support for the projects down on the ice. We would often be communicating with IceCube to plan shipments, or get machines that touched each other working. This was one of the most interesting systems support you can think of.

The hardest part of the support was system updates. There wasn't even a local yum cache on the continent, and many of these machines had security standards they had to meet involving staying patched. Once I managed to start a batch- update job over SSH, and within 15 minutes I had the team lead run into my office to see if I was doing anything, because he received a call saying we were saturating the bandwidth to the continent.

I never even considered applying for the jobs down on the ice, because I would never PQ. Even migraines can be too much, because if you're going down they need you ready to work EVERY day you're down there. Transient medical issues happen, but chronic without any control, or requiring medicine for survival, immediately disqualifies you. My friend who just hit McMurdo this week had to have dental work done to qualify.

All that being said, Barnett and the rest of the Ice Cube team do some amazing work with extremely difficult technical problems to solve. It is the same level of difficulty as anything in space, and they have done remarkably.

<comment><USER11> Very interesting. What does PQ mean? Pass qualification?

<comment><USER10> Physically qualify I believe, but either really works. Everyone would just grumble about all the health visits they would have to do in September and October to be ready.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I applied for this job. I have a PhD in physics and have some administrative experience, and I didn't (yet) have a postdoc position.

The application process was very interesting---I had a phone conference-call interview with a few people in Wisconsin and New Zealand. I made what must have been a relatively short short list, because the interview was not cheap: they flew me to WIPAC, had me take a full physical (ultrasound, cardio study, chest x-rays, etc.) which is required for any winter-over position, set up a full day of interviews with science-side, tech-side, and administrative-side people, some of whom themselves had wintered over. The beer and cheese curds in Madison are great. Check out the Great Dane.

A lot of the interview was to gauge personality, and there were a lot of questions along the lines of "If someone was acting in a dangerous & threatening way, and you were in a place more remote than the space station (in the sense that there is no escape capsule or any chance for rescue) what would you do?"

The tech that keeps IceCube going is a bunch of custom-designed and manufactured blades which receive (IIRC) UDP from the sensors in the ice. A lot of processing happens at the pole, because the limited (and satellite- orbit-dependent) bandwidth would make transferring the whole dataset wildly impractical. So the "interesting" events are found on-site and sent over the satellite, while everything is also written to tape. Once the summer comes the tape is swapped out. Scientists can also query additional data to be sent via satellite if they need something specific.

A few weeks later I was told that for the two IceCube winter-over tech positions, I was third choice, and that if one of the people offered the job sustains an injury, fails the psychological examination, or backs out, that I might be called on short notice. As I didn't have a job at that point, it was OK by me, but I was certainly disappointed. I'm happy in my postdoc position, but will certainly apply again when the time comes.

Had I wintered over, it would have been the smallest of small-world phenomena, as someone I know from college was one of the chefs there this winter.

Aside: I have heard that (if you get the job) they will sometimes preventatively remove your wisdom teeth / demand & provide other preventative treatments.

<comment><USER13> That's some crazy stuff. I wish you all the best when you re-apply!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those interested in working at Antarctica, check out the Big Dead Place:

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

From the old Antarctica FAQ on working there and how it changes you:

      First time is for the adventure,
      Second time for the money,
      And third because you can't work anywhere else

For those familiar with John Carpenter's _The Thing_ , this is also an interesting read:

[http://bigdeadplace.org/antarctica-the-thing-and-the- station...](http://bigdeadplace.org/antarctica-the-thing-and-the- station/index.html)

      As a whole the subjects became less trusting and more
      suspicious of others immediately after their year in
      Antarctica." –A.J.W. Taylor, Professor of Clinical
      Psychology, "The Selection of People for Work in Polar
      Regions"

The essay ends:

      In the actual USAP, employees are forbidden flamethrowers.

</comment><comment> SG- My dad did something like this up in northern Canada at the DEW Line ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Early_Warning_Line](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Early_Warning_Line)) to monitor the Russians during the cold war. He was a radio tech and while he told me stories about how bad the weather was combined with the loneliness, he also told me it was one of the most unique and best experiences in his life. It focused him into going back to school and becoming an aerospace engineer.

</comment><comment><USER7> I went out for one of these roles back in the early 2000's. I even flew to Dallas on my own dime to attend a Raytheon career fair, in hopes of getting in the door at Raytheon Polar Services. The recruiters at the fair had little knowledge of these openings and I never got a call back. I had about 8 years *NIX system admin experience at the time.

Raytheon's contract expired and now support personnel are found through a variety of contractors. It's incredibly tough to get in the door at these places. I never got a single call-back from any of them back in the day, even though I was very competitive for jobs at private sector tech companies. I suspect that you have to have an inside contact or luck out and meet them at a career fair if you want to get your foot in the door.

<comment><USER15> Here's a list: [http://ghgcorp.applicantpro.com/jobs/](http://ghgcorp.applicantpro.com/jobs/)

You might also consider volunteering with a research group. Though they tend to select from pools of grad students, I would think that someone with technical skills (particularly hardware related) would be competitive.

<comment><USER10> Look at the job linked at the start of the article. There's always a few positions being floated either with IceCube, UW SSEC, or UW AOS that end up down there every year. That is also true of grad student positions, as you say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're really interested in a job with IceCube, you can watch [http://icecube.wisc.edu/jobs](http://icecube.wisc.edu/jobs)

We'll be looking for a couple more winter-overs in mid-January. The newest winter-overs landed at the South Pole less than 24 hours ago! You can follow their exploits at [http://icecube.wisc.edu/news/current](http://icecube.wisc.edu/news/current)

<comment><USER17> Would any applicant from Europe be considered?

<comment><USER18> If you own an european passport I believe you could apply for a job at concordia, the most remote south pole station! It is 1100km inland in the coldest place on earth and 3233m above sea level!

Job board : [http://www.institut- polaire.fr/ipev/l_institut/travailler_da...](http://www.institut- polaire.fr/ipev/l_institut/travailler_dans_les_regions_polaires) (job offers are pdfs)

More info : [http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Concordi...](http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Concordia)

You may want to read about how to get there (if you know how to drive a truck you can apply to the heaby payload team that cross antartica once a year with haevy duty tractors, doing the travel from coast to concordia in 10 days) [http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Concordi...](http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Concordia/Voyage_to_the_end_of_the_world)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Twenty years ago, I spent ten weeks in Antarctica and the experience changed my life. It's hard to describe (and I'm not the guy to do it) but the bleakness and immensity of the continent is overwhelming--but then you realize that, hey, here are some bipedal mammals that flew in giant metal machines down here to eat, sleep, learn, and run IT systems. No big whoop, humans can do anything.

Every year, I still wistfully scan the Antarctica job listings...

</comment><comment><USER20> I have a friend who did this sort of thing back in the '70s, maintaining a PDP-8 that ran a weather radar at the South Pole station during the long winter.

Not much in the way of creature comforts back then, he said they got _very_ familiar with the few movies they had copies of, _What 's Up, Doc?_ was the only one he mentioned by name.

<comment><USER21> _" An annual tradition is a back to back viewing of The Thing from Another World, The Thing (1982), and The Thing (2011) after the last flight has left for the winter."_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_Po...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_Pole_Station#Operation)

<comment><USER22> That's awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> working in the south pole: very cool.

working for war profiteers: very uncool.

among other crimes against humanity, raytheon produce those illegal cluster munitions that indiscriminately kill kids long after the battle moves on. It is estimated that over 800,000 Raytheon cluster bomblets have been dropped on the civilian population of Iraq.

ckem.

<comment><USER24> This is an interesting line of thought.

I figure even a war profiteering corporation like Raytheon has some departments or projects that are a net positive for humanity.

By refusing to work at Raytheon, even in a positive role, you doom the company to hire less ethical people. if that happens enough, where good people won't work in good departments, eventually Raytheon will stop doing the good things, and become more evil.

<comment><USER25> Just as an Example, Raytheon invented the microwave oven.

<comment><USER26> Something we could do without, and that doesn't make any murdered person alive again. I'll go even further and say someone who kills a person and then saves the lives of 10 is still a murderer. This stuff is not up for calculation, really. But even if it was: did they also invent microwaves, or do you think there is just a _tiny_ chance that the microwave oven would have been invented either way, at some point or another?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm probably exactly the type of person they're looking for based on my background, and I've actually looked into going to Antarctica multiple times. I've always wanted to do at least a year long gig down there. The problem is that it's always contract-work, and I have never been at the right point in my life to give up a full-time job to drop everything and go.

I'm hoping if everything works out in my present organization, once we exit I can maybe take the time off needed to pursue an opportunity in Antarctica. That region of the world holds a particular draw for me because it's one of the least touched by humanity and has an almost ethereal natural beauty. It needs to be researched but also preserved and being a part of that would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER28> > the GOES-3 Satellite —a weather satellite launched in 1978 that lost its > weather imaging capabilities and now provides 1-megabit per second data > transmission for eight hours a day

Beautiful! From [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES_3](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES_3)

> having spent over thirty one years in operation, it is one of the oldest > functioning satellites in orbit.

</comment><comment><USER29> I worked with a guy a few years back that's done a few seasons with the Australian Antarctic Division. From everything I've heard it's an incredible experience.

For those who can work in Australia you can set up notifications for new positions (comms techs, electrical engineers etc) here: [http://www.antarctica.gov.au/jobs/jobs-in- antarctica](http://www.antarctica.gov.au/jobs/jobs-in-antarctica).

</comment><comment><USER30> I just posted this Linux Journal article from 20 years ago, "Linux in Antarctica." We've come a long way.

[0]: [http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2843](http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2843)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8571947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8571947)

</comment><comment><USER31> They're hiring a webmaster. But I think it's in a different cold place: Madison, Wisconsin. [http://icecube.wisc.edu/jobs/show/webmaster](http://icecube.wisc.edu/jobs/show/webmaster)

</comment><comment><USER32> Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station Antarctica Tour: [http://youtu.be/P5lQ9DCXIbs](http://youtu.be/P5lQ9DCXIbs). You can see the data center here for few seconds.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hmmh smells like global warming..</comment>


Getting Leverage in Hostage Negotiations - <AUTHOR> http://venturehacks.com/articles/positive-leverage <comment><USER2> For people who want more substantive ideas about the topic: they talk about "positive leverage" and compare the situation to what you encounter in a hostage crisis. In economics, this is actually called the "Patient Seller" model, or the "Rubinstein Bargaining Model" - it's a basic element of Game Theory and comes out of John Nash's famous "Nash Equilibrium" (see: Russell Crowe in the movie Beautiful Mind!).

Basically, when you work in (for example) sales and have to periodically negotiate new contracts with buyers, you learn that this model is intuitive and in practice really stands up to scrutiny.

Here's a quote from a good write-up on the subject:

"What determines the final selling price? The key observation is that patient players give up less at each negotiating step because they see more value in future dollars. Therefore, their strategies are represented by flatter lines. Impatient players want the deal done quickly, and their strategies are represented by steeper lines."

Quote Source: [http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/07/15/why-patience- pa...](http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/07/15/why-patience-pays-off-in- negotiations/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am looking desperately for some detailed examples where this principle is applied. I think there is a lot of value in this skill but I also feel it is hard to learn. I try for years without success.

So, share your experiences, where you've seen this in action (or even did it yourself)!!! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> As usual, solid startup advice from VentureHacks, unlike a lot of amateurish bloggers who think they know what they are talking about :-)</comment>