Red Gate is hiring, all interviewed will get an iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.red-gate.com/careers/free_ipad.htm We're looking for more Software Engineers and Test Engineers to help Red Gate grow into one of the greatest software companies in the world. We know there are lots of awesome people out there who may be bored or unhappy at work. We're going to make it easy for you to be happier - at Red Gate.
It's easy to apply. Just leave your details for either our Software Engineer or Test Engineer role.
We don't need your CV or a covering letter at this stage. <comment><USER2> We went down to the pub this lunchtime and there were a bunch of them there (they were doing a £5-towards-your-lunch-if-you-chat-to-us thing, too). We had a bit of a chat, but none of our company are really .NET/SQL types and their demographic also seems to be way young. That said, I know a few people at RedGate and they're all very happy, and people who use their tools seem to like them too.

Sure, it's a bit of a stunt but, as the guy we spoke to said, it's cheaper to hand out free iPads to a bunch of people (who pass your screener) than it is to pay a recruitment company, and it builds goodwill (amongst the kinds of people who are swayed by a free iPad, anyway).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're looking for more Software Engineers and Test Engineers to help Red Gate grow into one of the greatest software companies in the world. We know there are lots of awesome people out there who may be bored or unhappy at work. We're going to make it easy for you to be happier - at Red Gate. It's easy to apply. Just leave your details for either our Software Engineer or Test Engineer role. We don't need your CV or a covering letter at this stage. Thank you

<comment><USER3> I just wonder if you have anyone at Red Gate who commutes from London? While I've heard a lot of good stuff about Red Gate and Cambridge is a very nice place I would be hesitant to give up the awesomeness of living in London. (I suppose I'm not alone with that).

<comment><USER4> We (that is Citrix) have some people who commute from London. And our office is just a few hundred metres away from Red Gate.

(We are also hiring. Drop me an email, if you are interested.)

<comment><USER5> Man, I'd love to rewrite the god-awful son-of-windows-3.1 UI on citrix.

Solid software, terrible UI.

Glad it's a good company though! "We're not the sort of company that tosses a man out because he's over 40. How old are you Reggie?"

<comment><USER4> You are right about the UI. (Of course the UI is not made at the Cambridge office, where we only produce nice software. :o)

I have heard that Citrix is looking into making better UIs. All our top managers have been converted into Apple fan boys for a start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let's assume that person X applies because she heard about promotion, but wouldn't otherwise. Isn't there an adverse selection here that you would like to avoid?

<comment><USER7> You have to pass a 15 minute interview before being eligible for the iPad, by the looks of it. So I guess that'll cancel out all the builders and their dogs from walking away with an iPad.

I'm interested in if _free stuff_ devalues the employee or the employer. Or is it just awesome?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We think Redgate are awesome too and we don't have office there but sneak in whenever we can for lovely breakfast and lunch. Last time we were there we took some pictures [http://thebln.com/2009/10/inspiring-workplaces-red-gate- soft...](http://thebln.com/2009/10/inspiring-workplaces-red-gate-software/)

<comment><USER9> stats.pluginseo.com is murdering the performance of that page, for me at least. Took 21 seconds to load, as measured by FireBug; download of <http://stats.pluginseo.com/132108.js> timed out:

<http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/stats.pluginseo.com>

Looks almost like DNS poisoning attack or something:

        $ nslookup

        Name:    pluginseo.com
        Address:  22.214.171.124

        Name:    stats.pluginseo.com.re.getclicky.com
        Address:  220.127.116.11
        Aliases:  stats.pluginseo.com

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the tip. Totally forgot to remove it after I tested it out once upon a time a long time ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Incidentally Red Gate has really great jobs pages [1], clear, concise and informative.

1\. Example: [http://jobs.red- gate.com/templates/redgate/jobdetail_zip/183...](http://jobs.red- gate.com/templates/redgate/jobdetail_zip/183.aspx/Jobs/Software%20Engineer)

<comment><USER9> The quick application page, on the other hand (the link at the bottom of that page) seems more interested in what degree you have and where you got it than who you actually are and what you've done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a Red Gate customer and I have to say that their customer service is some of the best I've ever gotten from a tech company.

Of course, that doesn't have anything to do with them hiring or iPads, but I like to say it every time I see them come up because I've been really impressed with every interaction I've ever had with them.

</comment><comment><USER12> From the offer description: "Salaries range from £30,000 to £45,000."

That seems a little low? Is this typical for Cambridge? I'm not familiar with UK tax law, so what does this translate into in terms of take-home pay?

<comment><USER10> That's about £23,000 to £33,000 take home.

A bit above average for a graduate CS job. Less than you'd expect for a 30-35 year old with degree plus experience.

(roughly anyway)

<comment><USER12> Thanks! That explains my reaction, as I'm closer to being in the later group than the former. This probably also explains the promotion. I imagine that the fresh-outta-college type is more likely to be impressed by a free iPad offer than a journeyman programmer would be.

<comment><USER10> Yep my thoughts entirely; this will be a swinger for graduates looking for a job.

When you pop above 45K here tax starts to get excruciating (40%) so that is probably why the upper limit is sat there (I get 8% year on year increase in my current job and it's barely noticeable due to tax...)

<comment><USER13> It's a bit of misconception that tax increases that much - as national insurance drops off.

E.g <http://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php>

(figures in GBP)

      30k -> 22.6k    (25% total employee tax burden)

      45k -> 32.8K    (27% total employee tax burden)

      90k -> 59.4K    (34% total employee tax burden)

     135k -> 86.0K    (36% total employee tax burden)

<comment><USER10> You missed a key figure though:

60K -> 41.7K (30% total employee tax burden)

There is a sudden big leap (of an extra 1%) in that particular range before it settles back down again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think Red Gate is about as awesome as one can get without being a startup. [we use their offices and are eternally thankful]

</comment><comment><USER14> If anyone is interested in working for a game company on the Cambridge Science Park - Jagex Ltd is currently looking to recruit a Senior Software Tester. Details on the website - <http://www.jagex.com/careers/>

We cant promise a free ipad for those who we interview, but we can promise an uber cool place to work in the UK's biggest independent games dev studio :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> Tacky.

<comment><USER7> What do you find tacky about this?

<comment><USER15> Think about it. A FREE iPad?

<comment><USER7> free stuff - its as if they're trying to get people through the door... :)

<comment><USER15> I doubt that capable programmers are going to be enticed by a FREE iPad. You would hire a programmer that came for the FREE iPad?

<comment><USER16> Ah, but the iPad made it a news story. Look, this story has 26 points and is currently at the top of the front page. How many extra programmers are going to hear about the opportunity that wouldn't have if it weren't attached to a free iPad?

<comment><USER15> Honestly, I don't know. But I know a lot ignored it because it said "FREE iPad".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Business Model Behind Social Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.start-up.co.nz/the-business-model-behind-social-apps/

<comment><USER2> Would an opt-in social network search engine be viable? Has anyone already looked at this?</comment>


Lisp in a single expression  - <AUTHOR> http://thinkpython.blogspot.com/2008/02/lisp-in-single-expression.html

<comment><USER2> I love this, but it's an awful lot of complexity to print '9' to stdout. The first time I ran it through a python interpreter, I thought I made a mistake.

<comment><USER3> I bet you think computing prime numbers with Church Numerals is complex too! :)

<comment><USER2> See, this is why I love this place so much. I'd never heard of Church Numerals before. From the wikipedia entry:

>Many students of mathematics are familiar with Gödel numbering members of a set; Church encoding is an equivalent operation defined on lambda abstractions instead of natural numbers.

Utter clarity. Or, at least as clear as the python code the original post points to :-)

<comment><USER4> go out and buy Godel, Escher, Bach: Eternal Golden Braid. Right now!

It will make your life better.

<comment><USER2> I've always meant to pick that up. Looks like google books has a decent online copy:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=aFcsnUEewLkC&dq=godel+e...](http://books.google.com/books?id=aFcsnUEewLkC&dq=godel+escher+bach+eternal+golden+braid&pg=PP1&ots=FLMXfhfBwY&sig=A-zkU_v_89SVleKe63f6ipttMP0&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search?q=Godel,+Escher,+Bach:+Eternal+Golden+Braid&sourceid=mozilla- search&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with- thumbnail#PRA1-PA1,M1)

I had a buddy of mine in highschool who used to bring that book with him every time we took LSD. Of course, he's now got his Ph.D. in physics from Purdue.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Workspaces: A Super Awesome Feature Coming Soon To Chrome DevTools - <AUTHOR> http://browserfame.com/1090/chrome-devtools-workspace

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool.

I had to do one other thing (I'm using Canary on x64/Windows 7) I didn't see mentioned in the post to get this to work, which is to add an empty file named ".allow-devtools-edit" to the directory I was adding as a workspace before adding it in the devtools settings.

Prior to doing this, adding the directory was failing in a way where it wasn't obvious what the problem was (Chrome prints out the message to add this file to its DevTools console, but if you don't have that open there's no way to tell why adding the workspace directory failed).</comment>


How to Debug SQL Server PIVOT's - <AUTHOR> https://the.agilesql.club/2019/05/how-to-delete-a-lot-of-data-from-a-sql-server-database/ <comment><USER2> I just wish you could say "pivot this column" and have the database figure out columns it would generate - we can control exactly which rows are picked and I hate restarting to dynamic sql to fix this</comment>


High Schoolers Win Congressional Data Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://labs.loc.gov/experiments/congressionalchallenge/ <comment><USER2> Here is the link to the winning project [http://gentleknowledge.com/student- projects/congress-treatie...](http://gentleknowledge.com/student- projects/congress-treaties/)</comment>


Global Site Speed Overview: How Fast Are Websites Around The World? - <AUTHOR> http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/04/global-site-speed-overview-how-fast-are.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Why are we slow? An average page weighs in at ~1MB: <http://bit.ly/IRUzXD> \- 60% images, 18% JS, and a touch of html. Yikes.</comment>


Lisp, erlang, forth, scheme, prolog, ML maintainer(s) needed urgently in Fedora - <AUTHOR> http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/lisp-erlang-forth-scheme-ml-maintainers-needed-urgently-in-fedora/ <comment><USER2> The fact that the maintainer of Fedora packages is ready to pass them off does not mean the software in question is neglected/ignored. One of the listed packages is audacity.

It just means one individual doesn't have time to maintain Fedora packages anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is how to apply to become a maintainer:

<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Join>

</comment><comment><USER4> _It's a shame these advanced languages don't get more attention, since they are clearly better languages than the ones most programmers use day to day, and would solve their problems if only they tried them._

Or, maybe programmers aren't as dumb as some people think and there's more to making a language productive than optimizing for 10 line examples?

<comment><USER5> They aren't advocating Perl.

P.S. real world device drivers are written Forth. So it's not just optimized for ten-liners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _But it's even more of a shame if people won't even be able to try these languages because we lose them from Fedora entirely._

That's really overstating the problem. I've worked with several of these languages, one of them for quite a large project - and I've never relied on anything but the language's official site to get the necessary tools. A lack of maintenance from Fedora isn't going to kill anything.

<comment><USER7> True, but the number of developers who expect batteries to be included is not small. And those are the people who "* for dummies" markets to. And when your manager goes to Barnes and Noble and sees an entire wall of "* in 3 days", guess what language he is going to pick for his next project?

<comment><USER5> Java?

More serious: Batteries included make it easier to get up to speed. It's also easier to use synaptic as an "AppStore" instead of hunting for everything out in the web.

Though for languages that I am more familiar with, e.g. Haskell, I am more open to hunt myself (or install custom package managers like Haskell's cabal).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anything I'd like to see fewer packages provided as part of the distros and a cleaner system for installing them separately. I practically never use any of the installed versions of languages in Ubuntu. They're usually out of date, broken down into too many sub-packages, over-specified on dependencies, and unable to play nicely with packages you install yourself via gems/easy_install/whatever.

<comment><USER8> They are usually not installed by default (unless something pulls them as a dependency - can happen for perl or python, but definitely not lisp/erlang/forth... by default) and they are installed separately. The situation is exactly what you ask for - they are available for separate install, right there in distribution repository.

You can also choose - either too many subpackages, or overspecified on dependencies. You can not have both, for obvious reasons.

Wrt gems/easy_install/whatever, do you realize that these language specific systems are broken by design and interoperating with them is not exactly easy?

<comment><USER9> Do you have some more information about why they are broken? I'm not trying to call you out, I'm just curious and don't know much about these systems, or and couldn't find anything when I went looking for criticisms.

<comment><USER8> Oh, so you probably missed the discussion between Debian and Rails two years ago. Have look there:

<http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html>

<http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/upstream-devs.html>

The second link describes what is wrong with gems-only approach. See also links at the bottom of the first page.

<comment><USER10> From the second link:

".tar.gz is the most widely used archive format on Linux. Using other formats (.tar.bz2, for example) is discouraged, as it requires additional steps for the packager."

\-- so fix the bleeping package system to support bzip2.

I note, too, that Fedora has rubygem packages, which provide Ruby gems directly. Is there something rpm does better than dpkg here?

(Not that I give a flip about Ruby; it's a terrible language. I spent about 6 months building an app in Rails; it took about 3 months to go from "this is easy!" to "but it won't let me do anything hard!".)

<comment><USER11> > ".tar.gz is the most widely used archive format on Linux. Using other > formats (.tar.bz2, for example) is discouraged, as it requires additional > steps for the packager."

> \-- so fix the bleeping package system to support bzip2.

Here you have a point. That's a fairly silly requirement. However, the rest of the recommendations in the second link are pretty solid.

> I note, too, that Fedora has rubygem packages, which provide Ruby gems > directly. Is there something rpm does better than dpkg here?

No, it's a policy/politics thing. Gems break the FHS, so Debian pretends they don't exist. Not knowing it intimately, I don't know Fedora's approach precisely, but presumably they're either allowing FHS breakage, or patching the gems to bring them into line.

Patching them is a non-small job; the number of badly-written gems out there is astounding. I say this as someone peripherally involved with patching them to make them conform to Debian's standards.

> (Not that I give a flip about Ruby; it's a terrible language. I spent about > 6 months building an app in Rails; it took about 3 months to go from "this > is easy!" to "but it won't let me do anything hard!".)

That's a shame - the limitations of Rails are not an accurate representation of the limitations of the language.

<comment><USER12> Details on Fedora's policy on packaging Ruby-related items:

<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Ruby></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coming soon: secure, private, encrypted email done well - <AUTHOR> http://autonomail.com

<comment><USER2> I don't want a service, I want a protocol.</comment>


Show HN: Training site I made for my open source project - <AUTHOR> https://alexatutorial.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Everybody,

I created an Open Source project for Amazon Echo development in Python and paid video tutorials. To advertise, I do a link on the github page:

"Lighten your cognitive load. Level up with the $15 Alexa Skills Kit Video Tutorial."

[https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask- ask](https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask)

If you're willing to provide feedback on my videos, you can view them for free. Just send an e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com.

I used:

* Camtasia2 for screen recording

* Blue Snowball Yeti mic

* Neewer articulating mic stand

* Neewer mic pop filter

The payments were easy with Amazon payments: Copy and paste payment button code. I do hosting on DigitalOcean.

To deploy I use fabric. I also have a quick and dirty fabric task, create_user, that will provision a new user if someone buys the tutorial (since I'm not processing many orders).

The videos are a lot of work, but you get a process down, and it's fun. At first, one video took me all day, and it was poor. Now, I can do several in a day, and the quality is better.

I'll open source the training site code, so you can do the same on your projects if interested.

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome project, I will watch your videos and come back with feedback.</comment>


Why AT&T Killed Google Voice - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574358552882901262.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

<comment><USER2> Well written opinion, but misleading title - I was expecting WSJ to have found out that it _was_ AT&T who killed Google Voice, although we don't seem to know that yet. One can hope that this is high-profile enough reporting to let out some info about what happened, exactly.

Also, some of the advice is questionable:

 _Transition away from "owning" airwaves. As we've seen with license-free bandwidth via Wi-Fi networking, we can share the airwaves without interfering with each other. Let new carriers emerge based on quality of service rather than spectrum owned. Cellphone coverage from huge cell towers will naturally migrate seamlessly into offices and even homes via Wi-Fi networking. No more dropped calls in the bathroom._

But cell phone coverage reaches a lot farther than wifi. I'm not a radio physicist, but I think 802.11 allows communication over 14 channels, each of which can be crowded, and some of which can cause interference for others. It was designed with overlapping WAP and a (relatively) small number of people connecting to each. Now, I'm rather clueless about the implementations of cell phone protocols, but I know enough to think twice before saying "open her yup, baby! no dropped calls in the bathroom!" - it doesn't sound as if the author does. Can we keep GSM/GPRS/EDGE if we allow many overlapping connections? If not, are backwards compatible replacements feasible, or will we need to replace every cell phone in the country?

 _Encourage faster and faster data connections to our homes and phones. It should more than double every two years. To homes, five megabits today should be 10 megabits in 2011, 25 megabits in 2013 and 100 megabits in 2017._

Also, virgins should rain from the sky. The number should double every year. Five virgins today should be 10 virgins in 2011, etc.

 _These data-connection speeds are technically doable today, with obsolete voice and video policy holding it back._

What policy is he talking about? Is there a reason for this policy aside from holding back data speeds and virgins?

<comment><USER3> I liked the article, but agree that the suggestion that Cell networks can be run like Wi-Fi isn't feasible. The amount of signal loss through a barrier increases with frequency, so 2.4GHz signals die out more quickly than, say 700MHz. To be a bit anthropomorphic, radio waves don't see the thickness of an obstacle in terms of inches or meters, they see them in terms of wavelengths, which are inversely proportional to frequency. So opening up high power, low(er) frequency wireless equipment to everyone would most likely be a disaster.

On the other hand, the current practice of just handing over chunks of scarce resources to anti-competitive firms _is_ broken, so the author is correct that change would be beneficial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's an opinion piece that covers no ground we haven't already read a hundred times over - I didn't see any reporting in the article. Sad - in order to compete with the Tech Crunches of the world, even the WSJ is throwing out flashy LinkBait with little substance.

<comment><USER5> yes, but coming from the WSJ which is a lot more widely read by policymakers than, say, TechCrunch this gives the issue a lot more coverage which is probably the right way to think about how it can be addressed by those with the power to address it.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. It's fluff to us, but it's news to policymakers. It reminds me of a comment someone made about an article that claimed that nobody will read your thesis: something about an informal section to go with the formal parts. Well, more-mainstream journalists reporting on something we already know up in our ivory towers is a way to get the message out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Text messages are 20 cents each, or $5,000 per megabyte._

Wow.

<comment><USER5> It is quite a coup, especially because text messages are essentially free to the carrier:

 _Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks.

This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. Voice communication itself had taken place via a separate signal.

"We were looking to a cheap implementation," Hillebrand said on the phone from Bonn. "Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link. So, it was free capacity on the system."_

via: [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented- text-messaging.html)

<comment><USER8> Maybe for the radio part of it, but between cell tower and service center (and vice versa), SMS goes over the signaling links - which are also used for call setup, notifications, WAP push, and routing queries.

Theres nothing free about them, theres no such a thing as free in the telco world - everything costs _someone_ something, though I agree, SMS is extremely cheap for the carrier - definitely NOT worth paying 20 cent for. Carriers love SMS for that exact reason.

Having said that, SMS can also cause the carrier a world of pain... I obviously can't provide any details, but one specific network had a problem where two thirds of all signaling traffic was caused by some virus which a large percentage of their customers' phones were infected with. This was costing them many thousands a day! Thankfully, we were able to block these messages at an early stage in the transaction and reduce network traffic by a substantial amount and over the air traffic by about half.

<comment> a-priori They are _essentially_ free, because the carriers provide no delivery guarantees for SMS messages. That is, if the channel is busy with other signalling traffic, then SMS messages will be silently dropped.

<comment><USER8> The TCAP transaction would be retried approx. ten minutes later, up to three times (on the networks I've seen, anyway).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found the last part amusing. Andy's idea for fast data connections is that their speed should double every year. That brings him to a 100Mb in 2017.

Here in Europe ADSL is already 20 Mb for most connections and cable is offering up to 120 MB now. This is now, in 2009. I expect 100 Mbit connections to be the norm in 3 years here in western Europe.

Is the difference in network speed between the eurozone and the States that big? Hearing Andy it seems so, and that difference is to stay.

<comment><USER10> Yes, the difference is that big. Average cable offering is 7 Mbit today where I live. You can upgrade to a whole 15 for an arm and a leg.

A few lucky big cities have Verizon FiOS (fiber to the home), which can go up to 50 Mbit.

US broadband speed is seriously behind Europe and Japan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Worth pointing out that this problem is also present in Europe. We don't pay for incoming SMS's (thank god for that), but the telcos have an effective monopoly which they use and abuse to make sure no one can come up with any effective and profitable phone-based service (beyond those spam sites selling ring tones).

For example, they offer a way to charge customers via "Premium SMS", but the margins that they take on those are insanely high. See <http://www.txtlocal.co.uk/prices/> for example... If you want to charge your customer 25p, you will only get about 7p of that. Makes Apple's 30% cut look almost free.

Telcos are, worldwide, abusive monopolies. Given that communications are so important to our society, I can't wait to see the back of them, and the beginning of a new era in communication innovation.

</comment><comment><USER12> I hate having to mention this every time Google Voice comes up, but if you are using Google Voice from your AT&T phone, it uses your AT&T minutes. Just like any other call. (It is not VoIP until your voice gets to Google's servers. Then it travels over IP, until it is converted to POTS at the other end.)

The only loss for AT&T is that SMS messages use your data plan, and that you can call people (and receive calls from them) from a phone other than your cell phone.

Personally, I think killing this off was really stupid. It caused them lots of regulatory scrutiny for something that only a few users use. (GV is still invite-only, after all.)

<comment><USER13> I believe it switches over to VOIP if there's an available wifi connection.

<comment><USER12> Nope. Try removing your SIM card and making a call.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The last time I checked, the Palm Pre is available on Sprint's network, not on Verizon's. I expect more from the Wall Street Journal.

<comment><USER15> It's just an op-ed piece from a less than tech savy business observer. He misses many of the details, but his overall political points are right on in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like the author has little understanding of the technologies at play. Some of his suggestions at the end:

 _• End phone exclusivity. Any device should work on any network. Data flows freely._

Sure, great idea. Except that we already have competing standards (CDMA, GSM, etc.) Should every handset maker have to incur the cost of building/testing/certifying multiple hardware iterations? An iPhone can't just magically work on a Verizon network in its current incarnation. Someone has to fund the effort to make the radio compatible with Verizons network.

 _• Transition away from "owning" airwaves. As we've seen with license-free bandwidth via Wi-Fi networking, we can share the airwaves without interfering with each other._

So all of these large competitive companies will play nicely in a shared, non- owned space? As we've also seen with Wifi any number of other common devices can effectively dampen or block the signal entirely. Not exactly what I want for my cellphone service.

 _• End municipal exclusivity deals for cable companies._

Almost every municipality already manages their contracts with cable companies in a non-exclusive fashion. Except that when you do all the math, the cost of building a cable plant actually takes a very long time to recover. There is little incentive for secondary and tertiary carriers to come into almost any market because there just isn't enough subscriber base for the them all to divide and still make a profit on that area. I've been on telecommunications boards and negotiated/discussed this very topic and concept with multiple MSO's.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Transition away from "owning" airwaves. As we've seen with license-free bandwidth via Wi-Fi networking, we can share the airwaves without interfering with each other."

There's no way that will work. Wi-Fi is actually a good example of what happens when airwaves aren't regulated (owned). Especially looking at the 2.4 and 5 GHz debacles.

I'm a fairly free-market person, but sometimes a certain amount of ownership is required. I have no problem with AT&T, Verizon, et. al. owning their slice of the spectrum, but that ownership should come with some caveats ending phone exclusivity, etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> "No more dropped calls in the bathroom." Is that really why we need less owning of the airwaves? I get the point, but I think there must be more compelling argument.

</comment><comment><USER19> _It wouldn't be so bad if we were just overpaying for our mobile plans. Americans are used to that—see mail, milk and medicine._

I get the mail and medicine thing, but are we all overpaying for milk too?

<comment><USER20> I believe its through subsidies paid to milk farmers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Google voice does polling every quite a few minutes so text msgs are sloooow.

Google voice dials diff phone numbers so I donrt get to make google voice my free to call phone number

Google voice works on other ATT phones like BlackBerry

I don't get the benefits of free m2m I get when calling my wife so I wind up having to use two phone numbers.

The only thing it gives is at work BBs have text msgs disabled so they use gvoice for that.

There is NO revolution. Till google nakes it work better.

O and calling requires an internet connection using the BB app. Which means where I can call on phone (say subway overground) I can't call gvoice due to no service. But I get crystal clear calling using voice plan. Its bs.

<comment><USER21> My point with this is that there is no revolution... yet. It has a loooong way to go. And since BB on ATT has google voice its not ATT who is blocking or more drastic measures will be taken. In fact if anything google voice serves the BB customers much more than the iPhone ones. The BB customers are the ones who pay for massive minutes for business conversations and need this systems more. Having unlimited talk plans like t-mobile's fave-five calling one google voice number is what is really going to hurt telephone companies.

<comment><USER22> Everyone seems to ignore the fact that BBs on ATT can use the Google Voice app. I also used Google Voice sans app on my previous phone on ATT with no hassle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> RIP AT&T

(too bad that was also said a generation ago)</comment>


Tesla: Little electric roadster that could - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/environment/2008-03-03-tesla-electric-car_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

<comment><USER2> I posted this a few days ago, but the tesla guys have a pretty good blog. The last post covered the process of testing their traction control software:

<http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/?p=65>

I guess some types of debugging are a little bit more exhilarating than others :)</comment>


Simple Made Easy (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ <comment><USER2> Fantastic talk, covering the difference between "simple" and "easy", and how (when you can't have both) the former is preferable.

I find it interesting that Python, despite being widely described as a simple language, takes the opposite approach. The language isn't simple at all [0], it prefers to make things easy. This preference even appears (in the contrapositive) in the "Zen of Python": "Complex is better than complicated."

As a specific example, Python 3.7 introduced dataclasses, making them dependent on type hints when they could have been completely orthogonal. The language design ignored this talk's advice against "complecting" features.

[0] [https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/1280946969116995584](https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/1280946969116995584)

<comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/lxsameer/status/1273546170137300992](https://twitter.com/lxsameer/status/1273546170137300992)

> I wrote a #clojure program for logic A in 4 hours. I've been asked to > rewrite it in #python because of some product requirements. It's been 3 days > since i've started and still on the first 25% of it. Note: I'm using python > for more than 13 years.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, no way that's true if his python and clojure knowledge are at the same level. That tweet sounds like what you see on r/clojure all the time, a cult.

<comment><USER5> Just a language that isn't yet used widely in production. I remember when Python was like that, there is even a relevant xkcd strip: [https://xkcd.com/353/](https://xkcd.com/353/)

Gosh, I remember when JAVA was like that!

<comment><USER3> > isn't yet used widely in production

What are you talking about? Walmart has built their receipt processing in Clojure. Apple uses it (afaik for payments processing). Cisco has built their entire security platform in Clojure - security.cisco.com. Funding Circle has built their peer-to-peer landing platform in Clojure. Nubank - the largest independent digital bank in the world and sixth-largest bank in Brazil been using Clojure extensively. There are many other companies very actively using Clojure. Pandora, CircleCI, Pitch, Guaranteed Rate, etc. It's even used at NASA.

It's a the third most popular JVM language after Java and Kotlin, and the most popular alt-js PL (if you don't consider Typescript as alt-js). It's the most popular language among PLs with a strong FP emphasis - it is more popular than Haskell, Elm, Idris, OCaml, Erlang, Elixir, F#, Purescript, and (recently) Scala.

Clojure is very ripe for the prime-time. The ecosystem is really nice. A lot more nicer than most other languages. It is an extremely productive tool. But of course skeptics be like: "but it's dyyying ...", "it ain't popular ...", "but all those parentheses ...", "it's a cult ...", etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All of the Rich Hickey talks I watched (there are many!) are insightful and entertaining. He manages to talk about technical things on a abstract, sometimes philosophical level. I even re-watched some talks after a couple of years and got something new out of them.

One of the most entertaining ones I watched was "Spec-ulation". It is less general than some of the more shared/cited ones but really funny.

<comment><USER7> Anyone else interested it is available at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This talk had a profound effect on how I think about complexity, and taught me not to conflate easy and simple, 2 words in english that are often treated as synonyms. It really opened my eyes to how much tooling we use as devs (particularly in ops) that hides much of the complexity of a system. I'm much more dubious now whenever a tool comes around that makes X easier, and look for any added costs to complexity to see if there's a hidden tradeoff.

I highly recommend giving the talk a listen to.

</comment><comment><USER9> This talk turned an inflection point in my career. The physical metaphor of a braid and having that braid straightened out applies to so many areas of software. "Unbraidedness" is a very useful (albeit informal) measure of quality for me. It helps me detect when something's not right, as well as hinting how I can help straighten it out.

<comment><USER10> Even the informal concept is useful, but I suspect it could be formalized. I'd love to hear from a theoretical CS person about that notion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see this talk given as an example of best talks. I watched it twice. I'm obviously in a minority here, but I don't get it. I hear just truisms. Like: "It's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick." I know it's hard to summarize a talk in a few paragraphs, but what big point did you get out of it. Honest question, I'm genuinely interested.

<comment><USER12> 1) easiness is subjective, simplicity is objective.

2) simple code is easy to read, but hard to write.

If you're a programmer, and you're not surrounded by people conflating both words, consider yourself lucky. What does a coworker really means by "I did the simplest possible thing" ?

<comment><USER11> Ok. So it might be a language thing. Not being a native, easy and simple from pov of a customer is the same for me.

For example, for me, statement 1 is false. Simplicity is also subjective

I am one of the people conflating the terms. Are they used from the devs pov? Like what's easiest for you (add one more parameter to this function or another special case handled with its) might make things more complicated.

From the customer pov simple or easy is the same, or?!

<comment><USER13> It is a language thing, even for native speakers :) That is why he went to a lot of trouble to define each term in the beginning, and kept referring back to his opening definitions throughout the talk:

Simple = One thing not 'mixed - linked - folded' with anything else. That's why he says it is objective - if you look at something and see it's mixed up with something else, it's not simple (in his terms, now it's complex - eg many things woven together)

Easy = Near to you. Near in as you know it already, or you have it already and so on.

His talk is for the dev pov, but even outside of dev, simple does not mean easy all the time.

For example, (and something I am struggling with right now) it is simple to lose weight - eat less calories than you burn each day. Simple.

But I can attest it is far from easy.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for the reply. I'm starting to get it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow it has been close to a decade since then. Is there a simple made Easy 2? He presents a number of grandiose ideas, it would be interesting to see what he thinks he got right and what went off the rails.

<comment><USER4> He indirectly recognized the importance of declaring the shape of data 6 years later by introducing spec, which to date still has big issues and screams "just use a proper statically typed language".

<comment><USER15> Everytime I read your name, you subtile spread some negativity :)

Maybe Hickey just didn't prioritized "types" as high as some other ideas to spend his time on. And in my opinion he focused on the right things and achieved something really great.

As general advice stay positiv, focus on the things you like instead of telling everyone what you don't like, it's better for your mental health ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what he meant by "Rules" (compared to "Conditions"), in his table where he describes "Complexity" vs "Simplicity".

Is it some kind of paradigm that exist in Clojure but not in procedural languages?

<comment><USER17> I believe conditionals is referring to if statements (and their ilk, switch/case/cond etc). Rules is referring to rule systems and/or more generally declarative knowledge systems. Things like core.logic in clojure (or prolog, datalog and minikanren in the wider world).

Stuff like this is not specific to clojure, however it would be harder to have an embedded rules system in your language if its not a lisp. You'd probably have have to resort to a string based DSL (something like drools in java).</comment></comment>


Vista Is Good - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=377 <comment><USER2> You don't win by being "good". You win by being outstanding. MS died and stopped being relevent to anything much a long while ago.

What features does vista have that XP doesn't that are worthwhile? What is pushing people to upgrade? Nothing as far as I can see.

Now you can buy PCs without an OS, and some very cool portables like the asus eeepc using linux, I'd expect MS dominance to take a major bashing over the next years on PCs. Not to mention the march of Apple.

You can't really start an article with "As Apple fanboyism has spread throughout the tech publications" and expect to be taken seriously. Especially when you then churn out obvious Microsoft fanboyism.

I think to be honest the whole point is becoming moot. The operating system is becoming irrelevent. Everything is moving onto the web (Despite ms trying hard to stop it by adding bugs and incompatibilites into IE ;) ). Luckily though IE is nose diving in usage.

Add to that the new motherboards that ship with linux for a fast startup into a browser, and what is the reason for most people to boot into a full blown monolithic beast such as vista?

<comment><USER3> "MS died and stopped being relevent to anything much a long while ago"

Is this 2020? It must be the future because MS has not died and is still very relevant.

"Now you can buy PCs without an OS,"

How many non geeks do you know that bought one of these? I know 0.

"The operating system is becoming irrelevent"

Again this must be 2020 because the OS is still essential to almost 100% of computer users.

"IE is nose diving in usage"

Any stats to back up this claim? I'm not seeing it, in fact IE7 usage is now higher than Firefox on hundreds of my managed websites.

I'm sorry but you live in fantasy tech-geek world where Linux and browser based operating systems are the norm. Do me favor and do some work for real "users" and then re-evaluate your opinions about where MS is and is heading.

<comment><USER4> For browser statistics <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp> IE 7 is less than Firefox.

I found last year when I worked an Ajax project that when I replace DOM that contains images, IE 6/7 will load images twice. While Safari, Firefox and Opera all just load those images once. So if your managed servers have any program that replaces DOM on the fly that contains images, IE's usage in server log will be higher because IE wastes the bandwidth twice.

<comment><USER5> It's a site with web development tutorials. Of course Firefox has a strong presence.

Try stats from a less focused source:

<http://www.thecounter.com/stats/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> DRM gives power to Microsoft and Big Media.

        *  They decide which programs you can and can't use on your computer

        * They decide which features of your computer or software you can use at any given moment

        * They force you to install new programs even when you don't want to (and, of course, pay for the privilege)

        * They restrict your access to certain programs and even to your own data files

Even when you legally buy Vista, you don't own it.

        *  If your copy of Vista came with the purchase of a new computer, that copy of Vista may only be legally used on that machine, forever.

        * If you bought Vista in a retail store and installed it on a machine you already owned, you have to completely delete it on that machine before you can install it on another machine.

        * You give Microsoft the right, through programs like Windows Defender, to delete programs from your system that it decides are spyware.

        * You consent to being spied upon by Microsoft, through the "Windows Genuine Advantage" system. This system tries to identify instances of copying that Microsoft thinks are illegitimate. Unfortunately, a recent study indicated that this system has already screwed up in over 500,000 cases.

<http://badvista.fsf.org/>

[http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn- from...](http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple- II.ars/3) [Apple is even worse on DRM etc.]

<comment><USER7> This comment breaks how the page renders under FF 3rc1...

<comment><USER8> and in safari

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's too bad this article is such a troll. I'm sure there are intelligent and useful things to be said about vista; but this article is not where they can be found.

Vista strikes me as a reasonably good OS crippled by the need to support the entire win32 legacy. It's too bad that Microsoft can't take 2000 of their best programmers and turn them loose on building a new OS that supports .NET and nothing before; as it might be quite worthwhile.

However; Microsoft the company seems to be slipping into the senility phase, thinking that their spot at the top of the pile is a god given right and that they should stay there forever. They seem to have forgotten that it's capitalism, it's dog eat dog; and it's their turn to be a dog's breakfast.

<comment><USER10> Some would argue that Microsoft got to the top of the pile due in no small part to maintaining backward compatibility. By doing so they lower the barriers to upgrading for most of their users, who don't want to reinvest in new versions of applications that can't make the jump.

<comment><USER11> "Some would argue that Microsoft got to the top of the pile due in no small part to maintaining backward compatibility."

The most dangerous curses are the transiently useful ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why do nearly all of this guy's blog posts end up on the front page of HN? Sure, a couple have been good, but it strikes me as a little "odd" that he seems to be on here all the time. Group voting, or do random people really dig opinionated blog posts that much? Honest question.

<comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll>

"An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion."

I think quite a few of his blog posts fall into this category.

<comment><USER13> Controversial: he's just opposing conventional wisdom

Irrelevant or off-topic: Vista and Facebook are very relevant to this community

Baiting others: maybe he's guilty of this, but I think it's more the jarring cognitive dissonance of him opposing the accepted wisdom. A minority opinion isn't necessarily baiting.

Disrupt normal discussion: other people post his stuff.

Let's face it, he writes well, he argues his points well, and he calls out people he thinks are wrong. pg does the exact same thing, but no one disagrees with him since we're all in his world here.

Besides, how much of a troll is it to say something is _good_?

<comment><USER2> The first line of the article was "As Apple fanboyism has spread throughout the tech publications".

If that's not baiting I don't know what is. In actual fact a lot of articles about Apple these days are bashing them. Especially for the Macbook air.

Also, I'm not really sure why Vista is relevent TBH, are people here starting up a company to write desktop apps for Vista? Do any hackers use Vista?

<comment><USER14> You say how the article is flamebaiting, yet the last line of your comment was extremely flammable. To answer your question, if it was honest: I am a hacker and I use Vista daily. I am sure I'm not alone.

<comment><USER2> Sorry if it came across as flammable, it's just not something that you hear about - startups working on vista. And all the startup photos you see are full of macs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Too much slack in this article.

 _Which is not to say that Microsoft didn't make some mistakes in launching the OS. They clearly made a few. For one, they gave OEMs too much leeway in deciding what they could or could not slap "Vista Capable" stickers on. And even though it wasn't entirely their fault that manufacturers screwed this up, it reflects badly on Microsoft. It's just like when a program crashes your PC. It might not have been Windows's fault, but you get pissed at it for not preventing it, because that's its job._

Microsoft told the OEMs exactly what they could stamp Vista capable. It is entirely Microsoft's fault.

If a program can crash the OS, it is the OS's fault. (regular user mode program that is, third party drivers are a different story).

<comment><USER16> Not exactly on the OEMs.I suppose it's impossible to tell who had how much fault, but there's clearly some blame on both sides:

[http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/02/mi...](http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/02/microsoft_and_o_1.html;jsessionid=PRZRL3XPDRUNYQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN)

As for crashing, depends how you define "fault". If a program causes Windows to crash, where it wouldn't have without that program, it could be said to be the program's fault. I tend to agree with you, since the point of Windows is to be a platform on which programs run, and found myself on that side of the argument against a number of PalmOS fans not that long ago.

You could easily say either party (or both) were at fault, but Windows will be the one more damaged by it. Microsoft would tend to agree too, which is why they spent so much effort making XP resilient to that sort of thing by SP2.

<comment><USER17>
      If a program causes Windows to crash, where it wouldn't have without that program, it could be said to be the program's fault.

The job of a good operating system is to protect itself and other processes from themselves and each other. It's only after years of Windows use (or os 9) that people have grown accustomed to OS crashes caused by rogue processes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well there are more problems than pointed out in the blog. Many of the "problems" cited are actually just effects of the real problems. Corporates not upgrading and OEMs offering XP are not causes themselves.

One problem is that the UI changed quite a bit from XP but without any added value. Why rename My Documents to Documents? Just for the heck of it? Why change the network connections dialog? For the first time in my life, I had to spend more time setting up a wireless connection in windows than Linux. Change in UI can be good but only if the changed UI offers something new. Just renaming things or moving options around without any reason is plainly annoying.

Second problem is bloat. Why is the OS eating up so much RAM. Isnt the OS meant to run applications on top? Or is the OS just meant to run(or in this case limp) itself somehow. Again I dont see what Vista is doing with all that RAM. Is it doing something useful which XP didnt do? Then go ahead and use the RAM. But if it isnt, then why is it eating RAM?

I havent faced much problem with hardware incompatibility thankfully and as pointed out thats an issue with any OS upgrade. UAC is annoying but can be useful.

edit : I feel the blog only raised strawmen and then beat them up but did not tackle with the real issues.

<comment><USER16> "Corporates not upgrading and OEMs offering XP are not causes themselves."

Agreed, which is why I explained why they exist. I just take issue with the tech industry assuming that the cause of them is Vista sucking, when in fact if Vista were a good operating system, those issues would still exist.

<comment><USER19> Why are some people downmodding Matt's comments for no apparent reason?

Form your own opinion on whether Matt is trolling in some way or not, but even if you decide "yes", don't take it out on his innocent comments.

<comment><USER16> Ha, yeah. I don't mind. Until PG lets me convert my karma to real bucks, it's OK by me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A lot of Vista bashing is coming form ex-Windows programmers being dog-tired of coding for this platform, which hasn't been an enjoyable experience lately. Problem is that it's virtually impossible to code relatively complex software for Windows that can be installed on a typical "Windows box". There is no such thing anymore: Windows machines are like jungles populated by all kinds of trojans, software firewalls (often several of them), anti-popup programs, anti-spyware programs, anti-anti spyware, and so on... Computers are being sold new in a barely usable shape (pre-damaged by sacks of crapware), can you imagine what do they turn into after 2 years in average Joe's hands? Letting your code run down there without a programmer's supervision is like picking up a Burmese prostitute without a condom: can be done, but it's a tough exercise.

My friend got a Dell laptop and it's touchpad (made by Logitech) greets him every morning with a pop-up. WTF?

<comment><USER21> You're partially right. I'm a Windows programmer, and that's probably why I switched to Linux with the Vista release. I still program for Windows, but from the safety and comfort of a virtual machine. What you say about spyware and trojans and viruses simply isn't true - it's really easy to keep a Windows machine clean: NOD32 + Windows Defender is more than enough. However, the reason for "which hasn't been an enjoyable experience" can be found in the lack of stability and performance that we're seeing on the Windows platform. A decade's worth of Win32 gunk has caught up with Vista, and it's made coding Windows applications a serious PITA. It seems that somewhere between Windows XP and Windows Vista the proverbial "last straw" was added, and it's made coding for Windows Vista such a dreadful nightmare. It's not fun; & more to the point, it's exasperating.

Using a framework like .NET helps like crazy (.NET:Beautiful::Win32:Ugly) but the performance and reliability issues still persist no matter what you build your applications on.

Take for instance my current Vista install. Out of the blue it won't resolve DNS addresses - for no reason. Basically, the mess of code that is the TCP/IP stack - just like the other stacks in need of a from-scratch implementation on Windows - has gotten corrupted somewhere along the way to the point that reinstalling networking drivers, clearing ARP routes, etc. just won't fix.

Too much gunk === impossibly difficult to keep stable/reliable for any period of time.

<comment><USER20> Guru, keeping Windows machine clean is trivial, I more than agree with you (in fact I've never used an anti-virus or a software firewall in my life, and _never_ had any security issues). The issue isn't technical, it's a strange fusion of "software culture" that surrounds Windows: a combination of how software is written and how it gets consumed. Things that Windows programmers can get away with are not tolerated among OSX/Linux users, and the way typical Windows users do things is just... crazy. But I do believe that it was Microsoft themselves who seeded and cultivated those expectations.

And .NET is really just a layer on top of Win32, it was an MFC replacement, not Win32 replacement (which is what "new windows" really needs). Just getting rid of registry (along with stinky AutoRun section where every piece of shit software adds itself) and making system32 read-only-for-all would solve most problems.

But personally I don't care anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Works for me" does not represent any useful information.Frankly I listen to the people it doesn't work for--- and they are legion. Since I develop for Windows (but open source for any) I have a machine that runs Vista, just like I have a machine that runs XP and another that runs W2K. Any thing else and I won't work for the client unless he gives me a machine to test with. From my experience (not lack of sample size, common to the blogger...) of the three only W2K is stable. Not to mention smaller, faster, simpler and a host of other superlatives. I intend sometime later tonight to OK VistaSP1 and I am prepared for the possible crash--- I believe myself to be safe since such problems were tied to AMD chips and not INTEL. By the way 'wumi' is a CPU one of those single points of failure you claim are all of the problem? And as for the new version of search in Vista; does any one know a working method to revert it back to at least XP if not W2k. There are many worthwhile 12 step programs in the world, windows search isn't one of them.

\--hsm

<comment><USER23> I bought a new Fujitsu laptop that came preloaded with Vista. Technically the machine is no slouch.

Right-clicking on the network button to open a network connection reults in a grey box loading and hanging on the page for 10 seconds or so before it disappears. At that point you _can_ click on the exact same icon and have a list of options, one of which is "Open Network Connection". Clicking on that results in another 10 second wait, after which a list of possible networks to connects to opens up.

Either one of those waits would be permissable if Windows really needed to check if the network existed (doesn't take that long under Ubuntu though....). But both? And for the system to show nothing but plain grey boxes?

Frankly, I don't find the OS particularly usable for anything except Photoshop. And I'll be getting around to installing Wine soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You've conflated two separate issues (Vista the OS and Vista's launch) so it's hard to argue accurately about this. I think you're using a too-broad definition of _launch_ if you can offer _improved search_ as evidence of a successful one.

I would agree that Vista is an upgrade in the same way XP was: moderate improvements with new UI things to learn. And I think you're very right to refer back to XP's launch and how the same complaining was made then.

But I don't see who you can call Vista's launch a success. This would probably be better debated with empirical data about sales and time on the market and stuff, but just the general vibe about Vista is so horribly negative in ways I don't remember XP's ever being.

You say this is because more people are making their negative reactions known this time around, and we should ignore them because people like to bitch. But I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that their reactions would be negative -- they could've reacted positively.

I doubt Microsoft is proud of Vista's launch.

</comment><comment><USER25> He can't even get out of the first clause before trotting out the "Apple fanboyism" scapegoat. It's the tech industry equivalent of crying "liberal bias".

</comment><comment><USER26> I agree Vista is good -> for my bottom line, I charged a ton of money from companies to make their software UAC compliant.

</comment><comment><USER27> "For one, they gave OEMs too much leeway in deciding what they could or could not slap "Vista Capable" stickers on. And even though it wasn't entirely their fault that manufacturers screwed this up, it reflects badly on Microsoft."

That, in and of itself, seems to be almost the single point of failure on Vista. OEMs selling Vista Capable computers that don't have nearly enough memory to run Vista DOES reflect very poorly on Microsoft, and its something, that although may remedy itself as processing power improves and becomes cheaper, may not be erased from a lot of people's mind for a while.

As a longtime Windows user (and Apple Fanboy opponent), I certainly am almost ready to make the jump.

</comment><comment><USER28> Matt sounds like he has never encountered usable desktop search before. Has he really not been exposed to Google Desktop Search or seen Mac OS X since around 2005?

I think that my basic criticism of Vista is that it's just not worth it. It adds too much to read (I really need to do a formal study of this), too many choices to make, too many new UI paradigms (on top of the XP/2000/98/3.1 pieces still kicking around), too many things to authorize, too high hardware requirements, etc. ...

And what benefit comes from taking on all of these burdens? Nothing that I have seen yet that wasn't already implemented and more refined in other operating systems years ago.

<comment><USER29> It's weird that MS are blundering so badly with Vista. Server 2008 is shaping up to be a solid (if rather late) product. There's even a command-line only version (Server Core Edition).

The question MS are struggling with is "what does this do that that didn't", something Apple have been quite good at, e.g. '10.5 has Time Machine!".

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It will be interesting to see what happens the next time Apple needs to drastically overhaul their language and how gracefully it gets handled. I think they did a decent job in handling "classic" applications.

Why can't Microsoft do the same thing? Abstract out support for old versions and build something concrete that can be expanded. OSX has been around since 2001 with steady improvements with each upgraded version. A lot has changed on the outside as well as under the hood but the same core architecture is still in place. Why? Because it works very well, is modular, and can be improved without a massive overhaul.

<comment><USER31> Windows 7 is rumored to be going on this path (emulation of old windows, modular, ...)

but honestly I wonder how many of these new promises will come about. I still remember the old promises about Longhorn aka Vista. Their new filesys (i think winfs) is no where to be found, and their cool looking command line is just starting to show up on server 2008... M$ has a bad history with promises and reality

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Vista is not good.

<comment><USER33> Unlike Matt's, your opinion statement lacks a basis.

[Disclaimer: I'm a linux user, former mac classic/10.2.8 user, former windows 3.11/95/98/XP user.]

<comment><USER11> So a conclusion that's been arrived to empirically by a major portion of consumers and professionals alike is not a basis for that opinion statement?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Xlp-Thlplylp No word about Vista's DRM and the difficulty this is causing many multimedia content providers and others. Economist David K. Levine called Vista "one of the colossal business blunders of all time" in the following article in the Against Monopoly blog:

[http://againstmonopoly.org/index.php?limit=10&chunk=0...](http://againstmonopoly.org/index.php?limit=10&chunk=0&searchstr=14+billion&topic=DRM)

Here's an excerpt: "the demand for degraded computers that can play "premium content" is limited. People just don't buy computers to play movies on them. Michele and I previously dug out some numbers on the size of the "premium content" industry versus the IT industry. According to the RIAA, the value of all CD's, live presentations, music videos, dvds in 1998 was 13.72 billion US$. According to the SOI, in 1998 the business receipts of the computer and electronic product manufacturing including both hardware and software was 560.27 billion US$. I looked up at the census 1997 revenue in the telecommunications industry: 260.50 billion US$. So: are people going to give up their general purpose computers they spend $560 billion on to access less than $14 billion in content?"

From an economist's perspective, a $13.8 billion industry is negligible compared with a $560 billion industry.

</comment><comment><USER34> A lot of good points here. I think his best comes from the notion that business customers' slowness to upgrade "...was the case last time. The reason is that enterprise customers don't upgrade much."

So true.

Apple's taken the tact in their "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" adverts that Vista's a failure for it's lack of penetration among enterprise users. Nice work, Matt, for pointing to the fact that while little penetration may be true, it may be irrelevant.

Edit: What was worth downmodding here?

<comment><USER28> > Edit: What was worth downmodding here?

I don't think many people believe that "business customers' slowness to upgrade" is the cause, and Vista's poor reputation is the effect. Most people believe it to be the other way around.

<comment><USER34> Fair, but that kind of disagreement is what the "Reply" button's for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Vista is good in the same way that a $4 gallon of gas is good: it gets people to consider alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hi, I'm Matt Maroon's agent. Please direct all irrational, accusatory non- productive trolling downmods at me. As of right now, 23 people have voted for my client's article, indicating that it many people think my client is in fact _not_ a troll. If you disagree, please leave a civil comment. If you disagree with my client's responses, add another civil response of your own. Disagreement isn't cause for downmodding.

<comment><USER16> Lol. You're much better than the last agent I worked with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Fail.

</comment><comment><USER37> The feature that Matt says he likes (searching, eg poker) is much better implemented with Quicksilver on Mac OS X.

<comment><USER16> Does it search inside of files? I did like Quicksilver a lot. But it isn't fair to compare an OS against an OS and a third party program.

<comment><USER24> OS X has Spotlight, which searches inside files. It's probably comparable to Vista's search.

<comment><USER38> Since it was released before MS' offering, Spotlight was probably inspirational to Vista's search.

<comment><USER39> Which is an important point.

Steve Jobs was able to make it very clear that the most notable features of Vista were in OS X first. I was at the WWDC where Tiger was introduced and the posters said things like "Redmond, start your photocopiers", and "Introducing Longhorn" (Vista's previous code name).

The brilliance of the Mac vs. PC adds is that it has been pounded into the subconscious of the consuming public that innovation happens on the Mac first and is eventually picked up by Windows sometime in the future. This means that the PR burden has now shifted to Microsoft to demonstrate that they actually can offer functionality that's not already available on a Mac.

Which is not to say that PR can exist in a vacuum. If Apple didn't have some legitimate claim to being ahead of Microsoft in technology, the ads mocking PC would not be effective.

(ps The long version of PC's country western song is brilliant. I especially like how they were able to work a rhyme of "Control-Alt-Delete" into the lyrics.)

<comment><USER40> "the PR burden has now shifted to Microsoft to demonstrate that they actually can offer functionality that's not already available on a Mac."

This doesn't seem compelling. What is wrong with MSFT simply copying Apple while maintaining compatibility and familiarity for its users?

Consider American retreads of Britcoms (a longstanding tradition, I recall watching "Three's Company" religiously). The value proposition is simple: All the laughs of "Robin's Nest," with an accent you can understand.

So why must MSFT "innovate"? What is wrong with going to their user base and saying "All the nice features of OS X, with backwards compatibility and rewritten to be familiar to you"?

This may not be sexy to me personally, but it seems like a legitimate business strategy and like something many Windows owners would want.

<comment><USER39> "What is wrong with MSFT simply copying Apple while maintaining compatibility and familiarity for its users?"

I didn't say MSFT is doing something immoral by copying Apple. My point is that Apple has shifted perception such that MSFT, and specifically Vista, is now the butt of a joke. They have had external help, for sure, but Apple's relentless advertising campaign has certainly also contributed to making it so.

So my argument is that, empirically, in the minds of many consumers the burden has shifted to Microsoft to prove they do not deserve ridicule. Whether or not that is "fair" is a separate matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> funny how i never cared about the OS. i program and for personal use the OS really is whatever in my opinion.

for porfessional use maybe windows has issues but really what is wrong with vista or earlier windows for the average computeruser?

</comment><comment><USER42> Vista's failure is most evident once you've used Ubuntu, which contains wheelbarrows full of innovation not incorporated into MS's effort, which is ironic because that's the software you're actually paying for.

</comment><comment><USER43> @backward compatibility

This doesn't really matter anymore because you can just make a VM with the OS you need and install your program there. There are both free and open source virtualization programs.

@Vista

The UAC is annoying for programmers; that's the real problem with it. I've even had trouble doing reasonable actions in the designated folders (make a new directory, for example). Yes, it is annoying for customers too, but that it annoys programmers is an unforgivable sin.

Having just interviewed with a couple of people from Microsoft, it's clear that they are working on interesting problems and that they aren't dumb. Individual Microsoft engineers seem to be just as dedicated and smart as the rest of us. Some of these decisions must come out of committees with values different from the individual engineers.

Their major concern was security, which they've frankly fixed in XP at this point. I haven't had virus software on my XP machine for 18 months and I haven't had a problem. So, the major feature of Vista (more security) was filtered back into XP, thus there is no drive to change to Vista.</comment>


A single Quine for 11 languages - <AUTHOR> http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ku-ma-me/20090916/p1 <comment><USER2> Not quite. This is a quine that relays through eleven languages before finally reproducing itself, not a quine that works in eleven languages. There's an actual algorithm for doing it in some journal somewhere, but it's still pretty impressive.</comment>


Maria didn't get the Starbucks job, so she set out to crush it - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/wheelys-coffee-starbucks-maria-de-la-croix <comment><USER2> >Cameras check to make sure people aren't stealing.

Question: in a city like Shanghai, where a startup founder from Malmö is presumably not politically connected, what will the cameras do once someone has stolen?

The store is 100% staffless and the theft is petty- will the police actually enforce/investigate?

She licenses out the carts and tech so I guess she's not directly eating the cost but.... I really don't see how this works.

And I would love to be wrong!!

<comment><USER3> I'd imagine it is similar to them establishing a branch in the US. The business and the citizens would be governed according to the host countries laws.

The app seems to control door access and it presumably knows email, bank information, possible gps\location data, about its users so I may not be too difficult to ID a perp.

Doubt the police would get involved for small amounts but it likely depends on the precinct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Wheelys began rolling in 2014, when De La Croix built her first café cart > out of a bicycle and a box. "It was basic," she recalls. Even so, coffee > drinkers liked it and the low running costs made the business profitable.

Love this. She is just getting after it and doing whatever she can with what she has. Inspirational.

<comment><USER5> Agreed - love the fuck the establishment approach. Sounds similar to the WhatsApp story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Where she got the idea from:

[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_WjsocrjdnA/V5rP7GnI8pI/AAAAAAAAA...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_WjsocrjdnA/V5rP7GnI8pI/AAAAAAAAAmI/iy1AfECL2KQMY3YqEOPI6LMI- QrWAbS0QCLcB/s1600/27bollywoods-tea-party2.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER7> Love her fuck all attitude. She's gained a new admirer today.</comment>


Resignations at Cisco hint at internal power struggle - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2016/6/6/11871550/cisco-mpls-team-resigns <comment><USER2> A legendary racket from days past! Leave Cisco with technology and engineers, get generously funded by Cisco, get generously bought out by Cisco, inside Cisco enjoy sandbagged targets and guaranteed payouts, lather, rinse, repeat. Self-dealing masterpieces!

<comment><USER3> My impression from people who have been involved is that it's not just a self- enriching racket; mainline Cisco is actually really bad at building new products that aren't just minor variations on old ones. Sometimes they innovate through acquisitions, but if there's no external company to acquire sometimes you have to make your own to get your good engineers out of that environment of "sandbagged targets and guaranteed payouts" for a few years.

<comment><USER4> This.

(At the risk of getting down voted) Cisco is a sales driven company not an engineering company. Barring a few business units (and that too I'm being generous) there is absolutely no innovation or drive to build new products. It's a terrible place to work if you are an engineer with aspirations to tackle engineering challenges.

<comment><USER5> > Cisco is a sales driven company not an engineering company. > Barring a few > business units (and that too I'm being generous) > there is absolutely no > innovation or drive > to build new products.

this is _exactly_ right. for example, nick-feamster (formerly gatech, and now at princeton) hosted a google hangout with nick-mckeown (stanford) as part of his sdn mooc on coursera. the hangout video is approx. an hour long, and is available here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abXezfJsqso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abXezfJsqso)

initial 15-20 minutes of this video describes the experience of these n/w researchers (mckeown, cassado etc) when they presented their (sdn) idea to execs at csco, their (exec's) rejection of the said idea, which indicating to them (the researchers) that it (the idea) passed the so called 'idea-smell- test' :)

if you have time to spare, watch it !

<comment><USER6> What is wrong with your punctuation?

<comment><USER7> Some people speak with a lot of parentheticals.

We don't need speech to be a monoculture for people to understand one another.

<comment><USER8> I don't see how disliking that poster's writing style translates into advocacy for a speech "monoculture."

<comment><USER7> I read the comment above as disapproving of the all of the parentheses in the gp post.

If you remove the posts from people who write that way from the total we are closer to a monoculture.

The difference between having one fewer way of writing and literally having one way of writing is the size of the rhetorical exaggeration in my comment

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As problematic as Cisco's messaging was on this fiasco, Tony Fadell should take note about how professionals handle disagreements in the press.

<comment><USER10> I'm sure Tony Fadell still thinks he did an amazing job at Nest.

<comment><USER11> By all objective measures he did a phenomenal job at Nest. He started and sold it for $3.2B. The fact that he failed to continue to be successful post- acquisition, is hardly a "poor" overall record.

<comment><USER10> I would describe his exit as the only real thing he was successful at. The product is not selling, his employees are all quitting, the acquirer is pissed, the acquisitions he made are all pissed, product development is stalled, Google had to go to plan B with Google Home, ...

<comment><USER11> Yes, and all of that just shows he isn't perfect. But Tony Fadell will have _no problem_ raising hundreds of millions for his next venture, joining a VC firm, or joining another company as a C-level executive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is my understanding that Cisco was founded on router technology developed Stanford which was then patented and exploited by the company (despite Stanford's intention that it be public domain)[1]. I wonder if the cultural tone that that set is what, decades later, has landed them in this situation.

[1] [http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html](http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html)

<comment><USER13> The NOS was based on software written at Stanford. The HW was Andy Bechtolsheim 68K board, which also (without the theft) become the SUN-1.

cisco paid Stanford off later, although the author of that NOS is still unhappy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> While things like Jabber have an obvious alternative (i.e. Slack), who can compete with Cisco in terms of their desk phones and meeting room equipment? I only ask because their hardware is so ingrained in the company I work for that even if I were somehow able to convince everyone that Slack was worth switching for, who the hell else am I gonna get video conferencing equipment like this[0] from?

[0][http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaborati...](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/collaboration- endpoints/telepresence-mx-series/datasheet-c78-731263.html)

<comment><USER15> Polycom and Huawei are the two next largest providers of telepresence equipment and there are a host of smaller competitors.

As far as phones Avaya is the big competitor in the enterprise space. Microsoft Skype for Business/Lync is also deployed many places for voice using phones from a variety of suppliers including Polycom and HP. Lately a lot of enterprises have started to move away from desk phones to using soft phones.

<comment><USER14> Cool, I'll have to look into both! Huawei feels like an "Oh, right, of course" answer but Polycom doesn't ring any bells.

Interesting observation on the soft phones trend, though. In my work environment our Cisco phones might as well be softphones since everything's rigged through Jabber. Give us a webcam instead of the desk phone and I don't see any loss of functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> MPLS' impact at Cisco is similar to that of Jeff Dean and others at Google. They were responsible for creating Cisco's most successful products, so it's sad to see them leave. But the power struggle is definitely undeniable, as a lot of senior figures have departed Cisco.

<comment><USER6> You mean like the Catalyst 2600?

<comment><USER17> I feel fairly confident you're not referring to the 10/100 Token Ring switch, so... could you clarify?

<comment><USER18> I don't think there was ever a 2600 model in the Catalyst family. But the Cisco 2600 series were incredibly common routers.

<comment><USER15> Maybe he meant the Catalyst 2900 which was really a 2 slot version of the 5000 with the sup card and a 12 or 24 port line card already screwed in. I did a large deployment of Lightstreams (It think 1010s), Cat 5000s and Cat 2900s. This was prior to official availability of the Cat 5000 and 2900. They were running beta code and we had to upgrade them every couple of days. We hit a stable enough build about a week before going live to coincide with the official availability of the 5000s. Our customer got a big break on the equipment but had to be live by general availability of the catalysts to be a demonstration customer. The chain smoking tool of an engineer Cisco sent, he like to brag his employee number was in the teens, instilled a distrust of Cisco support engineers that future Cisco engineers have reinforced, the good ones have been few and far between. That system made it live despite his best efforts.

Anyways I digress. The Cat 2900 and Cat 5000 came from the Crescendo acquisition as did Mario Mazzola and Prem Jain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a bit biased here since I work doing development mostly aimed at a competitor of Cisco in the Unified Communications space, but after seeing a few presentations by Rowan Trollope at Enterprise Connect, I have the feeling all is not well at Cisco and this article seems to echo that.

At EC, I really felt like they were on the defense trying to market a product that's trying to be "cool like Slack" while chiding enterprise customers for being uncool and wanting things like control over upgrade roll-outs and being interested in "fake clouds"[1]. Their presentation of this new product had the feeling of an angry old man trying to sell mood rings to hipsters.

The attitude of the presenters bordered on insulting and I was reminded of a meeting with Cisco guys with a very similar attitude, almost decade ago, when my previous employer was trying to re-instate maintenance on our Cisco phone infrastructure. At the time, we were looking to either get maintenance or replace it with something else (Office Communications Server 2008 -- which hadn't been released yet, but which Microsoft was actively courting us to become a tester of with very good financial terms associated). The rep sarcastically said "What are you going to do, switch to Asterisk or LCS?"[2].

My recollection of parts of this is hazy, but IIRC, they weren't willing to budge on price and even found places that we had miscalculated the cost we already couldn't pay, resulting in a _higher_ cost. In 15 years of dealing with vendor reps, I've never had a call that even came close to that one. I fielded two different calls within an hour of that meeting's end with _both_ people saying the Cisco guys were "arrogant DICKS".

Within two years my previous employer ripped out all of our Cisco IP-PBX related devices, moved to OCS 2007 and the company has stayed with the Microsoft Solution of Various Names since. If the vendor reps were any indication, Cisco didn't believe there would ever _be_ competition for their product, and had a _very_ dim view of Microsoft (still seem to, today). Their new product (who's name escapes me) seems to be the direction they want to go, but they're late, and aren't as good as the competition.

[1] This was a phrase the Cisco folks seemed really attached to and I kept thinking that the one feature you want in a collaboration/"phone" system is stability. And the "fake clouds" were things like on-prem/cloud deployment options available from Microsoft and policies that embraced limited backward compatibility and controlled update roll-out. For me, the phrase became "fake clouds don't rain" (or at least when they do, you have some control over it).

[2] This is paraphrased, but not much. Microsoft had courted us at the time and we were involved in pre-release for OCS. We didn't actually migrate to LCS, we migrated to OCS while participating in the OCS R2 TAP. They provided us with people on-site that basically designed and helped us roll the solution out at no charge (they were supposed to be resources for the TAP program but they assisted with everything).

<comment><USER20> "If the vendor reps were any indication, Cisco didn't believe there would ever be competition for their product"

Familiar feeling. The explanation: there is no long-term horizon. All they care about is near-term bonus, and things that position them personally.

Companies with clearly-defined leading products are under permanent risk of being hijacked by sociopaths.

Engineers are intelligent, but we are focused on hard problems, and we are typically invested in the platform which limits our ability to manoeuvre.

The sociopaths have nothing better to do than spend all their day consolidating position, and they don't care if they have to destroy the mountain in order to take it. (Once a company has been pillaged, they can just go somewhere else and do it again.)

As an engineer, you will fight to kill this thing. But once you see it has succeeded in taking root, immediately try to get clear of it. I don't think this gets enough emphasis in our circles - we need a short phrase that captures the transition point. I've just read your blog and suggest "bed bugs".

<comment><USER19> Agreed. I think the other part of it is organizational blindness, as well. They reacted to OCS in the same manner that Microsoft reacted to the iPhone. They were the established player with a mature platform and here came along a service that did things radically different and lacked, what they perceived, as the major features that customers in that space were looking for so they simply laughed at the product. Companies certainly didn't flock to it like people flocked to the iPhone (a trick I think only Apple can pull off), but by comparison, Cisco's offering provided a far less integrated experience at a greater cost and once those back-end features got worked out (or were no longer relevant), they had a surprise competitor with (at the time[1]) a much lower price. Couple that with the fact that people are far more comfortable with making video/voice calls from a PC due to Skype (consumer) and the idea of getting rid of your desk phone[2] and taking it with you on your laptop for all of your "business phone needs" isn't so radical anymore.

[1] At the time, there wasn't even a comparison. It took far fewer servers, cheap (by comparison) licensing that gave you dial-in conferencing for the cost of the server and the call's cost (no additional per-minute surcharge for the privilege of using a bridge). I haven't priced a Cisco equivalent in a while so that may all be different, today.

[2] You can still have a phone with Skype for Business (and they're great phones from what I've seen) and many companies still pop those phones on desks. I worked at Global Crossing when we switched, though, and we required a departmental waiver to get a physical phone (to save money). People did get decent, certified, headsets, but we made the switch the way people take band- aids off and there was a _lot_ of bleeding in the first couple of months. It died down once people got used to it and within a half-year, meeting rooms went empty in favor of calls with desktop sharing (one can multitask and no need to walk down the hall carrying your laptop). Laziness always wins. :o)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It had become known that Mario, Prem, and Luca were moving on, but the expectation was that Soni was sticking around and gaining more responsibility. Guess not. Unfortunate for Cisco.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think Cisco is going to end up like HP.

<comment><USER23> Aren't they already HP?

<comment><USER22> Not yet. They still have good revenue and a large share of the market, and new engineering grads still want to work there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For those unfamiliar, the name MPLS here is also a play on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching)</comment>


Show HN: Five Thousand Novels, Ranked by Vividness - <AUTHOR> http://www.prosecraft.io/analysis/vividness/percentile/#50 <comment><USER2> This will come across as very mean-spirited but I find the idea of measuring a novel's "vividness" based on the kind of vocabulary it uses (or the voice of the verb, etc.) to be completely bogus.

<comment><AUTHOR> The purpose of this metric is to give authors a practical tool they can use to measure the degree of direct sensory language they use in their writing, and compare it with authors they admire. It's not a value judgement.

There are other admirable qualities of writing (emotional, conceptual, etc) that are orthogonal to "vividness", and in the long-run, I plan on developing metrics for those qualities as well.

For example, take a look at the works of Jane Austen. Here's the analysis of "Pride and Prejudice":

[http://prosecraft.io/library/jane-austen/pride-and- prejudice...](http://prosecraft.io/library/jane-austen/pride-and-prejudice/)

She's a brilliant writer, and her prose is highly emotional, but it isn't especially vivid, according to my definition of "vividness", which is: prose that evokes a sensory experience (with colors, textures, flavors, aromas, sounds, and bodily sensations).

There are plenty of ways to write a brilliant novel, and some of them involve vivid sensory writing. But Jane Austen's brilliance comes from her handling of emotional relationships.

For a modern example of the same phenomenon, take a look at one of my favorite authors, Nick Hornby:

[http://prosecraft.io/library/nick-hornby/about-a- boy/](http://prosecraft.io/library/nick-hornby/about-a-boy/)

[http://prosecraft.io/library/nick-hornby/juliet- naked/](http://prosecraft.io/library/nick-hornby/juliet-naked/)

I've read every one of his novels, and they're all about human relationships, but the prose itself isn't very vivid. Nothing wrong with that, though. It's just a measurement.

As an author, it's helpful to be mindful of these kinds of measurements. The same thing is true of "passive voice". Using a lot of passive voice is still a legitimate way of writing, but it's helpful for an author to be aware of the literary voice they're crafting:

[https://blog.shaxpir.com/thoughts-on-passive- voice-705fa4dbd...](https://blog.shaxpir.com/thoughts-on-passive- voice-705fa4dbd291)

<comment><USER3> My impression is that your "vividness" metric is closed source. [0]

Your metric is wholly subjective without a derivation and formula. We have _no clue_ what's being measured. Your results are susceptible to "Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion man".

[0] [https://blog.shaxpir.com/writing-vivid- prose-33283e861358](https://blog.shaxpir.com/writing-vivid-prose-33283e861358)

<comment><USER4> In these criticisms, I find a laudable impulse to protect language from being captured by formal analysis, with an ethical impulse something like not wanting to see an elephant caged at a zoo.

But in outcome, I always seem to see so much more detail in the positive efforts to analyze than I do in the defenses of language as being beyond analysis. Effort at making analysis comes with deep engagement on the different dimensions upon which language can be expressive, and the gist of challenges to these analyses are "it's subjective. You just can't do it!"

And without even commenting on the substance of these respective arguments, the types of output they tend to produce makes me more sympathetic to those making the effort to analyze.

<comment><USER2> I don't think this is about "protect[ing] language from being captured by formal analysis", it's about calling out bogus analysis when you see it.

This "vividness" analysis is bogus for two reasons: (1) The idea that individual words have objectively different levels of "vividness" completely divorced from context (when and where the novel was written, which character is speaking, etc.) is extremely debatable; (2) The idea that the "vividness" of individual words makes the novel as a whole "vivid" is a logical fallacy (compositional fallacy).

I'm 100% behind the use of "formal analysis" to extract new insights into literature and language – there are examples where it has been done very well [1] – but analysis has to be robust, which I don't think it is here.

[1] [http://jonreeve.com/2016/07/paradise-lost- macroetymology/](http://jonreeve.com/2016/07/paradise-lost-macroetymology/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's an article I wrote, describing the idea behind the project, defining the idea of "vividness", and explaining how the linguistic analysis works:

[https://blog.shaxpir.com/writing-vivid- prose-33283e861358](https://blog.shaxpir.com/writing-vivid-prose-33283e861358)

You can click around anywhere on the histogram chart, to see the different percentile buckets. And you can click on any of the books, to see detailed linguistics, including a snippet of the most vivid page in the book.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! I'm enjoying comparing novels I've read and finding surprises at misremembering the prose of some of them. Was it a deliberate decision to not include the ability to search for specific titles? I've been clicking through the percentiles and realized could save some time finding the titles if they were all on one page (Ctrl-F) or via a search box.

edit: manually editing the URL helps with this :)

edit2: and apparently the home page

<comment><AUTHOR> You can click on the logo in the upper-left corner, or you can go directly to the homepage, [http://prosecraft.io](http://prosecraft.io), to search for specific titles :)

<comment><USER6> I'm disappointed there is no Gene Wolfe. I'd be extremely interested at his metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How'd you assemble the corpus? Only some of these books are public domain, did you have to buy/license the rest?

</comment><comment><USER8> Apologies if this is mentioned and I missed it, but does this account for changes in word meaning or context over time? Earlier literature, such as Austen, could be considered "not-vivid" unless you're clued in for particular hints/phrases. I'm thinking of, perhaps, the use of "Et cetera" for pudenda.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here is the "most vivid" page of the "most vivid" book:

"giants, and they were impaled by spear, lance, and crystal shard. A series of explosive reports echoed across the battlefield as the giants stumbled upon the Mistcloak's tripwires, sending lethal blossoms of sharpened steel twisting through the air. Fell and his minions moved through the giants like an avalanche. The Under-King shifted his form to a flowing slab of stone and crashed down upon giant flesh, pulverizing it to blue powder and red ash. Even the animals, though weak and weary, tore into the giants with the primal fury of the wild. Claw and fang stood with horn and hoof, wounding with equal enmity. Beak and talon darted and gouged. The entire island of Mistgard stood united against the foul armies of frost and fire. Devastation was rampant on the mountain, but it was nothing compared to the wrath of the Storm Speaker. Even the stoic Under-King was surprised at the power of the Oldest of Cubs. At the back of the Pandyr's armies, high atop the tallest of Fell's battlements, stood the lone figure of the Storm Speaker. He called forth and charmed the very storms from the clouds beneath him and sent electric green-and-blue arcs of lightning into the giants' lines, blasting hundreds of their bodies off of the battlefield and into the mist below. The world above burned. The radiant morning light was blackened by acrid smoke, making the golden skull radiate a brown and bloody glow. The Aesirmyr lay strewn with broken bodies: blue and red"

</comment><comment><USER10> This is an interesting analysis, but I have a serious problem with the strong implication that high vividness = good.

At the rock bottom of the vividness scale, we find Jane Austen, Isaac Asimov, Agatha Christie, C.J. Cherryh, and Danielle Steel -- all extremely popular authors. And at the very top, we find George R.R. Martin, Roald Dahl, Poul Anderson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and Kim Stanley Robinson -- also popular, but generally not quite of the same stature as those on the first list.

Possibly the reading public is slightly biased toward low vividness. Meanwhile, I have at least two favorite authors on both lists.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was naturally curious about outliers so went to the most vivid book which is "Pygmy". I haven't read this book, but style of it is listed as incorrect grammar "English" written in a detached scientific tone. I wonder how much this threw off the algorithm to cause it to have such a high score (over 100% and nearly 25% higher than second most vivid).

</comment><comment><USER12> This is great.

I wish we could do our own arbitrary style analysis on the data set sort of the way one can do a factor analysis on a portfolio.

I would look at words that are common between Marukami and McCarthy compared to the rest of the corpus for instance.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting project. Not surprised to see Chuck Palahniuk at the top of the list, but was a little shocked how much he dominated it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Incredible concept! On mobile (ios 6s) the website needs some work.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is very cool. I want to search, can we search?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can search from the homepage: [http://prosecraft.io](http://prosecraft.io)</comment></comment>


Amazon Fire Phone: Does it really kindle fire? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140622070449-44477394-amazon-fire-does-it-really-kindle-fire

<comment><AUTHOR> Its a fair point; the Amazon app is perfectly suitable for showrooming, but i think the Fire handset takes it to the next level and opens opportunities for tech based on visual identification, sizing and comparisons. Already, there are apps being developed that use the depth perception functions to size the users shoes, and apply these dimensions to the sizing categories of various manufacturers, abstracting the sizing differences between brands. With 4 front-facing cameras, this kind of app will only improve.</comment>


Suppression of Chloroquine Is Scandalous - <AUTHOR> https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/06/18/suppression-of-chloroquine-is-scandalous/ <comment><USER2> What a fool. Chloroquine has never been a safe drug. It has been used for a long time as a risky but effective drug for Malaria and Lupus, since the dangers of the drug are known and bearable, and since they are less severe than the diseases - even so, Chloroquine users are watched and tested for dangerous side effects, with dose reduced or eliminated as decided by supervising doctors.</comment>