Why bad-tempered people earn more and live longer - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160809-why-it-pays-to-be-grumpy-and-bad-tempered <comment><USER2> I watch out for people complaining about things, but don't treat it as a negative. It shows that at least they care enough to complain. The situation is far worse if they give up complaining, because they no longer care. Complaining also implies there are improvements that could be made, so again a benefit.

This attitude surprised someone the other day complaining about their code. I was delighted, since it meant they cared!

<comment><USER3> Careful, sometimes people don't complain because they are afraid of the retaliatory consequences if they do. Seems like a very dangerous assumption to make. I've talked to many people who just feel like they can't speak up in certain situations.

<comment><USER4> Chilling, from a chilling effect, is generally bad. It's better for people to speak their mind, and for folks to feel comfortable sharing their opinion.

<comment><USER3> I agree 100% it is good for people to speak their mind, but I'm just saying in some cases you really can't.

<comment><USER5> Frequently, complaining is important to getting things done at work. If I were in a situation where I was worried about retaliation for speaking up about a problem, the real problem isn't the issue at hand but that I need to find a new job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Text of article ties pessimism, not bad temper, to higher earnings and longevity.

Ideally you have a full emotional toolbox. If you're always optimistic you'll blind yourself to risks. If you're always pessimistic you'll blind yourself to opportunities.

<comment><USER7> This is great common sense thinking. We have all the different emotions for a reason. You can even think of them as the tools. Right tool for the right job as programmers love to say. If someone follows article's "scientific" advice and stays angry all the time it will just become really stressful for him. I think if you are really dissatisfied with something it's best to burst out in anger and forget about it after few minutes. At least that's how I use this anger tool :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just some thoughts:

High achievers are frequently perfectionists. Perfectionism is a good eye for details on the basis of very high standards. We know the downsides of perfectionism (e.g. black & white thinking, more difficulties to work towards 80/20 if necessary), but it is still an excellent basis for achieving great work.

There seems to be less cognitive load in keeping up perfectionism / high standards simply all the time; in comparison to deciding whether perfectionism is useful in each individual situation.

Therefore many high-achieving people will keep up their perfectionist attitude all day, for all things they encounter in life.

Unfortunately, few things in the world are perfect, or well enough under their control to become perfect.

Hypothesis: The bad temper of many good workers and high achievers comes from perceiving everything in life with the black & white pattern of perfectionism in a non-perfect world.

This both drains their energy and can make them appear a little dissatisfied.

<comment><USER9> I think this hits the nail the nail on the head.

You said it eloquently.

Less scientifically stated: I personally see it as more of a point & click gesture coupled with a lot of 'Alpha' tendencies. It's a simple as "this is wrong. shut up. Make it this way which is the right way, and, do it now."

speaking as a bad-tempered, high earning person.

relevant part of the article:

> The truth is, pondering the worst has some clear advantages. Cranks may be > superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of > having a heart attack. Cynics can expect more stable marriages, higher > earnings and longer lives – though, of course, they'll anticipate the > opposite.

also shout out to Elizabeth Hurley who was mentioned in the article :)

> To his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley's friends he was apparently known as > 'Grumpelstiltskin'.

> Hugh Grant may be famed for being moody and a little challenging to work > with. But could a grumpy attitude be the secret to his success?

<comment><USER10> There is a little secret here. If you 'Alpha' in /just/ the right way, you edge on the side of gentle bullying your environment, and end up having an effect of changing it more than by trying to always try to negotiate your way into having people 'see' the 'right' path.

Basically. it saves time and effort. I know it's not a popular thing to say, but everytime people talk about 'leadership ability' it's mostly that: ultimately, driving people to do as you say.

I know it works for me, sometime you just can't re-re-re-explain stuff around, and a bit of the Alpha button aka Follow-the-leader wand waving helps saving time and saliva.

And yes, being grumpy (more often than not, faking it!) helps too. I think I've fine tuned the ability to an Olympic Sport. I'm known as 'the gruffalo' in the family ;-)

Of course you need to balance all that weight throwing with the counterpart: You need to be the first, and loudest to say if/when _you_ get it wrong.

<comment><USER11> > If you 'Alpha' in /just/ the right way, you edge on the side of gentle > bullying your environment, and end up having an effect of changing it more > than by trying to always try to negotiate your way into having people 'see' > the 'right' path.

how do your colleagues perceive you? If you work alone, or if you are the boss, maybe it's alright (the examples show Jeff Bezos, Beethoven, ...), but what if you work with 2-6 other people?

And in addition to that, although I agree that trying _always_ to negotiate takes a lot of effort and energy, how do you prevent misunderstandings when you are grumpy? Because if I say "X is 10", and then you say "No, I don't think so", but X _is_ 10, while you still don't see that even if I try to use smoke signals to explain that to you, then you can see that being bully/grumpy/defensive/negative is not only not worth it, but it can also jeopardize tasks and the relationship with your colleagues, because it makes it harder to communicate with you - therefore next time, I won't ask you anymore, unless I really have to.

How do you personally deal with such situations? Because I believe that the answer is in the middle: a straight NO sometimes is better than any other attempt to negotiate (oh, wait, how do I tell him that this idea is dangerous? etc.), however, in my opinion it takes years of tuning and understanding. However, when dealing with other people, how do you unleash your emotions blindly? It just doesn't work out, despite all the benefits it might have.

> I know it works for me, sometime you just can't re-re-re-explain stuff > around, and a bit of the Alpha button aka Follow-the-leader wand waving > helps saving time and saliva.

The question is: why do you think you _are_ the leader? No offense, just asking, because I want to know what makes people believe that.

I have seen this behavior pretty much unjustified - meaning: without this person who believed to hold the key to heaven, things worked better for everyone and even more efficiently, without communication issues and anger. I believe that a real leader doesn't need to be grumpy, as he will show with his actions how things should be, and people will automatically follow, because of respect, not because of fear.

<comment><USER10> Oh actually I should have added a bit more precision too -- I like working with people who do the same! Basically, it's nice for someone (me, or someone else) to feel a bit stronger about something, pick it up, 'claim' it and run away with it...

And yes, with people who /can't/ do that it's a bit more difficult..

You have to keep it in check and also be able to champion ideas that are not yours; ie become an advocate.

<comment><USER11> I have many questions for you, which I hope you can answer - at least to some extent.

For example, is it easy for you to blend in when you are with new people? Suppose you start a new job, new people.

Were you ever left alone in your job? If yes, how do you deal with it?

Have you ever had fights with colleagues due to those reasons? Did they ever tell you it's hard working with you? And your managers? If so, how did you fix it? Did you fix it?

Why do you do it? I mean, you mentioned it, when you said "to feel stronger", but then, my question is if this is worth it. Do you ever feel you miss good insights about issues? Because in my opinion when you behave that way, you will mostly focus on what you want to shout, your ideas, etc, but not on learning. How do you deal with it?

P.s.: I am not criticizing, I am just curious to know how people behaving this way deal with some of the most common issues in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article is kind of all over the place.

I've long looked for a kind of "creative impatience" in people as an indicator of someone who will likely make a creative leap on a problem or simply bulldoze their way past a hurdle.

They can come off like a malcontent but if I see them start working on something with that certain body language of "I've had enough of this" I'm always secretly pleased and look forward to the outcome, letting whatever sparks may be, fly.

On the other hand if these same folks walk away from something it's likely they don't see any way of salvaging whatever the faults may be. Either way, their mindset or approach is a gift.

<comment><USER13> Hate driven development. Once your hate for the current solution's inadequacies pass a threshold, you start implementing the replacement.

<comment><USER14> Spite driven development: when you develop something just to prove someone else wrong.

<comment><USER15> Classic.

Both spite driven development and hate driven development belong here: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming- jargon/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/)

The horror is the comedy and the comedy is the horror.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I got really annoyed at the poor science behind this study and wanted to compose a really good, original comment in response.

But I couldn't come up with one, proving the study wrong.

I just think that they have the causality reversed.

Care a lot -> Focus + Hard work + strong emotion

So the anger is a side effect of caring.

But that is a guess. I'd have to look at the study and I would flip directly to the page where they reveal the effect size and the significance first. That's what they should report.

<comment><USER17> You don't have to prove the study wrong, you just have to be cognizant of this:

THESE ARE ALL JUST NARRATIVES.

Sure, they found some studies on the subject of anger and creativity. Does this mean that "bad-tempered people earn more and live longer"? Fuck, no.

First of all, this was never what was being studied. Second of all, what the hell is "bad-tempered"?

It's all "just a guess". The act of going from observation (the behavior of a bunch of students in a study) to the abstraction (anger helps you live longer) is necessarily an act of intuition. You can accept it or not, as you like. If you decide the evidence is compelling, go for it - live your life by swearing at people.

But you're just as free to say, "This evidence is bullshit, and it's a great stretch to say that it has general implications about the impacts of anger- management on health and success." There is no one to tell you otherwise.

The unfortunate problem with this, and other articles in this vein, is the pretense that we have arrived at some idea of the "truth" based on "evidence", as if either of these things existed, and we should all start living on the basis of this paradigm. There is only ever observation (itself a fraught enterprise) and subjective interpretation.

<comment><USER18> > _THESE ARE ALL JUST NARRATIVES._

> _the pretense that we have arrived at some idea of the "truth" based on > "evidence", as if either of these things existed, and we should all start > living on the basis of this paradigm. There is only ever observation (itself > a fraught enterprise) and subjective interpretation_

Perhaps a bit tangential, or perhaps not, but anyway - that comment was very strongly postmodern.

<comment><USER17> I've been reading Feyerband (Against Method), Latour (We Have Never Been Modern), and Foucault (The Order of Things) lately, I am so hopped up on postmodern criticism of science it isn't even funny.

Also, invaluable in being an excellent scientist. Understanding the epistemology is great for destroying your illusions about what you are producing and clearing the way for useful effort.

<comment><USER18> > _I am so hopped up on postmodern criticism of science it isn 't even funny._

I can tell. :)

I'm not being ironic, because I agree with:

> _invaluable in being an excellent scientist_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the 2009 study in the article:

"Half the students were asked to recall something which had irritated them and write a short essay about it. The other half of the group were made to feel sad."

So the "better" performing group was angry and did something about it. While the control group was made to feel _sad_. Not neutral. Not happy. Not optimistic. Hm.

</comment><comment><USER20> Optimism means you assume a good outcome. Pessimism means you generally perceive risk as more likely. Anger is a reaction to a potential threat; you already see risk and think you can change it. Happiness is a state of contentment.

So.... Yeah, if you're happy, you generally perceive low risk and don't see a need to be defensive or change anything. But we don't live in the jungle. We don't have to be constantly on guard, because we are on top of the food chain, and generally speaking we don't need to compete to survive or even thrive.

So the premise that being angry will make you live longer is at best misguided. If anything, being angry will more likely help you assume a defensive posture; not many people want to attack someone who looks like they will attack back. But again, this assumes your livelihood depends on fending off attacks, or beating other people. Not all people live those kind of lives.

Finally, things like heart attack are probably more related to genetics and diet than how angry you are. But being angry also clouds your judgment, meaning you're less likely to take advice, like your doctor telling you to lay off the doughnuts and red meat.

</comment><comment><USER21> "They don't really live longer... it just feels like it."

\-- Apologies to Sir Clement Raphael Freud.

</comment><comment><USER22> People who read comments before they click on the link are less frustrated and thus live longer*

*study sample size: 1, preliminary results

</comment><comment><USER23> Or, perhaps people become more bad-tempered as they age. The OP assumes that there are good-tempered and bad-tempered people and that we remain in our respective categories throughout out lives. That's plain wrong.

Money changes people. Getting old changes people. With age and money can come paranoia. Having a pile of cash can make you look at those without as potential enemies. In much the same way, the reduced mental and physical abilities of age can make old people fearful of the young and better-abled.

I'd say that long-term studies are needed that track angry people over decades, but that too is premised on the concept that angry people remain angry. Imho temper is a function of life circumstance, not vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER24> The article is a hodgepodge of anecdotes. Does not make an effort to attach some science to it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Off on a tangent, I find myself wondering if I'd have a higher opinion of Hugh Grant's acting if he did roles closer to his real mood. He needs to consider following in the footsteps of another Hugh: Lawrie as Dr. House.

</comment><comment><USER26> this basically contradicts to many other studies about the mind-body connections, such as hapiness-immunity connections.

that 2010 study of patients of CAD and their follow-ups of 5-10 years of 'angry' levels is kind of flawed as what should actually be studied should be the "anger" levels as the causal effects of the CAD 5-10 years _prior_ to the onset of CAD. it's more likely beyond certain points of the progression of CAD the change of mood does not mean anything to the prognosis.

</comment><comment><USER27> But... are they happier?

<comment><USER27> and hopefully the converse is not true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wouldn't bad tempered people have bad heart rates and stressful lives?

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe, but they have lower karma on Hacker News.

<comment><USER30> Interesting observation, do you have a source for that?

<comment><USER29> Well, just anecdotally, blunt or angry contrarian responses seem to be downvoted in most online communities.

<comment> et-al The key there is "contrarian".

If I posted an angry, but seemingly well-supported rant _aligned_ with the sentiment of a particular group, people will probably upvote/reblog it (see: Trump).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anecdote: "This is a recorded "interactive" message."

"O.K. The others are gone übermorgen and, I told it before, that we have our own problems. We have fooled ourself the whole time - to... _Alas!_ I think ye understand.

But at least i want to give you one pointer:

Mass as a description can be "trained"

around information-points of a reality.

(2nd "Art"-Law) ^^

</comment><comment><USER32> Does this mean many more years of Donald Trump?</comment>


If you're not going to become a professor, then why bother pursuing a Ph.D.? - <AUTHOR> http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir-epilogue.htm

<comment><USER3> "my six years of Ph.D. training have made me wiser, savvier, grittier, and more steely, focused, creative, eloquent, perceptive, and professionally effective than I was as a fresh college graduate"

This statement is essentially a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Anything that _didn't_ leave you wiser after six years would be a pretty terrible way to spend time. Heck, simply being alive for six years probably makes you somewhat wiser.

<comment><USER4> yikes -- i never meant for anyone to read the epilogue without context (or see it posted standalone to HN). the rest of the book talks about how i cultivated all of those traits throughout the past six years.

also, that's sort of why i had the parenthetical following that statement ...

(Two obvious caveats: Not every Ph.D. student received these benefits—many grew jaded and burned-out from their struggles. Also, lots of people cultivate these positive traits without going through a Ph.D. program.)

<comment><USER5> I gained all of these above qualities by working for 6 years, becoming jaded and burnt out, leaving the PhD program, and then finally repurposing myself. Other than the projects you specifically worked on and the papers you published what can you say the greatest advantage over someone in my situation would be?

I understand the grind as a tool for personal sharpening better than a successful graduate would because it is all I have to take from the experience - no plaudits, no social or familial approval, no resume bullet (rather more like a gaping resume maw, depending upon the attitude of the person reading it).

<comment><USER6> _"What can you say the greatest advantage over someone in my situation would be?"_

I can't speak directly for pgbovine, but I had a similar experience as in his book (finished fall 2011). I also can't compare to your situation since I don't know you. But I share pgbovine's sentiment: The PhD wasn't necessarily fun, but it was personally fulfilling. It also left me with a deep sense of accomplishment and appreciation for "just how far the rabbit hole goes." I often describe research as: 80% banging head against a wall, 10% cursing, 10% progress.

Some of my recent work is more akin to "engineering consulting." I've found this job to be vastly different from research -- implementing solutions that are mostly-known rather than exploring uncharted territory. It's probably closer to 30% banging head on a wall and 70% progress, without any cursing (and saner hours with better pay). YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> wow didn't expect to see this on here, especially with that particular post title!

just to provide some context, this page is the epilogue of a ~100-page memoir of my Ph.D. experiences [1], so parts of it might not make any sense as a standalone article.

[1] <http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm>

<comment><USER7> This is less related to the current thread but along the book you have not mentioned any deep social relations created during those years. Was that intentionally dropped or there were none because of the load? do you have any recommendations on the subject?

<comment><USER4> great question -- i should add a book FAQ soon. yes, i focused the book exclusively on research and not on my personal life. (also note that i didn't talk about classes, teaching, qualifying exams, or other non-research things)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, I have a Ph.D. and I always ask myself why I got it, because now I just build websites.

Basically, what I feel like I got most out of it, was that it was a good life, that I ended up really enjoying. I did theory and I felt like my professors let us kind-of do whatever we want. We got paid enough money to live and I had a lot of time to enjoy my hobbies. I learned to play tennis and surf (I went to school in LA). But I would figure things out and work when I was inspired.

That is pretty much how I live now and it is still great!

<comment><USER9> Heh ... I have one too. I spent pretty much all my time trying to graduate. With the exception of my first year ... now that was fun!

Some days I feel a bit demented. I was certainly sharpened but the experience feels a bit like opening Pandora's box. Anyone else feel like that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"Defaults aren't usually in the best interests of those on the bottom (e.g., Ph.D. students), so it's important to know when to reject them and to ask for something different. Of course, there's no nefarious conspiracy against students; the defaults are just naturally set up to benefit those in power."_

That is very reminiscent of Nietzsche.

Also worth reading, when it comes to the question of to do or to not to do a PhD is: <http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

<comment><USER11> That Greenspun essay makes me angry every time I read it. The kind of clubhouse mentality of "we don't invite girls to our club because they wouldn't be stupid enough to join our dumb club anyway" is nothing but thinly veiled paternalism. He makes a good point about pay, but the way he frames it as a paternalistic pat on the head to women is insulting, at best.

<comment><USER12> You should rebut Greenspun's arguments, not slander him by words in quotes and pretending they paraphrase what he wrote.

How is this paternalistic or uninviting to women?

> A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as > become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and > keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American > Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be > surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads > against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year > post-doc job?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In most (all?) science fields, without a PhD you're stuck pretty close to the bottom. Its impossible to be anything much above lab tech/lab manager without a PhD in biological sciences. Some people want to work in the private sector for pharma companies for example...

<comment><USER14> You can just go off and do some damn good scientific work and then publish. You don't really need permission to do science, if what you are doing is good work. The college environment just gives you time and space and environment in which to do that and a social cover for your interests. The only major downside to just looking into things in your own time is that many people seem to find it an extremely odd thing for someone to do, unless they are doing it within the confines of a suitably sanctioned institution.

<comment><USER15> Well, you do have the problem in most science fields (except the theoretical sciences) where it costs a lot of money to run experiments, so it's not just something you can do in your kitchen.

<comment><USER16> > Well, you do have the problem in most science fields (except the theoretical > sciences) where it costs a lot of money to run experiments, so it's not just > something you can do in your kitchen.

Are you certain? See <http://openwetware.org/wiki/DIYbio/FAQ/News>

<comment><USER17> This is very cool. I love to see the general trend of bigger and more expensive science being bucked here.

In general, though, we're still chasing the long tail of knowledge. Nobody's going to build a cutting-edge particle collider, space probe, or Inca ruin in their spare time.

Arguably microbiology is a lot more like computer science than other experimental sciences economically, at least in certain respects; for example, once you've got something interesting, you can probably execute a fairly cheap reproductive process and get a whole bunch more of it. (Well, this is cheap compared to reproducing a particle collider, at least.)

Fun to think about.

<comment><USER15> That's true, but when you start talking about reproduceable science instead of just tinkering, you need to be very careful about contamination, repeatability, etc. This is very difficult to achieve without expensive lab equipment (although part of that expense is due to economies of scale - <USER2> everyone started buying centrifuges and gram scales, maybe they wouldn't cost thousands of dollars).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a PhD, and left grad school directly after graduating because I had no real interest in pursuing a career in either research or teaching. I also joined an industry that is only peripherally related to the field I studied, and don't use much of the knowledge I gained on a day-to-day basis. However, I don't regret doing the PhD, and would recommend a similar path to people in the same position as me.

Like the author, I learned a great deal during the years of my (European- style, not American-style) program. I learned how to explain complex ideas to experts and laymen alike. I learned how to present data to make a compelling argument, both in text and in graphics. I learned how to read complex technical writing and extract the author's point. I learned how to ask a series of questions that got to the core of a complex matter. There are all soft skills - but I have found that the complement the set of skills that I got from the subsequent years in industry very well.

I also had three years to meet and talk to some extremely smart people, which has helped me in several big ways and many small ways in the years since I graduated. Maybe the biggest reason I don't regret doing a PhD was that I got to spend two years gratifying my intellectual curiosity about a topic that I was really interested in. Few people get such an opportunity, and for those who enjoy that kind of thing it's an opportunity not to be missed.

<comment><USER18> It took you only two years to get your PhD?! I thought the average duration is around 4-6 years. Congrats!

<comment><USER19> It's not too uncommon, I think, that the first two years of a PhD program award you a masters and then another two years (on average) to get your PhD.

IIRC, there are a few types of Masters like an MPhil which are pretty much labels that you were in a PhD program but didn't finish your PhD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article is long and makes a lot of good points about things that you can gain from receiving doctorate. It sort of obscures one point that I think is the most important thing.

You learn an incredible amount about what you're studying and what you're interested in, and an academic environment is where some people learn best.

<comment><USER21> Regarding your last comment, "an academic environment is where some people learn best", I would put forth that an academic environment is useful for _all_ people.

There are very few environments in the world that give you the kind of access to information that an academic environment gives you. Being a graduate student at a major university gives you access to nearly every journal article in the world, numerous domain experts, and advanced labs for the physical sciences. There are few to no industry jobs that provide this level of information access to someone right out of undergrad.

That said, graduate school is not for everyone. If your goal is to learn, and learn how to learn, then graduate school might be for you. If your goal is to make money, or learn enough to make money or produce popular apps, then graduate school may not be appropriate.

It's also the case that for some areas, like computer science, there is an increasing amount of free resources that one can make use of outside of graduate school. Many journal articles are free, and one can always buy and read through textbooks outside of school.

<comment><USER22> On the latter point, many public university libraries also allow anyone to come in and read books, download journal articles, sometimes even ILL.

The main question in CS, imo, outside of certain capital-intensive areas (robotics, HPC), is learning styles. Do you learn better taking formal courses, having a supervisor oversee your project, having formal evaluation milestones (quals, proposal, thesis, defense)? Some people do, some don't.

I do think the process of doing research and thinking of your goal in terms of "research contribution" rather than "product" is valuable for many intelligent/curious people. I'm less sure (despite being an academic myself) that the formal academia route is the best way for everyone, though. Imo the most valuable part of academia is the interaction with a research community in an area that interests you: work on a project, collaborate with some people, submit papers to conferences, get reviewer feedback, revise things, present papers, chat at the conference banquet, get inspired with new problems or ideas, etc., etc. You don't strictly have to be an academic to do any of that, especially in CS, although a large proportion of people who do are. Some of it is just culture I think: I think a lot of people outside academia who could submit interesting conference papers just don't even have that possibility on their horizon as something they could do, or would want to do.

<comment><USER21> These are all good points that I generally agree with. It is also the case, however, that experiences do vary. For example, my supervisor was hands off to the point where I had to largely fend for myself. The quals and proposals were more things that got in the way of research rather than helped. This was the case so much that I ended up doing my proposals long after research was underway.

The thesis and defence is useful in the same way that publications are. However, even there, if you get a bad committee with political or personal axes to grind, it can be very much not that helpful. My experiences with publications are the same. I've had good rejections that help me improve the work as well as several bad rejections (from conferences where you cannot respond) where the reviewer simply did not understand the research.

In short, for some people a PhD is very hands on rather than overly formal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Imagine how disconcerting it would be if medical or law school graduates > couldn't get jobs as doctors or lawyers, respectively.

The latter happens.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/grace-nasri/law-schools- feel-t...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/grace-nasri/law-schools-feel-the- heat_b_1297823.html)

I'm not sure about the US but the former happens in the UK:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9274753/Up- to-1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9274753/Up-to-1000-new- doctors-could-face-unemployment.html)

Perhaps not to the same extent, though.

<comment><USER24> In fact it's become quite difficult to land a job as a recent law graduate if you didn't go to a first-tier school, at least in the U.S.

There's a huge glut of unemployed lawyers, most of whom racked up a lot of debt getting their degrees.

<comment><USER25> Yep, and many of the schools provide horribly misleading statistics about their graduates' careers.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?pagewa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?pagewanted=all)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I got my PhD in English so when there's an emergency and someone yells: "Is anyone a doctor!?!?!" I can reply: "I am!" And then I start reciting one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. (Bonus points for anyone who can guess which one.)

<comment><USER27> Batter my heart, three-person'd God?

<comment><USER26> Solid guess... but the answers the judges were looking for were either "What is Holy Sonnet X?" or "What is Death Be Not Proud?"

But I'll give the points anyway for bothering to answer.

<comment><USER27> Gargh. That was my first guess and then I changed it.

(They are the only two I've heard of.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Environment. Working to contribute to human knowledge in a place focused on research first, commercialization second sounds very rewarding and effective.

<comment><USER29> This is true to some extent; unfortunately in many cases the focus is on career advancement before contribution to human knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think that spending 4-6 years doing research in an area you love is something anyone would be interested in. In addition, going into it with the decision that you don't want to have a career in academia would free you up from much (though of course not all) of the "game." The OP echoed this sentiment in the memoir. You can go to conferences without worrying about proper "networking" and just talk to people. You can focus on research that interests you even if it's not a "hot" or "prestigious" field among academics, as long as your results are publishable. You still have to bend to the system in some regards if you want to graduate, but I think not having to worry about securing a professorship would really take a lot of the weight off. In fact, I would consider doing a PhD under these conditions :)

</comment><comment><USER31> Also, if you're planning to work in research, then having a doctorate is a plus in grant applications.

</comment><comment><USER32> Professorship is a position in academic organizations. The declared reason of Ph.D is to become a scientist, to learn and prepare to be a researcher. After you're a researcher, it is not necessary to get involved in other parts (and bureaucracy) of academic life.

</comment><comment><USER33> I hugely enjoyed the full memoirs but there is one conclusion which I strongly disagree with. "Outputs trump inputs", the frantic scramble to do something. I spent the first three years of grad school reading and talking to people. Then I wroteone good paper which made my name. And when you have a name things are easy.

I was certainly very lucky, but fully and deeply understanding my field helped me do research which was considered by others interesting.

<comment><USER4> great insight!!! perhaps i should've added more clarification in that section. i guess the way i worked best was to learn by producing; i wouldn't have had the patience to do what you did (consuming deeply for three years -> producing one great work). instead, i learned a great deal by producing a series of failed and semi-failed projects, and eventually what i produced got reasonably good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> A: To have something to lord over the other baristas.

</comment><comment><USER35> because I need financial support for my education. it's difficult for a master degree to apply for TA and RA positions.

</comment><comment><USER36> Um, because, knowledge?

<comment><USER37> I agree, why not do it "just because"?

<comment><USER38> 'just because' doesn't seem like sufficient justification for spending 4-6 years working crazy hours for scant pay. It's a big sacrifice, so as other have alluded to it is important to think hard about your reasons for getting into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Hubris, mostly.

</comment><comment><USER40> Yes, Ph.D. students can suffer. I got a Ph.D. in some applied math in engineering, didn't suffer very much, saw some terrible suffering by others, and can offer my brief advice here.

For the question "why bother pursuing a Ph.D.", I never had any desire for an academic career but got a Ph.D. to learn material I believed would help my career in business, the money making kind. The program did teach me some powerful material and gave me some good practice in doing original work.

I've published in artificial intelligence, computer science, and applied math of engineering.

Currently I'm working on the making money part. Some of what I learned in my Ph.D. program -- both some powerful material and how to do original work -- is crucial to the crucial core 'secret sauce' of my business work.

Scope. I restrict my comments here to technical fields, e.g., applied math, engineering, computer science, applied physics. I can't comment on biomedical fields.

For how I got a Ph.D. without undue "suffering", broadly at US research universities in technical fields, the main requirement for a Ph.D. is enough 'research'; in case of any doubt, one way to 'prove' that your work is 'research' is to publish it in a peer-reviewed journal (or conference proceeding); the usual criteria for publication are "new, correct, and significant". It also helps if the work is novel and, for work in engineering (and computer science, here and below), useful. It also helps to write and present the information clearly, at least in part (snow jobs can be useful in places).

My suggestion for research in engineering is to (1) accumulate some background knowledge in some tools that can help in the research, (2) pick a good problem, (3) have some bright ideas, (4) execute and graduate.

For more:

(1) Tools. A common recommendation in research (in technical fields) is to 'mathematize'. So the most valuable tools can be some useful math. I recommend undergraduate abstract algebra, linear algebra, analysis, and optimization. For graduate math, I recommend measure theory, functional analysis, ordinary differential equations, probability (based on measure theory), stochastic processes, mathematical statistics, and control theory. More is welcome in, say, mathematical physics.

(2) Problem. I suggest for a problem, try to pick one so that the solution you find will likely be seen by academics as useful outside academics. A big part of success in research is problem selection. I picked my own problem and declined ones suggested by faculty; I did like my problem better. If only since the person who cares the most about your problem and Ph.D. is you, for the sake of a good problem I suggest you at least try to pick your own problem. Then, in picking a problem, look and think carefully and critically; since that problem is like a horse you have to ride across the finish line, pick carefully.

Next, with your problem in hand, I suggest you do the main original research independently, that is, without faculty supervision.

So, keep your problem and work secret. Wait to tell others until you have the main research nicely done and the time is right for you explain to others.

Reason for the independence and secrecy: You get to do your work without interference or 'helpful suggestions' from others. Others can't 'share' or steal your work. You get to hit bumps in the road, backtrack, make mistakes, change your mind, have some better ideas, modify your problem, select what to include or exclude, etc. without opening yourself to criticism from others.

If some faculty start to be too critical, then one solution is for you just to publish what you have.

(3) Bright Ideas. Put your feet up, pop open a cold can of, perhaps, caffeinated soda, review your math tools, review what is known about your problem area, review your specific problem, and then start thinking.

Here is my non-standard suggestion for how to do much of the crucial thinking: Do a lot of the thinking with just rough conceptual, heavily intuitive models about how your subject works and what is likely true or false. Use at least some simple facts, scenarios, etc. to test your models. E.g., think, "If this is true, then likely that is true, and we can see from some simple cases that that is not true." Or, "This looks like wild stuff, but maybe it's true, and is there any solid reason to believe it's not true?".

Be quite willing, for maybe a few days, to consider some far out, radical, seemingly impossible results, and then evaluate them as above.

Commonly play two separate roles, (A) dream up wild conjectures and (B) (somewhat constructively) critique the conjectures.

Likely do most of this work just between your ears. It's better to identify the main ideas between your ears than just to push symbols around on paper (or a computer screen) without some clarifying ideas for why the symbol pushing is promising.

Here's one trick: When you see something that works, maybe not even original, take it apart into tiny pieces, accepting nothing as 'obvious', and see solid theorems and proofs for every little step. Then formalize and generalize. E.g., even if the case in R^1 is 'obvious', it may be that there is so far no good R^n version but your breaking apart into little pieces shows you how to do a good R^n version.

When you have something worth writing down, do so. When you have something that looks like it can be solid, write out what you have carefully, likely as theorems and proofs.

I do my more mathematical writing by typing Plain TeX into my favorite text editor.

It's fun!

For a nervous, straight-A student, OCD, over achiever terrified of their own shadow and any possible chance of criticism (not me, but I've seen such people), relax, work quietly out of the view of others, and show colleagues and/or profs only final, solid results, maybe already published.

Q. Why pick a problem that academics will believe is useful outside of academics?

A. Because such a problem helps set aside that you are trying for academic, pure as the driven snow, glory, and that lowers some standards and reduces chances of jealously and criticism. You will be answering the common complaint that academics is useless and have a fairly strong additional reason for the work to be regarded as "significant". Also since you may be solving a practical problem, if you pick a recent problem from practice, then likely there is so far no clean solution for that problem published in academics; so your solution can be seen as both "new" and "significant".

Q. Why present work as theorems and proofs?

A. Because 'mathematizing' a field is highly respected, and it's super tough to argue with a carefully done proof. If you learn how to write proofs from Birkhoff, Halmos, Rudin, Coddington, Bourbaki, von Neumann, Breiman, Dynkin, etc., then that part of your work, heavily both in practice and in principle, will be immune to serious criticism. The proofs in parts of computer science can be okay but generally are a long way downhill from proofs from the names I mentioned. Actually, only a little of computer science is good at 'mathematizing' their field, and the flip side of this situation can be an opportunity for you. With solid theorems and proofs, it's easier for your work to meet the criterion of "correct".

For getting research grants, that's asking for money. Generally it's easier just to make the money in business.

For getting a good academic career, in practice the main technique is politics. The main substantive technique is to become well known for doing some research that is regarded as especially good. Then you can get a 'bidding war' going on for your services from universities that want well known, highly regarded faculty.

For business, say, an Internet based 'information technology' startup, pick a problem where a much better solution will be very valuable and where you have a good shot at doing some original research to get some 'secret sauce' for such a solution. The solution can be "very valuable" from, say, a little money from many sources or a lot of money from a few sources. Then do the original research and implement it in software. For protection of your intellectual property, keep your software locked up inside your servers, and don't let users know what's going on behind the curtain.

Go live, get users and, hopefully, revenue, i.e., 'traction'. Grow. Smile on your way to the bank.

In academics, commonly you can get some competent peer-review of your original, technical work, but in business mostly you can't. Instead, it is as if business believed in a Markov assumption: The core 'secret sauce' and the future value of the business are conditionally independent given the current level of traction. That is, the business world wants to evaluate projects much as in accounting where for a startup they may be willing to use surrogate measures such a traction. For the secret sauce, the business world has little desire or ability to evaluate that, and the flip side of this situation can be an opportunity for you.</comment>


Submit your web form with out form back end(PHP or JavaScript) - <AUTHOR> https://formsubmit.co <comment><USER2> History repeats itself: That's how we did it in 1999, except it was a perl script (mailer) in a cgi-bin/ directory.</comment>


Why was Scala designed to have var/val/def for variable annotations? - <AUTHOR>

Can someone explain to me why Scala was designed to have var/val/def for variable annotations? All of the following are valid ways to declare a variable:
def a = 1
val b = 1
var c = 1
I know the difference between them. But why was it designed that way? Is it really necessary to have this type of confusion?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4437373/use-of-def-val-and-var-in-scala <comment><USER2> Presumably it was designed that way because scala is designed to be a functional programming language, motivating a concise syntax for function definition (def), that favors immutable variables (val), but supports mutable state where it simplifies expression and to ease transition of, e.g., Java programmers (var).

> Is it really necessary to have this type of confusion?

For Scala's goals, all of those serve distinct and important purposes. I mean, sure, you could have less concise forms that made things more explicit to people who've never used scala, like:

      declare a as method returning 1
      declare b as fixed value of 1
      declare c as mutable variable initialized with value of 1

But, I mean, think of the keystrokes!

It is something to learn, but it is a fairly straightforward distinction, and it lets Scala express a lot cleanly and concisely.</comment>


Small talk should be banned - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/banning-small-talk <comment><USER2> Oh, THAT smalltalk. Lame. :/</comment>


Biggest drop in US fertility rate in recent history - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/americans-aren-t-making-enough-babies-replace-ourselves-n956931 <comment><USER2> The sad reality is that its the poorest and most irresponsible that are having kids. Its the most educated that aren't.

I was recently in India and my driver was my age (under 30) with 3 kids already. He told me his kids' favorite thing is a bucket KFC which costs his entire day's wages.

This kind of reversal is happening everywhere. No surprise that while US, Japan, China and Europe having shrinking native populations, Africa is expected to go from 1 to 4 billion people this century.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is terrible news and shows what I think a lot of folks already knew. Falling birthrates are generally terrible for both the economy and society as a while.

An aside: In my social circle I know dozens of older millennial couples who would love to have children however due to massive student loan debts & high rent/mortgage payments the concept is simply unaffordable.

The student loan crisis is going to result in a "lost generation."

<comment><USER4> The solution, for your friends and for the economy, is more immigration. If the USA could some how get itself 5 million immigrants a year (an ambitious target) then the economy would grow so fast that your friends, lifted by the overall economy, should have an easier time paying off their debts. And also, higher levels of immigration would help the USA avoid any of the negative effects of falling fertility. All 4 of my grandparents came to the USA at a time when the USA still had open borders and I'd like to think that they and my parents made a positive contribution.

<comment><USER5> > when the USA still had open borders

Even under Trump, US borders are more open than ever, so the past tense is unwarranted. Sources:

[https://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/06/us/immigration- statistics...](https://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/06/us/immigration-statistics- fast-facts/index.html)

[https://cis.org/Report/US-Immigrant-Population-Hit- Record-43...](https://cis.org/Report/US-Immigrant-Population-Hit- Record-437-Million-2016)

<comment><USER4> Did you read the article you linked to? The sub title includes "Overall growth slowed". And anyway it's talking about the total immigrant population that's built up over several decades, and even if that wasn't an issue, it's talking about absolute numbers rather than percentages of the population. As a percent of the population, immigration to the USA peaked in the early 20th century, which is when my 4 grandparents arrived. Immigration to the USA, nowadays, is just a small trickle, compared to what it used to be.

<comment><USER5> From the chart in my second link, 2016 immigrant population (good proxy for yearly immigration) was 13.5%. The highest it has been since 1900 is 14.7%. How is that a trickle?

For comparison, in 2010, China's population was 0.04% immigrant - 300-times less, per capita, than the US!

Edit: More international comparison: in 2015, India's population was 0.5% immigrant, Japan's 1.9%, Brazil's 0.9%, South Korea's 2.9%, Mexico's 0.9%, and Turkey's was 3.8%.

<comment><USER4> So, according to your own numbers, the peak was 119 years ago. So your own numbers demonstrate why you were wrong when you wrote " _Even under Trump, US borders are more open than ever_ "

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great news- having fewer children is one of the best ways we can decrease our impact on the environment. Additionally, with the expected declines in quality of life over this century due to climate change it only seems right to have fewer children as they will likely suffer due to the widespread famine and water crises that are expected, especially as the American bread basket turns into a desert.

</comment><comment><USER7> \- It's too expensive; health care, child care, education, and housing costs are too high.

\- Relationships at this point in time in the US are more volatile and disposable than they have ever been.

\- No one wants to pay child support for years if a relationship doesn't work out.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe more people are realizing that not having children offers an equally valid life experience? I chose not to have children since I'd rather spend what time I have in life concentrating on me and my wife's happiness, not a child that didn't choose to be brought into an uncertain world. The financial benefits are obvious as well, despite the government subsidies on having a child that I miss out on (and pay for).

<comment><USER9> >>>a child that didn't choose to be brought into an uncertain world

why so negative? If ever there was a time to have children it's now, and it's only going to get better. Don't plan your life around the highly improbable and unlikely negative events in life. Of all the children born in the history of the world none have it so good as those born today.

<comment><USER6> But this is the peak- climate change will only shrink our economy and our living standards from here on out. Why bring a child into the world that will never be able to achieve the same quality of life that we enjoy today? A child born today will turn 21 right around the time the IPCC expects the climate crisis to be ramping up, and they are historically conservative: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate- repo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate- report-2040.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like that this article was normative (didn't veer off into cheering or bemoaning the data).

As it happens I consider this good news.

</comment><comment><USER11> Completely unrelated: Real wages falling in 2018: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feeling-poorer-thats-because- re...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feeling-poorer-thats-because-real-wages- fell-last-year/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, do your duty. No excuses! My 12th is due at the beginning of summer.

If you are a capable software developer or better, you can afford this. It only takes one income of that type. You might need to trim back your expenses, but you can definitely support a dozen kids.

<comment><USER2> underrated comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I suspect the two biggest factors here are distributional aspects of the economy and the opioid epidemic (the latter of which has already been established to be driving the recent drop in life expectancy and skyrocketing suicide rate.)

On its own, the drop in fertility isn't directly worrying (if I'm right about it's causes, _they_ are, though), but it does make it a particularly bad time to be making an anti-inflammatory drive; the economic consequences of an aging society are something you should want to mitigate.

</comment><comment><USER14> "The rent is too damn high."</comment>


CCRM partners with GE Healthcare to manufacture therapeutic stem cells - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/trudeau-mars-1.3401542 <comment><AUTHOR> The announcement is live now. The Centre for the Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine ([http://ccrm.ca/](http://ccrm.ca/)) is within the MaRS Discovery District.

[https://twitter.com/MaRSDD/status/687290609044856832](https://twitter.com/MaRSDD/status/687290609044856832)</comment>


PDP-11 Instructional Tape (1977) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kz0i3ANHZY <comment><USER2> The DEC system handbooks, which they gave out for free, were incredibly thorough and informative. Here's a link to the PDP-11 ones on Bitsavers:

[http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp11/handbooks/](http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp11/handbooks/)

It's harder nowdays to get your hands on a LSI-based PDP-11 system than it was in say, 2000 or so - but simh lets you emulate just about anything you might want, with less space and power usage.

Here's the student workbook to go along with the video:

[http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp11/Introductio...](http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp11/Introduction_to_the_PDP-11_Student_Workbook_Apr77/)

I kick myself every now and then for getting rid of the garage full of PDP and VAX stuff when I moved from Austin to Houston twelve years ago.

<comment><USER3> Anyone seen the Digital Networking Product catalogues from the late 80's. With thin Ethernet and DELNIs and DECSTAs the in thing and lots of solution drawings using cool graphic icons, it made it all look like Knex. Would love to see them again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How many PDPs are out there, still yet to be retired? Is there still hope for crazy hobbyists to get their hands on one?

<comment><USER5> There was one on eBay a couple years ago, "only" $5k. They're definitely out there! I hope when you _do_ get your crazy hobbyist hands on one that you document the shit out of every interaction you have with it.

<comment><USER4> I'm attempting to acquire one now because I'm starting a retro computing club at my college. I want to get my hands on it so me, and a group of about 12 other college students, can fix it up and keep it running for as long as the college is alive. Since the college is a state funded college that will likely be for quite some time.

If I were to ever find a PDP I'd ask the person to donate it to me and I'd donate it to my club with the stipulation that I'm allowed access to it even after I graduate. If that didn't work out then, hell, I'd still take the PDP if it was only for a few years.

My club's constitution has been approved, it's being voted into club-hood (or whatever) in a few weeks. It's called Ar.C.S. or the Archaeological Computation Society. This is a play on a A.R.C.S. which stands for Academic Research Computing Services. This is a department of my university that manages all of our super computing power. They run our cluster called Kong.

ARCS maintains the super computers, ArCS maintains the not-so-super computers.

So far we have an...

         1. Compaq III clone (i486, 200MB drive, Debian 1.1, DOA & fixed by me)
         2. Timex Sinclair 1000/ZX80 \w cassette player (untested)
         3. Commodore 64, NIB (will be donated by my coworker during the semester)
         4. IBM PCjr (will be donated by another coworker when he finds it in his attic)

If I got a PDP my goals would be....

        1. Get it working
        2. Get a VT100, CR11 (punchards), LA36 (dot-matrix), RX01 (8" floppy), and a RL02K (swapable HDD)
        3. Get SVR1 installed on it
        4. Get other CS majors to help me write our own operating system on it (optional)
        5. Bell Labs Day. Suits, thick glasses, etc. Most of my profs are ex-bell so they'd get a kick out of this.
        6. I'm a ham radio operator so allow Radio TeleTYpe  (RTTY) for login.

A lot needs to happen before any of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the "basic computer elements" middle school science fair style construction paper visuals.

<comment><USER7> Quite adequate I thought. Who needs powerpoint.

<comment><USER8> Especially considering that the person watching the tape probably didn't have a computer with a color display handy.

To view a PowerPoint, you would need some kind of digital equipment to run it on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been hoping to find a PDP-11 for my basement ever since I moved to Maynard, MA (where DEC's headquarters used to be). Does anyone know if any being given away in the Boston area?

Have they all been chopped up and sold as replacement parts to military contractors?

</comment><comment><USER10> I once found a book called "Machine and Assembly Language Programming of the PDP-11" in our university library. It is very old and was published in the 1980s. It includes some interesting knowledge about two pass assembler, relocation and two pass linker.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you liked this, try the IBM 1401 manual set to music: [https://youtu.be/tUkgJWxCyR0](https://youtu.be/tUkgJWxCyR0)

<comment><USER12> Oh no, regional restrictions! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiUtRnG- bg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiUtRnG-bg) worked, however.

But where can I find the rest of that PDP-11 soundtrack? For those late night hAx0ring sessions [https://ap.mnocdn.no/images/401c1688-08aa-4414-ae46-d0fd12ce...](https://ap.mnocdn.no/images/401c1688-08aa-4414-ae46-d0fd12cef9a7?fit=crop&h=551&q=80&w=980) =P

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can almost swear that sounds like Leslie Nielsen narrating this instructional film. I wonder if this was one of his early "documentary" gigs?

</comment><comment><USER14> Ah memories! What a great machine!

<comment><USER15> 2nd that! First machine I learned assembler on was a 11/45, still remember toggling in a bootloader to load RSTS/E from the RK05-disk :-)

<comment><USER16> 3rd that! Only assembly language I ever enjoyed. So uniform, it just made sense. You could look at it and guess what those instructions were doing and you'd probably be right.

And the instructions in octal actually made sense as well, they were laid out such you could follow an octal dump. Well, my TA for that course, Ken Witte, could. I have memories of him coming over for a beer and reading my octal core dump and pointing to the string of numbers and saying "right here is where you went wrong". Smart dude, I never got that good, I could puzzle through the dumps but it was work; he could read them like assembler.

I believe that only worked because DEC laid out the instructions, the numbers themselves, in a uniform way. Not positive but I think they used 3 octal digits and the middle one was like load or store and the leading/trailing ones modified how/what was being loaded/stored. I'd have to go look it up to be sure, but there was something like that, might be different than I said it, but it was laid out in a sensible way in the actual numbers so you could read them easier.

Really fun machine. I think the only 32 bit machine that came close was Nationals 32032 but they never seemed to be able to produce a bug free chip. Too bad, that one was pleasant too.</comment></comment></comment>


Google faces $5B lawsuit in U.S. for tracking 'private' internet use - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-privacy-lawsuit/google-faces-5-billion-lawsuit-in-us-for-tracking-private-internet-use-idUSKBN23933H <comment><USER2> Ambulance chasing, frivolous lawsuit. It's literally on the _very first screen_ of Private Browsing that it does not prevent websites from tracking you, and it's just about cleaning up your local history automatically.</comment>


YouTube's new Anti-harassment policy - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/12/an-update-to-our-harassment-policy.html <comment><USER2> They just want to make videos easier to monetize I think.</comment>


Branwell, the often-overlooked Brontë brother - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/26/its-time-to-bring-branwell-the-dark-bronte-into-the-light <comment><USER2> Predictable deluge of thin-skinned comments under that story in the guardian.</comment>


ChefSteps Announces Joule - <AUTHOR> https://www.chefsteps.com/joule <comment><USER2> As far as I know, this is now the 4th major brand of sous vide wand. I appreciate that sous vide is having a moment, but I really don't see that this adds anything new to the market other than a higher price and a complete lack of physical controls.

Functionally, there is almost no difference between any of the wand models on the market. I've found the features like wireless controls completely gimmicky and unnecessary. So long as the device is accurate enough and powerful enough, it will do everything you want. Grab an Anova for $100 and get started.

<comment><USER3> I agree, this cool but has been done several times already. What would be great is an inexpensive equivalent approach applied to a chamber vacuum sealer, which are still prohibitively expensive.

<comment><USER4> I find this (not used for cooking, just for storage) to be a great option [http://smile.amazon.com/Ziploc-Vacuum- Starter-3-Quart-1-Pump...](http://smile.amazon.com/Ziploc-Vacuum- Starter-3-Quart-1-Pump/dp/B003UEMFUG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448570382&sr=8-1&keywords=ziplock+sous+vide+bags)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (Full disclosure: I'm an engineer and co-founder of Pantelligent, a Y Combinator-funded company.)

For a wider view of this space:

Temperature-controlled cooking "version 1" = thermostat on an oven. (A real innovation in it's own time!)

Temperature-controlled cooking "version 2" = sous-vide. (Steady-state thermal equilibrium -- that is, waiting until temperature has equalized throughout the entire mass.)

Temperature-controlled cooking "version 3" is about going _beyond_ steady- state thermal equilibrium to controlling transient heat transfer.

That gives you the delicious repeatability of sous-vide, with the fast cooking times of non-steady-state cooking, and the controlled, desirable temperature gradients at the exterior of your food. (Note how any sous-vide recipe ends with cooking the exterior in a pan for extra deliciousness!)

We built "v3" and called it Pantelligent. Macworld just produced a video review and said, "Most importantly, the results are fantastic. I've made eggs, salmon, risotto, seared tuna, and steak using Pantelligent's recipes, and everything turned out delicious. The salmon was my favorite, since the pan's sensor made it nearly impossible for me to overcook it" [1]. TIME Magazine just called it one of the "Best Inventions of 2015" [2]. And there are plenty more press and customer reviews on our website [3].

[1] [http://www.macworld.com/article/3006950/holiday/6-chef- calib...](http://www.macworld.com/article/3006950/holiday/6-chef-caliber- cooking-gadgets-for-the-connected-kitchen.html)

[2] [http://time.com/4115398/best-inventions-2015/item/the-pan- th...](http://time.com/4115398/best-inventions-2015/item/the-pan-that-teaches- you-to-cook/)

[3] [https://www.pantelligent.com/](https://www.pantelligent.com/)

<comment><USER6> > Note how any sous-vide recipe ends with cooking the exterior in a pan for > extra deliciousness

More correctly, I'd say that many sous-vide recipes end with searing the exterior in a pan for extra deliciousness. The food is already cooked, assuming you are post-searing. This of course gives you that maillard reaction goodness.

Having said that, I took a quick look at your links. A few comments.

\- Non-stick pans aren't so non-stick after a while. How does your pan hold up?

\- Lightweight, non-stick pans are poor for searing. I'm guessing that I'd need a second pan for that? Related to this are those times you actually want those crispy burned on bits for a follow-on sauce of some kind.

<comment><USER5> Great questions!

1) Surface coating lifetime is mostly a temperature-related effect. By controlling the temperature (i.e. avoiding unintentional too-high-temp excursions), you get longer lifetime. Plus we start with a thicker/heavier cast aluminum base than you may be used to on low-end non-stick pans. This reduces hot spots and uneven thermal expansion which both contribute to relatively shorter working lifetimes of low-end cookware.

2) We get delicious browned crusts on steaks etc in roughly the 380-420 degree F surface temperature range. You get a nice controlled browned crust, rather than a fully black crust. IMHO this is way better!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The page is pretty and all, but I had to re-read some paragraphs to understand what the product is.

<comment><USER8> I agree. I was expecting a product description for the uninformed at the top... then at the bottom... then in the video. None of those did it. I'm a big fan of kitchen gadgets too. I really wanted to understand this thing without leaving the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am a big fan of ChefSteps, but this feels too little, too expensive. It is _marginally_ more powerful than the newer Anova, but lacks physical controls. It's smaller, which is cool, and the magnetic base is useful, but that does not justify the 2x~ cost over the Anova.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, the Anova's physical controls are great. It takes a little while to get my phone out and the app up and running. Whereas, when the thing is beeping at me to remove my food, it's handy to just tap a button and silence it quickly.

<comment><USER6> That and cooking is often a messy business. You don't want to be handling your phone when your hands are a mess because you are in the middle of preparing another dish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The lack of a real display on the thing would be a deal breaker for me. I like how I can see the temp on my Sansaire at a glance from across the room.

</comment><comment><USER11> Was that Gabe Newell in the white car towards the end?

<comment><USER12> Yes.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A tool to get "Deep Work" done - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mitul45/ta-calendar <comment><USER2> Why can't I just do this in my current calendar? All of them has a "time it will take" entry (to my annoyance, actually).</comment>


Arrington On Copyright: Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/05/arrington-on-copyright-wrong.html

<comment><USER2> There are quite a few huge bands these days who owe all their success to the internet and more specifically Myspace. The Artic Monkeys are the first that come to mind, but I know there are a few others I could list if I thought about it.

"Third, if the recorded music industry goes down, concert sales will not grow – they will shrink"

Also wrong and with no reasons why he believes this. The record industry and the concert promotion industry are separate yet complementary industries. The loss of the record industry will almost certainly have no huge effect on the concert industry.

I'll be honest I stopped reading at the end of that paragraph.

<comment><USER3> One other thing...

"The loss of the record industry will almost certainly have no huge effect on the concert industry."

Name a successful touring artist that has not had a successful, label based, recording career.

<comment><USER2> Correlation does not imply causation.

You're looking at it the wrong way, in the current world popular bands get signed to labels so pretty much all major touring bands will be signed to a major label. It doesn't however mean that an absence on labels will kill touring since the labels for the most part aren't into touring. It's another set of companies that handle that.

<comment><USER3> I am very familiar with how this works so I promise you I am not "looking at it the wrong way" but describing how things actually work. I am not making this up.

Labels create band demand. Concert promoters do not. I promise you this is causation and not correlation. People go see shows because they have the record and know the band. I am sure you have never gone (willingly) to see a show from a band whose music you didnt already have and/or or know pretty well. The band marketing (the label) created the market environment for you to know and like their music. People do not go see artists because they saw some add in a local paper advertising an artist. It doesnt happen. Promoters only provide awareness so that if you are a fan you will know that this band you like is in town.

<comment><USER4> Hank, I agree with you overall on this issue, and I liked your article, but your argument in this comment is terrible. You are appealing to your own authority and you're not provably right in any sense.

<comment><USER3> You are right. But sometimes authority and experience are relevant. I cant help that I really do know what I am talking about on this matter. I guess I could go out and interview some other people about how this part of the industry works so that I would be relying on someone else's authority and not mine, but we don't all have equivalent knowledge on everything. I have been involved in music for a long time and know how this part of the business works.

I am not sure how, other than expressing that, that I can explain this. This is not really a judgment issue but about explaining the dynamics of an existing market. If you would prefer to believe that I don't know what I am talking about that is fine. But at minimum I would suggest, if you are really interested in how artists today become successful that you do a little independent (and therefore not tainted by my bias) investigation from people that are really in the biz. The funny part is that there really is nothing to argue about here. No one in music will tell you that concert promoters create demand for artists. It feels a little surreal to even be arguing the point.

<comment><USER2> If you read what I said I never said concert promoters were the people that create demand, just that labels aren't the only way to create demand and the disappearance of labels will not cause the disappearance of promoters or live music either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Williams On Copyright: Wrong

First, what is with the "music goes down"-statement. Arrington just said that "a new era of free recorded music and paid live performances is a very good thing". Lots of things are free and still up and running (eg. this site, tv, radio..).

"Second, there is no evidence _at all_ that free music on the Internet is an effective". Ok, but there is. Next.

"Third, if the recorded music industry goes down, concert sales will not grow – they will shrink." There is no evidence that it would happen like this. First, marketing efforts results are usually hard to measure. Second, cleary marketing isn't the only thing, or even the most important thing on creating demand. It's the music.

If we get back to the original Youtube-Viacom case, what's the harm if you watch some clips of the Office from Youtube? It isn't like you were going to buy the dvdbox, just for watching it at work while sipping your coffee, but you might buy it afterwards, because it got your attention again.

Ok, I understand that Viacom has the copyrights, and Youtube is making money of them. This dispute, as many others, isn't about ethics, morale, downgrading our culture, terrorism or ripping of the artists. It's just about money. You can even watch South Park for free on their own site

</comment><comment><USER6> _Our visual entertainment would be confined to things like Star Wars Kid._

He forgot "Ow, My Balls", I think.

Seriously though, I think live music and recorded albums are actually disconnected and septate products. What will happen is that there will be no more soccer moms going to $100 million dollar REO Speedwagon reunion tours and instead there will be a resurgence in small venue, local music scenes."Pop" music as we know it today, when it becomes a free commodity, will be seen by most people as a product for children.

This can be good because although there will be no more "Madonnas", hundreds of smaller acts will take her place and offer much more variety. I can't wait.

</comment><comment><USER7> There was art before copyright and there will be art after it as well.

The rights afforded artists under copyright laws are not natural rights, but were created for the specific purpose. If that purpose is no longer served by these laws then they should be eliminated.

It is a federal crime now to take a camera into a movie theater. You can receive jail time for this. When will the insanity stop?

<comment><USER3> "The rights afforded artists under copyright laws are not natural rights"

There are no such thing as "natural rights" - only rights that we as society agree are beneficial. IP rights are no different than the rights for you to own your shoes or your house. They are just social contracts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No more $100000000 movies is a small price to pay for no more copyright. I could happily live the rest of my life without another professionally made book, program, or song. In fact I would be ecstatic.

<comment><USER9> You might, but seemingly you'd be in the vast minority. There is currently any number of bands and film producers making stuff available for free legally. But even with the threat of prosecution, and the hatred for copyright, these bands can barely make an impression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Time has arrived where original content creator/artist (musician, writer etc.) has to decide how they want to publish their content and make money. Self- publishing is gaining momentum in the book arena, the same can happen in music, movie and tv - the only thing is someone has to make self-publishing and internet distribution eco-system simple and affordable (wow! here is the business idea).

The other platform that can be explored is creative commons. Licensing under creative commons and sharing content freely with the support of some kind of revenue generation is one of the best option (i think).</comment>


Former Mayor of Munich Explains How Microsoft Undermined Linux - <AUTHOR> http://techrights.org/2019/11/09/christian-ude-on-microsoft/ <comment><USER3> > "The decision to convert (14.000 PC clients) back to Microsoft from Limux > [some time] until 2020 was a purely political one. Christian Ude: "There > wasn't a single unsolvable technical problem."

I have worked on the Limux team during university. There were a couple of problems that led to resentments:

\- fossilized, underpowered computers (1G RAM!) combined with fossilized software versions (Firefox/Thunderbird/Openoffice) thanks to testing/conformity requirements. This was what drove the majority of customer complaints.

\- underpowered Internet uplinks of the dozens of government offices - <USER2> would think each had a gigabit fiber uplink, which is far from reality

\- lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay compared to the free market

\- special IT software was mostly Windows-only or, if it was available for Linux, compiled for rpm-based distros while Limux was Ubuntu-based leading to all sorts of issues

\- city staff being used to MS and not to Linux, requiring extensive training

\- infighting among departments of the city, not everyone was a friend of centralization in IT

Technically all of this would be solvable but the budget was too low. People, especially key deciders, blamed it on "Linux" instead on their failure to provide adequate resources. The colleagues were the best people I have had the pleasure to learn from and work with, even to this day, but the best work is moot against idiots or bought-off morons in politics

<comment><USER4> > \- lack of manpower in the dev department, mostly caused by abysmal pay > compared to the free market

Abso-fucking-lutely. IMO this is _the_ main factor why most government IT in Germany is in such a disastrous state. Not just abysmal pay, but also coupled with:

a) Limited-term contracts (usually 2 years)

b) Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is ~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore

c) In the case of Limux, Munich has one of the highest costs of living in all of Germany. You earn the same amount of money for a position, no matter if you live in Munich or somewhere in the middle of nowhere with half the cost of living.

d) Since this year there's now also a requirement that a candidate must not have worked under a limited-term contract for the government before. You can imagine how that works out, when most government jobs of the last decade were mostly limited-term.

<comment><USER5> > Ludicrous academic requirements: You only get pay grade E13 (which is > ~40k€/year) with a Diplom or a Master's Degree, so there's no way to hire > motivated talent that the rest of the market is more likely to ignore

Surely 40k EUR seems very little from an American perspective, but in Germany you cannot really expect much more than maybe 50-60K straight out of uni (as a normal, average student). 40k is surely less (I think E13 is more than 40k though), but the difference isn't that huge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You either pay with licensing or hire a team to support. There's no free as in beer, anywhere. At least once you get beyond some guy's single Linux Mint install on his personal laptop, but not at any complex scale. Active Directory, development support, these things are needed. Hiring and maintaining a competent team is most often more expensive and importantly, far more difficult to competently do than licensing. Microsoft has a complete, vertically aligned stack that they've spent decades building and refining, there's a lot of value there. Ubuntu is setup to compete here, and they're a fine choice, but you do lose some things over going with Microsoft.

The wish upon a star for free beer is strong.

<comment><USER7> Support? I urge you to try run your IT on Microsoft, with a support contract. Their phone support was useless, is useless, and will be useless.

I worked in BestBuy once, their IT gave up on fixing Windows and defaulted to re-imagining disks upon first issues with Win/Office despite having a support contract.

<comment><USER6> That's not the sort of support that I'm talking about. That's trivial, and those Best Buy employees are most likely just incompetent, kids off the street that enjoy computers. It's true you might get better desktop support out of a Redhat engineer (for Windows, desktop Linux, or otherwise), if you could afford to pay him. The same would apply if people had a direct line to a Microsoft engineer.

I'm talking about ensuring some script you wrote in VB6 in 1998 still works on machines in 2019. Take that scenario times 100. It's not advertised but they do fix (or break, then fix) enterprise issues better than any entity I've seen, and definitely at that scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "We assume our readers are wise enough to understand that Microsoft is the same old corrupt company, with new lies and PR."

I assume Microsoft still wants to make as much money from Windows and Office as they can but the trend has been to get users onto Azure and that's not incompatible with Linux desktops and LibreOffice. That said, it's possible that Microsoft Germany is doing things of which Redmond wouldn't approve if it were fully know back at HQ. This isn't Ballmer's MSFT anymore.

<comment><USER9> I thought the same thing on azure but I recently stood up an environment there and found there are a lot of cool tools available that are greyed out with a message saying "not available on Linux hosts". Maybe it's just temporary until they add those features and Linux stuff deploys just fine, but I did feel like Linux was a second class citizen. It doesn't help that most of the selection boxes I ran into had Windows as the default option.

<comment><USER10> It depends on the service, and a lot is the legacy of Azure actually being windows first or only for the first 5 or 6 years. I'm betting the area you were playing around in was web apps or VMs. If you look at the various container based offerings or the newer dev tools they are clearly Linux first. I'm pretty sure the new Visual Studio online offering doesn't even have a windows configuration.

<comment><USER9> You're right, it was with App Services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would prefer a translation instead of this editorializing.

<comment><USER12> Here's the original 4-page interview of former mayor Christian Ude, it's very readable and should translate well with Google Translate:

[https://www.linux- magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/](https://www.linux- magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/)

<comment><USER13> Hmmm, it's not a very good translation:

Page 1:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux- magazin.de%2Fausgaben%2F2019%2F10%2Finterview-2%2F)

Page 2:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux- magazin.de%2Fausgaben%2F2019%2F10%2Finterview-2%2F2%2F)

Page 3:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux- magazin.de%2Fausgaben%2F2019%2F10%2Finterview-2%2F3%2F)

Page 4:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linux- magazin.de%2Fausgaben%2F2019%2F10%2Finterview-2%2F4%2F)

<comment><USER14> Try DeepL [https://www.deepl.com/en/translator](https://www.deepl.com/en/translator) — unfortunately it can't translate webpages, so you would have to copypaste the contents</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brian Kernighan: sometimes the old ways are best - <AUTHOR> http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/0109/theme/sw-tools

<comment><USER2> The contents as text instead of pdf:

As I write this column, I'm in the middle of two summer projects; with luck, they'll both be finished by the time you read it. One involves a forensic analysis of over 100,000 lines of old C and assembly code from about 1990, and I have to work on Windows XP. The other is a hack to translate code written in weird language L1 into weird language L2 with a program written in scripting language L3, where none of the L's even existed in 1990; this one uses Linux. Thus it's perhaps a bit surprising that I find myself relying on much the same toolset for these very different tasks.

What's Changed

Bill Plauger and I wrote Software Tools in 1975, nine years before IEEE Software began publication. Our title was certainly not the first use of the phrase, but the book did help to popularize the idea of tools and show how a small set of simple text-based tools could make programmers more productive. Our toolset was stolen quite explicitly from Unix models. At the time, Unix was barely known outside a tiny community, and even the idea of thinking consciously about software tools seemed new. In fact, we even wrote our programs in a dialect of Fortran because C was barely three years old at the time and we thought we'd sell more copies if we aimed at Fortran programmers. A lot has changed over the past 25 or 30 years.

Computers are enormously faster and have vastly more memory and disk space, and we can write much bigger and more interesting programs with all that horsepower. Although C is still widely used, programmers today often prefer languages such as Java and Python that spend memory and time to gain expressiveness and safety, which is almost always a good trade. We develop code differently as well, with powerful integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio and Eclipse--complex tools that manage the whole process, showing us all the facets of the code and replacing manuals with online help and syntax completion. Sophisticated frameworks generate boatloads of code for us and glue it all together at the click of a mouse. In principle, we're far better off than we used to be. But when I program, the tools that I use most often, or that I miss the most when they aren't available, are not the fancy IDEs. They're the old stalwarts from the Software Tools and early Unix era, such as grep, diff, sort, wc, and shells. For example, my forensics work requires comparing two versions of the program. How better to compare them than with diff? There are many hundreds of files, so I use find to walk the directory hierarchy and generate lists of files to work with. I want to repeat some sequence of operations--time for a shell script. And of course there's endless grepping to find all the places where some variable is defined or used. The combination of grep and sort brings together things that should be the same but might not be--for instance, a variable that's declared differently in two files, or all the potentially risky #defines. The language translation project uses much the same core set: diff to compare program outputs, grep to find things, the shell to automate regression testing.

What We Want

What do we want from our tools? First and foremost is mechanical advantage: the tool must do some task better than people can, augmenting or replacing our own effort. Grep, which finds patterns of text, is the quintessential example of a good tool: it's dead easy to use, and it searches faster and better than we can. Grep is actually an improvement on many of its successors. I've never figured out how to get Visual Studio or Eclipse to produce a compact list of all the places where a particular string occurs throughout a program. I'm sure experts will be happy to teach me, but that's not much help when the experts are far away or the IDE isn't installed. That leads to the second criterion for a good tool: it should be available everywhere. It's no help if SuperWhatever for Windows offers some wonderful feature but I'm working on Unix. The other direction is better because Unix command-line tools are readily available everywhere. One of the first things I do on a new Windows machine is install Cygwin so that I can get some work done. The universality of the old faithfuls makes them more useful than more powerful systems that are tied to a specific environment or that are so big and complicated that it just takes too long to get started. The third criterion for good tools is that they can be used in unexpected ways, the way we use a screwdriver to pry open a paint can and a hammer to close it up again. One of the most compelling advantages of the old Unix collection is that each one does some generic but focused task (searching, sorting, counting, comparing) but can be endlessly combined with others to perform complicated ad hoc operations. The early Unix literature is full of examples of novel shell programs. Of course, the shell itself is a great example of a generic but focused tool: it concentrates on running programs and encapsulating frequent operations in scripts. It's hard to mix and match programs unless they share some uniform representation of information. In the good old days, that was plain ASCII text, not proprietary binary formats. Naturally, there are also tools to convert nontext representations into text. For my forensics work, one of the most useful is strings, which finds the ASCII text within a binary file. The combination of strings and grep often gives real insight into the contents of some otherwise- inscrutable file, and, if all else fails, od produces a readable view of the raw bits that can even be grepped.

A fourth criterion for a good tool is that it not be too specialized--put another way, that it not know too much. IDEs know that you're writing a program in a specific language, so they won't help if you're not; indeed, it can be a real chore to force some nonstandard component into one, like a Yacc grammar as part of a C program. Lest it seem like I'm only complaining about big environments here, even old tools can be messed up. Consider wc, which counts lines, words, and characters. It does a fine job on vanilla text, and it's valuable for a quick assessment of any arbitrary file (an unplanned-for use). But the Linux version of wc has been "improved": by default it thinks it's really counting words in Unicode. So if the input is a nontext file, Linux wc complains about every byte that looks like a broken Unicode character, and it runs like a turtle as a result. A great tool has been damaged because it thinks it knows what you're doing. You can remedy that behavior with the right incantation, but only if a wizard is nearby.

There has surely been much progress in tools over the 25 years that IEEE Software has been around, and I wouldn't want to go back in time. But the tools I use today are mostly the same old ones--grep, diff, sort, awk, and friends. This might well mean that I'm a dinosaur stuck in the past. On the other hand, when it comes to doing simple things quickly, I can often have the job done while experts are still waiting for their IDE to start up. Sometimes the old ways are best, and they're certainly worth knowing well.

<comment><USER3> It really does sound like he doesn't want to learn new things.

"I've never figured out how to get Visual Studio or Eclipse to produce a compact list of all the places where a particular string occurs throughout a program."?

Come on. [in eclipse/variants] CTRL-H? Search menu for the blind?

The rest of the points are pretty general: Utility, availability, generality. This covers most good IDE's if you ask me.

What's needed is a study rather than an opinion. Compare two or more groups, experts in either emacs/vi + shell vs eclipse/visual studio and one common language. Look at the speed of completing basic tasks common to programming.

I would hypothesize that while differences amongst groups exist, no differences between means would be larger than a cohen effect size of 0.5

<comment><USER4> Question: What about when you need to do something that the IDE doesn't have built in?

(I use Emacs. Many years ago (mid 90s) I used the IDE that came with Turbo C++, but haven't used Visual Studio or Eclipse, and am genuinely curious how they handle extensibility.)

<comment><USER5> They don't handle it well. I haven't used Visual Studio in a few years, but Eclipse has plugins that you can get off eclipse-plugins.org. unfortunately, they are not all free :-( Emacs is certainly superior for most everything.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I don't see it. It's been a while since I used emacs for development, but the entire reason I moved from emacs to eclipse was because I had at least a 10x improvement in productivity working with large [java] code bases.

Has jdee come a long way since? I just checked and it doesn't look like it.

<comment><USER5> As far as java on emacs, I can't exactly comment. Java is my one main exception to emacs. Its not that I dislike it on emacs, I just have never tried it there. I learned on Eclipse it worked for what I needed (although Eclipse is horribly slow...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I learnt to program in an IDE, and was born and raised in a Microsoft environment. My entire computing experience has been dominated by Microsoft.

But now I'm learning Unix-commands just for the fun and romance of it.

It may sound shallow, but one reason I want to learn Unix is because it's somewhat "mysterious" and all the cool hackers I know use Unix.

And many people I know in the IT world who can get things done often turn to Unix.

Thus, this article re-inforces my motivation to learn Unix -- the operating system of our ancestors.

I should note that it doesn't mean I hate windows. In fact as I learn unix commands I am seeing more and more that Windows was born out of Unix and is a "distorted" version of unix. But Windows feels like home to me. So I'll likely always use both: Windows and Unix.

<comment><USER7> That does not seem shallow. That seems a very good algorithm for discovering good new things.

<comment><USER8> That reminds of this article about why Unix is inherently made for a programmer's style of thought: <http://igor-nav.livejournal.com/12843.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So is this a grep/diff/sort/awk/etc man saying that IDEs tend to suck?

It's nice to hear it from Kernighan, but it's hardly surprising. IDEs do suck.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think he should have attributed more importance to regular expressions. They don't even get mentioned, beyond being implied by grep.

<comment><USER11> You can grep for regular expressions? I think my mind just got blown. For the last ten years I've been finding them with awk.

awk '(/putithere/) {print $0}'

<comment><USER12> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep>

_grep is a command line text search utility originally written for Unix. The name is taken from the first letters in global / regular expression / print, a series of instructions for the ed text editor._

grep -rHnE 'my [r]eg+ex' /path/to/folder/ : look for files with this regular expression recursively and print out their name and the line number, as well as the matching line itself.

Awk might do it, or you can -exec it with find, but I've read several times that grep is generally faster, even faster than a simple search with a custom and non-optimized C program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Somehow I expected a bigger beard.

<comment><USER14> He had, but his Beard Mass Index (BMI) was heading towards "clinically obsolete", so he's trying to cut down.

;)</comment></comment>