Open Dylan - <AUTHOR> http://opendylan.org/index.html <comment><USER2> I do a lot of the work on and with Open Dylan.

So, why?

Rather than point to any particular language feature or design aspect of the language (which are what originally drew me to Dylan), the thing that keeps me there now is that it is a green field.

If one has newer or different ideas about how things could be done or structured, this can't really be introduced coherently and consistently across a language ecosystem that is already big. I think Node did well at the start in part due to being able to build everything new with non-blocking I/O in mind. That's unlike the use of Twisted in Python which had a number of caveats when working the standard library (and now there are a number of other non- blocking I/O libraries).

The other side is that I do it because I enjoy it and we're building something good.

We do have some good language features (like multiple dispatch as someone else has mentioned), we have some pretty good documentation, our upcoming LLVM compiler back-end is generating good code, we have a good debugging story.

People start languages all the time. I find it best to just pretend that Dylan isn't an old language, but something new that is being created on the grave of Open Dylan. We're working on changes to the type system, the compiler, the libraries, and soon, I'll be starting in on some stuff that takes advantage of our green field status. We just didn't go and start a new language from scratch, but decided to build upon the massive amount of work and design that went into Old-Dylan.

<comment><USER3> Hi Bruce! Good to see Open Dylan getting some attention on HN :)

<comment><USER2> Maybe? (I'm going to leave where I am shortly on a 6+ hour drive. I'm on holiday in the US for another several days.)

I was talking with someone else last night that has worked on and with Dylan for the last 20 years or so over dinner.

He commented "I'm sometimes afraid to use Dylan as I don't know if someone will be supporting the compiler." I replied that "I'm afraid to support the compiler sometimes as maybe no one will use it."

That said, I've put some years of effort into it and have been actively maintaining the compiler for a while now. Now I'm building up libraries that I need for my green field project and working on some language changes to support that.

I'm now working on a 2-5 year time frame.

That said, if we got another like-minded hacker out of any attention, I'd fall over from joy. We have so many things that we need help with, especially things like type system work, but also plenty of easier things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a quick lock at the website, the 'history' page, the 'old.' website etc., but I still didn't get an answer to a very basic question for a programming language which is: why?

Somewhere in a post from a couple of years ago I read "a vision of a different world: one with the flexibility of Smalltalk, the power of Lisp, while still allowing for compilation to efficient code", but as someone said in a comment to the link of that post in HN these these are already covered (and if not, they have a lot of people working on them) by other more popular (and more friendly imho, from the few examples I had a look to) languages..

So again, why Dylan?

<comment><USER5> The 'killer app' of Dylan is (IMO) multiple dispatch. I believe that it changes significantly (in a good way) how the behaviour of programs can be modelled. But the 'Why Dylan' document fails to do a good job of putting that front and centre and explaining its utility and excellence.

<comment><USER2> We would welcome help from fresh eyes on improving that sort of material on the website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the perspective of a hobbyist programmer, the compiler seems very "enterprisey": it doesn't look like you can just stick a program in a file and run it or put some functions in a file and load them into a REPL. Instead it seems you have to make an "application" with some specified directory structure and several files indicating where to find things and so on. I guess that's what a serious programmer would do anyway, but it's a little off- putting to people like me.

</comment><comment><USER7> Old HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3339952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3339952)</comment>


Ask HN: shouldn't there be a way to undeadify users? - <AUTHOR>

In HN, when a user is banned all his new comments are marked as dead and are invisible to most people... I understand the reason for this and I quite agree that it's a good way to fight spam.
But, often, I see comments marked as dead even though they contribute to the discussion and looking at the history of those users, they sometimes have left interesting comments for the past year without realizing that no one could read them...
So, could there maybe be a way to guard against this? Maybe a link to undeadify a comment that marks up the banned user for review? Because I'm quite sure we lose quality conversation from that and that's a pity...
This rant was triggered by seeing the dead comment from jaiwithani... <comment> barry-cotter There is. If they notice they can email pg. If they don't notice they're not going to be contributing to the conversation anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I'd agree with you, but I know that some people I've contacted in the past didn't know that HN did that and they just were surprised that no one were responding to their comments...

<comment><USER2> I'm of two minds on this. For spammers I agree with the treatment, if a person is a long standing member of HN then I think some way of alerting them would be more appropriate than the current system.

PG does not like you alerting people on the site that they've been banned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same here, for spammers, of course I completely agree with the treatment... It's just that sometimes some long standing members are banned and there doesn't seem to be any reason for it...

I didn't know that PG didn't like us alerting people that they've been banned... Any reason for that?

<comment><USER2> I've received a rather pointy email from him asking me not to even discuss that this happens.

I think the reason is that there are a number of notorious trolls that still haven't figured out that they've been banned and that this might bring them to log out and check to see whether their posts are still visible.

It's called 'hell banning', and on other fora it is only applied to the worst cases, on HN it is the only way people get banned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that's really why if there was a way for the community to mark interesting comments from banned users (sort of like the flag/unflag thing), it would make it much easier to manage...

No need to point it out, just click on a link and if enough people think that the user shouldn't be banned, automatically unban him...

<comment><USER2> The only 'unban' here is to email PG, and I think he likes it that way, bans on HN of established users are rare enough that he can keep tabs on it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The DiggBar controversy summarised in two easy screenshots - <AUTHOR> http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2009/04/12/the_diggbar_controversy_summar/ <comment><USER2> Just curious... why hasn't StumbleUpon been pulled into this fight? They've had their own frame-based bar for a while now.</comment>


SendHub (YC W12) Lets You Send Mass SMS to Students, Clients - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/03/21/sendhub/

<comment><USER2> What's the unique proposition with this? In NZ this is already very common with Universities, Dominos etc. Is it just a market that SendHub wants to contest in or does SendHub bring something new to the table (or is this difficult in the US?)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks awesome. My friend had an idea for something like this, but It's not this clean.</comment>


Chickens 'teamed up to kill fox' at Brittany farming school - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/12/chickens-teamed-up-to-kill-fox-at-brittany-farming-school <comment><USER2> Chickens are brutal. My friend asked me to feed his chickens while he was away and the damn things attacked me and pecked me hard. I tell you I was having second thoughts about giving them food after the beating they gave me.</comment>


Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/08/07/firefox-offers-recommendations-with-latest-test-pilot-experiment-advance/ <comment><AUTHOR> Note that this doesn't work like the recommendations in the activity stream, where recommendations are picked client-side from a standardised list.

> we want people to clearly understand that Laserlike will receive their web > browsing history before installing the experiment

Thus, keep that in mind before installing the extension: [https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/advance](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/advance)</comment>


Where Flux Went Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://technologyadvice.github.io/where-flux-went-wrong/ <comment><USER2> I haven't used Redux really yet, because Mobservable [0] seemed even easier to use, with the same end result.

[0] [http://mweststrate.github.io/mobservable/getting- started.htm...](http://mweststrate.github.io/mobservable/getting-started.html)</comment>


A Truly Depressing Visit to JCPenney - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/03/jcpenney_ron_johnson_came_from_apple_to_reinvent_j_c_penney_and_ended_up.html <comment><USER2> This article over-generalizes from one visit to a single store without providing sufficient information to judge whether the author's conclusions are valid for all or most of the company's stores.

According to the company's recent presentations to investors, over the next few years JCPenney is converting its locations from traditional department stores into 'mini malls' with small independently-operated stores and a 'town square' with amenities like coffee shops. Recent data provided by the company shows that those stores that have been converted into the new format are generating TWICE the sales per square foot of stores with the traditional format.[1]

The author doesn't say if he visited a really old off-mall store, or an on- mall store that has not yet been converted to the new format, or an on-mall store in the midst of converting to the new format, or a store that has already been converted to the new format. How can he generalize without specifying which kind of store he visited?

Shame on him for not doing his homework.

\--

[1] See slide on page 41 of this presentation: [http://phx.corporate- ir.net/External.File?t=1&item=VHlwZ...](http://phx.corporate- ir.net/External.File?t=1&item=VHlwZT0yfFBhcmVudElEPTQ4NTA2NTh8Q2hpbGRJRD00ODUzMDk=)

<comment><USER3> I think their "mini mall" strategy is interesting, but I have my doubts if it will work beyond being a novelty to buyers in the short term. If a brand is strong enough to support having its own store, why wouldn't they just open up a store in the adjacent regular mall and cut out the middle man?

<comment><USER4> This mini mall department store strategy is actually prevalent in Taiwan. Basically there is a big department store with a bunch of these mini-stores inside of it. The big difference in Taiwan is that when you want to purchase something you purchase it at the mini-store - they are all completely independent operations. I'm not sure if the idea translates as well when the stores aren't independent, because then you are right that getting their own storefront might make more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man, this is kind of a poor article, down to the insinuation that Ron Johnson was the dude who decided to include in-store WiFi. (I say this because the Sears and Nordstrom in my local mall both have free WiFi, and whether its a good thing or a bad thing it certainly isn't causing JCP to hemorrhage money.)

I haven't heard much about Ron's attempts to actually change the retail and storefront look or offerings compared to his attempts to change consumers, which I think is much loftier. The shop that the author describes sounds identical to a JCP store from five years ago -- and sounds identical to all of its competitors today.

I think a much more cogent point (that the author was flirting with, assuredly) is that consumers don't go about buying clothes the same way they go about buying technology. JCP's strategy is to appeal to the _rational_ consumer -- the consumer who sits down and makes a pro-con list for every prospective purchase, the consumer who divorces themselves from such petty things like cheap heuristics and the innate pull of a "THIS WEEKEND ONLY!" sale.

Those consumers might employ such strategies for a $1500 laptop (or a $500 phone), but probably not for a pair of $50 khakis.

<comment><USER6> Installing WiFi may not cause JC Penney to "hemorrhage" money but with 1,107 US stores if you assume a best case cost of say, $500 (and I think that's really optimistic) per store to make WiFi available to the public that's still $500k down the tubes for next to no benefit.

I'm sure the decision was based on this idea that they want people to shop on JCP.com while in the store, and if they can't get a cell signal, obviously they need to have WiFi. But still, the whole thing strikes me as poorly conceived. If I'm in the store, how about making my experience shopping at the store as good as possible and not tell me to pull out my phone to make it work?

<comment><USER5> Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying WiFi was a brilliant move or anything: I'm saying that it's not JCP-exclusive, it's not particularly important, and there's nothing pointing to the conclusion that it was Ron's idea or decision. (My money's on the bet that it was in place before he took over.)

> _If I'm in the store, how about making my experience shopping at the store > as good as possible and not tell me to pull out my phone to make it work?_

100% agreed.

<comment><USER7> 32% year of years sales drop. One of the only differences the reporter could tell about the shopping experience offered free wifi that was slower than his cell service. An example of seemingly arbitrary and, in the eyes of shoppers, non helpful changes Johnson oversaw. What exactly was your critique?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Our local JCP was one of the stores that were re-made, entirely. The store was formally a jumbled disaster, more along the lines of a Marshalls than a department store. It was blight on the brand, and needed to simply be re-done.

About two years ago, it was refreshed. The clutter was organized, and there was actually room to maneuver about the store. It was a big improvement.

A few weeks ago, I'm trying to help my daughter find some form of clothing that was completely necessary for whatever reason. Looking at JCP, we're searched around in the various departments -- is it here, or there, or maybe around there? I had no idea. Then, we tried to find someone to help us -- hmm, nobody around. Well, let's ask at the counter -- hmm, where the eff is a counter to actually purchase these things? At this point, I called BS on the experience and we walked out. They literally failed at every possible point in the entire process.

As I thought about it, and knowing that Johnson was the guy who built the Apple stores, I came away thinking that the changes JCP made to stores were entirely physical but the experience hadn't changed. I don't mean to sound elitist, but the staff at the store was not of caliber in the way I find the staff at Nordstrom. The products didn't differentiate themselves for me. The changes came off as superficial.

I hope they get it right because everyone loves a turnaround story, but their current results shouldn't be so surprising.

</comment><comment><USER9> >Not discounting works for Apple because products become obsolete long before they stop working.

No. Not discounting works for Apple because it's the only store selling MacBooks. You can buy pants and underwear at dozens of places that are not JCPenny. The usual practice is deceptive to be sure, but JCPenny gave up their most effective means of advertising bargains short of relentlessly juxtaposing competitors' prices against their own.

<comment><USER10> > Not discounting works for Apple because it's the only store selling > MacBooks.

The only store... along with Best Buy, Amazon, Simply Mac, etc. etc.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough, but it's still a niche market that Apple has near plenary control over. Indeed, Apple essentially dictates what price other retailers may charge by keeping the wholesale price high. [1]

1\. [http://www.macworld.com/article/2024257/how-apple-sets- its-p...](http://www.macworld.com/article/2024257/how-apple-sets-its- prices.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Growing up lower-middle-income, JC Penney's was a brand I associated with "kind of luxury", at least better than Goodwill.

Only after living in New York, when a JCPenney installed a midtown flagship store and was greeted by this NYT article calling it "dowdy" did I realize it was a low-brow store: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/fashion/13CRITIC.html?page...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/fashion/13CRITIC.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

Also, speaking of NY regionalism...the Macy's store in midtown does have wifi. But it's also the biggest department store in the world, apparently.

<comment><USER12> Growing up somewhere without JCPenney I kind of thought the same thing when I first came here.. I got a pretty nice couch from there at like 50% off when I moved down to the USA, and the store was actually pleasant compared to a lot of other department stores. It felt higher-end than Sears or Target. Hell, even half the Macy's I've visited have been kind of disastrous. Maybe I just went to a really nice JCPenney.

<comment><USER13> It is higher end than Target. Target is the nice box store, J.C. Penney is a low(er) end department store.

Sears is too weird a brand to invite direct comparison, but it is probably barely a notch higher than JCP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't believe (well, if you're desperate, a nice big celebrity CEO makes a good splash) they would turn their brand into this.

JCPenney's whole method, and all mall retail, is the sales prices and coupons for rewards. I must get a mailing from Macy's once a month, if not every other week with 10% off. If I was running JCP here's how I'd reinvent:

* Make the sales people dress up, _fitted_ suit/tie, ladies in sleek business atire in most areas, youth/petites follow what they allow at American Apparel/H&M/Gap employees attire. The brand is classic style, JC Penney was there growing up with basic style that translates into casual everyday wear. The sales people reinforce casual, yet approachable authority.

* Make it easy for the shopper, to get into mental space of styles. Formal fades into casual, but the sections are distinct with mannequins highlighting combos. Between have a "style-lab" that churns limited line clothing like Zara. Same stuff won't be there in a few weeks. 'Style' in this sense is very mild. The average JCP customer isn't a risk-taker.

* Store brands. JCP has a bevy of store brands, and these should be highlighted and re-imagined. JCP is now Trader Joes of clothes. Store brands aren't a Levi's (but you have Levi's), but are good enough for the price point.

* Store Card loyalty. This is probably the number one money maker. 0% APR 3 month specials all the time, %2 off everything when you use it, etc...

* Dumb Gadgets for $5 from China should be at the cashwraps. Churn these every month.

I grew up wearing mostly JCP clothes as a midwestern kid and I almost am banging my head on why this is so hard to understand how a Midwestern Mom shop and how to build a store that sells better-than-bigbox clothes that range from Casual to Formal and has a classic, yet forward approach.

</comment><comment><USER15> For everyone who thinks doing a startup is hard. THIS is hard. At least in a startup you have no legacy customers or revenues to worry about.

<comment><USER16> Well. Not until you get customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very interesting. I had noticed a change in their branding but didn't really know what it entailed.

It just goes to show you that some people, despite rising high in the org chart, are really unable to understand which parts of their experience generalize and which parts don't--they can't discriminate the incidental from the intentional. Probably everybody underneath this guy knew that in-store wifi would be a waste of time and money, but to him, it was an essential part of the Apple store's success.

</comment><comment><USER18> _"So I took the Metro to the Maryland suburbs for a visit to the JCPenney in the Wheaton Plaza Mall to see if Johnson really is reviving the legendary chain."_

This is the problem, to see Ron's "vision" you really have to go to one of the stores that has been remodeled on his "boutique" view, its sort of a mini-mall within a single store. It does _not_ suffer from having mix mashed things all around and it does have a more intimate customer feel, but I didn't even realize that was key to the plan until I read the Economist article on it.

That said, Ron Johnson is in a world of hurt here. Not only does he have to figure out if he can change what a department store is, he has to convince people who have been to the store before that its different now. Neither are easy.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the biggest problem Ron Johnson faced is that with Apple, the products sell themselves and are exclusive to that retail store. Customers come in not needing to be sold on it... just wanting to see it in person before purchasing since buzz around the launches and commercials do the selling part.

JC Penney however, does not have exclusive products and customers don't necessarily come in knowing what they want to buy but might need to be sold on a product.

That affects pricing as well. Apple can do one price without discounts without a problem since you can't find their products anywhere else for much cheaper, mostly just online retailers without sales tax.

JC Penney's products can be found in many other stores and thus pricing needs to be flexible to draw people in for sales.

Thus the huge drop in sales.

<comment><USER20> Apple products are sold at lots of retail outlets; the Apple Store retail locations aren't exclusive vendors. It's true they have far more control over pricing and product presentation than JC Penney, but it's not total.

<comment><USER16> I wonder how many people actually know that, though. No one I know talks about going anywhere except an Apple Store to service an Apple product, and no one I know seems to consider going to another store to buy an Apple product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I heard he was taking over JCP I thought it was a really good thing. I am the kind of person who buys everything on Amazon, but having actual low prices at a retail store sounded great. Now whenever I needed something in a hurry, or something Amazon didn't have, I could go to JCP.

I tried to go to JCP twice since Ron took over. Once for a dress shirt, another time for some drinking glasses. When I went for the shirt, they didn't have every size in every color. Ended up going to Macy's. When I went for drinking glasses, again the selection was miniscule, went to Amazon instead.

The number one thing they can do to get me to shop there is to stop selling crap! Price doesn't matter if you have such an awful inventory.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is one bad quarter/year - typical WallStreet thinking: no patience for any change.

JCP like many other retailers are in big trouble. At least, they are trying something different: the other ones are slowly sliding into nothingness.

<comment><USER10> Mistakes have certainly been made, but yes: this is typical Wall Street fare.

When Johnson first started the turnaround over a year ago, he made it clear this was a long-term undertaking, of at least 3 years, but probably 5 years. That should really hold true for any turnaround, but especially one of this size.

The company is only 1 year into the turnaround. It's headlines like this and investor myopia that gives way to great investment opportunities. Maintaining a long-term view can frequently lead to making money off of those who don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Personally, I think the 'no sales' thing could have worked if their prices were lower. The couple of times I've been in a JCPenney since this started everything was depressingly expensive for what it was.

It's one thing to not discount, but it's another to not discount while selling a commodity product for 2x or 3x it's actual value or reasonabl price.

Likewise, I'll concur that the stores still have aesthetic, layout and lighting issues which are getting ignored.

If they had gone for a GAP-like store aesthetic with prices between ROSS and Target with a no-discount policy, I think they'd have not had the same problems.

</comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of my favorite Warren Buffet line: "When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."

<comment><USER25> I'm also reminded of a line from Neil Sheehan's classic "A Bright Shining Lie" that has stuck with me since reading it:

 _Men who succeed at an enterprise of great moment often tie a snare for themselves by assuming that they have discovered some universal truth._

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Johnson's ideas could work in retail, but trying to implement them in an existing chain like JCPenney seems terribly foolish. It's very hard to make meaningful physical changes quickly when you have 1000 stores. It's very hard to change staff attitudes when they have been working there for years and like the old setup. And it's especially hard to change customer's attitudes, when they like shopping in the clearance section and getting a great deal at 60%.

</comment><comment><USER6> JC Penney's hiring of Ron Johnson seemed puzzling to me from the beginning. There are parts of the Apple Store experience that are good (being free and fairly comfortable to look at and try the products for as long as you want.) But there are many parts of it that are totally awful; if it's busy there's no lines to get help you just have to kind of crowd around the nearest employee and wait until they can assist you. If you don't make a Genius Bar appointment days ahead of time; good luck to you. I worked the Service desk at Best Buy for years when I was a teenager, so I know a little about what the job entails, and I have to say the Apple Store experience could be much better than it is. (Not that Best Buy is any good either.)

The point I'm trying to make; Apple's success was not because of the retail store experience. So hiring away Apple's chief of retail operations seemed like a weird move to me. Even with his prior Target experience.

Also, am I the only person on earth who thinks the new JC Penney logo and advertising aesthetic is not only ugly but looks completely amateurish? It's like someone saw that clean, geometric designs were "in", and had no understanding of how to make them actually look good.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I agree with you. The Apple Store experience for people who are there to just buy a thing is terrible. There is no real "cashier" at the Apple Store so you have to find someone who will tell you what to do, which if you're buying a computer you might be lucky enough to buy it off the spot. If it's a iPhone case or something you might have to go stand in line behind people who are getting repairs.

<comment><USER28> This was not my experience at all. I replaced my iPhone recently and was in and out of the store within 10 minutes, despite the crowds. The first guy I spoke with got my phone from the back and took my payment info right there, no line whatsoever.

If you go to the Genius Bar to purchase something you're making a mistake. Any employee can sell you things. (And with the app they have, you don't even need an employee. Just scan whatever you want to buy, put in your password, and leave.)

<comment><USER27> I've had the same experience at times as well, when the store is not as crowded. But when all employees are helping 3 people at once, they don't have the time to stop and checkout your $15 ear buds or whatever and you get sent to the line. That's why every other store in the world has dedicated cashiers who just check people out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Another in the pattern of bringing in executives without _direct_ experience (retail mall stores) resulting in disappointment. Apple stores and Target are in the general retail category, but serve a different customer base with different desires.

Does business (school) teach anything other than a copycat approach? The increasing rate of failure in business is unsurprising given the complete lack of imagination.

</comment><comment><USER30> I had high hopes when JCP announced their new pricing, I hate having to go to a store and find things ridiculuously expensive, then wait for a "sale", collect your coupons and then buy something for what to me is a fair price. The quality of the products though at JCP was not so great IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER31> Let's not forget one of the main reasons to buy something not on sale: Size. If you are average size (like me), you often end up buying stuff not on sale, because the sale rack is stuffed with 44W32L pants. If I put on about 75 lbs. it'd be sale items only for me!

</comment><comment><USER32> Ignore your core market at your own peril. If middle-aged mothers are your market, don't scare them away. Us them as your word of mouth marketers.

</comment><comment><USER33> i prefer ross. they don't even have an online store...

<comment><USER30> Ross and TJ Maxx are a different category, they get rejects from major department stores. They can't have online stores because they have no fixed inventory. If you can find it, you can get great deals there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> HN discussion about the original moves.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3522169>

Always a fun read in retrospective.</comment>


The Power of Simple CRUD - <AUTHOR> https://volument.com/blog/the-power-of-simple-crud?b1 <comment><USER2> Not really a CRUD article more of a weird angry article about SAAS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Kind of. However, I think the mentioned problems about SAAS are valid.

<comment><USER2> I feel like they attack from the wrong angle. Consider BareMetrics an SAAS. They aren't really just a CRUD, but are lumped in with CRM's. The easiest CRM is a spreadsheet and a mailer like SendMail.

<comment><USER3> Many organizations have used Excel as a CRM and then hit a lot of problems. It is very hard to scale up and also hard to add features to if you need them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I'm looking for is something to replace external CHAT systems with something that stores all the data in our systems, replacing Intercom or whatever else.

<comment><USER5> That's our goal too. We pushed out this simple CRUD first for commenting and private support chat/email. We'll add realtime chat functionality later if needed. Currently, we are doing fine without it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure what this article was trying to get at. If a SAAS service could be replaced by a single line of code, then you did not need to use it in the first place.

<comment><USER5> We could ditch Recurly because we had all the necessary billing data available on the new, central system. Not before that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The next time someone mentions that infamous "simple CRUD", you might want > to take them more seriously.

I agree.

</comment><comment><USER8> Are there any ways to quickly build mobile crud apps?</comment>


These Apple Engineers Want to Put Backup Camera with Computer Vision on Your Car - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/06/21/pearl-backup-camera/#2e25dff65b34 <comment><USER2> It's been great working on this product, and with this amazing team, for the past couple of years!

Sure feels fantastic to take the "stealth mode" veil of secrecy off our startup today.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Pearl thinks that about every one in four cars in the United States on the road today has one"

Isn't this the kind of statistic they should know in order to show the possible market?</comment>


Show HN: My personal project landing page - <AUTHOR> http://intro.daloops.com/

<comment><USER2> Here is the list that hides from you:

      Make your art richer and interactive
      Get collaborators to work with you
      Use the internet as a canvas
      Record, stream and share your sessions
      Remix many different kinds of media
      Use your external controllers on the web
      Work offline and sync online
      Opensource and developer friendly

</comment><comment><USER3> When I opened the page, I started reading the long introduction text. Then that disappeared and some hexagons appeared. I can click them, but for what purpose I couldn't figure out.

There's a little plus-icon I can click to see the first 4 lines of the former text, but that is it.

I have no idea what your project is, but it seems to be user hostile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the bad experience (that was not the point of it). The initial list is my failed attempt at making it also available to anyone without JS. I just removed it since it is present on the +.

Im going to change the site to make the purpose evident, thanks for the feedback (and sorry again for the hostility).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback, i changed a few things and now it starts with a small presentation of what it is.

Any new feedback ? (do i have to do another Show HN for new feedback?)

</comment><comment><USER4> I have no idea what it is about.

</comment><comment><USER5> Far too vague if you're trying to find interested early adopters. The only thing clear to me: The photo and video were taken in West Seattle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Ill try to make it clearer :)

The photos and video are from Lisbon</comment></comment>


19-square-mile ice sheet breaks loose in Canada - <AUTHOR> http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/A/ARCTIC_ICE_SHELF?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

<comment><USER2> Sigh. Anyone else feeling like we're all screwing around writing web frameworks when we should be focusing on things that are sort of more important?

<comment><USER3> No, because my strengths are in web software development and one of my weaknesses happens to be predicting and extrapolating the effects of insanely large and complex systems over several decades (like the Earth and its weather).

Web software dev - urgent and important

Glacier moving at 1" per year - sorry, I'm filing this one under important but not urgent.

<comment><USER2> "urgent and important": Really? I think the urgency is largely self-imposed, and important to whom?

I don't think we should all spend our time modeling global warming, but we could at least be solving hard software problems for, say, <http://www.betterplace.com/> or <http://www.teslamotors.com/>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill "Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s."

Ummm... wouldn't this possibly indicate that there is some long-term warming going on?

If you actually read the whole article, there are some facts, followed in each case by suppositions that are unproven.

</comment><comment><USER4> Guess what. Dinosaurs used to live in Canada too. The earth is in a constant state of change. The state where I'm sitting right now used to be under a sea.

It's amazing that supposed free thinkers and critical minds are in such a hurry to believe that we can do something about the climate of the planet for better or worse.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Canada breaks free from ice continent"

</comment><comment><USER6> yeah definitely, the question is how to apply our technical ability to meet some of these challenges. I been asking myself this question for awhile. However I also look at guys like sergey and larry and see how there innovations in the web have enabled them to move into other fields that have a direct impact on climate change.

</comment><comment><USER7> The next ice age will balance everything out, don't worry :)

<comment><USER8> Polar Bears might not survive that long, i don't care about ice, i care about bears, and they care about ice.

<comment><USER7> 99.9% of all species of all living things on this planet are now extinct. The odds aren't looking high for the polar bear my son :)</comment></comment></comment>


How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves - <AUTHOR> http://georgehart.com/bagel/bagel.html

<comment><USER2> This was oddly enough talked about almost exactly one year ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982249>

<comment><AUTHOR> I should really have learned by now to hit searchyc before submitting.

<comment><USER3> If it is over a year old most likely there are a ton of people who haven't seen it, and those who have may not remember it completely.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I totally agree... but it is also good to see previous comments as well. On my Hacker Newsletter I always post a couple items that are a year or more old and they always get a high click through.

And the only way I remember this was because I tried it back then. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that upon attempting to do this your wife will laugh at you during the several minutes it takes and then laugh more when you have to cut it to put it in the toaster to eat it. Oh and the bagels at the store were all pre-cut requiring extra work to find the bagels. Still worth it though :)

<comment><USER5> I'd totally use it at work for bagel friday, except for getting moved to a basement a full 3/8th mile _away_ from the bagels…

<comment><USER6> Milton, is that you?

I found your stapler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And they said mathematics has few practical applications.

<comment><USER8> My favorite is the cup trick:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYBqIRM8GiY>

<comment><USER9> I've heard that called the "Spanish waiter" trick and seen it done with full plates. It's cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bagels tomorrow for breakfast.

<comment><USER11> And Cheerios in a couple of weeks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meh. In the time taken to do this I could have prepared and eaten TWO normally-cut bagels.

</comment><comment><USER13> Mobius strips? In _my_ breakfast? It's more likely than you think!

<comment><USER14> Those aren't Möbuis strips.

They are twisted by a full rotation rather than a half. In other words, they have still two sides rather than just one side.</comment></comment>


Really, Google? (Or Why We Can't Have Nice Wireless Networks) - <AUTHOR> https://it.toolbox.com/blogs/leebadman/really-google-or-why-we-cant-have-nice-wireless-networks-010219 <comment><USER2> While the rant is valid, I feel like the amount of effort venting about this was equal to or more than actually attempting to get this to work. The author claims that there is "a fair amount of multicast in play which could be part of the issue," but there are no inherent issues with multicast over wifi. My suspicion is that it uses mDNS or some other _link-local_ multicast protocol for discovery. This isn't really news though; any network operator that supports Apple TVs, Chromecasts, etc on their network has had to deal with this (and most vendors have solutions for proxying mDNS).

<comment><USER3> Proxying mDNS is such a pain if your vendor doesn't have something built-in.

Like when you have to start creating VXLANs to accommodate devices that assume L2 adjacency or installing L7 proxies I think it's fair to say there's some fault with the application vendor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "IT admin being a dick and won't turn on peer-to-peer networking on the corpnet? Plug a router you bought off the internet into the corpnet tap, or better yet, run a hotspot from some random phone!"

I don't think the title fully encapsulates how astounded I am that this made it through the multiple layers of the Google corporate machine without someone in the chain, _someone_ , saying, "umm..." Next time someone asks you to review those user docs, really read them this time in case you have to be the one raising your hand. ('cuz I know _I 've_ been guilty of kind of skimming them.)

<comment><USER5> According to the description above that section, it doesn't even need an internet connection in that mode, so a quick dumb hotspot for just this purpose seems like a fairly reasonable solution. If IT isn't flexible enough to provide that on request, someone else setting it up at least doesn't hurt that much.

(a server-based fallback would have some value, but I bet people would find something to complain about that too. To slow, unnecessarily sending data back to Google, ...)

<comment><USER4> _so a quick dumb hotspot for just this purpose seems like a fairly reasonable solution._

I believe the issue at hand is the question of who the user is going to call when that doesn't work. The phone vendor? The phone OS vendor? The telecom? Hmm, somehow I feel that those three options will not be first on the list, but rather who is closest and has technical knowledge of any kind.

<comment><USER5> Who either has "making such things work" in their job description and thus is the right address, or says "not a school-owned device, not my responsibility, please go through the process next time". If it truly works without connection to the internet (and you thus can ignore a lot of the security etc concerns), providing an unconnected AP with a flat network shouldn't be a big issue for most sysadmins. (And yes, I know what first-level support for random non- technical users is like). Yes, they'd prefer if it just worked in whatever environment, but I don't think it's that out of order that it doesn't, especially without knowing the tradeoffs involved in the design.

I agree with the article on "they should specify what they need exactly" though, for those orgs that want to explicitly allow it in their main infrastructure instead of providing a workaround.

<comment><USER6> I think you're missing an important point, but I don't disagree completely.

The biggest problem is that this is a product DESIGNED to be placed in educational IT environments. As such, the product should either be designed to work in those environments with reasonable effort and without violating common security practices.

It's like marketing a car specifically to people with garages that are too small to fit the dimensions of the car. Either you make the car fit where it needs to go or you market it somewhere that fits. You DON'T market it to a demographic who can't reasonably use it. You're just making bad press for yourself.

And as a network IT guy myself we have a responsibility to maintain order on the networks we administer. Just because someone calls me down to their desk to install CCleaner on their laptop doesn't mean I'm obligated to do it. Infact I'm obligated to steer him in the right direction and make sure he understands the errors of his ways.

IT is the gatekeeper. You don't tell IT what to do... You tell them what you want to accomplish and let them tell you how to do it.

<comment><USER7> The IT department is an enabler for the avarage user or the least common denominator, when we are talking about the monocultures of companies there is no room for niched solutions. The issue here is that location based computing is an feature that people need, but the official channels fight.

<comment><USER6> Companies hire IT departments to manage their IT infrastructure correctly. Maybe some companies just want some cheap kid who can activate a cell phone or plug wires into a tower, but those aren't the companies who NEED to care about IT.

You go to your doctor and pay him good money so he can tell you how to properly take care of your body. If your doctor tells you that you have diabetes and you continue eating sugar, you will die.

If your IT department tells you something is a bad idea there's a reason for it. You don't have to understand his logic, and he doesn't have to explain it to you. Your company pays him to understand all of that so you don't have too.

Enterprise infrastructure is extremely complex and enterprise applications are often extremely fragile. If the company could exist without their contributions I'm sure there would be no IT department.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bigcorp gets all the positive PR for bringing new technology to schools and "disrupting" the classroom paradigm, while the IT department gets all the blame because Bigcorp doesn't field test.

Sounds like Google to me.

</comment><comment><USER9> How come multicast, bonjour etc doesn't work on enterprise networks? I've always wondered this because it would've been helpful several times.

<comment><USER10> I'm no expert, but I think most enterprise & university networks enable client isolation in the routers.

If I know the IP of a friend on the LAN, I can connect to him directly, as normal - the connection will not be blocked by the router. But other than that, the router shows my device a view of the world in which it is the only thing connected to the LAN.

Enumerating the private IP space and trying to connect to all of the possible addresses might reveal the actual stuff though? But the multicast protocols I assume use a smarter and more efficient approach which gets blocked by client isolation.

<comment><USER11> Client isolation is just wireless clients on the same AP. PIM routing acts like a proxy, and the multicast address for whatever service your routing will be proxied to the clients local multicast address.

Ruckus calls it bonjour fencing, and has pretty good support for creating useful policy.

[http://docs.ruckuswireless.com/smartzone/3.6.2/sz300-vszh- sc...](http://docs.ruckuswireless.com/smartzone/3.6.2/sz300-vszh- scg200-administrator-guide/GUID-538CB11D-E4D2-4C71-BEBF-3B0645E7D12E.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I expect to read next that they blocked port 80 too because "security" and it's Google's fault they can't get to web sites now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wtf dude, you're a network admin, administer your network. Perhaps you should read up on the end to end principle, instead of blaming the apps.

<comment><USER3> I think the point is that admins _are_ administering their network. Disallowing wireless clients from communicating with one another is SOP.

<comment><USER14> No, they aren't.

Making a one-size-fits-badly policy is how you get large amounts of shadow IT and assets on non-controlled machines.

The security policy has to balance with what the users are tasked with, and what's expected. And when IT won't budge, you get really weird stuff happening.

I've seen professors running a linksys natted network on a uni lan, precisely because he needed control and lookup of IPs for his robotics setup. And Uni IT did their knuckle-dragging usual of nothing (blame the user). His solution was "insecure" but that went to his real task of robotics prof.

<comment><USER6> This sounds to me like the prof tried to tell IT what to do instead of explaining to IT what he wanted to accomplish.

If you came up to me and said "Hey I want to plug in my own router in my office so I can have my own little WiFi network for my projects" I'd tell them no, it's against policy, against SOP, against best everything, and it would be an unmanaged, insecure, non-company asset (probably with default credentials and unpatched firmware). I would then just nod my head at his hemming and hawing and invite him to go over my head.

Now... If you came up to me and said "Hey I've got a ton of wireless devices in my office that are related to my work. What would be the best way for me to network them all together and isolate them from the rest of the network?" I'd gladly draw up a plan to get the task done, order the assets that I want in my shop (with company money), configure it the way I want, and then roll it out and keep tabs on it.

Just doing whatever you want on the network because IT won't let you is asking for trouble, and could/should get you fired.

<comment><USER15> But if the prof doesn't have a budget or billable cost-centre you're just going to shrug and he's back to 'do it myself'

That's the most common problem users have with IT.

<comment><USER14> Yep, and since he was one of the senior faculty teaching engineering (that the uni started the new program for within the last 4 years), he's immune to these kinds of "we'll fire you if you do X it thing".

He needed not wpa2 enterprise wireless. WPA2 personal would have sufficed for his robotics... but "Policies". When he asked how to proceed, IT-Networks responded with "We dont tell people how to do their networking. We enforce policy."

He had contacts in IT (my director), and put me to make it work. So I helped configure a better router, made sure DHCP and other protos wasn't leaking out the WAN, set a stupid long PSK. Took me .5h to get a good environment set up. And sure, it violated policy, but it was secure and enabled the prof to continue his swarming robotics experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm curious what's the suggested alternative. If you have a self-setup device with no physical interface, which can be accessible from any place on the network - how would you do that?

Is there some kind of interval version of upnp? Nmb is theoretically possible, not wouldn't work outside of specific environments.

</comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of trying to get Active Directory to work across firewalls. MSRPC makes it a total nightmare with moving, randomly assigned ports.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but this is MUCH easier today. Next Gen firewalls support Deep Packet Inspection for MSRPC traffic, you can even whitelist specific RPC calls, auto/temp allow the ephemeral ports, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> tl;dr "I run a network with some wonky Enterprise stuff that does weird things I don't understand and it's Google's fault."

<comment><USER18> Yeah, this was a lame rant. Just create a single purpose SSID on your enterprise wireless controller that supports peer-to-peer (client to client connectivity). Bind the educational hardware to that, everything is fine. Really I dont see Google doing anything wrong here...

<comment><USER20> True that sounds tenable, but dealing with multicast can be a pain. There's no such thing as "enable p2p", there's enable multicast and open specific ports between clients, etc. Does Google give the IP and netmask for the multicast, or the requirements for TTL, or even just the multi-cast ports used, etc? Are they even using multicast? It's all basic info which could readily be listed allowing a configuration to meet the user's needs. Having a single "wide open on all ports" (e.g. consumer grade) SSID on a network could be a significant vulnerability vector.

<comment><USER18> There is enable p2p, its called disabling client isolation mode. This isn't even specifically about multicast. Its just the peers (clients) cannot make unicast connections to each other.

<comment><USER21> >> its called disabling client isolation mode.

So then you proved your statement wrong, there is not a setting or feature called "enable p2p"

>This isn't even specifically about multicast

According to the article it is

<comment><USER18> Buddy, client isolation mode or lack there of is sometimes called allowing 'peer to peer' traffic. I understand the ambiguity over TCP P2P networks, but given the context most network engineers know what you are talking about. Regarding the article mentioning multicast -- the engineer SUSPECTS its to do with multicast. Im saying it could be due to several configuration issues, but most likely client isolation mode (aka not allowing peer-to-peer traffic). Why pick a fight over this?

<comment><USER21> I am not your buddy, pal...

as far as picking a "fight" I was not, I was being technical. When it comes to talking about Technical things I prefer when people are technical. This is key when writing technical documentation.

For example, if you were writing a technical doc you would not put in the doc "Turn on P2P feature" as that feature does not exist, instead you would say "To enable P2P communication, turn off Client Isolation"

One should be technical when talking about technical things, and assuming "most network engineers know what you are talking about" is often how mistakes are made...

I have seen companies lose millions because one engineer assumed another engineer knew or thought about, or would preform steps not included implicitly in an instruction set</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The grim truth behind the Pied Piper - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200902-the-grim-truth-behind-the-pied-piper <comment><USER2> Another possible sources of such legends are fictional stories put into documents as page-fillers.

In my city there's court documents going 5 centuries back, and there was a tradition among scribes to fill the pages between separate cases with "obviously false cases" and other stories so nobody can add false details to the cases.

So there are stories about a sheep sueing a wolf and other classic jokes.

And in the actual court documents from 17th century there's a formally written letter signed "Pluton, lord of all hells" praising his protestant politicians for doing great job in the city :) At the time there was reformation and counterreformation going on.

And there were obviously legends based on that :)

<comment><USER3> That is hilarious. Are any of those documents available online?

<comment><USER2> I've searched for it, found mentions but no full text. Here's one example (in Polish): [http://pther.net/PDF/Miscellanea/MIscellanea%20tom%2010](http://pther.net/PDF/Miscellanea/MIscellanea%20tom%2010).

It mentions an article by M. Trojanowska called "Wpisy epickie w księgach grodzkich lubelskich XVU-XVUI w." fully concerned with these "wpisy epickie" or "wpisy ludyczne" (epic/ludic entries)

It was published in "Biuletyn Lubelskiego Towarzystwa Naukowego", tome 23, year 1981, no 1

<comment><USER4> Malformed link it appears!

<comment><USER2> Weird. The link is the same but this one works.

[http://pther.net/PDF/Miscellanea/MIscellanea%20tom%2010.pdf](http://pther.net/PDF/Miscellanea/MIscellanea%20tom%2010.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And here I was thinking middle-out compression.

<comment><USER6> Well, the rats are filtering out some frequencies when they search for predators..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like it could have been the Children's Crusade (or something along those lines)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade)

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania)

Apparently, there is no consensus as to what triggered this phenomenon. Very interesting mystery.

</comment><comment><USER9> One thing that the article hints at, but doesn't explicitly say is that "children" probably doesn't mean literal children, but may mean something more along the line of "citizen" or "young adult".

<comment><USER8> That's what the recruitment theory implies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are lots of great stories about "magical music" that could have a hint of truth to them. But the rat bit seemed to come later.

It seems to me there is something more shameful going on, as the original tragedy was forgotten.

The earliest written town records of Hamelin state, in 1348, "It is 100 years since our children left." The German Lüneburg manuscript, dating 1440-1450 "130 children born in Hamelin were led away by a piper [clothed] in many colours to [their] Calvary near the Koppen, [and] lost."

<comment><USER11> almost sure so. Being religiously uneducated atheists we have no associations with "Calvary near the Koppen" while it seems to have had well defined semantics back then:

[https://www.coursehero.com/file/p1upht4/What-is-the- signific...](https://www.coursehero.com/file/p1upht4/What-is-the-significance- of-the-concept-hill-of-Calvary-in-relation-to-the/)

"... conflated the concepts of Koppenberg , the hill of Calvary and Golgotha as though they all meant the same, but that can never have been the case. There were always substantial differences between them, as in the Middle Ages itself the concept of Calvary referred exclusively to the head or skull surmounting the jaws of Hell, otherwise referred to as the lion's or dragon's mouth, that swallows sinners while little demons spare no effort to push poor wretches into this mouth with their tridents or other implements. This was the typically medieval image of the journey to Hell or the entry into the jaws of Hell up to the era of the Crusades, when a Minister General of the Franciscan order interpreted the Bible in such a way that the hill of Calvary , the skull, became synonymous with Golgotha , a concept which later included an association with any place of execution, and thus Calvary acquired a new significance ..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Needs some pop music:

Abba - The Piper, 1980, 3min24sec

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

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't know about rats, but we called animal control on an aggressive gator. And the guy who came out sat down on the side of the pond with a boombox playing a cassette tape of some weird noises. Gator swam right up to him and he then disposed of it.

I don't know that it's that far fetched to think that at least the rats part could possibly have been true.

As for the gator cassette, I asked and was told it's gator mating sounds. The bad news was that he then said that to catch the mate, the cassette won't work and he would have to use chicken.

<comment><USER11> rats have ultrasound hearing, and children have higher range of hearing than adults, though not in ultrasound. While i don't subscribe to the literary version of a piper taking children away, it may have been noticed by the people back then that animals and children hear some flutes while adults - don't. (An example of a gruesome speculative version of events would be for example that it was used to sort "good" children say from "possessed", especially if children playing in the dirt/etc. were noticed to have say higher infection rate) The story don't mention nor dogs nor cats reacting to the piper, and that is natural given that it is a rat infested medieval city - getting rid of dogs and especially of cats (done back then for superstitious religious reasons ) would be the major way of getting into rat infestation in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Baby boomers will remember a wonderful musical made off the poem shown on TV during the Thanksgiving weekend. It used a lot of Greig music.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin_(195...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin_\(1957_film\))

In its heyday it was as popular as the Wizard of Oz musical. Wikipedia says that because its copyright expired, no network now reshows it. However it is available on youtube.

[https://youtu.be/563V_2pIuwU](https://youtu.be/563V_2pIuwU)

<comment><USER15> Why should copyright expiry decrease popularity? They can still broadcast the show.

</comment></comment><comment> Digit-Al My nan used to be able to recite the whole poem from memory. She's 93 now, so can't remember so well any more.

</comment><comment><USER16> tl;dr: the event refers probably to an emigration that really happened, and the pied piper might have been a recruiter to attract settlers to newly conquered lands near Berlin

<comment><USER17> The article suggests multiple other interpretations. That does seem to be the most accepted, although "probably" seems like the wrong word.

<comment><USER18> Jürgen Udolph - the researcher in Onomastics who has proposed the generally accepted theory - is well respected. The names of families and of places in that region northeast of Berlin resemble those from Hameln/Hamelin. However, he does not claim to have found the one true truth. A possible alternative is that both things happened - locators recruiting the younger generation around Hameln as well as the incident that became the story of the Pied Piper

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The non grim it didn't happen would be the obvious. They all slowly moved away as mentioned.

But sex/slavery would be a grim working theory. Sold by their parents, who then wouldn't rush to dispel rumours.</comment>


Ask HN: What functional programming language should I start with? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
I have been programming in C/C++/Python for some years now. Now, I am going start learning a functional programming language, but don't know which one to start with. Some comments on which is the best to start with and why, would be great.
Cheers !! <comment><USER2> Haskell is a good place to start. I personally got into functional programming from forcing myself to learn what lambda x in python does, and I learned Haskell soon after. I think it's an easy-to-learn FP language

<comment><USER3> Just curious: What functional languages would you find more difficult to learn than Haskell?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started with Haskell because it forces you to write programs in a functional way. If you're interested, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (<http://learnyouahaskell.com/>) is an excellent introduction.

</comment><comment><USER5> Erlang. It is a reasonable stepping stone towards Haskell and will introduce you to some new concepts and syntax. It is also a simple language. Then tackle Haskell, which will build upon what you learned in Erlang.

</comment><comment><USER6> Haskell if you are an artist. OCaml (without the OOP stuff, no one uses it any way) if you are a plumber.

</comment><comment><USER7> A Lisp dialect is surely the right choice if you are new to functional programming. The language itself is very simple, so it won't get in your way as much as some alternatives.

I recommend starting with racket and the free textbook "how to design programs" especially if you are not comfortable with recursion. It is pretty introductory, so you may be able to plow through the exercises quickly.

MIT's classic SICP is another great starting point, especially if you have an adequate academic background.

</comment><comment><USER8> My suggestion is to bite the bullet and learn Haskell

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a question that's been on my mind lately as well. What are people's opinions of LISP, or variations thereof?

<comment><USER10> I've played around with at least half a dozen lisp dialects. Currently only Clojure and Common Lisp are good practical general purpose lisps(maybe Racket too, but I've only played with r5rs Scheme, so I don't know for sure). Both are excellent languages, both with their own strengths and weaknesses. After using Common Lisp for a while now, its my favorite language, and Clojure comes in as a very close second. IMHO these are the two BEST dynamically typed languages that are currently used in practice.

Choosing between the two could be hard, but my general advice is that if one prefers a more strict FP approach, Clojure is better, and if one prefers to have more choice over what paradigm to use when, a good multi-paradigm language like Common Lisp can make you happy. I happen to like the latter. Which reminds me, I have a lot of lisp hacking to do, enough HN for the evening.</comment></comment>


IPhone 4 is official - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/iphone-4-official

<comment><USER2> I'm impressed with 24% thinner. After holding an iPod touch for the first time I always wished my iPhone was less bulky.

<comment><USER3> To be honest, I would much rather see a thicker phone with a longer battery. My current iPhone (the 3g) feels unnecessarily thin to me.

What I would _really_ like to see would be the option for a larger battery.

<comment><USER4> The Mophie Juice Pack does two things for my 3G:

(1) Makes it thicker (2) Gives it longer battery life.

Problem solved ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there any good, sound, technical reason why iOS4 won't run on 1st-gen hardware (iPod and iPhones)?

I understand some hardware may be missing (bluetooth on 1st-gen iPods and 3G on 1st-gen iPhones) but the computer that runs the show is pretty much the same as the 2nd-gen ones.

<comment><USER6> It seems that Apple has historically concentrated more on pushing towards the future instead of dragging legacy support with them.

In the long run this means that users who don't make the investment to stay current hardware-wise often lose out on being able to take advantage of the latest features.

This certainly creates a good cash flow situation for Apple, but my guess is that the cost-avoidance side is equally lucrative. Not having to run QA tests for hardware that is 3 revisions back, and possibly still running original or near-original code has got to look good on the bottom line as well. Also, knowing that you can leave any mistakes or oversights in the past, and keep drivers for massively old legacy items out of the code base probably just makes for a better overall experience for everyone.

I once worked with one of the guys who was a kernel developer for Windows95. According to him, a lot of the Windows bloat and slowness at startup was directly attributed to massive hardware base they had to maintain support for. IMO, I personally _like_ the fact that Apple doesn't waste a lot of time and effort on worrying that every new feature is fully back-portable to everything they've shipped in the last 5 years.

<comment><USER5> This is not even close to a good, sound or technical reason.

The reason I asked is because, as far as I know, the processor and the amount of memory is the same for 1st generation and 2nd generation hardware. I wonder if Apple is artificially limiting the availability of their software just to force fashion victims to buy new hardware.

And calling the hardware base iOS has to support "massive" is quite an overstatement. That's the enormity of 7 models.

<comment><USER6> _This is not even close to a good, sound or technical reason_

Well, "good" is a little subjective. I am purely speculating here, but I _doubt_ that Apple compiled something into the code to make it simply not run on first gen hardware. IE: there must be something about that hardware platform that makes it different enough from current-gen hardware that supporting it adds some amount of back-end effort. Perhaps the reason has to do with one of the other factors I mentioned, a "mistake" or shortcoming in the first-gen hardware that requires more internal hacks and work-arounds in the code than they are willing to support.

It's not like this sort of thing is unique to Apple. Some of the first-gen Droid phones are not going to see the 2.2 update. Yes, there may be more hardware variants and changes among the Droid phones, but it is still a relatively new platform abandoning not-that-old hardware.

<comment><USER5> It's either a hardware difference or Apple artificially restricting where it installs to increase hardware sales.

It would not be the first time - the first iMacs are capable of running up to MacOS X 10.4, provided they have enough memory. I have successfully ran 10.4 on a beige G3. The installer, however, checks the hardware against a list of "forbidden" (if I remember the term used in the .plist file) machine types.

Here is a similar story, regarding 10.5:

[http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200710260837463...](http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071026083746346)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To me the IPS 300+ DPI screen is the best part. I can't wait until the iPad gets this kind of DPI.

</comment><comment><USER8> It depends on if you have to switch to the tiered plan on upgrade.

It's a foolish purchase if you do, or if this is your first iPhone. 2Gb is nothing, particularly when they're pushing ads at you, and don't forget the game network is coming.

I'm installing an in dash GPS receive this week that will let me stream Pandora in my car, that's next to useless without unlimited.

Hell a poorly written app could blow through wads of data while you're at the doctor's office and you wouldn't know until too late.

The iPhone (and realistically all phones of this nature) need unlimited plans. AT&T is really screwing the customer here, and Apple as well.

At the very least they should have offered a $50 a month unlimited (or practically unlimited) plan.

They really need to open up the market and get some competition going.

<comment><USER9> _It depends on if you have to switch to the tiered plan on upgrade._

ATT has been pretty clear that you don't (i.e. you can upgrade and retain the unlimited data plan).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's insanely high res. How many pixels would my 15" MBP have at that DPI?

<comment><USER11> 15" / 3.5" * how many pixels the new iPhone has. Math people.

So ~4100 by 2700. Pretty nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm upgrading as soon as I can...if for nothing else but HD video!

</comment><comment><USER13> Anyone know when iPhone 4.0 will be available to download.

As a bootstrapped developer I ran OS 4.0 through the first 3 betas, but as noted by apple do so at your own risk. I had some issues with beta 3 so Ive been waiting for an official version, before upgrading to 4.0 again. I just checked developer page and it still says the latest beta 4 well is in still in beta. I guess they release the official version around same time phone comes out?

<comment><USER14> Steve said (in the keynote) that the Golden Master download should be available today.

<comment><USER15> They said "master candidate done today, so out soon". Also that the phone is available on the 24th, so iOS needs to be finished enough before that to be built in and shipped off on time.

But I'm guessing they wont allow us to have iOS 4 in wide circulation before iPhone 4 itself is out, so 24th or after is my guess.

<comment><USER16> Wasn't it mentioned in keynote? Where do I got June 21st date then…

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Apple's next-gen iPhone also comes equipped with Apple's speedy A4 chip and a gyroscope, which when coupled with the accelerometer, provides 6-axis motion sensing._

Six Axis? OK, I picked up my mouse, and demonstrated to myself, rotating it about each of the three(X,Y,Z) Cartesian axis -- no problem. So then I tried to figure out the other three: All I can guess is that they are movement along those prior mentioned axes. Is this correct?

<comment><USER18> I assume three are for position, and three are for angle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Huh, no WebM support.

<comment><USER20> It isn't in any stable build of any popular browser yet, and you expect it to be in MobileSafari's stable build that is released as GM today? That's unrealistic.

<comment><USER21> It'd have been nice if they had at least announced it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The front camera is the most important innovation to me. I think this will really bring video calling to the masses, for the first time.

Many people have been doing that with laptops, but the increased mobility will make a huge difference.

(edit: also, I was mystefied why the iPad doesn't have one. Surely the first update will?!)

<comment><USER5> Indeed. I think this is the major game-changing feature of the phone.

I also like the gyroscope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm very impressed. Anyone know if only the rear camera is 5 MP/720p or are both cameras? If not, what are the specs for the one in the front?

<comment><USER24> "VGA-quality photos and video at up to 30 frames per second with the front camera" <http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html>

VGA is 640x480, correct?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know when it's coming?

<comment><USER26> June 24. Pre-orders starting June 15.</comment></comment>


Getting Your Open Source Project to 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://damienkatz.net/2010/07/getting_your_open_source_proje_1.html

<comment><USER2> 1.0 is hard, because it is a commitment :)

All other issues with reaching 1.0 simply follow from that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome post and very interesting perspective.</comment>


Musical Illusions - <AUTHOR> http://philomel.com/musical_illusions/ via RadioLab: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21 (I'm catching up on the last 4 years). <comment><USER2> In my opinion the most bizarre illusion Professor Deutsch discovered is the "octave illusion".

Be sure to use headphones and prepare to be surprised!

[http://philomel.com/musical_illusions/example_octave_illusio...](http://philomel.com/musical_illusions/example_octave_illusion.php)

The mechanisms that give rise to the illusion are not well understood, but it seems to have something to do with hemispheric asymmetry. Individual differences in how the illusion is heard often correlate with handedness (ie whether you're left or right-handed)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll forever have the phrase "sometimes behaves so strangely" stuck in my head --

Radiolab interviewed Diana Deutsch on her research a few years back, and it's one of my favorite episodes.

[http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21/segme...](http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21/segments/58272)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm. I pasted the RadioLab link in my description (I just listened to it yesterday) but I guess it didn't show. RadioLab is great! I'm just getting into it and I have 4 years of episodes to catch up on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of Shepard Tones: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone></comment>


What feeds do you have in your RSS reader? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> In my RSSOwl client I have; #1. Hackers News (YCombinator) of course ^_^ #2. Medium.com UnOfficial Front Page RSS (shameless plug) [http://feeds.feedburner.com/gotux/medium](http://feeds.feedburner.com/gotux/medium) #3. SlashDot RSS #4. Hack A Day Blog RSS But I find my self using "Polly" twitter client and following various people, websites and news this way.</comment>


Copyright and wrong: Why the rules on copyright need to return to their roots - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15868004

<comment><USER2> Let's be honest for a minute.

Copyright for music is already dead. Consumers like free music. Sometimes they'll pay for concerts, or merchandise, or convenience, or ignorance, but that's it. They might tell you it's wrong on an opinion survey, but they keep downloading.

The situation isn't going to change any time soon, either. Widespread use of DRM'd hardware might work, but the early adopters you'd need to get the new media formats off the ground already benefit the most from free downloads.

Books, movies, and TV shows haven't been devalued yet, but only because ripping and (especially) downloading them are still inconvenient to most people. Bandwidth can't stagnate forever, though. Like with music, when you can download a two-hour movie in ten minutes, and store them by the thousands on your hard drive without missing the space, the only way to prevent rampant piracy will be to stop selling media.

Regardless of the legal niceties, the marginal cost of digital media is zero plus some rounding error. Isn't that a radical enough departure for us to ask whether copyright itself, rather than just its expiration date, might have to change?

<comment><USER3> I kind of agree with you, except that last sentence.

I once worked for a client with no upfront contract and no initial fees, the agreement being that I had to get paid when the work was done. After the work was done (in an incremental agile process nonetheless) the client said that he's going to go to someone else ... and when that someone else finished his work, I discovered that he stole from me ideas from my design, articles blatantly copy/pasted and some implementation details.

Sorry, but even if the cost of reproducing digital media is zero, the cost of producing it is not. And if I'm producing something of value, it's only fair to get paid for my work.

And in the above case I only had the copyright law to defend myself.

What the media industry needs to realize is that people don't pay for crap. If you want to make money out of movies then stop producing crap like Jennifer's Body and stop promoting crap like Britney Spears.

The price of a movie/music album/newspaper subscription should also variate according to its quality / cost of production.

Personally I buy all the albums of my favorite bands (all 3 of them ... I like supporting them and I like discovering tracks for which there aren't mp3s available on torrents). I'm also going to the local cinema regularly but only to see those movies that are worth the price of a ticket.

<comment><USER4> So instead of learning to write a better contract, you want government bullies to enforce the contract you didn't write?

<comment><USER3> You like your physical properties to be protected right? If I stole something from you, would you consider it normal for me to get away with it because you haven't made me sign a contract? WTF dude ?!?

It's not a question of whether IP should be protected or not, it's only a question of where to draw the line. If I create something I want full rights on it, regardless of the ease with which it can be copied and my desire to be in control of the results of my work should supersede your desire to get free stuff ;)

<comment><USER5> If you steal a bike from me, I have lost a bike. If you "steal" a design from me, I am still free to write code from that design, but with the added benefit that if I don't want to bother, others can do so also. I don't want to have to sign a waiver every time I give some advice.

Yes it sucks that you got ripped off. But you should have had a contract before undertaking a paid project. There's a reason it's called _contract_ work.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but the work I did was useless to me, and I couldn't resell it.

So something was stole from me, and that's the precious time I invested in it.

And I totally understand their decision to go to someone else, but then that someone else ripped-off my work. Sorry, but that shouldn't be legal ... the world is full of jackasses that don't give a shit about your needs or about the endless hours of work you've put into it.

The alternative to having laws that protect your property is anarchy ... making your own justice ... _here's your software, it's DRMed, it regularly phones back home with logs of your activity, and I can shut it down with the push of a button. Enjoy!_

Don't get me wrong ... 100 years of copyright is a lot. 10 years of protection would be much more appropriate. I'm not advocating against changes for the good of the public ... but having a healthy copyright law also encourages content-authors. So IMHO, all I'm saying is that we need copyright, not that it doesn't need changing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article does not address the central problem with copyright protection: that it is founded on industrial-age assumptions which no longer apply. As long as copying was capital- and labor-intensive, copyright was enforceable with reasonable measures. But it's now so easy to privately copy a work that copyright protection has become similar to the war on drugs in that it can only be enforced with draconian measures.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Patents and copyrights are artificial government grants making the intangible tangible. It's the artificialness that bothers me.

Our culture has come to think ideas are _real_ like real estate. But they are not. They are intangible, and so is information. This feels an awful lot like the meme "ideas are cheap; execution is everything".

As all media become more like raw information--as the cost of transmission and storage of media falls--it will act more like _ideas_. All that will be left is the government grant to exclusive rights. Thus IP holders lobby governments for larger and larger hammers to beat down infringement.

And anyway, the point of limited IP terms is to allow derivative works for the greater good. I don't hear this greater good argument often enough.

The system is flawed. Perhaps short copyright terms as the article suggests are more workable as the information will be fresh. It may also be the only realistic solution when the time comes that infringement is effectively free (as in beer).

</comment><comment><USER7> I very much agree with this article, copyright terms have become way, way too long, and are very close to no longer being the 'limited time' that the constitution requires. Another good read on the matter is <http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/papers/copyright99.html> .

</comment><comment><USER8> Copyright is essentially a law of physical objects. Information is only involved superficially, to modulate it. When information doesn't need objects anymore, copyright is basically dead. It exists only by vestiges of behavioural convention.

Debating the length of copyright term is pretty much useless. As are refinements of 'fair-use'. If there are no solid 'attachment points' for payment, and no discrete identifiable product, the machine is just spinning but going nowhere. We need entirely different ways to pay for abstract creative effort. It is an opportunity to make something better -- copyright was fundamentally economically suboptimal anyway.

</comment><comment><USER9> > The notion that lengthening copyright increases creativity is questionable

Really, I find it blatantly disingenuous. As "IP" owner I can sit on my ass milking my original creation for 90+ years or I can be "forced" to actually produce more works every 5-15 years.

<comment><USER10> But a theoretical someone who has not yet created any intellectual "property" might get encouraged to get of his ass and write something to get profits for 90 next years, while the "mere" 5-15 years might not have that appeal.

Not that I agree with the original assertion, I just think that your counterargument is a bit weak.

<comment><USER11> Nope. A person who is a creator will build and write things regardless of the copyright protections. There is not a single person out there who is going to say, "You know, I should publish this song, but I won't because it's just going to end up in the public domain in 10 years."

<comment><USER12> "A person who is a creator will build and write things regardless of the copyright protections."

That's an interesting thought, but almost certainly not true. Some forms of creation require a large amount of time and effort. Some people will squeeze in time around their jobs and friends and families no matter what so that they can create. Other people will not.

But even if you're right, I want some creative people to be able to create full time. If I can get twice the output from Neal Stephenson or John Darnielle or Linus Torvalds because they don't have to work a separate day job, that is a world I want to promote. This doesn't mean that copyrights should be defined the way they are, or that copyrights are even the way to achieve this world, but don't act like economic compensation for creativity isn't useful.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, but the record seems to indicate that your viewpoint, although common and valiantly expressed, is wrong:

<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090308/1022324034.shtml>

Copyright on music got introduced part way through composer Giuseppe Verdi's career. He clearly coasted for the latter part. Want more from Stephenson or Torvalds or even Stephen King? Shorten or eliminate copyright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just yesterday, I ran some calculations based on a different assumption, just on raw economics. It goes like this:

1) Suppose that "intellectual property" (IP) is taxed, like real estate. Say at a T = 1% rate, to keep it simple. This pays for the property protection service the state provides.

2) But the holder does not actually pay tax. He just accumulates back payments to the state, at an interest rate R per year.

3) When the state is owed 100% of the value, the IP reverts to the public domain.

This has the advantage that the property value does not matter - it can be 1, 100, 100k; nothing to haggle there. It is just assumed to be constant for the period considered.

Run your own calculations. Mine were that with a T=1% tax rate, and a R=5% interest rate on unpaid tax, you get 37 years. (26 years for R=10%, 47 years for R=3%.)

P.S.

I got curious, and just checked with a lower tax rate T=0.5%. R seems to dominate T. Here is a little table:

                R=3%  R=5%  R=10%
        T=0.5%   66    50     32
        T=  1%   47    37     26

<comment><USER15> Lessig had a simpler idea.

The first n years of copyright protection are free, for a modest n (say 10). After that, the copyright owner can get extended protection by paying minimal fee every so often, say $1 every 5 years.

Lessig's numbers were almost certainly different.

<comment><USER16> I think there's an idea where copyright extension fee grows exponentially, so free for first N, $1 for the next N, $10 for the next N..

And after a few N's, it'll either be economically infeasible, or you can still keep them, but it'll be worth it for you (Mickey is worth quite a bit after all these years).

I think Lessig's idea was basically get the "dead" copyright properties into the public domain, where you can't get permission because you don't know who owns things.

<comment><USER15> > I think there's an idea where copyright extension fee grows exponentially, > so free for first N, $1 for the next N, $10 for the next N..

There are lots of ideas. However, few of them can be realized.

If we can't enact Lessig's plan, what makes you think that an exponential fee schedule has any chance?

> but it'll be worth it for you (Mickey is worth quite a bit after all these > years).

"Micky" isn't copyrighted. Mickey is trademarked. Things where Mickey makes an appearance are copyrighted. (Trademark is what keeps you from producing new works containing Mickey. Copyright keeps you from copying existing works and deriving new works from said existing works. For example, porn mickey need not have copyright problems.)

There are literally millions of such things. Do you really think that applying an exponential fee to them has a chance?

<comment><USER16> Steamboat Willie is still not in the public domain.

I'm just stating an interesting plan, not that it is realistic. Please do not make unnecessary assumptions.

<comment><USER15> > Steamboat Willie is still not in the public domain.

That's true, but misses the point. Even if Steamboat Willie enters the public domain, Mickey Mouse doesn't enter the public domain.

Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain - I can sell new Sherlock Holmes stories. Mickey Mouse is protected by trademark, so I can't sell a new Mickey Mouse story, no matter how many Mickey Mouse stories have gone off-copyright.

<comment><USER13> Some questions about the copyright status of Sherlock Holmes stories still exists: [http://www.techdirt.com/blog.php?tag=sherlock+holmes&edi...](http://www.techdirt.com/blog.php?tag=sherlock+holmes&edition=techdirt)

If I had any literary talent, I'd think twice about writing any Sherlock Holmes sequels, etc, althought I cheerfully bought, read and enjoyed "Shadows over Baker Street", a mashup of Sherlock Holmes, and HP Lovecraft's Elder Gods.

Surely this illustrates that "chilling effect" on free speech that copyright has, eh?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is an outstanding audio essay on the state of copyright in America: <http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=16>

</comment><comment><USER18> So, is this article interesting because it comes from The Economist? I think most of us here have been reading copyright law analysis and critique that's far beyond this since before the DMCA was passed.

<comment><USER19> One of my yardsticks is that when the Economist supports something, it's clear that those that claim that it would be "bad for business/bad for the market" are no longer to be believed.

<comment><USER20> I agree. When it was Lawrence Lessig saying this, there was a certain note of the crank about the idea (very much increased by the performance of Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg in the lead-up to _Eldred v. Ashcroft_). But when the world's magazine of record says it, it's as mainstream as UNICEF. (Not that being as mainstream as UNICEF is necessarily a good thing.)

That's how changes to the world normally occur: not through a revolutionary minority, but through the development of a consensus which serves as a suitable powder keg. Look at British and French SF from the twenty years before WWI, for example.</comment></comment></comment>