Hacker in AT&T iPad case breaks gagging order - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/hacker-in-att-ipad-case-breaks-gagging-order-2010078/

<comment><USER2> As much as I like what he's doing, he's so fucked.

</comment><comment><USER3> He's kind of a douche. Between this [1] and his infatuation with the God- hates-gays Fred Phelps, his ties to antisemitism, etc, he strikes me as not a real nice guy.

[1] "Auernheimer claimed responsibility for the disruption to Amazon's services in April 2009 when many books on gay issues were reclassified as pornography."

<comment><USER4> Weev is a troll.

Phelps is one of the greatest trolls of all time -- he started as a civil rights attorney 50 years ago, but his more recent shtick is to do provocative shit to get his civil rights violated so that he can sue. The infatuation is obvious.</comment></comment>


Intel Recalls Sandy Bridge Chipset - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/1/31/intel-recalls-sandy-bridge-chipset-over-sata-flaw/

<comment><USER2> It seems like this could really hurt the PC market. A lot of people were holding off buying a new system, because the advice for the last 6 months was "wait for Sandy Bridge". Now all those new systems are being recalled...</comment>


Repl.it - Online REPL for over fifteen languages - <AUTHOR> http://thechangelog.com/post/20352411486/repl-it-online-repl-for-over-fifteen-languages <comment><USER2> It's 17 languages. What's with all this "over fifteen" nonsense?

<comment><USER3> Could be 18 tomorrow.</comment></comment>


Congress Revives Ban on Altering the DNA of Human Embryos Used for Pregnancies - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/congress-revives-ban-on-altering-the-dna-of-human-embryos-used-for-pregnancies/ <comment><USER2> How reliable are techniques for fixing single-locus mutations in mammal zygotes? I heard that CRISPR is not all that reliable and the risk of introducing unwanted changes is fairly high. Does anybody have numbers about how many embryos you would have to go through on average until you get one with exactly the alteration that you wanted?

<comment><USER3> If you're looking for offspring without some particular mutation you're much better of with embryo selection rather than trying to use CRISPR. It's only when you have some specific trait not present in the parents that you'd even want to consider it, really. Well, if you've got a problem on the y-chromosome or the mitochondria then you have a good medical reason but there just isn't that much on the y-chromosome and the three-parent embryo thing in the article is a good solution for mitochondrial DNA problems.

<comment><USER4> What about some specific trait present in both parents, that will get worse in the child if both parents have it, because it's a phenotype influenced by the number of copies of a gene the parents each have, and the gene is dominant? Cystic fibrosis, for example. Be nice to just slice all the copies out and start fresh, so that the child isn't even a carrier.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused here, I'd always thought that Cystic Fibrosis was a classic Mendelian recessive and a quick look at Wikipedia suggests that's correct. If you want to get rid of an autosomal recessive gene through embryo selection just make a few blastocysts and only implant one that doesn't carry any copies of the allele you don't like.

If you do have a gene with a number of copies on each chromosome, like the one for amylase say, the number of copies of one type or another don't generally have enough of an effect to get too worked up over it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I understand the concerns with this, I highly doubt our government does (they still don't understand the internet). I'm a believer that this ban is centered around religion and the fear that if man can "create" then it takes away from religion and a God creating man.</comment>


Last Week in Apple: Drunk Employee Strikes Back | GiveMeMind - <AUTHOR> http://www.givememind.com/last-week-in-apple-drunk-employee-strikes-back/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+givememind%2Ffhcn+%28givememind.com%29 <comment><USER2> This lame "OMG APPLE IS BREAKING INTO PEOPLE'S HOUSES" story has been thoroughly debunked. Apple employees did NOT pose as SFPD police officers, the police officers assisted them, and the employees asked the tenants for permission to enter the house.

</comment><comment><USER2> Here's the real story: [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/09/05/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/09/05/national/a111154D69.DTL)</comment>


Rallax.js – Dead simple parallax scrolling - <AUTHOR> https://chriscavs.github.io/rallax-demo/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, sorry in advance for the shameless self-promotion.

I recently released Rallax.js, a dead simple package for creating dynamic parallax scrolling effects. Rallax is fast, dependency free, and extremely lightweight. Check it out, and let me know if you like/hate it XD

<3 Chris</comment>


Computer Science Tests are Like It's 1984 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.andrewmunsell.com/post/37925556071/computer-science-tests-are-like-its-1984

<comment><USER2> This just sounds like a lot of whining to me.

On every CSE test I took when I was in college they graded the code writing portions based on algorithm implementation. No one ran your code through a compiler and docked pointed for each error. If you wrote array.length() instead of array.length you wouldn't lose points as long as your loop did what it was supposed to do.

Also, on every job interview I have ever gone to I have had to write code on paper with the interviewer breathing down my neck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Programming transcends programming languages.

The purpose of examinations are to measure your understanding of programming concepts, not how you would translate those concepts into the programming language of the week.

You don't even need a computer to program, just an imagination and ability to apply those concepts to the problem you are trying to solve to yield a solution.

To share your solution, all you need is a writing instrument and surface, just like you encounter in your examinations.</comment>


Bruce Schneier debates former TSA boss - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/822 <comment><USER2> First: this "Economist Debates" format is a wonderful idea, but questionably executed. Its layout could use quite a bit of rethinking, focusing on improving usability for those who've only stumbled onto the debate after its conclusion (as I assume most of us have). I'm guessing that the format felt more natural and threadlike to those who were along for the ride from the get- go. But there's real value in being able to read the debate, after the fact, from start to finish in an intuitive and easy-to-follow fashion.

As for the content of the debate: I've been following Schneier's commentary on airport security for at least a few months now. What he's saying is no surprise to me. He's preaching to a choir of which I am a fast and firm member. On the other hand, I'm actually amazed at the willingness of his opponent (Kip Hawley) to concede some points that I would have thought were held as unshakable dogma amongst the TSA-apologist set. To me, genuine progress was made in this debate. This was not a case of two people's arguing pre-fixed talking points in circles around each other. This felt more like a real discussion, with give and take.

Kudos to The Economist for hosting this debate, and for attempting to innovate on the printed-debate format. To date, it's a format that nobody's quite nailed. (Nor, for that matter, has The Economist here). But it's an interesting step forward.

<comment><USER3> I suspect it is significant that Kip Hawley is former administrator. He is no longer being paid to stick to the party line in the face of reason and fact. A debate with the current administrator would be a display of colossal stupidity.

<comment><USER4> Schneier previously interviewed him back when he was still with the TSA: <http://www.schneier.com/interview-hawley.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please don't editorialize in the titles. Also, there's a lot of material there, what are you referring to, exactly?

From the guidelines:

"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

<comment><USER6> I would assume this - "I have made two basic arguments about post-9/11 airport security. One, we are not doing the right things. And two, the things we are doing are wrong."

<comment><USER5> There's also the moderator stating that Schneier won. The derrier handoff is not obvious at a glance. I think a more neutral title would be better; this is an important debate, not cheering for your favorite sports team.

<comment><USER7> However, it is also worth considering that a more neutral title may not have made it onto the front page.

<comment><USER7> I wasn't aware that I was making that contentious a statement.

Was just meaning that the titles on a news site are effectively headlines and that the style of how they are written can massively effect how much attention they are given.

<comment><USER8> >massively effect how much attention they are given.

This is very true. And is also a massive problem with news sites. You didn't post a accurate, descriptive title, you posted an editorialized opinion.

Yes, you get lots of views if you distort the article (18% do NOT agree that he lost the debate), but catchy title does not good journalism make.

I think HN should shy away from this sort of thing. We'll all complain about Fox, MSNBC and the Drudge Report for their ridiculous headlines (This just in, Obama sacrificed a child! Click for story!!), lets apply the same set of critical standards here.

Otherwise we'll become /r/politics..

<comment><USER7> I didn't post any title, accurate, descriptive or otherwise.

I'm not the OP, I was just commenting is all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I went to this site 3 times now and still have no idea how to use it. What should I be reading here? Usability FAIL.

<comment><USER10> I think the problem is the original link doesn't really go to the beginning or the 'home', as it were.

Here's the start: <https://www.economist.com/debate/overview/225>

then it starts to make sense IMO.

in the end, yes, a bit of a usability hiccup.

<comment><USER9> Thanks. The fact that it needed explaining says it all, though. Nonetheless, the debate format is interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "More than 6 billion consecutive safe arrivals of airline passengers since the attacks on America on September 11th 2001 mean that whatever the annoying and seemingly obtuse airport-security measures may have been, they have been ultimately successful."

The first paragraph of Hawley's opening statement is a complete non-sequitur and doesn't bode well for the rest of his arguments.

<comment><USER12> The question left unanswered was how many safe arrivals were there before 9/11? There statement in no way proves or even correlates save arrivals.

The Sun has risen every day since I was born, you are all welcome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So the TSA guy is trying at every turn to say there has been some value and success in the current procedures, whereas Schneier says there have been none.

But both agree on a picture of airport security going forward that is much more pre-911.

So its the TSA guy trying to CYA and not be held accountable for the cost carried so far, but conceding it has to end.

<comment><USER14> > "is trying at every turn to say there has been some value"

And failing to provide one well documented example. No, just saying there were some cases is not fine. We've had very detailed examples of issues from people who experienced them, we looked at videos taken on cameras, we've heard multiple analysis of the failures. From the other side I've heard only "there were some successes, really". They completely fail to validate this point...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does one read this debate? I don't think starting at the top and reading down makes sense....but am I wrong?

</comment><comment><USER16> So I read the entire debate and while I generally agree Schneier on this topic one of Mr Hawley's arguments gave me a few second thoughts about the efficacy of reactive security.

Bruce's argument is like this: There are two kinds attackers, amateurs and pros. Amateurs are easily caught because they don't have the time or knowledge to properly plan an attack and the pros have the resources to work around any defenses the TSA has set up because the TSA cannot be proactive enough in its measures. Bruce argues that post-9/11 security measures are both superfluous and insufficient at the same time.

However, what if the amateurs and pros could work together? What if the pros developed attacks and published the directions? Amateurs could use those directions to their hearts content. In that sense, reactive security may not prevent al Qaeda from attempting new clever attacks, but it will prevent copycat attacks an the part of sympathizers (or folks with their own agendas) who have no overt connections to major terrorist networks. Organized criminal hacker organizations have been known to pull this very same stunt by releasing easy to use programs which make it possible for dilettantes to pull off attacks that they would otherwise be unable to do.

In fact, it's a little bit like computer security, where, every time a vulnerability is discovered, either by a security researcher, or through a successful zero-day exploit, a patch is developed to plug the hole and thousands of sysadmins apply the patch as soon as possible. In this way, we can't prove that say, Apache, has no vulnerabilities, but we can be sure that it has no known vulnerabilities and all the easy ones to find have been dealt with long ago.

So it seems to me, that by routinely 'plugging holes' so to speak by implementing reactive measures, the TSA is increasing the marginal cost of each attack for al Qaeda significantly, and this hypothetically, does increase security.

Of course, that doesn't detract from any of the other arguments against the TSA in it current incarnation, especially the obvious haphazardness of its measures, the occasional abusiveness of screeners, and its political essence. It does though, seem to make one of Bruce's arguments seem less strong.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's not as though the audience were disinterested judges -- they were partisans, and more anti-TSA partisans showed up to vote. Popularity contest, that's all.

And nothing will change though the Economist debate, or any other debate. Only declining profits for the arilines, spurred by declining passenger miles, will force change.

By then, TSA-esque processes will probably exist for every form of transport, including automobiles.

<comment><USER18> I disagree that nothing will change because of this debate.

It's slight, but now there is now a larger crop of people who understand two viewpoints on an important issue and are armed with better rhetoric for the view they espouse. That's a win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> You go, Bruce.

Isn't it stunning how long it takes for our elected representatives to even begin to decide to do the right thing?

Granted, there was an overreaction to security following 9/11. We understand that the TSA needed to figure out how to do the job the public expected. We gave them almost a decade.

Concerns started to really amp up at the end of 2010 when those scanners started to appear. Last year, when so many stories surfaced of children being trauma-searched, TSA employees misusing the near-naked images, and then the full-body grope pat-downs -- I fully expected some prompt hearings and action from our elected representatives.

What did we hear from the people who are supposed to be protecting the citizenry? Nothing.

Better late than never, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER20> >"[I]f tomorrow air passengers were offered the option of a 'secure' flight on which all passengers are subject to security, or a 'non-secure' one where they could go straight to boarding, hassle-free," he writes, "I promise you that many travellers would still take the 'secure' option."

I would take the "secure" option because who is left taking the "non-secure" option? Terrorists.

If all the flights were "non-secure", just like every train ride, then we spread the terrorists out and my odds are better.

<comment><USER21> This quoted argument is moronic, he is saying in effect "either do it our way or not at all". No one is saying there should be no security at all. In the rest of the world there was pre-boarding security prior to 9/11, it was pretty much only the US where there was very little security on domestic flights, this presented a soft underbelly to attackers which only an idiot would have ignored.

El Al is the perfect example of how flight security should be achieved, and yes, it involves profiling to select the people you want to pay most attention to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does he also hand him a grainy greyscale picture of it too?

</comment><comment><USER22> I wish Bruce Schneier in an otherwise nice essay wouldn't propagate the meme "the goal of terrorists is to terrorize".

The end goal of terrorists is to fight a war or change government policy (through acts of violence). They may have a goal of terrorizing, and they may even enjoy causing harm and terror, but that is still a means to some other end, not an end in itself. The USA is targeted because of how it exercises its power in foreign policy. That does not imply that terrorism is deserved, just that actions have consequences and should be discussed in a more intelligent way rather than deceiving ourselves with over-simplistic notions.

<comment><USER23> One need only to quote your post to refute it:

> I wish Bruce Schneier in an otherwise nice essay wouldn't propagate the meme > "the goal of terrorists is to terrorize".

> [Terrorists] may have a goal of terrorizing, and they may even enjoy causing > harm and terror...

Is it a meme, or is it a fact? The truth is, it's a fact. Terrorists use fear & intimidation (and yes, terror) to coerce governments, through public opinion, to change certain policies.

Terror is both the means to an end, and an end in and of itself. You are unequivocally wrong.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Posting a job on Remoteok.io costs as low as $3 - <AUTHOR> Not affiliated, was looking through the remote job offers and noticed that the base price has dropped to $3. <comment><USER2> Link?

What's the average price someone pays though? Or is this a corona discount?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://remoteok.io/](https://remoteok.io/)

Normally it was in the $200-$300 range.

Not sure if this is a corona related discount though.</comment></comment>


The smallest JavaScript libraries on the internet - <AUTHOR> http://minime.stephan-brumme.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm wondering for some time if the minification could be done in a way that would help the gzipping achieve better ratios.

For example if you have to minified function and one has three local variables and the other two it might be beneficial to minify it as "var a, b;var c;" if there are a lot of functions with two parameters a only one with 3. Or always assign "this" to a variable called "t" so that "t=this" (or "var t=this;") is repeated often.

This seems to be low hanging fruit but there is a lot of microoptimizations like that even if it saves <5% like this brute forcing it might be worthwhile.

<comment><USER3> Google's Closure Compiler does something like this [1].

It also reminds me of Stack Overflow in 4096 bytes [2], where author also tried to write code that would compress more.

[1] [https://github.com/google/closure- compiler/wiki/FAQ#closure-...](https://github.com/google/closure- compiler/wiki/FAQ#closure-compiler-inlined-all-my-strings-which-made-my-code- size-bigger-why-did-it-do-that)

[2] [http://danlec.com/blog/stackoverflow- in-4096-bytes](http://danlec.com/blog/stackoverflow-in-4096-bytes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do these JS framework comparison articles never include [http://vanilla- js.com/](http://vanilla-js.com/) ? It's all the new rage, and has these other contenders beat every time when both post- and pre- compression.

<comment><USER5> Vanilla JS is nice, but I like Vapor JS better. It has some famous people behind it. Check it out [https://github.com/madrobby/vapor.js](https://github.com/madrobby/vapor.js)

<comment><USER4> Wow - the packed version even gives asm.js a run for its money!

Wonder if they'll make a CoffeeScript wrapper soon.

Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As as aside, there's a good list micro-frameworks and micro-libraries at [http://microjs.com](http://microjs.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> > "Surprisingly, most Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) give you a quite bad > level of GZIP compression."

I think CDNs have a good reason for choosing their preferred method of compression. Just the file size alone isn't the whole picture.

<comment><USER8> Then explain to me, what reasons the CDN has not to choose the best available compression (at least for small files that are downloaded rather often)?

<comment><USER9> Stress on the client CPU + proxy caching is harder + broken support on some old IE

<comment><USER8> * Stress on the client CPU

Do you have any evidence that these smaller files stress the client CPU more (this is probably not an absurd statement, but I claim that one can only make serious discussions about this point if one has a computable (i.e. not only empirically measurable) metric that measures how much a client CPU is stressed by some file).

* proxy caching is harder

Could you explain me the reason for that?

<comment><USER9> > Do you have any evidence that these smaller files stress the client CPU more > (this is probably not an absurd statement, but I claim that one can only > make serious discussions about this point if one has a computable (i.e. not > only empirically measurable) metric that measures how much a client CPU is > stressed by some file).

[http://tukaani.org/lzma/benchmarks.html](http://tukaani.org/lzma/benchmarks.html), Actually I was wrong, Gzip decompression doesn't seem to be impacted at all by higher compression rate, it's even the reverse with small gain in decompression speed. Gzip compression is though - for a mere 3% to 5% gain in size, compression is taking 4x to 6x the time.

> proxy caching is harder, could you explain me the reason for that?

The tricky part is each filed can be compressed in different ways, the CDN might have to store different versions of the same file that can lead to a mismatch between the compression used and the actual compression of the file, a good post on the topic: [https://www.maxcdn.com/blog/accept-encoding-its- vary-importa...](https://www.maxcdn.com/blog/accept-encoding-its-vary- important/) It's doable but it's not trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It'd be good to try with Brotli compression too; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotli)

A new compression algorithm from Google, which is already used for web-fonts. Currently usable in Chrome & Firefox.

 _Replacing deflate with brotli typically gives an increase of 20% in compression density for text files, while compression and decompression speeds are roughly unchanged_

<comment><USER11> Scroll down to the bottom of each page (e.g. [http://minime.stephan- brumme.com/jquery/2.2.0/](http://minime.stephan-brumme.com/jquery/2.2.0/) ). There you will find a comparison of the major non-DEFLATE algorithms, such as Brotli, RAR, 7z, xz, bzip2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Author here: my website isn't about Javascript in the first place, it's about compression. I could have done something similar with PNGs, PDFs or ZIPs (same DEFLATE compression algorithm) but Javascript is much more widespread.

<comment><USER12> I have an issue with the load local copy code:

<script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="local_server_path/jquery.min.js"></script>')</script>

In the browser I always end up with a ') at the top of all my pages. I'm assuming this is because the script tag actually closes inside of the document.write instead of the actual end. Am I the only one with this issue? Not sure what went wrong here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the time taken to decompress these minified libraries identical to the original minified libraries? Be nice to see if there was a measurement on that.

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://vanilla-js.com/](http://vanilla-js.com/) is also pretty small</comment>


Walmart is piloting a pricier 2-hour 'express' grocery delivery service - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/30/walmart-is-piloting-a-pricier-2-hour-express-grocery-delivery-service/ <comment><USER2> Curbside pickup is about as safe and easier to scale.

It's trivial to repurpose any employee as an order picker with 5 minutes training.

<comment><USER3> How is it about as safe? What if I don't have a car?

Delivery seems MUCH safer -- I don't have to leave my home at all.

<comment><USER4> There is no effective difference in the safety of delivery vs curb side pickup.

<comment><USER5> Driving is by far the most dangerous thing that folks do on a regular basis. If I get delivery I don't drive, but I am offloading that risk to someone else.

Either way, I disagree.

<comment><USER2> It is AS safe insofar as risk of infection. The risk of driving to the grocery store is pretty low if you are at not to much below average in your driving skills and not drunk.

Current stats are I believe 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US. Someone came up with a great metric to compare risk called "micromorts"

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

Defined as a 1 in a million chance of death per unit of exposure. All causes in the US give an average of 22 per day in the US in 2010. Traveling 5 miles by car is 0.02 micromorts. Climbing Everest is aprox 38k mm if you are average competence for people who normally do such a thing.

To get the risk profile of going out you would have to get the all cause probability of dying from everything else other than driving and add the chance of dying on a given trip but 0.02 is probably fairly reasonable.

Infectious disease is particularly interesting because its unreasonable to assign a simple probability of infection and then probability of death because if people in aggregate opt to collectively take more risks they each may indeed face only a small initial chance of mortality but their collective choices can going forward spread the virus around and greatly increase their chances of infection in future expeditions.

This is what people who want to assess the risks for themselves usually fail to get. They aren't allowed to do it because they are extremely likely to be bad at it and their risks effect others futures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It makes sense. Just like "economy" vs "first class" for travel. As a business, it needs to partition out the consumer buckets into various groups for profit maximization.

<comment><USER7> "Pay less if it's not urgent" doesn't sound evil or anything. Like the pandemic has proved that delivery workers are a scarce resource, what do you want them to do, have a raffle?

<comment><USER8> It sounds like it's actually "pay more if it is urgent".

<comment><USER9> In a competitive market, it really will be "pay less if it's not urgent". In particular, if you're a peon flying coach, you _want_ some people flying first class, because they are effectively subsidizing your ticket. Bring on the rich!

<comment><USER10> The ecconmics of airplanes is different and do not apply. Here you want enough people paying for the cheap service that it makes money so they don't kill it. There is no advantage to a class of service that doesn't pay for itself in this space, you just move up to the next one.

Actually the worst thing would be most people choosing this as they may decide that the cheaper class isn't worth serving at all.

<comment><USER9> I don't think this analysis is correct. No one's going to offer a service if it's cheaper not to, yes. But if there's only one class of service, you have to make $X on each order to cover your fixed costs. If there are multiple classes, the cheapest class could end up being $(0.8X) and still allow you to make _more_ money overall.

<comment><USER10> In an airplane the (.8x) works out because the seats are going anyway. I don't see how that works for Walmart where they can not do the delivery.

<comment><USER11> Think of it as an SLA. People optimise for different outcomes, some people _need_ their groceries in a 1 hour timeslot because they have other commitments.

<comment><USER10> I agree, but what does that have to do with Walmart providing some class at a loss?

<comment><USER9> It's not at a loss, it's just at a rate they couldn't support if it were there _only_ rate.

As a thought experiment, suppose there are a few local zillionaires start making "platinum" orders to local markets each day, with a $1M delivery charge. Will the markets stop accepting otherwise-profitable peon orders? No. That part is easy. But what will happen to the price of peon orders as the markets compete? They can afford to lower those prices a bit, since their fixed costs are spread across all customers, and the zillionaires are already paying the lion's share.

If you doubt this, imagine you run one of the markets and your competitor drops the price of his peon orders by five percent. Are you going to allow the competitor to take all of your business, forgoing the profit you'd otherwise earn?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not sure how this is going to work, even the standard service is completely booked until next week at my local Walmart, unless they'll reserve some drivers for the 2-hour service.

<comment><USER13> You can't blame Walmart for that, that's case everywhere, from local supermarkets to Whole Foods delivery. All deliveries are out at least a week due to everyone avoiding going out because of covid.

<comment><USER12> I'm not blaming them, I just legitimately don't see how they could offer another service when they're already booked solid and don't have any drivers to spare.

<comment><USER14> 26 million workers have lost their jobs in a little more than a month. The labor market might well be worse than the Great Depression. It doesn't seem to be a hard problem to solve.

<comment><USER15> I get what you're saying, but I have to imagine some people are reticent to start engaging in such a dangerous task for such a small amount of income. You're literally putting yourself and your immediate family in danger of catching a potentially serious illness for the opportunity to make, maybe $50 a day before expenses.

<comment><USER16> I feel like this is an American perspective. From my understanding the danger is overblown (provided social distancing measures are in place and respected).

> maybe $50 a day before expenses

If the alternative is homelessness, people will take this offer. And don't forget, there's entire groups of people who do dangerous jobs daily with little thanks (builders, bin men, etc..) so I don't think they'll have a problem filling these spots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just a thought, make it optional to get rid of the scheduled pickup time. I would be happy with an expected average waiting time, and have them text me when it's ready.

Many of us, myself included, are working from home and have totally flexible schedules. I wouldn't mind just dropping everything and heading over to the store.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's almost always better to use your local grocery store.

You get your products quicker and have a greater selection as well.

<comment><USER19> I assume you mean local as in not large corporations like Walmart or Meijer or Target or Jewel. Because those are local for people also.

And that may be true most of the time, but not during this pandemic, if you want to stay home to protect yourself. None of those places have delivery, at least not that I know of, so I would have to go there to shop. I'm not even sure if they have Curbside pickup options.

<comment><USER20> _I 'm not even sure if they have Curbside pickup options._

One of the local chains where I live just added curbside this week — seven (eight? nine?) weeks into this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would love use a Walmart grocery delivery service, but they use a 9 mile radius around their stores to qualify for delivery and I'm 10 miles away from the nearest store.

<comment><USER20> Keep trying. I wasn't part of the Wal-Mart delivery area until last week. They seem to be expanding lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems interesting, but I highly doubt Walmart can make it work.

Everything about the company screams crap. Every time I go to a Walmart store, I feel as if I lose several IQ points. I have stopped going there.

Their only saving grace, is that I don't trust Amazon to buy certain things, which means I'd rather buy it from a physical store. But I'd still choose any other company, than Walmart.

But, if they can offer decent delivery, with the option to return stuff, then I might try them out. I dislike returning stuff at Walmart.

</comment><comment><USER23> As a customer I would rather they solve the problem that their pickers decrease the usability of their stores.

<comment><USER24> I had a good laugh yesterday at their store. They have finally put one-way stickers on the floor to indicate aisle directions. The only people I saw going the wrong way were wal-mart order pickers.

<comment><USER25> Serious: Are those stickers any better?

I haven't shopped at a store with those arrows, so I haven't seen how well they work, I can only guess...

If someone is standing in the aisle comparing two products, are you going to wait for them so you don't pass them?

If you only need one item and it's in an aisle towards the front of the store, are you going to follow the arrows so you go further towards the back of the store and down an aisle that you didn't need to go down?

Are the arrows going to prevent you from walking through someone else's exhaled air?

It seems more like something to appear doing good than actually doing good.

<comment><USER9> > Are the arrows going to prevent you from walking through someone else's > exhaled air?

In most aisles, it's almost impossible to maintain your distance from others if people are traveling in both directions, since you're frequently passing closely. If everyone makes a one-way "circuit" around the store, you can maintain pretty large distances.

<comment><USER26> I think the point stands - the standard 6' / 1.5m guidelines are completely arbitrary and it's likely that droplets remain suspended for some period of time, so regardless of direction, you're certain to encounter potential infectious agents if you're in an aisle within 15-30+ minutes of someone contagious passing through.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I was merely responding to the naive "why are there arrows?" part of that. The true story is more complex and probably mostly unknown at this point.

That said, at this point, I'll take the arrows and my six feet, for starters. When I'm in a store, which I've done once in the last six weeks...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> using clayton christensen, what's in the downmarket forcing them to retreat upmarket?

<comment><USER28> They're not retreating. It's an additional service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Also a way around price gouging laws. Many vendors cannot raise wages to attract more couriers since they are legally barred from raising prices. So they position this as a new service.

</comment><comment><USER30> hah, not only are they copying Instacart's business model, they also copied the naming ([https://www.instacart.com/store/express](https://www.instacart.com/store/express))

<comment><USER31> _express_ isn't a particularly novel brand term.

<comment><USER7> _express_ to mean getting something faster. Unheard of!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yet another way a huge corp is using this pandemic to make more profit. Now, some elderly person, cancer patient, etc won't be able to get a delivery slot because they cannot afford the premium for the faster service, and this will take resources from the cheaper delivery choice.

Edit: spare me from your acrobatics that make this sound like a fair move by _such_ a wholesome company. I'm sorry if I don't bend over for the company that tells employees to go on food stamps instead of paying a fair wage.

<comment><USER33> If it's so lucrative why isn't there an UberEats for groceries (if there isn't one) and why can't these people just use those services?

imo saying they're using the pandemic for profit by giving you an option to not have to wait 2 weeks is like saying the drivers of these services are just taking advantage of the pandemic. It becomes pretty meaningless.

<comment><USER34> Instacart would be the "UberEats for Groceries", and already has issues with running out of time slots.</comment></comment></comment>


The iOS Gmail situation is an unmitigated nightmare of epic proportions - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/28/3424806/the-ios-gmail-situation-is-an-unmitigated-nightmare-of-epic

<comment><USER2> > _... an unmitigated nightmare of epic proportions_

It's entertaining to live in a time of relative peace and prosperity, to discover what people think constitutes a crisis "of epic proportions". :)</comment>


2010 Tesla Roadster Sport first drive - <AUTHOR> http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10393900-48.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

<comment><USER2> "Surprisingly, it was intuitive and easy to input a street address using the minimal controls, all while stopped at traffic lights _(the system doesn't allow input while the car is in motion)._ " (emphasis added)

I've never heard of this practice before. Is it common for cars with built in navigation to lock the controls while in motion?

Part of me thinks 'That's nice. People are less likely to crash' and part of me thinks 'If I ever get one like this, the first thing I'm gonna do is figure out how to disable the lock.'

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's very common with built-in navigation systems that are standard or optional equipment on a model. I'm not sure about after-market systems that you happen to install in the dashboard, such as the JVC unit that is shown in the article (vs the portable ones that you mount on the windshield).

EDIT: Made the distinction between factory-installed units and after market systems.

<comment><USER2> Thanks.

Now another question. Why would they do this? Isn't it plausible that the passenger/navigator is trying to update their navigation settings?

<comment><USER4> Plausible, but would probably be a minority of cases considering that most people drive alone in their vehicle.

Maybe they could set it so that weight on the passenger seat unlocks it?

<comment><USER2> I was just thinking about the weight sensor. Still, I think that there's too much baby-sitting going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is definitely written like a tech review, not a car review.

The sort of minor interior refresh Tesla did is not uncommon for larger car companies to do every year or two. The complete redesign that happens every five to eight years is a lot more complete than what Tesla has done.

Also, a big weight toward the rear of the car will (all else equal) lead to _over_ steer. (To the uninitiated, understeer = "I missed the turn", oversteer = "I spun out"). A little oversteer is what you want in a sports car, but that can be adjusted pretty easily by tuning the anti-roll-bar stiffness. Most cars from the factory are tuned to understeer slightly, as most consumers who lose control of their car expect to leave the road facing forwards and not backwards.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks sweet.

Is there a reason it has no power steering?

<comment><USER2> Possibly to save energy. Possibly to increase performance. Power steering takes juice. It also adds weight, which takes more juice to move, and could reduce the performance. Do many other roadsters have power steering?

<comment><USER7> With a car that small and light, power steering isn't really necessary. It adds weight and diminishes the driver's ability to feel what the car is doing and feel the road through the wheel.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. At that point it's more of a trade-off between luxury and performance.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hundreds of Fossilized Pterosaur Eggs Uncovered in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/science/pterosaur-eggs.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 <comment><USER2> This is kinda pedantic but what the hey...

> Pterosaurs terrorized the skies for more than 160 million years until they > went extinct alongside the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago.

This should say "non-avian dinosaurs", because dinosaurs made it. The question of why birds survived and pterosaurs didn't is actually a very interesting question.

<comment><USER3> Maybe birds reproduce faster and needs lesser food to survive

<comment><USER4> Considering all the other megafauna that died out around then too it'd make sense to me if it was similarly related to size and resource requirements. Smaller varieties of what existed managed to survive easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've seen this movie, and I'm getting ahead of this trend. If anyone needs me, I'll be buying dozens and dozens of elephant guns.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like the opening line to the next Jurassic Park movie...

<comment><USER7> "unscramble the mystery" –_–

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm, there was this TV program about a girl who had two or three allegedly inert flying reptile eggs ... the insurance guys were rather unhappy ...

<comment><USER9> there is another story about a girl that inherited 3 dragon eggs and was destined to rule the 7 kingdoms, oh wait... who else is excited about season 8 ?! ps: TGIF</comment></comment>


Museums to try ancestors' sail from Taiwan to Okinawa - <AUTHOR> http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0003553716 <comment><USER2> Reading about this reminds me of my favorite folktale from Yonaguni, which shows off how ingenious these embattled islanders were:

"It is said that from the top of the hills on Yonakuni, one can see Formosa and sometimes can even notice the lights on that island at night, so that one would think there would have been much intercourse with Formosa during the history of the islands. The commercial route is modern, however, and there has been little communication between Formosa and Yonakuni in former times. It is said that long ago the fierce natives of Formosa came and took captive some men and women on Yonakuni Island and ate them. The inhabitants of the island were, therefore, very much afraid of the Formosans and did not even date to light a fire at night lest the Formosans should see it and visit them again. There is a story that when the wind blew in the right direction, the natives of Yonakuni took long sandals of a length of two feet and threw them into the sea. When they drifted to Formosa, the [Yonagunians] thought that the Formosans, seeing them, would imagine from the size of the feet that there were very big men in that region and would refrain from exploring their country!"

(From Charles Leavenworth's account of his 1905 visit to Okinawa, "The Loochoo Islands".)

The Taiwanese cannibals never came back, so I'd say the Yonagunians' gambit worked!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is actually rather less impressive than it sounds: Yonaguni is only about 100 km away from Taiwan. The major difficulty would be actually _finding_ Yonaguni, as it's comparatively a very small island.

[https://email@example.com...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,121.8467353,9.09z/data=!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x34674de19cdcab25:0xabd5fdc669e9f772!2m2!1d123.0085106!2d24.4616586!1m5!1m1!1s0x3442ac72bce20a99:0x3f6a35cedd0ac2e0!2m2!1d121.5654177!2d25.0329694?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER4> > "The project is aimed at examining what kind of boats Japanese ancestors > used when they crossed the sea to travel from Taiwan"

While the topic is interesting, the wording of the article is problematic: given that formal annexion of the Ryūkyū date from 1879 and that the local people go through a process of Japanization[1] since this date, speaking of ancestors of Japanese people is more of a political statement than a scientific one.

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

<comment><USER2> Right; I wouldn't call them "Japanese ancestors". The Okinawans of today are descended mostly from migrants from the mainland, and even these people are not necessarily the same ones who came to the islands from Taiwan many millennia ago.

(Those underwater ruins that Yonaguni is famous for almost certainly stem from those people and not from today's Okinawans. While some of them look like a city of some kind, it is just as plausible that rock was cut out of the ground to build things. I would love to know the truth behind that amazing place!)</comment></comment>


Adventures in Go land: high performance custom HTTP(S) service - C-- http://aruiz.synaptia.net/siliconisland/2014/01/adventures-in-go-land-high-performance-custom-https-service.html <comment><AUTHOR> Ever heard of Nginx? Would have solved the problem (HTTPS & caching) without one line of code.</comment>


Cartier boss with $7.5bn: fear of the poor rising up 'keeps him awake at night' - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/cartier-boss-with-75bn-fortune-says-prospect-poor-rising-up-keeps-him-awake-at-night-10307485.html <comment><USER2> The actual quotation is way more reasonable than the headline:

 _"How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare?" he said. "We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It's unfair. So that's what keeps me awake at night."_

<comment><USER3> This is a total garbage headline. I've seen so many stories about billionaires building underground bunkers in the past few years that I immediately expected this article to be another one of those.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, if you have a billion dollars and you don't build a bunker, I'd question your knowledge of history and world events.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Part of me feels that some of the anti-gun news coverage and concerns are driven by the concerns of the super wealthy.

I have no data to back this concern, but I feel with all their money and all the think tank they're financially backing there is a probably some prediction of the impact of AI into future employment and the growing inequality divide.

If you're super wealthy, the last thing you want is a large disenfranchised population without much prospect and sense of purpose in life with guns in their hands.

<comment><USER6> Would it be a good idea to use the term _technology_ instead of AI? There are so many current jobs that will be replaced by pure technological progress (manufacturing jobs, cashiers, cleaners, low-entry banking employees, even drivers). The term AI reads like something amazing (singularity) has to happen for jobs to go away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You just need to take a glimpse at human history to know what happens to the rich when the poor are properly motivated. I don't know if the advances of the last 50-100 years have completely eliminated the probability of such uprisings happening again in America, Europe, etc. It certainly has happened in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East this decade.

<comment><USER8> There is a small chance, that those uprisings had some small little help from unofficial spy organizations which may not be the case to get help in their own territory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good, this is how it should be. The powerful should be fearful of the masses.

<comment><USER10> The more they fear the more they will prepare for it. I dont think you want billionaries with private armies.

<comment><USER9> This is why the right to bear arms is so important. If only the wealthy are able to arm themselves there really isn't much available to keep them in check.</comment></comment></comment>


Isla: a programming language for young children - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maryrosecook/islaclj <comment><USER2> Hi, Mary here. I wrote Isla.

Just FYI, the Clojure version of the language is deprecated. For the last year, I have just been working on the JavaScript version:

[https://github.com/maryrosecook/isla](https://github.com/maryrosecook/isla)

My latest work has been on a programming environment and programming demos:

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

<comment><USER3> Very interesting language!

Why are numbers quoted? It seems that many of the quotes could be optional (except when needed for parser disambiguation). From your examples:

      age is 1
      name is Mary
      friend is isla

You could also use '.' as an optional command delimiter (in addition to newline) for more prose like, such as:

      age is 1. name is Mary. friend is isla.

<comment><USER2> I like the period idea. I will try it.

Quotes are required around number literals to maintain consistency with string literals.

<comment><USER4> I'm partial to the advice to designate strings by the vertical bar instead of quotes. eg, write |Hello | input_name |. Nice to meet you|. This avoids the complication of escape formats until much later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> First, I want to be clear that I attribute noble motives to the designer of the language, and second that I recognize the hard work and effort that goes into a project like this.

My unanswered questions:

() What are the pedagogical principles upon which Isla is founded?

() How is the language tied to models of developmental psychology and to what models?

() For what age is the language appropriate?

() What does it do better than other similarly targeted languages, e.g. LOGO or Alice?

Isla looks as if it could be a game changer. I want to know more.

<comment><USER2> Sure thing.

1\. No principles at all. I know little about education. Since the time I started Isla, and since the time I joined Hacker School as a facilitator, I have been learning as much as I can.

2\. It is not tied to any models.

3\. I am aiming the language at children who are just learning to read and write. So, children between 5 and 8.

4\. I don't know enough, yet, to know if Isla is better than LOGO or Alice.

<comment><USER6> I second brudgers re: noble motives and hard work. :)

Follow up question: Have you stuck it in front of kids to see how they take to it?

Without being based in theory, I'm curious how the language works out in practice.

<comment><USER2> Most of the stuff I have learnt from the experiences of young children using Isla comes from second hand reports from parents. I have also tested it on non-programmer adults.

There are some definite mistakes in the language.

It uses named nouns, yet in real world, we usually refer to things with adjectives and types. We say "pass me the red apple", not "that apple is called Jimmy, now pass me Jimmy".

People get confused about the difference between strings and variables.

To define a function, you make a list and add built in functions to it. This is awkward.

<comment><USER7> Have you looked at Inform? There's a paper on its Web site [1] discussing its approach to modeling the world.

[1] [http://inform7.com/learn/papers/](http://inform7.com/learn/papers/)

<comment><USER3> I was reminded of Inform and also the world modeling languages for AI systems like Cyc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not a fan of languages designed "for children". They tend to be toy languages with limited expressibility, and libraries tend to be limited or nonexistent, severely limiting what the user can actually do with the language.

When I was in middle school, I first learned to program using BASIC. While BASIC was designed to be easier to use, it was still a full language designed for people to be productive in.

There are a whole host of languages that can be taught to (or independently learned by) children that have a clean, simple syntax. Why do we need to create another one with all the drawbacks a small, obscure language brings to the table when Ruby, Python, Scheme, etc exist and are just as easy to get started in, but much more powerful when you dig into them?

<comment><USER9> This comment assumes that Ruby, Python, and Scheme are easy enough for children to get started with, and I disagree with that assumption.

This is clearly, in my mind, better than the languages out there and I've only seen 3 lines.

<comment><USER10> Age 5-7 I spent figuring out to get sprites and music to work on a Commodore 64 that had no commands for it - it was all "POKE"'s to various memory locations. I was by no means unique for my generation, or even my class.

There's a huge number of us that are evidence that non-custom languages that were massive pains to program are easy enough for children to get started with.

Does Ruby, Python and Scheme have dark corners that are harder to understand than BASIC? Sure. Just like my C64 had all kinds of secrets I couldn't figure out by myself by POKE'ing randomly around at that age.

But I'd hazard a guess that most children will be mature enough at some point between 5 and 10 to be able to pick up the basics of pretty much any reasonably "normal" language if they have the motivation to try (for me it was seeing my dad program a simple game and wanting to be able to do the same thing). I'd hate to dumb it down unnecessarily.

<comment><USER11> > Scheme

Out of interest, what are the dark corners of Scheme? I've been using Racket for a while now and I've not come across any unexpected behaviour.

I suppose using non-idiomatic language elements such as mutations is a little odd but so far I've found nothing in the language which has surprised me.

<comment><USER12> Oleg Kiselyov has done some exploration into the darker corners of Scheme. See things like:

How to Write Seemingly Unhygienic and Referentially Opaque Macros with Syntax- rules [http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/macros.html#dirty- macros](http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/macros.html#dirty-macros)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The first "programming language" that I learned to use was LEGO Mindstorms, when I was around 8 years old. I think that was an absolutely AWESOME way to teach the principles of computer programs to children. (And transferring the programs to the robot was WIRELESS! Serial -> Infrared, that is)

Each "instruction" was represented on a computer as a "LEGO block". For example, there was a conditional block. You'd place it under a block that would return an output (like a "sense" command), and then you'd place two blocks below it for the True/False conditions. So basically you ended up building a tree of the logical structure of the program.

I think this style is the BEST way for children to learn programming. In fact, I think a block-like/tree-like structure is often a great way to think about program structure (even for advanced programs; Simulink is really great!).

Now, once you get comfortable with the constructs, actually dragging-and- dropping blocks often gets too slow. But for children, and for building simple programs, I think it's great.

I'm afraid that text-based languages are just unnecessarily difficult for children - only a small fraction of what you can type actually represents a valid program. The blocks allow programming without having to deal with these syntactic barriers. After all, when I program in a language like Haskell, 90% of my programming errors cause the program to fail to compile. These sorts of errors (syntax errors or type errors) can be prevented _as_ the program is built with the block interface.

And while I'm extolling Mindstorms, another great thing about creating these programs was that you weren't just flipping bits on a computer; it was pretty satisfying to see a robot "in the real word" follow your commands.

<comment><USER14> And not only that, but if you're already interested in playing with legos (as I was as a child, although mindstorms was windows only back then much to my chagrin!), what a great way to learn basic programming concepts without even realizing you're learning! You're not even interested in programming, you're adding extra functionality to something you already enjoy in a fun way.

It's like asking some one to learn how to do the rainbow kick move over the head with a soccer ball when they don't play soccer at all compared to when they do if that is an okay analogy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Write [cherry is a circle] below

I don't know pedagogy, but I like that _objects_ have _names_ and _properties_ , which is concrete and comes from the physical world (and our language). However, I find some things about the language, environment, and also tutorials rather confusing.

In the shapes tutorial, for example, we name an object that doesn't exist yet. We also name the object "cherry", which is also a word for an object in English. We write [melon color is 'yellow'] when the object named "melon" is actually red. I also wonder why there is no visual indication of which object is which (why not label the objects with their name?).

More fundamentally, in Isla each text block is a command. Why are there no actions words (at least in these initial commands)? Just like _objects_ , _names_ , and _properties_ are first class syntactic citizens, so should _actions_. I think this would clear up some of the weirdness above.

      # make circle named bob
      # set bob color RED
      # print bob color
      ... RED
      # print bob
      ... circle
      # move bob RIGHT
      # make square named alice
      # trash bob
      # copy alice named chris
      # make circle named alice
      ... oops, alice already exists!
      # print dan
      ... oops, dan doesn't exist!

<comment><USER2> I like your idea for making the set and creation commands more aware of time. I will think about this. Thanks a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are two things that I immediately think while looking at this language:

        1. If languages were syntactically easier to read, then we wouldn't need one that's made just for young children.
        2. This confirms my suspicion that "=" and "==" are damn harmful stupid syntax for assignment and equality.

<comment><USER16> When I get around to writing a language = won't be a word (or maybe it will be just for initial assignment). Assignment (or at least mutation) will be := and equality comparison will be ==.

<comment><USER17> Yes, please make me hit three keys instead of one just to make an assignment.

<comment><USER14> It would be interesting to see whether assignments or equality operations are performed more often across the board in programming. I can't tell which way my initial lean would be.

:= certainly makes things syntacticly clearer but really after a point = and == are so common and so natural, is it a problem that even needs to be solved?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it really such a great idea to make languages that look more like English? From my experience, newcomers to programming pick up a lot of misconceptions about general programming from English-like syntax.

<comment><USER19> Well, there's actual research on it. Most of our intuitions about teaching and learning are wrong.

Google computer science education or check out SIGCSE

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A year or two ago I created a very similar language [1] in collaboration with my kids, then aged 8 and 10. They had a lot of fun writing their own stories and "telling computers what to do". The oldest has since moved on to writing her own HTML and CSS. Hoping to keep the fire alive.

A few more ideas that I never got around to, feel free to take or leave them:

* A simple tool to draw characters. My kids liked Google drawings more than Paint. They didn't mind (at first) that the drawings weren't animated.

* Sharing stories with family and friends

* Drawing backgrounds, moving between scenes, animation editor.

* They liked the idea of writing a story, but very quickly wanted to build a game. An animation editor could introduce looping. Collisions could introduce conditional actions, etc.

Good luck. It's a lot of fun.

[1]: [http://kevinbeaty.net/projects/storyturtle/](http://kevinbeaty.net/projects/storyturtle/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Isla... Isla Nublar... Jurassic Park... "This is a UNIX system, I know this!" It all makes perfect sense now...

</comment><comment><USER22> 1\. Kudos for the very interesting initiative!

2\. I was looking for a "natural syntax programming language" on Google and this is what showed up as the first result [http://bglang.org/](http://bglang.org/)

3\. If I might add something, I think what something like this would need is flexibility i.e. a more "freestyle" way of writing expressions. It would not only be much easier to use by children, it would also be a nice technical challenge for the language designer.

Some examples:

* sum of all numbers from 1 to 10

* x is 3; y is 15; print their greatest common divisor

* if folder has file 'file.txt' then put x in file

* print 5th fibonacci number

* c is circle, diameter 10; C is square, side 9; print maximum area c, C

* show bigger number 2/3, 1/2

<comment><USER2> The danger with a natural language-like programming language is that it gives the impression . This is impossible.

I want the advantages of a natural language-like syntax (easy to read, not scary) without the disadvantages (the impression that the computer will understand whatever you type). To do this, I intentionally made the syntax only support one grammatical form of each type of statement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is "Isla" pronounced "ila" (as in the "s" is silent)?

I ask because I'm sure my otherwise-literate 8-year-old would have trouble spelling the name without some coaching…

(edit: typo)

</comment><comment><USER24> I love this and I think it's beautiful. Removing a lot of the symbols will make it far less scary and "techy". I'd really like to see it develop.

<comment><USER10> Why do you think the symbols are "scary and techy" to _children_?

<comment><USER16> They're scary to adults. As a scala programmer I wish there was a similar language that used words rather than punctuation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I teach 5th grade science, and we do a solar system unit that is sometimes remedial for kids already testing/learning at grade level. I'm going to try giving the Isla planets page to students who finish early, and see if they can figure out Isla and create a replica of our solar system (without instruction/help), as a quick brain teaser for them.

Thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is great! Keep it up! Grown ups have tons of languages to choose from, so should kids.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great stuff, when I have a little person ill look for something like this. One suggestion: better errors.

If I was a kid and I saw this:

      #hi
      Expected [ \t\r] or [a-zA-Z0-9_]
      but "\n" found.

I'd think that I broke something.

</comment><comment><USER28> Isla needs a read function for inuut.

</comment><comment><USER29> We don't have mathematics for children. Or English for children. Sure, the stuff taught to children is simple, but it isn't simple coz it's being taught to kids, it's simple because the basic building blocks of any body of knowledge are typically simple. If you wanted to teach English to an adult Chinese man who only knows the Chinese alphabet,you'd have to start of with the same things you'd teach a child. When someone sets out to create a programming language "for children", my fear is that you might try to "dumb down" the art and/or science of programming. I could be wrong, off course. And I haven't looked at this particular language, so I wouldn't know if this is the case here. I'm just not very comfortable with the premise of a programming language aimed at children. What is it about it that makes it for kids? That which makes it for kids vis a vis other languages is what worries me in the context of what the kids will learn vis a vis what they should eventually learn, which is the "adult" stuff. Try and imagine a painting course for kids or adults. Same concepts, technique's, brushes, etc. In the same way you don't have canvases or brushes for kids, I don't think you should have a programming language for kids. But like I said, I could be wrong.

<comment><USER30> "Dumbed down" programming is still programming, just like dumbed down mathematics (2+2=4) is still mathematics, or dumbed down painting (finger painting) is still painting.

In each case, children are simply being presented with a limited subset of the entire subject, to accomodate the real physical differences between children and adults (less complex mental models, less fine motor skills, etc).

We can argue about which specific subset we should start with, but the fact that it's a subset is not inherently wrong.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: If Buffer is so open where can I see their cap table? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-open-equity- formula/](https://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-open-equity-formula/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's for employees, it's not the cap table, it's equity compensation. Where is the investors equity?</comment></comment>


Y Combinator's Graham Discusses Start-Up Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/video/83135286/ <comment><USER2> In the later part of the interview she asks some questions about the recent discussions regarding minorities in the startup community. I thought his response was insightful:

"Well, I think the problem is upstream from us. I don't think it's that, like, huge numbers of women and minorities want to start startups and that we're filtering them out because they're not white or men or something like that. I think that the applicant pool, the applicant pool has the same problem that people see in our output, right? The same problem is in our input that people see in our output. The problem is further upstream. The problem is that the pool of startup founders is the people who are messing about with computers at age 13. If you want to fix the problem, that's what you have to change."

<comment><USER3> Some other incubators fund more women and minorities than YC, so this seems like it's only part of the story. A couple questions this leaves in my mind:

\- what are they doing to broaden the applicant pool?

\- have they considered that something about the process or their reputation might lead to women and minorities steering away from YC?

<comment><USER4> Probably the biggest things we've done to broaden the applicant pool are Hacker News, Startup School, and all the essays I've written about startups.

I don't think there's anything about our process or reputation that directly discourages people of any gender or race. But we do prefer founders who are hackers, which presumably thus causes fewer members of groups that are underrepresented among hackers to apply to YC.

<comment><USER5> It's definitely a complicated issue with no clear overriding cause. As a minority who did take apart his mothers computer at 13 and compressed the windows partition to install linux (woo hoo slackware) and has gone on to found a startup I think some of Paul's commentary is spot on. Though I was representative of some of the larger stats (single parent home, lower middle income specturm) I was also one of two kids on my block with access to a computer in the home, and my single parent was a teacher who made education a priority. If you looked at the cohort of kids I grew up with you'd find myself and 2 others out of 11 or so that are not either a. dead or b. in jail, or have been in jail. Why is that? I don't know and don't claim to know, but the road to changing it starts very young.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really enjoyed the interview but I found this exchange puzzling:

Emily Chang (quoting Max Levchin): 'Entrepreneurs aren't taking big enough risks … '

Paul Graham: 'Well, that probably isn't true because it's gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to start a startup and when the cost of failing gets lower usually people can do riskier things'

Risk is the potential for loss. If the cost of starting a startup is lower then the potential for loss is lower which means the risk is also lower. More people are starting startups because it is less risky, not more. That means the number of companies being formed is going up; in turn, that means that more people are _taking the risk_ of starting a company, whether they are risking much or not. This might seem a subtle distinction but I think it is an important one.

A week ago I sat down opposite an entrepreneur who built a 24-hour transaction layer on top of the UK's banking system which runs on nightly batch- processing. It made the transition from 9-3 banking to 24-hour online banking possible. He started out with a _really big_ vision and had to take _really big_ risks and the result was a _really big_ company that created a lot of value economically and socially. It took him two decades and nearly bankrupted him on dozens of occasions. His vision sustained him. It kept him going through all the terrible lows and in the end he shook up one of the slowest- moving industries out there. That was a big risk. That was a big reward.

</comment><comment><USER7> "it's gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to start a startup"

"maybe it's just not the right time yet for a vacation on the moon"

There is a terrible amount of segment bias here. It is orders of magnitude cheaper than it used to be to start a _software or virtual service_ startup. Other varieties of tech startups (chip fabs, space launches, flying cars, etc.) aren't nearly as cheap yet and represent far greater risk. It's a big world. Lots of markets. Lots of possibilities.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, and if anything this makes it harder to aim for something like holidays on the moon.

If it costs the same to try and build a spaceship as it does to create the new social fad then why not reach for the stars (literally) - but when it's so much cheaper to try and start the next Facebook, and you know that starting the next Facebook could have just as much potential to make you far less people will take the riskier option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You know, it's always a visceral pleasure to hear/watch pg talk; at least for the way my brain is (soft-)wired, he's so charming and listenable.

But every time I see him interviewed, my "he's got an axe to grind" detector is going off so loudly that it's starting to drown out the charisma. It's understandable, in that high-tension soundbyte-oriented environment, that pg wants to ensure he stays on-message, but it's also disappointing from someone who we know is capable of being so much more informative.

He says, in response to several questions, "oh, that's not how a perfectly rational market would work, so it's probably not what's happening". I mean, I agree with the argument as far as it goes, generally reality roughly approximates an ideal market, but the approximation is always rough, and pg repeating this is sort of wasted air, isn't it? Examples:

at 2:08 in response to "big enough risks",

starting at 2:38 in response to valuations like Dropbox's,

at 5:25 in response to Aston Motes's very plausible theory about bias in "pattern-recognition"

Everyone's entitled to try to manipulate the media as best they can, and I'm not even doubting the sincerity of pg's claims about the market's effect on all those issues. But it sure would be nice to hear you dig a little deeper, pg.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand the women+minority problem. Different people have different interests, and I believe this is a good thing and not a problem. If more diversity were to come to the startup world that would be awesome, but I don't see this as a problem that needs fixing.

Startup people just have to keep doing what they do and if more people get interested in startups then things will all fall into place. What about the percentages of women and minorities in such places as politics? Is this a problem too? What about other industries that are dominated by women, is there a problem there?

People like what they like and that's that!

</comment><comment><USER11> Eric Ries claims to have had "shocking" results when having recruiters remove all demographics from resumes. His suggestion for YC:

 _I suggest the following experiment: for your next batch of admissions, have half of your reviewers use a blind screening technique and the other half use your standard technique, on your first screen (before you've met any applicants). Compare the outputs of both selection processes. I predict they will show different demographics._

<http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/19/racism-and-meritocracy/>

Obviously YC needs to interview applicants, but as it already cuts people before the first interview, it might be an interesting experiment.

<comment><USER4> We see them at the application stage too, because the application includes a video. The video tells us a lot more than their race and sex. So if half the people reading applications didn't see the video, we'd do a lot worse at reading applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is the "not enough women and minorities" question even on the radar? Did I miss something?

<comment><USER13> Because it is an ongoing and serious issue that hurts startups as well as women and minorities.

<comment><USER12> care to be more specific?

<comment><USER13> They spent a long time talking about this, at the expense of more interesting questions she could have asked PG. Especially more interesting to people interested in startups.

It is a serious issue though, 96/4 men to women is a really bad ratio. And my guess is that the ratio of white and asian to hispanic and black is even worse. So startups miss out on a huge potential talent pool and the perspective of people who might approach problems in a different way. And at the same time women and minorities are largely failing to take advantage of a really exciting opportunity.

PG is probably right, the bulk of the problem is that thirteen year old girls / black kids are not playing with computers. So maybe this is a question that would be better directed at parents or teachers, but it definitely should be on the radar. It is a problem that can be solved, that we should solve, and is a good thing for people watching Bloomberg / people doing startups to think about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thought she handled the, "well, this is news to me! i don't know anything about the recent IPOs!" response pretty well.

<comment><USER15> She's also very smart (Harvard grad) and has an impressive resume. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Chang_(journalist)>

<comment><USER16> So she is of Chinese ascent. How weird, I couldn't tell. And her strong American accent, so strange. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A bit OT but would be nice to have a [video] tag for these autostarting videos.

<comment><USER17> I particularly hate autostarting videos with loud preroll ads :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love Emily Chang's facial expression :)))))

<comment><USER19> Listened to the audio while browsing web, the condescending tone of overvalued tech for privileged white people was all I could hear from her.

Paul, on the other hand, is a class act as always.</comment></comment>


Humans Are Turning Mammals More Nocturnal - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/2317506/nocturnal-animals-humans <comment><USER2> Relatedly, we're screwing up the already nocturnal animals too. Street lights get mis-perceived as sunlight, keeping them in.

We actually started fixing this by switching to sodium bulbs, which was better for humans too, but now with the push to LED, we're undoing the fix that we did, again hurting both the wildlife and ourselves in the process.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for bringing this up!

It can be addressed with warmer LED's, filtered LED, narrow-band LED... trouble is the bulk of the market is at 4K & 5K white balance, so that's the default choice to put in.

The good news about LED is, due to more even color profile, they can use dramatically less lux, but that requires adjustment to lighting level too.

<comment><USER2> > they can use dramatically less lux

They can, but at least what I've seen around California is that they don't. The one outside my window is a good example. It was replaced with LED and now it's like a spotlight right into my window. I didn't even realize there was a light there when it was HPS.

<comment><USER4> It varies, but a call to your local jurisdiction can get a shade put on a light. My city painted a segment of the nearby intersection's diffuser black so it doesn't shine in my eyes when I'm on my balcony.

<comment><USER5> Which city is this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Once technology allows us to more completely bridge the communication gap between humans and animals I think we'll realize that animals have been communicating amongst themselves in sophisticated ways for a long time and they won't have very nice things to say about us.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps you're right about cetaceans or octopi, but as far as terrestrial animals, I haven't seen any evidence that any of them are smarter than a young human child.

What makes you think terrestrial animals are smarter than young children, or that something less intelligent than a young child has any coherent commentary?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not sure if this was studied here, but I wonder if it's really "humans" or if its humans of modern-day, industrialized, "western" culture. E.g., do indigenous populations have the same effect on animals?

<comment><USER9> I think it's more about human occupied area than modernity. There just isn't much space which doesn't have constant human presence through it.</comment></comment>


Intercom IPs blacklisted by Spamhaus - <AUTHOR> https://status.intercom.com <comment><USER2> Every email service provider has to deal with this from time to time, but well-designed email operations and infrastructure should generally limit the impact to a small subset of customers - usually, especially with a known high- volume sender, Spamhaus will list as narrow of a range as possible to prevent false positives.

The fact that this applies so broadly implies that Intercom may need to rethink some of the details of their email operations, and/or beef up their anti-spam enforcement efforts.

As an aside, it appears Intercom uses Mailgun with dedicated IPs, judging from recent samples.

<comment><USER3> My personal mail server kept getting IP blacklisted, but only on Microsoft Outlook. I kept submitting it as non spam, they kept accepting and then couple days later it was back on. No mail relay, no unwanted traffic, nothing.

They seem to have some weird way of blacklisting whole IP ranges. In the end what helped was moving the machines at hetzner to more expensive ones, which put them in different IP ranges.

Even before the age of Mailgun I remember outlook being a problem at a startup I worked at. There's also dnswl, but dnswl doesn't help for low volume senders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've received spam from Intercom many times. They have always responded swiftly when forwarding the messages to abuse@. No spam at all would be better.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rightly so. Intercom are, in my experience, a facilitator of spam, dressing themselves up as some sort of communication revolution. I've had their IPs blacklisted on my own mx for two years or more.

</comment><comment><USER6> You'll never guess why!

<comment><USER7> They send so much "follow-up" e-mails from chats that it's basically indistinguishable from real spam?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> this is causing us terrible inconvenience .. has been going on for months :/</comment>


So You Wanna Build a Crowdfunding Site - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/07/so-you-wanna-build-a-crowdfunding-site/#

<comment><USER2> This coincidentally is also the Final Assignment of the Coursera course by Stanford "Startup Engineering". Every one there would be making a Node based, AWS powered, Bootstrap themed Crowdfunding site.

<comment><USER3> It's worth noting that Startup Engineering is basing its payment platform on Bitcoin whereas this Mozilla article covers Balanced Payments.

I also get the impression from the lectures so far that Startup Engineering isn't covering databases to any real extent, whereas the article covers MongoDB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a non-js based programmer, This is some excellent insight in what a webapp looks like when built with node.js. I'm definitely gonna be reading through this to get my feet wet with node, as it's something I've been meaning to do but have been so occupied with other languages. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER5> If you are new to Javascript you should note that this tutorial makes heavy use of Promises which is one way to handle callbacks piling up, but it's not the only way, or even the most common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Or you could fork selfstarter[1], which is what we used to allow users to reserve their username on [http://microco.sm](http://microco.sm)

[1] [https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter](https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter)

<comment><USER7> Crowdhoster is a fork of selfstarter bit it's behind a request form.

<comment><USER8> The source and a readme to set up your own instance of Crowdhoster is at [http://github.com/Crowdtilt/Crowdhoster](http://github.com/Crowdtilt/Crowdhoster).

Feel free to email firstname.lastname@example.com if you need any help setting it up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Crowdfunding tools should belong to the crowd? I'd like to hear more rationale on that statement.

<comment><USER10> I think he was being somewhat flippant. He's really saying: we think it should be easy to crowdfund something, so we're open-sourcing our own crowdfunding software.</comment></comment>


Quake Engine source code review - <AUTHOR> http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php <comment><USER2> [http://22.214.171.124/search?q=cache:ngG57s8Nb3wJ:fabiensang...](http://22.214.171.124/search?q=cache:ngG57s8Nb3wJ:fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php+http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox-a)

Cached version as I'm getting an error about excessive bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is good, if a bit short.

Having tips for getting it to compile with free tools was especially useful. I would like more info on the rendering engine, etc, along the lines of the Wolf3D review posted a few days ago.</comment>


Don't Pickle Your Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.benfrederickson.com/2014/02/12/dont-pickle-your-data.html <comment><USER2> JSON, while a fantastic lightweight data format, is insufficient for storing even moderately complex objects. It can not properly differentiate between tuples and lists, it can only accept strings for object keys, and it only stores unicode strings.

You also have to write custom (de)serializers if you want to store datetime objects (my personal pet peeve), any of the special python containers... basically any time you want anything other than an object, array, string or number.

Unless I'm dealing with untrusted data sources, or need to interoperate with other languages, I will keep using Pickle.

<comment><USER3> Heh. Pickle is not really sufficient for some edge cases, too. Luckily, there's Dill that can take almost perfect snapshots of the whole interpreter: [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dill](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dill)

<comment><USER4> Also Dill's developer Michael Mckerns is super responsive and helpful. Hopefully someday pickle will be replaced / augmented with dill in the standard distribution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Use pickle with caution" would be better advice. There are plenty of cases where your data is under control and pickle is a huge time saver. It takes work to translate most data structures to/from json.

</comment><comment><USER6> Your benchmarks don't mean much because you're giving different data to different packers.

cPickle gets a list of objects but json gets a list of dictionaries? The cost of converting the objects into the dictionaries is conveniently excluded from the json benchmark.

You should try serializing the same list of dictionaries, use the highest pickle protocol and repost results.

</comment><comment><USER7> This benchmark doesn't specify a pickle protocol, which forces Python to use a big, inefficient format.

I filed a bug. [https://github.com/benfred/bens-blog- code/issues/1](https://github.com/benfred/bens-blog-code/issues/1)

<comment><USER2> I also went and tested it.

Baseline JSON:

        </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
        JSON
        packTime 0.612724065781 s -  163205.601975 items/s
        unpackTime 0.782174110413 s -  127848.772631 items/s
        size 174.26637

Baseline cPickle, ascii protocol:

        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
        cPickle
        packTime 2.41442704201 s -  41417.6938297 items/s
        unpackTime 0.875658035278 s -  114199.831408 items/s
        size 286.26637

cPickle, highest protocol:

        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
        cPickleHP
        packTime 1.02942800522 s -  97141.3245929 items/s
        unpackTime 0.583297967911 s -  171438.965162 items/s
        size 198.26637

For giggles, I evened the playing field and let cPickle at the same data structure as JSON, ascii protocol and highest protocol:

        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
        cPickleJsonData
        packTime 0.642832040787 s -  155561.629874 items/s
        unpackTime 0.478959083557 s -  208786.101847 items/s
        size 205.53356

        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
        cPickleHPjsonData
        packTime 0.285845041275 s -  349839.897708 items/s
        unpackTime 0.340456962585 s -  293722.881273 items/s
        size 175.26637

My conclusions? Serializing dictionaries is easier than serializing objects, and using a non-ascii protocol offers some obvious benefits. JSON is not obviously better than cPickle when comparing apples to apples.

It's also worth noting that comparing the json module to the pure python Pickle module isn't a fair fight either; json is at least partially written in C.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how ujson (pure-C) compares? [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ujson](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ujson)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the end of the post he says that only Python can parse Pickle. This is not really true. You can write a Pickle parsing library in any language (maybe some special use would not be possible).

For instance I have implemented enough of it[0] to use in a drop-in replacement for Graphite[1].

[0]: [https://github.com/noteed/python- pickle](https://github.com/noteed/python-pickle) [1]: [http://graphite.wikidot.com/](http://graphite.wikidot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10>
      >>> import json
      >>> json.dumps(set())
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
        File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 231, in dumps
          return _default_encoder.encode(obj)
        File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 201, in encode
          chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True)
        File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 264, in iterencode
          return _iterencode(o, 0)
        File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 178, in default
          raise TypeError(repr(o) + " is not JSON serializable")
      TypeError: set([]) is not JSON serializable
      >>> from decimal import Decimal
      >>> json.dumps(Decimal(1))
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
        File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 231, in dumps
          return _default_encoder.encode(obj)
        File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 201, in encode
          chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True)
        File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 264, in iterencode
          return _iterencode(o, 0)
        File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 178, in default
          raise TypeError(repr(o) + " is not JSON serializable")
      TypeError: Decimal('1') is not JSON serializable

<comment><USER11> What, precisely, is your point? The article points out JSON's limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like y_serial, a library to store compressed Python objects in a sqlite database.

[http://yserial.sf.net/](http://yserial.sf.net/)

</comment><comment><USER13> > Given the downsides though, its worth writing the little bit of code > necessary to convert your objects to a JSON-able form if your code is ever > going to be used by people other than yourself.

Disagree strongly. You have _no idea_ how complex my graphs of (pretty damn complex) python objects are and how much I value being able to change their organization without having to rewrite the serialization code every time I do so.

Don't fear pickle. Just don't expect it to be secure or amazingly fast.

</comment><comment><USER14> Pickle seems to be five times faster than standard json. If I store lot of data and want it to be compact then I'll use xz on top.

</comment><comment><USER15> In case anyone doesn't know, Python has had a json library since version 2.6.

<comment><USER16> That's not the issue. The issue is that python objects are not serializable into json without writing a custom serializer. Rather than telling devs not to use pickle, why not build a json serializer that can handle simple objects and try to get it adopted into the python standard library?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought pickle output was just JSON? Shows what I know.

<comment><USER18> If it was JSON, how would you pickle dictionaries with tuples as keys?

<comment><USER19> The same way you would in JavaScript: turn it into a string first. "(1, 2)" Its not that serializing python objects to json is impossible, just that there is not a straightforward implementation that everyone agrees is correct.

For a fully general python <-> json serializer/deserializer, you'd need a bunch of extra annotations etc that would make it look very weird compared with what most people expect when they think of json.</comment></comment></comment>


New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 22 Venustas - <AUTHOR> https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-22-venustas/ <comment><USER2> July 26 release, this has been around for a while.</comment>