The Babysitters Club - <AUTHOR> http://reallifemag.com/the-babysitters-club/ <comment><USER2> Cuteness is everywhere in Japan and it's not just anime girls and Hello Kitty. It's things like graphics of characters bowing on ATM and vending machines, and the Tokyo Police mascot, a sort of Pikachu/Astro Boy hybrid named Pipo- kun. This is a country where failure to be sufficiently serious and industrious is a black spot not on just your good name, but those of your parents and grandparents. And yet, cuteness which would be perceived as offensive or even unsettling here is critical to marketing strategy there.

It serves a social function. It helps break the ice and gets the consumer to perceive a company or institution as friendly and helpful. Maybe you can build the case that Japanese are somewhat infantilized and like to feel swaddled by the loving care of large corporations and political institutions, but I think it's more that they are rather conflict-averse, and cuteness in marketing is a way to get confrontation off the table.

<comment><USER3> Neat. The article isn't about Japan, though.

<comment><USER4> You're right. But neither is the GP's comment. He's using it to show that perhaps cuteness is not an attempt to treat us like kids.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but that's my point. If we lived in a culture where cuteness carried the same valence as it does in Japan, or if we were talking about apps developed in Japan, by people immersed in Japanese culture, which just happened to make their way to the US - that'd be one thing. But we're not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There was another article recently discussing cuteness and its disarming effects [1]. This author is obviously hyper aware of cuteness in apps. But the average user is not going to give much thought into it. In fact, the cuteness is probably not supposed to convey a thought, only a passing feeling. Too much cuteness is easily revolting (think the PINK barbie aisle in a toy store). But just enough cute helps give an emotion to a brand.

Brands of the previous generations were arguably more masculine (Reliable, Tough, Powerful, Extreme, New). But these emotions don't really work for everything. Do I really need Yelp to be Mountain Dew Extreme or Ford Tough? No. I am not sure what I emotion I want Yelp to be, but cute is an easy default. Especially for a generation that is accused of not growing up, aligning a brand with a "child-like" emotion is not a bad idea.

We should be aware of it though. The "NEW" obsession of the last 50 years has resulted in a massively wasteful consumer culture. Arguably companies want to sell new stuff, so they sell the New version. But the obsession with the New version has probably had some amount of feedback forcing companies to constant produce upgrades.

[1] Related article and discussion [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/19/kumamon-the- ne...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/19/kumamon-the-new-science- of-cute) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127650)

<comment><USER6> Ugh, cuteness. Although I am kind of a fan of NancyFX's commissioned The Oatmeal error pages[1]... But it's not necessarily a great look for a more serious product. On the other hand, most internet businesses are not particularly serious - what makes sense for Twitter would be ridiculous for Colt Arms or Caterpillar Tractors, or Amalgamated Magnesium (imagine, Coltie, the six-shooter-packing adolescent cowboy horse mascot...)

Apparently the fail-whale is no more? Today I'm seeing something that looks like a robot version of the sock-monkey

[1] [http://mike-ward.net/2013/04/11/custom-error-pages-in- nancyf...](http://mike-ward.net/2013/04/11/custom-error-pages-in-nancyfx/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the "you're factually wrong department":

> Yelp, like Google, makes money by collecting consumer data and reselling it > to advertisers.

False. Google does not resell consumer data to advertisers, nor anybody else, and never has. It does, of course, use this information, as per its privacy policy, to display ads that are hopefully most relevant for a particular user (and allows the user to view & control what information is stored about them, e.g through Privacy Dashboard). At no point does information about the user leave Google.

This might seem like a minor nuance, but the difference in trust and privacy implications are enormous. User trust is Google's single most important asset and a whole lot of work, attention and money goes into earning it and keeping it.

Disclosure: I'm employed by Google. Enjoy the Kool-aid.

<comment><USER8> Well, depends on how you define "reselling data". One could argue that giving advertisers an application where they can target users based on a bunch of metrics that are personal data from the user's point of view is also "reselling data", even though it's not in the form of a database of names and birthdays.

But in the strictest sense, you're absolutely right.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that is a reasonable definition of "reselling data".

If I offered to sell you data, I expect you'd be surprised if after collecting payment I clarified that you couldn't actually have the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not even sure where to start with this article. There are valid points, but they are shuffled up (is this against smartphones, corporations treating customers as kids, or as it seems at the end, taking issue with hot topic Pokemon Go), bathed in smugness (look how self-aware I am that this is like a temper-tantrum!), and taken quite far.

If you take the author at his word, cuteness, and corporations being patronizing (and the two are linked here), are a new trend, not something obvious even in early advertising.

Further, I find it quite ironic that a publication started by SnapChat is calling out the possible misuse of camera imagery from Pokemon Go. I figure if the cameras were regularly uploading we'd know by now, by size of data usage if nothing else.

In the end, as someone with an Android phone, never saw that hamster in Yelp before. So I suppose it got me to go find an Easter egg hidden there.

<comment><USER11> I don't think the points are shuffled; the main topic is the infantilization of consumers by companies. Cuteness, targeting products more appropriate for children to adults (like coloring books or Pokemon), etc are simply examples of that broader point. And while this was obviously used since the beginning, was it ever a _trend_? When was that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The whole "adult coloring book" thing initially struck me as weird and vaguely sad, but then I realized it's not substantially dissimilar to the way I use hand chores - not so much as a way of falling asleep, but as a method of relieving stress by finding something to concentrate on that isn't in any way related to work. Unlike a coloring book, hand chores also provide a sense of accomplishment, because you're actually doing something with a valuable result instead of just burning ink and time.

For me, sewing is a great option; I always have a zipper to fix or a patch to sew on or a seam to reinforce or _something_ \- if nothing else, I'll whip up something out of patches and scraps, just so's not to have old clothes go to waste. It's the same kind of concentration that goes into precise coloring, but in three dimensions, and you end up with something useful to show for your time. It's definitely worth a try, and all you need to start is a pair of scissors, a spool of thread, a needle, and some fabric to work with. (I can't be the only one with old clothes sitting around!)

</comment><comment><USER12> > This hamster has a name. It's Hammy. ... Who is the person who enjoys this?

I think it's a mistake to assume that enjoyment of that hamster defines a class of people unto itself. Maybe one person who enjoys it is a 45 year old housewife, maybe another is a 22 year old graphic designer, maybe another is a 63 year old retired accountant. Among "people who enjoy a cartoon hamster" the thing they most have in common is probably just their enjoyment of that hamster.

This whole article seems to say a lot more about the author than it does about the apps being criticized. How insecure do you have to be to wonder whether a subway ad is talking down to you?

<comment><USER13> Spot on. In fact, what this really says to me is that these apps and movies are in fact much-loved by people who feel like they aren't supposed to love a "kid's movie." I have numerous professional guy friends who feel embarrassed going to pixar movies without their girlfriend present as an excuse, but I can tell by the way they talk about them that they like them.

Is it possible Yelp A/B tested Hammy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >In her essay "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde," Sianne Ngai, a professor at Stanford, theorizes cuteness as an "aesthetic of powerlessness." In the face of the overwhelming question — "What's it for?" — a strain of avant-garde art responds by playing up its inutility, she argues.

When I began reading this article, I was reminded of the cuteness that overwhelmed social media/web branding about five years ago--everything had a little laughing monster or a big smiling whale. At the time, I figured it was trendy and a means of appealing to mainstream, non-geek/non-nerd/non-whatever audiences, but now I wonder to what extent they were staring down their own uselessness.

</comment><comment><USER15> Eat24 (which was acquired by Yelp) does this a lot too. ("Give your thumbs a rest: You just made food happen!")

The jokey things they encourage people to tweet about having ordered from Eat24 are really something. (It would be interesting to think about what some of the messages in them are; I think there's something more than talking-to- little-kids there.)

<comment><USER3> Eat24 does a lot of things, including pissing off restaurants to the point where you have to talk them into not blacklisting you because they don't call or email if you use Apple Pay for an order with a special request that requires adjustment of the total. I discovered this on a day when I'd just got back from an exhausting conference and really didn't want to deal with anything beyond eating something and going to bed. Thanks, Eat24!

Eat24 also really sucks at handling account cancellation/deletion requests, above and beyond the degree to which their customer service has gone to hell since the Yelp acquisition. I've been trying to cancel and delete my account per their privacy policy for almost a week now, and oddly enough, it's become impossible to get anyone to respond via email or website messaging. So that's more time wasted and frustration added. Thanks, Eat24!

<comment><USER16> Agreed - I just recently stopped using Eat24, I was a whale for them as well (~4-5 orders a week), using ubereats + grubhub now.

<comment><USER3> How are you finding Grubhub? I've been trying OrderUp, but it's a little bit of a mess, and their customer support has yet to answer an inquiry that's a couple days stale by now. I gather Grubhub is more or less eating everybody's lunch, excuse me, but before I sign up with yet another bloody website, I'd like to get an opinion from someone who's already using it.

(Postmates is good, too, if it's in your area, but the fees can get a little spendy.)

<comment><USER16> Hey I'll have to check out OrderUp haven't heard of that, grubhub has been good so far - I haven't had to contact their support for anything yet so can't speak to that but in general I've found many places have lower delivery fees. They also have their own drivers which is nice.

Ubereats actually comes in cheapest if you're ordering for just yourself, no need order extra food to hit a delivery minimum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These companies are targeting urban millennials who shun things that feel "corporate". The "cute" voice feels sociable without being alienating to their customer base the way a lot of alternatives might be.

<comment><USER17> Yep. Ironically, the next generation will likely find this sort of saccharine cuteness to be hopelessly old-fashioned and conservative, the same way the 60s/70s counterculture rejected the aesthetic of the cutesy cartoon corporate mascots that were common in the 50s and early 60s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Meh, you were told and thought the world was X but really it's Y but you're resisting because you don't like change.

Adults through out the ages passed on from the awesomeness of childhood, because their kids and friends died all the time, they starved and were abused.

Now we can be as we wish in many societies. Which include having fun, get over you the world view your grandparents taught you.

<comment><USER19> Non-awesome aspects of childhood include having to depend on people you can't necessarily trust. What if (as a child) your caretaker or parent is an alcoholic narcissist? Too bad. And what if (as an adult) the entity that wants you dependent on it is a corporate "person" with only a profit motive and no morals or conscience?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Japan does cuteness as whimsy, not humor. This works better. Some of the cuteness is functional, such as the jingles which identify train stations.

Here's an advertiser that understands whimsy, without talking down to their customers - Caterpillar.[1][2][3] Here's a tech company that gets it right: Volvo.[4] This is an ad for their self-driving car. In both cases, the manufacturer has a product that's visibly better than its competitors, and just needs to get that message out. It's harder when your product isn't that great.

Food delivery startups seem to be especially pretentious. They are perhaps trying to differentiate themselves from the low-end services that deliver Chinese food and fried chicken. They're not succeeding. Doordash: "minute by minute, morsel by morsel, we've broken down every step of your food's journey into a perfect science." In reality, you get your food in a paper bag, cold.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVPku- xItv8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVPku-xItv8) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nltqM_Q- cwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nltqM_Q-cwg) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS9D1VqBcmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS9D1VqBcmI) [4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwKuWz_lkE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwKuWz_lkE)

</comment><comment><USER21> I am a 32 year old man and I like cuteness.

</comment><comment><USER22> Only tangentially related: I'm a little skeptical about the claim that "caretaker speech" shows adeptness -- have there been any studies about whether it helps or hinders your kid to say stuff like "doggy-woggy"?

<comment><USER23> The short answer is "Research shows that yes, it probably helps". It gets the child's attention better being a part of it. :P

[0] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1207/s15327078in0701_5...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1207/s15327078in0701_5/abstract)

[1] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01636383928...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016363839280003D)

You can find more citations at the bottom of this page: [http://www.parentingscience.com/baby- talk.html](http://www.parentingscience.com/baby-talk.html)

<comment><USER22> Thanks! Especially that last article is pretty informative. I automatically use baby talk with my baby, but I've always felt kind of ridiculous and guilty about it. Now I can say it's science, I guess.

<comment><USER24> I can't see the full paper, but I don't think you can draw the conclusion that they do. The outstanding question that remains is whether it is the choice of words that seemed to affect the difference in attentiveness, or the tones in which the words were delivered. Edit: the final link in the parent does indeed address the issue I raised, I had only read the last of the numbered references, [1].

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think a little personality from the products/services you use is nice. And some personalities are cutesy. As long as it doesn't get in the way too much, I don't see what there is to fuss about.

Personally would rather take what we have now in terms of product voice than revert to the souless, bland, offend-no-one product and corporate voices common as of, say, the 80s.

</comment><comment><USER26> _" There is no better example of cuteness applied in the service of power- concealment than Pokémon Go, which is a large data-collection and surveillance network devised by the former Google Earth engineers at Niantic and then candy-coated with Nintendo IP."_

Author Jesse Barron is a big meanie, and is not getting dessert any time soon.

Nyah nyah.

</comment><comment><USER27> Maybe Yelp needs a 'grown-ass man' template for people who can't tolerate cartoon hamsters.

I just realized that I use Yelp a few times a week and I don't think I've ever noticed the hamster before.

</comment><comment><USER28> Busted link, y'all.</comment>


AI Is a Misnomer at Present - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/ai-doesnt-actually-exist-yet/ <comment><AUTHOR> I submit The fundamental thing that most people get wrong when discussing the _future_ prospects of artificial intelligence is ignoring the necessity of motivation. Biological intelligence is motivated by the Darwinian program to survive and reproduce at an improved rate. Pattern matching without real drive is not intelligence but just fancy combinatorics.</comment>


Zoho Creator Pricing "Strategic Blunder" & Lessons Learned - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zoho.com/general/zoho-creator-pricing-strategic-blunder-lessons-learned/ <comment><USER2> we use this for work, it's a pretty solid system. The old pricing scheme was quite poorly planned. Nice to see them working to improve it.</comment>


Three Battle Tested Ways to Install PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://www.codefellows.org/blogs/how-to-install-postgresql <comment><USER2> I'm using [http://postgresapp.com](http://postgresapp.com) just because I like the fact to have an App Package :)

<comment><USER3> In my classes, I've found a lot of problems with Postgres.app. It definitely works for some, but not as reliably as home-brew. It depends on how your machine is set up. I needed a foolproof, repeatable process for students to follow, so that's why I wrote this article.</comment></comment>


The Upcoming Parallel Digital Universe - <AUTHOR> http://thomashunter.name/blog/the-upcoming-parallel-digital-universe/

<comment><USER2> Microsoft Photosynth has (or had) a similar feature a while back. I don't know if they ever took it further than the "isn't this cool" phase though.</comment>


100 companies are source of over 70% of emissions - <AUTHOR> https://www.cdp.net/en/articles/media/new-report-shows-just-100-companies-are-source-of-over-70-of-emissions <comment><USER2> This is stupid and counterproductive. By blaming those companies you make it seem like you could solve everything by just shutting them down.

And if we are looking for the "source" why not blame the Earth itself? After all one Earth is responsible for 100% of emissions.

<comment><USER3> This is no "blaming" it's an assessment of the most polluting companies in the world, and given that the one of the goals for the future is to reduce emissions worldwide they will bear a great responsibility to do so. Or are you proposing that we should just let go on as usual?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Source" as in producers - the energy they produce is used by the entire world.</comment>


Language Trends on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/2047-language-trends-on-github

<comment><USER2> Er, how is the "rank" defined? # of new repositories in that language during those years? # of total repositories in that language during those years? Or some weighted average?

I really am not fond of the trend of "arbitrary rankings" a lot of startups have been using recently as content marketing to create statistical analyses that cannot be questioned.

I could reverse-engineer the ranking chart using the GitHub Archive on BigQuery to check it, but I have no idea how to actually determine the statistic for ranking.

<comment><USER3> Rank is number of repositories with that language created in a given year, so e.g., the languages with the most repositories created would be ranked 1, the second most 2, etc.

Source: I ran the query.

<comment><USER2> So I ran this BigQuery:

       SELECT repository_language, COUNT(*) as num_repositories
       FROM [githubarchive:year.2014]
       WHERE type="CreateEvent"
       AND IS_EXPLICITLY_DEFINED(repository_language)
       GROUP BY repository_language
       ORDER BY num_repositories DESC
       LIMIT 10

which returns the top languages in 2014 by # of repositories created, per your statistic.

The output is:

JavaScript 1273811

Java 930359

Ruby 769712

Python 630549

PHP 601101

C 473113

CSS 445501

C++ 355996

C# 183349

Objective-C 165102

Which doesn't completely match up with the order in the chart for 2014. (Positions for Python and PHP are reversed)

<comment><USER3> From the original post:

> The rank represents languages used in public & private repositories

The delta is due to private repository usage influencing the rank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a Ruby on Rails project on Github. After I added Twitter Bootstrap and the Ace text editor to my project, Github started showing that my project is 85% JavaScript. I guess it is, but I didn't write all that JavaScript! So I'm a little skeptical about JavaScript being number 1 here.

<comment><USER5> you added the entire bootstrap project to your repo?

<comment><USER4> I put the minified CSS and JS files under vendor/assets/. Is that not kosher?

<comment><USER5> As the number of external dependency(i.e bootstrap) increases, I find using something like bower very useful. It's probably not worth it for solo projects where bootstrap is the only external dependency

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would be nice to have these stats just for private repos. My idea (maybe wrong) is that private repos are used mostly by startups and enterprises so will be interesting to know which language is really trending in the industry.

<comment><USER7> I'm just a casual unemployed student developer, but I use private repositories all of the time. It just seems easier to have a couple of private repositories, work on them until they're actually useful and then make them public and share the hell out of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish it showed more than the top 10. I'd like to see the rank among languages outside of the top 10. Like even Go and Rust.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely. This is useful but it is _highly_ unlikely that any of the languages in this chart will disappear anytime soon. As I plan my learning- time investment budget for the next few years, it's only marginally interesting to me that blockbuster language Number 2 goes to Number 4 or whatever. I already know that any of these languages would be a good choice as long as they fit the applicable domain.

What matters much more to me is that language number 40 suddently find itself at 20, for example. To really plan for the future we need to peek at the nascent trends in small-language land. I'm much more interested in Ocaml, Julia, Nim, Rust, or Lua, even Cuda, OpenCL, Chapel or Cilk, than I am in Python, Java/script, or (sigh) CSS.

<comment><USER10> You can also look at this programming language rankings post by Stephen O'Grady with RedMonk for a longer tail list. (Though I suspect potential biases in the methodology of such rankings become more pronounced the further out on the tail you get.)

[http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language- rankings-6-15...](http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2015/07/01/language- rankings-6-15/)

(Donnie used to be with RedMonk as well.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm really surprised that JavaScript is not a steeper increase, and what's up with Java? Really Java?

<comment><USER12> Mentioned in the article - Android. It is the most popular mobile phone OS in the world right now.

<comment><USER13> Also probably that enterprises started migrating to Github. At the beginning it was probably early adopters platform with the languages that early adopters use.

<comment><USER14> Early adopters also use Java.

<comment><USER15> This is of course true in the trivial sense, but he means languages disproportionately used by early adopters (Ruby, Python, Go, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This puts things into perspective. As a full-time Clojure dev, this graph makes me feel part of a very niche group, for better or worse.

<comment><USER17> Except you target and interop well with #1 and #2 :)

<comment><USER16> It's interesting that with such a huge and diverse, rich set of Clojure repos on Github that everyone depends on and loves, they still didn't even rank enough to be on this list. I'll admit that was a bit surprising at first, but perhaps it shouldn't have been.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Related material, number of modules and average growth/day by [[http://www.modulecounts.com/](http://www.modulecounts.com/)]

               count | avg/day

JavaScript..214,741.|.379/day.[Bower + npm]

Java..........114,860.|.108/day.[MAVEN]

Ruby.........106,195.|..50/day.[Rubygems]

Go..............86,512.|.299/day.[GoDoc]

PHP.............68,276.|..99/day.[Packagist + Pear]

Python.........64,865.|..56/day.[PyPI]

Modulecounts offers info for more languages, I just did a TL;DR

EDIT: is there a good way to present data on HN?

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd be leery of putting too much trust in those numbers, as Linguist detects the language for many repos incorrectly. I've had a number of Grails projects detected as type "javascript" or type "css" until I went in and added a .gitattributes file to help it get things straight. And I'm pretty sure not everybody bothers to do that.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ruby: look at me, being cool!

Java/JavaScript: lol, no you ain't!

PHP: whatever...

<comment><USER21> PHP: I ain't going nowhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If I'm reading this correctly, Objective-C is bumped out of the top 10. The line just sort of stops though, which doesn't give much indication of just how far down the list it is now.

<comment><USER7> Yup, and there's new HTML dot, so I suppose that HTML replaced Objective-C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This would be better with absolute numbers, for comparison, as well as a longer tail, so we can, say, see how Tcl is doing against Perl.

</comment><comment><USER24> CSS is the most intriguing I think, why the sudden peak since 2013? I would have guessed that we're writing less and less CSS these days with tools like preprocessors and autoprefixers.

UPDATE: I'm assuming the ranking is based on the LOC number. Might be wrong since, sadly, there is no mention on how languages are ranked...

<comment><USER25> GitHub counts preprocessors as CSS. For example, I have a project that only has .scss files but it says "2% CSS". Similarly, it says Bootstrap is built with CSS even though it uses LESS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just a bit surprised by the steady ascent of Java to #2. Are these enterprise programmers moving to open source?

<comment><USER27> More like mobile developers. Android development is mostly Java

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "The rank represents languages used in public & private repositories, excluding forks, as detected by Linguist."

As it excludes forks, I have doubt about the data representing the actual number of repositories for the language.. as I have seen many forks doing better then their original repos..

</comment><comment><USER29> All google code java projects are (auto)migrating to github. Also android.

</comment><comment><USER30> Cirru -- the syntax I created is beyond 200..

I think CSS and PHP are tricky. HTML file are sometimes recognized as PHP files. And CSS, it hardly a general purpose language.

</comment><comment><USER31> Would be nice to have the origin of the project... I suspect java is growing up because too much projects migrating to github.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow, more CSS than C,C++,C#. There is no hope for this world.

<comment><USER33> Why is there no hope for this world?

Less people using C/C++ just means less security vulnerabilities as far as I can tell. Not entirely sure why C# is listed but not Java here.

<comment><USER32> _Why is there no hope for this world?_

Because we are starting to neglect useful and important languages that shaped both our thinking and engineering. Instead, we use languages that babysit us at the expense of expressiveness and speed. Not a fan at all.

 _Less people using C /C++ just means less security vulnerabilities as far as I can tell._

Yeah, better rewrite Linux in CSS to make it secure. I heard CSS is turing- complete if you click through instructions, so it's possible!

 _Not entirely sure why C# is listed but not Java here._

Because there's more Java than CSS.</comment></comment></comment>


Inside the Incubator – Silicon Valley is satire, but feels like a documentary. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2014/04/mike_judge_hbo_series_silicon_valley_reviewed.html <comment><USER2> This wont be seen by the target audience, as this requires cable.

There's this new thing called Roku, Amazon TV, Apple TV and such, it just came out, check it out. Even tablets or touch chrome-books ($300), let you watch it while commuting. You know, internet will be big some day. /s

<comment><USER3> You can watch HBO on any computer/tablet/smartphone plus Roku and Apple TV using HBO Go. (I hate to sound like an advertisement here. I'm not a customer of HBO Go, but it's worth noting that they were actually one of the fastest cable TV companies to put their content online.)

<comment><USER4> Last I checked that was only true for HBO subscribers, which you can only get through cable systems. So their content isn't online in the sense that puppetmaster3 means.

<comment><USER5> Those cable companies have been their distributors for 30 years. They'll loosen gradually. The new infrastructures will help. But I don't fault them for taking it slow and easy.

<comment><USER4> Oh, agreed. HBO has no need to rush; they're doing fine financially, and cable companies still have a lot of power. And I've been impressed by their attitude toward the piracy of their content. Right now I watch Game of Thrones via torrent and then buy the DVDs when I can just to support them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That seems appropriate, since Judge did "Office Space", the finest documentary ever made about the tech industry.

<comment><USER7> And don't forget "Idiocracy", the finest documentary ever made about SoCal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, it's got to be better than Amazon's "Betas", right?

</comment><comment><USER9> HBO has made it available on Youtube until the 28th.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvkmsI54ss4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvkmsI54ss4)

Having just watched it, I take back my earlier skepticism -- it's eminently watchable.

</comment><comment><USER9> Please say it's better than _Betas_. I only lasted 10 minutes into that one.

</comment><comment><USER10> If anyone wants to read the pilot: [http://www.fileswap.com/dl/wQwDwVML9f/](http://www.fileswap.com/dl/wQwDwVML9f/)

Honestly wasn't a fan at all. Felt very contrived and inorganic. Would have been a bigger fan of a more serious take on the subject matter.

<comment><USER11> > Would have been a bigger fan of a more serious take on the subject matter.

But...it's a comedy. Isn't the point of a comedy to take a not serious approach to things?

<comment><USER12> The comments in this thread are the exact reason why this show will be hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I saw the first two episodes at SXSW and it's hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER14> I will be checking this out for sure but I really hope they get the tech terms right.

It's going to be hard to stand if they do the usual technobabble.

They could win major points with their target audience simply by namedropping Vim or BSD.

<comment><USER15> Mike Judge and his co-creator were doing some research for the show about 2 years ago, and stopped by our office in SOMA (San Francisco). We were telling them about open source, meet ups, editors, and stuff like that. Here are some clips of it:

Here's him asking about ruby: [http://www.tout.com/m/t0x6dh](http://www.tout.com/m/t0x6dh) judge drawing on one of our desks: [http://www.tout.com/m/q8ppc1](http://www.tout.com/m/q8ppc1) here's the full stream: [http://www.tout.com/hashtags/MikeJudgeToutHQ](http://www.tout.com/hashtags/MikeJudgeToutHQ)

<comment><USER16> Does Mike Judge and his co-creator visit HN for research as well? He would get tons of material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope they have a laugh track.

<comment><USER18> Sometimes the only thing differentiating a documentary from a comedy.

Although a comedy without laugh track easily turns into a show with long, awkward silences.</comment></comment>


Religion should be taught in schools (debate) - <AUTHOR> https://beta.trustory.io/claim/1292 <comment><AUTHOR> _It 's elitest to only learn about one religion - the one we are born into - and that too, in bits and pieces._

Okay, so my point is - the current methods via which we learn about religion are limiting and biased. All of us learn about only one religion - the one we are born into - and that too, in bits and pieces. Thus, we are a.) equipped with half-knowledge about our religion, and b.) criticize other religions without any knowledge about them. A deadly combination!

If religions would be taught in schools, everybody can realize that moral lessons are common across all religions. Just knowing this one fact will remove the elitist mindset that most of us grow up with.

The hypothesis is instead of teaching one religion to a kid, if he/she is taught about all religions and then asked which religion he/she would like to choose, chances are they will choose not to choose any one religion. And a generation later, we'll have a world free of religion-based hatred.

</comment><comment><USER2> Religion is taught in school here in the UK.

It certainly not about converting people or asking them which one they want to choose (that would be scandalous) but to foster cultural knowledge and understanding.

Moreover, certainly we don't all have a religion, it would be quite unacceptable to assume that we have.

The gripe I have with it in the UK is that they start too really, as it starts in primary school, at a time when many children are not even clear whether Santa or unicorns, etc are real or not.

It would be better to wait a bit and to teach children reasoning, critical thinking, and science first.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my youth, we learned about Greek and Roman myths. We also delved at least a little into various Nordic myths. So why not also Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, etc myths as well? Notice however, that I would treat them all the same. Myths teach you a lot about mindsets of people living in the times when those stories were emerging and becoming established.</comment>


Multitasking Management in the Operating System Kernel - <AUTHOR> http://kukuruku.co/hub/opensource/multitasking-management-in-the-operating-system-kernel

<comment> Anthony-G I usually only have time to check the most upvoted submissions and only clicked the link by accident. I think it's useful to have an understanding of how OS kernels carry out fundamental tasks such as scheduling and memory management. It's a very good introduction to the subject of scheduling but I'd need to brush up on my C to get the full benefit of the article.

</comment><comment><USER2> I particularly like how the article builds from the ground-up, with examples on the way. I think starting with the simple things first is always a good idea.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the less known HN-like forums? - <AUTHOR> With the rise of cancel culture and remotely offensive language being censored where can one go to find a community more tolerant of opposing views? Of course, I realize the moment the name of those communities are revealed, if any exist, they will be filled with people seeking to ban them.
I guess that makes this more of a meta-question, not a direct question. How can I learn about more open communities that may exist on the net where I can have the type of discussion with people that was possible 15-20 years ago?
Topics of interest: hacking (actual, not just in the name), startups, entrepreneurship, internet marketing. <comment><USER2> >Topics of interest: hacking (actual, not just in the name), startups, entrepreneurship, internet marketing.

I'm curious why you feel being able to use offensive language and express "opposing views" (whatever that means, I assume politics) is particularly germaine to high quality discussion of those topics.

If all you're looking for is a place where you can be an edgelord without consequence then there's always /g/ and 8chan (on the dark web as 8kun,) and maybe Voat and Gab.

</comment><comment><USER3> > With the rise of cancel culture and remotely offensive language being > censored where can one go to find a community more tolerant of opposing > views?

If you're itching to call someone the N or F word or want to brood about the sudden rise of feminism in America, may I suggest finding a pen pal and communicating that way?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow that seems awfully presumptuous!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would guess Reddit is where I would start looking for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reddit is huge I'm sure great communities exist, but I'm not sure if that recommendation gets me any closer to an answer than just starting from the internet as a whole.</comment></comment>


Is Sugar Really Bad for You? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180918-is-sugar-really-bad-for-you?ocid=ww.social.link.twitter <comment><USER2> Like most popular reporting on nutrition, this article is a mess. "Well, a little sugar doesn't kill you, and might even do good, so sugar is just fine, except for how it causes problems...." If it's a subject that interests you, I'd recommend reading The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes. [https://g.co/kgs/13NUgb](https://g.co/kgs/13NUgb)</comment>


Show HN: How much is my life costing now - <AUTHOR> http://howmuchismylifecosting.now.sh <comment><USER2> Grammar nazi / random tip: "how much does my life cost?" would be a better title.

Overuse of the present continuous "is ... (something)ing", particularly with a postfix "now" is a hallmark of Indian English.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> You already know what your life costs (per year). What your life is costing in real time is the interesting bit.

PS: I'm the most Anglo-Saxon Aussie you've seen, I just wanted to make use of the 'now.sh' domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, you can literally see your time being spent at sub second resolution...

I feel like my life is comparable to cloud hosting

<comment><USER4> >I feel like my life is comparable to cloud hosting

There are some philosophies that suggest this is no accident.

<comment><USER5> What are you talking about?

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice, I made a similar thing last year. It's a browser extension that counts the time you spend on distracting sites and shows how much money you could make if you were working instead:

[https://qotoqot.com/sloth-worth/](https://qotoqot.com/sloth-worth/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is actually how I decide whether someone is worth paying to do something for me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source is open by the way: howmuchismylifecosting.now.sh/_src

<comment><USER8> Awesome! How is it licensed?

<comment><AUTHOR> This site isn't, but everything it's built on is MIT, have a look, there's not a lot to or.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My car has cost me $29 today sitting in the garage :|

<comment><USER9> Wait, your car costs $10k/year?

<comment><USER10> If op has a 5 year loan on a $40,000 car + taxes + insurance + repairs... that sounds about right.

<comment><USER11> I'd assume after the 5 years you still have the car, or at least sell it for something rather than scrap.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great bit of insight that most don't get. I'll be making a total cost of ownership site soon to show how all of these details affect true cost of a car.

<comment><USER12> My husband and I did some of those calculations when we were considering my next car seven years ago.

Result: I ended up not considering anything less than three years old, and am still the content owner of an off-lease diesel 2008 Ford Focus Turnier (station wagon), about to have a new timing belt put in. My cost per kilometer would have been lower had I been confident in my manual shift driving capabilities (at the time, no; now, yes) and had eschewed luxuries like leather seats and the larger engine.

Cost per km over the past seven years: 0.334 EUR Average cost per year (not considering that I've dropped my driving from over 20T to under 8T km/yr): 5826 EUR

But I've not looked at it from an inventory perspective; it does spend an awful lot of time sitting in our garage ever since I switched offices and now carpool with a colleague who loves driving his BMW and is delighted that I give him 10 EUR/wk for gas and peer-pressure him into leaving for work at 7am :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tried to access this at work. It's blocked because of malware. opendns. com (spaces included in link deliberately). Caveat browser...

</comment><comment><USER14> Damn all these heart beats are costing a fortune

</comment><comment><USER15> Nicely done :-)</comment>


The Stranding of the MV Shokalskiy - <AUTHOR> https://idlewords.com/2019/07/the_stranding_of_the_mv_shokalskiy.htm <comment><USER2> That was a fascinating read, thanks for sharing. It's nice to be reminded that even though the entire world feels accessible, there are still wild places where you can die not due to violence from other people but just because the harshness of the environment.

<comment><USER3> That's surprising? I was more surprised that anyone had the audacity to bring their children to the place, or that an elderly, limited mobility retiree would think it would be a good idea to go sightseeing there.

Remember, the thing that makes this place memorable is the epic, heroic struggle of the men who, one century ago, had to eat every calorie contained in their sled dogs to avoid starvation, and two of those three did not survive.

Humans are fragile, tiny, sensitive, and weak. We're good at building safe habitats for ourselves, but outside of those prepared environments the universe is not safe.

<comment><USER4> Most of the people who go on sea voyages to this side of Antarctica are retirees (because it's expensive and you need five or six weeks of free time), and they do perfectly well for themselves. The physically hardest thing about modern Antarctic travel is Zodiac landings.

My issue with bringing kids is more about their inability to consensually weigh the risks than their physical capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Antarctic continent as a whole has a range of possibilities for the traveler. I was there in January on a "regular cruise ship" (Celebrity Eclipse) that passed along the West coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Muster drill on the first day (sailing out of Buenos Aires) had a different feature, an explanation of the special evacuation gear that would be available in case we had an extremely sudden need to stay warm outdoors. We did not get out of the ship in Antarctica, because the conservation group that regulates this rules that ships the size of Eclipse cannot disembark passengers onto Antarctica. One can always choose cruises from several other cruise lines that have ca 200 passenger capacity. These ships drop anchor and allow passengers to kayak over, or else take a leisurely Zodiac ride. There might even be a polar plunge. And finally, there are a handful, or more, Russian-made and Russian-crewed ships available which range to the other shores besides the ostensibly friendly Peninsular coast. One or two of these has a small hangar for really small helicopters. I could provide more detail but I'm not a travel agent and what I want to do is give an idea of how "normal" it is to go to Antarctica and do your wedding on an ice floe.

This research expedition cruise was not the normal deal in the tourism industry.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just finished reading "Endurance" for the first time. If this is appealing to you Id highly suggest grabbing a copy.</comment>


Askite – is it time to get rid of FAQs? - <AUTHOR> The Wikipedia article on FAQs says:
"The 'FAQ' is an Internet textual tradition originating from the technical limitations of early mailing lists from NASA in the early 1980s. The acronym FAQ was developed between 1982 and 1985 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list."
Since 34 years have passed since 1982 we thought it was high time we gave FAQs an upgrade.
So, we developed Askite, a bot that helps you answer customers' questions better and learn about what your customers look for when making a purchasing decision.
Askite lets customers type questions into a text box to find an answer or a way to reach a human being.
Since Askite takes up very little space, it can be used as a contextual help tool that can be strategically located anywhere inside a web page.
The questions asked on Askite can help a seller find out why people do not purchase a product.
Let's say a customer is looking to buy a whetstone (a knife sharpening stone).
They want to know how big the whetstone is, but the product information section lacks that detail.
In most online stores, the customer has to either take a chance on the product (and possibly return it) or move on.
Askite gives them a third option - to ask questions about the product, and hopefully obtain the information required to make a purchase.
Askite can be added to a website painlessly by pasting in an HTML snippet obtained from Askite (at http://www.askite.com).
We're looking for feedback and suggestions from everyone.
Don't you think it is time to get rid of FAQs? <comment><USER2> _Askite lets customers type questions into a text box to find an answer or a way to reach a human being._

There's an assumption being made here that I believe would stop this working for a lot of users - in order to ask a question the user needs to know enough about their problem to phrase the question in a way that will result in a useful answer. An FAQ has the advantage that the user can come to it with _no_ knowledge and still get value from it.

So. continuing your whetstone example, I would need to use the right language to get the right information from Askite. If the seller has added details like "The size of the stone is X by Y by Z" but I ask "What are the dimensions of the stone?" then I don't get anything useful. If I could just read through the seller's FAQs I would find what I'm looking for.

Lists of FAQs are very, very powerful, usable ways to access information. They're not going way any time soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a very good observation.

So, we have considered the discovery problem.

What we've done to make the discovery easier is that we've built in auto- suggest capabilities.

So if the person starts to type "What are the " ... they will see "What is the size ...".

The second thing is that we can in fact incorporate synonyms in the tool as well (query expansion is a common way to handle it).

However, I will take away a good point you've made - that FAQs can be of use to a customer with 0 knowledge and that they are very powerful.

I just hope that we can provide an equally powerful alternative, if only for people with >0 knowledge (as they're likely to have if they're looking to buy the product).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An faq replacement will work if the customer could type his query in his language (not knowing how it is written in faq) and yet get the correct answer. I read your answer suggesting usage of synonyms. Well faq mining is a classic information retrieval problem so you can potentially use the entire IR tech here! Most enterprise bots today are basically faq miners(ask optus) or order placement ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, multilingual support would be an interesting feature. In fact, what we're trying to do is improve FAQs by using an FAQ mining system as the entry point to the FAQ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's say a customer is looking to buy a whetstone. They type "Whetstone size" into a search engine. A FAQ which was previously indexed comes up as a result. Up until that point, no direct interaction with the product's webpage happens at all. Where's your bot now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the observation.

However, I have to point out that typing "Whetstone size" into a search engine will return the sizes for arbitrary whetstones.

I was talking about the use case where a customer is on say Amazon and looking at a specific whetstone.

Sometimes, the product descriptions are woefully inadequate.

The vendor, in such cases, ends up being unaware of the inadequacy because (s)he has no way of learning what the customer is looking for.

If a system such as Askite were to be embedded in each Amazon product page, customers would ask their questions right there, and at the very least, the vendor would come to know about the problem.

So, Askite doesn't help in the discovery of a seller. It helps the seller convert a customer once the customer has found the seller.

<comment><USER4> Good points. Still, having the known answers discoverable (and indexable) probably wouldn't hurt - bot and FAQ as mutually supporting tools, not one as replacement of the other.

Is there, perhaps, a demo site to showcase what you have in mind?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you're right. We wish to make them mutually supporting in future (so that the SEO benefits of FAQs will be available to the website).

There is a demo available at [http://www.askite.com](http://www.askite.com).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why do we need FAQs anyway, I thought, they were dead some 5 years ago on a website. I guess we need a place to find information that we can't in a website, but we have an information need to fulfil ?</comment>


The first gene on Earth may have been a hybrid of RNA and DNA - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2330-9 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-first-gene- on...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-first-gene-on-earth-may- have-been-a-hybrid/)</comment>


Owning materials from an asteroid now legal in United States - <AUTHOR> http://marketbusinessnews.com/owning-an-asteroid-now-legal-in-united-states/113158 <comment><USER2> How does the United States have the authority to set laws governing asteroids? What if I am not in the US, not a US citizen, and launch a spacecraft from somewhere other than the US and go ravage some asteroids for resources? Why is this not an international treaty jointly made by at least the space-capable nations?

<comment><USER3> The US is only governing its own citizens and claiming the rule and responsibility to enforce its decisions over them. It's the same as if they were telling US citizens what they can own if they do activities in international waters. Your what-if answer depends on your country.

<comment><USER4> > The US is only governing its own citizens and claiming the rule and > responsibility to enforce its decisions over them.

How I wish that were true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Was there already law someplace that addressed such things as _not_ eligible for ownership? If not, why would this not fit under marine salvage laws?

<comment><USER6> > 'Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject > to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or > occupation, or by any other means'.

Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty [0]

The whole treaty is pretty vague and mostly deals with access to objects and national claims of ownership preventing access to objects. Article 9 might apply here but it's pretty loosely worded too and basically says exploration will be conducted "with due regard to the corresponding interests of all other State Parties to the Treaty" and avoid harmful contamination.

Not sure if this qualifies as allowing national appropriation, all I've seen is that this applies to the bits they pull out not giving ownership to the body itself. There will probably be challenges once someone actually tries to go out and actually mine one. Article 9 might make better fodder for that though.

[0] [http://www.unoosa.org/pdf/gares/ARES_21_2222E.pdf](http://www.unoosa.org/pdf/gares/ARES_21_2222E.pdf)

<comment><USER7> The only groups I can imagine challenging the mining itself would be private environmentalist groups (and even then, of the environmentalists who care at all, this would still be a low priority), and they do not have standing to challenge it.

In order for a state to care about challenging it, I suspect we would need to states to want to mine at the same location, in large enough quantities that they might get in each others way, or deplete the resource.</comment></comment></comment>


Charles Schwab CEO on how he tests job candidates by taking them to breakfast - <AUTHOR> https://www.theblaze.com/news/2016/02/22/charles-schwab-ceo-reveals-how-he-tests-job-candidates-by-taking-them-to-breakfast-having-restaurant-mess-up-their-order <comment><USER2> Ha! The ole "Double Gimmick."

Tricking the candidate to deal with a wrong food order and then telling the candidate that his biggest failing was falling for the trick that his professor pulled on him (The final exam was "what is the name of the janitor?" presumably the professor failed most of the class on the final).

This CEO's whole life is a pithy business stories with a moral suitable for a business advice book!

</comment><comment><USER3> Eh, I guess I'd pass that test because I honestly don't care about my order most of the time. And if I'm out on an interview, I _definitely_ don't care about it, especially not enough to risk making a bad impression.

I doubt many would fail that portion of the interview.

The biggest failure question, however, is a pretty good one, and it seems to be pretty common in interviews that it's almost become cliche. Honestly, I feel like this article is pretty weak.

</comment><comment><USER4> Fantasy response, like if you somehow saw it coming and didn't care about the job:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-b2nc4Qbi4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-b2nc4Qbi4)

(unedited: [https://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/chris-farley-coffee- comme...](https://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/chris-farley-coffee-commercial- snl-high-quality/83156267) )</comment>


Ask HN: The future of programming languages? - <AUTHOR> I've been thinking a lot about programming languages lately and I wonder what you guys think about what the future of programming will be.
Considering the amount of "new" languages(/dialects) popping up (Clojure) and some languages find new popularity (JS) I wonder how they'll be used.
It feels to me like languages are getting more problem specific, I.E. Haskell, Clojure and other functional languages get most attention for research and heavy calculation while some stuff get specialized for web-usage.
Will the future of programming be like science; where people get extremely specialized on a small set of problems, or will programmers learn multiple languages and use the best one for the problem at hand?
Will game development ever diversify or will it go from C++ to C# to ...
How do you view a future world filled with hundreds or thousands of fantastic programming languages? <comment><USER5> Topics that I think will be important:

      - Functional Programming
      - Logic Programming
      - Managing asynchronicity
      - Managing concurrency / Managing state
      - Pruning bad directions in OO (see the first two)
      - Type Systems
      - Virtual Machines

Languages/technologies that I would look at more closely given these are Haskell, Scheme, Prolog, Clojure, Qi, LLVM. I love JS but as far languages go, I would not look there for new ideas. At best I see it becoming a fantastic compile target.

I also don't see Haskell and Clojure being particularly specialized. They are very general purpose and suitable for tackling any kind of programming problem - simple to complex, JS on the other hand is a language with a _very specific_ focus.

I don't see the importance of being able to read and understand C/C++ diminishing anytime soon as those languages are intimately tied to our operating systems.

EDIT 2: I added Type Systems above. I think Haskell has shown the power of an expressive type system. However it has it's problems. I look forward to see the distinction between languages w/ strong type systems and those without being abolished. Languages should support turning the type system on and off - see Qi. Type systems also should allow the typing of a much richer set of values - Qi's sequent calculus types is eye-opening in this regard.

EDIT: I'm opinionated about this, but the constant announcement of new languages that simply continue the traditional stateful OO paradigms (perhaps tacking on a couple of syntactic niceties or a crippled static type system) seem like complete dead ends.

<comment><USER6> Both your list and your comments look good, generally, but I have to wonder about your mention of logic programming.

I think logic programming has a lot to offer the world, in theory, but in practice it seems to be pretty much dead. True, there is probably more going on with Prolog now than, say, a decade ago. But widespread use is not happening, nor is inclusion of logic-programming features into other languages. Further, I don't see this changing in any truly significant way in the near future.

Apparently, you _do_ see it changing. Would you care to comment on that?

<comment><USER7> Two visible things to come out of logic programming are Erlang and constraint programming. Both are very significant, in their own niches.

I don't think Prolog is dead yet, either.

<comment><USER8> Erlang is not a logic programming language. They started with a logic programming language and eventually removed every feature that made it a logic programming language.

<comment><USER9> Correct, what's left in erlang from prolog is the pattern matching syntax for function definition, where you have multiple clauses to test, sequentially, whether runtime args match the number and types of parameters in each clause (and values, if guards are used). No unification/backtrackig involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Decades ago, lots of programming languages were created that hardly anybody knows now, including some that would definitely be considered very specific, research-oriented, etc. This isn't really a new thing. See for example Jean Sammet's _Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals_.

Edit: Bergin & Gibson's _History of Programming Languages, Volume 2_ is pretty good, too, but that one covers more recent languages: Prolog, C, Forth, Lisp, Icon, etc.

It's not a bad idea to read about old experimental designs, particularly those that didn't work out because of limited hardware. I think there's a lot of potential in the APL and concurrent / constraint logic programming families.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the references. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you in general for the high quality of your posts.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. My academic background is in historical research, so I take references pretty seriously. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of research has not made its way into any language yet. In particular, the data models and optimizers of current languages are woefully inadequate. Most mainstream programming languages are still in their infancy, being nothing more than glorified assembly.

The future will be more about declarative programming - write down a mental model of the program, and the language/compiler will do the rest. A simple restricted example is SQL - you write what data you want and the optimizer figures out the best "program" for the query, using even genetic optimization in the case of PostgreSQL. Another example is data binding - you write down what data connects to what part of the GUI, and the framework figures out what to update and when. The problem with SQL, data binding etc. is that they are not tightly integrated into a general purpose language, and do not have clear theoretical underpinnings.

A good language will have simple, compact theories and abstractions as general as possible to reduce the mental baggage necessary for programming - <USER2> of remembering hunders of special cases, you should only work with a couple of general constructs.

Optimizers for these languages will have to be far more advanced - <USER3> state between compilations to reduce the impact of whole program optimization, have advanced specialization and type checking capabilities using abstract interpretation etc.

Data models will have to grow too - they will have to be high-level and low- level at the same time to cope with the onslaught of data. The semantic web provides a fairly universal data model with RDF/OWL, but this again could be simplified and abstracted. A data model should also have the capability to specify the physical layout of the data down to the bits, but also at the higher level, such as distribution between disks and machines. Ah, finishing now to avoid tl;dr.

</comment><comment><USER10> I for one wish that implementations of future languages provide the following features a) Some extension mechanism for the language like clos etc, where hooks are provided for executing code. b) Code walkers c) Documentation about the internals. I dont mind the language implementation being a tad slower because of simplicity but in the core has to be grokkable and extensible by the end programmer.

Existing languages suffice for most easy problems. For the hard problems that ive been tackling lately ive wished I could overcome some logical impedance between what I am doing and the language in a sane way. A few examples where additional flexibility would help a) Opengl is a state machine. Being able to take the graph of my program and write assertions that critical setup functions are called before other GL functions would help detect invalid logical states. b) Before, after functions (which exist in lisp) would be nice. EDIT: c) Being able to say -> for all objects in in my program that match this criteria, do something. Essentially -> for x in criteria(primitives(program)) do foo.

EDIT: A common thread to all the times I feel trapped as a programmer is when I have a knowledge of the meaning of my program which I want to express, or perhaps a question about its existing implementation which I would like answered. Many languages lack the introspective power to help me as a programmer to tackle these situations. Others simply make it inconvenient to do so.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think VMs are the future of application programming, especially as manufacturers become more amenable to using "unconventional" architectures like ARM to host full-featured computers. LLVM, the JVM and the CLR all have benefits- I don't see any reason to believe there will be a convergence in the near future.

Environments like .Net and the JVM stack will slowly allow tighter and finer- grained interoperability of the languages they host. We currently have class- level blending of languages, and in the future we will probably see method- level blending. The best DSL for the job.

<comment><USER7> Those VM designs are pretty heavily skewed towards class-based OO languages, though. Most VMs have some kind of behavior (polymorphic method lookup, unification, message-passing) that they do very efficiently because of the language they target, but others are omitted. For example, it isn't possible to do real tail-call optimization on the JVM without a trampoline, AFAIK. If it had been created for (say) ML, TCO would be a given, but OO stuff would be an afterthought.

The Erlang VM is another interesting platform, albeit one heavily skewed towards fault tolerance, concurrency, message passing, etc.

<comment><USER13> LLVM is not skewed that way.

<comment><USER7> Very true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think (hope?) that the next wave in hacking will be understanding programming paradigms better as hackers - the specifics of language choice will probably matter a little less. I like the idea of languages that support multiple paradigms internally (e.g., you can embed logic programming into your functional programming language). A while back I spent some time reading Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming and I wish I had found this book earlier in my career. I probably wasn't ready for it though.

This aspect of software development was largely missing from my formal educational experience in programming language paradigms.

What I am trying to do now is develop a better "taste" for what is "easy" using one programming paradigm compared to another. I'd ultimately like to have a better problem to paradigm mapping internalized. I've toyed with the idea of putting together a seminar or undergrad course to do flesh this out.

The elephant in the room is more market based - what programming languages will someone pay you to use in the future? We already have a number of interesting programming languages. But when you do your job search these days, I see a small number of large buckets. The .Net/CLR C# world, Java in the enterprise, Ruby (really the Rails framework, but even so), and a strong side of the data storage backend of your choice (RDBMs or NoSQL or sexps - <USER4> on that, pg keeps our own forum in files full of sexps).

<comment><USER15> I'm surprised you included Rails in that list. While there are quite a few Rails jobs, it pales in comparison to what's available for .NET and J2EE. Even PHP blows it away by pure number of jobs.

<comment><USER14> You know, you're right. Probably a sign of spending more time on HN and peeking around my local community of devs that reflection of a larger trend.

A quick look around found that Java, C++, C#, javascript, and perl (?) are big in job listing at Dice.com right now. [http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language- jo...](http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jobs-and- trends)

And the always friendly tiobe index at [http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html) is useful when thinking about current programming language trends.

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately those search queries are worse than "ballpark" figures as they're mostly based on keyword matching, not the amount of code the developer is writing in that language for that job.

There are certain search queries that will always hit high. Of course, JavaScript is going to be in almost any job posting that's web-related, even if it's not true hardcore JS coding. Perl is used heavily for development automation, so it's also going to have a big showing, even if it isn't the core language. You'll also tend to see lines like "Previous scripting experience with Perl, Python, Ruby a plus" for Java postings.

If it could be monetized, doing more sophisticated data mining into job postings for actual popularity trends would be awesome, especially with a decent granularity. It wouldn't be difficult to train a supervised ML algorithm with a set of keyword-tagged job postings with weights as to how significant a certain set of skills would be used at a job for a certain job posting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think that eventually some programming tasks will become highly specialized, yes, and use custom and very specific languages depending on the field and the problem at hand and may end up with their own degree programs, etc. There's already hints of this sort of thing right now. It's very hard to transplant a programmer from (for example) web development to 3D game engine development - it has nothing to do with language, though. There's just a huge set of knowledge required for each that has very little overlap - even if the languages used happened to currently be the same in some cases.

It doesn't make sense to forever expend the effort required to force every problem into just a handful of languages' structures - even if it is theoretically possible to do so.

I think that things like OMeta (<http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/>) are an important piece and the other work being done by Viewpoints Research (<http://www.viewpointsresearch.org>) could help.

</comment><comment><USER17> Aside from programming paradigms, my frankensteinian view of the future is as follow: Javascript VMs become so good, other languages start being built on top of it. The future V8/Rhino... instead of JVM for new languages.

I can certainly see Clojure in JS pretty soon. This might be wishful thinking on my part (see bellow for why).

"Will game development ever diversify or will it go from C++ to C# to ..."

Yes, WebGL is in my view a game changer (pun intended). I'm pretty bias considering I use it currently a lot. But I'm replacing scientific application in C++ with WebGL version online.

Finally, I don't see a slow down in new languages popping up any time soon. I think it's important that they can run on some generic VMs to allow for multi language apps to be possible.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really hope that game and other performance-dependent development moves to Go or something like it, rather than being stuck in C/C++ land.

The advantages of modern syntax design coupled with a fast native compiler would be a potent and exciting mix.

<comment><USER12> The good news is that computers seem to be fast enough to allow game developers to work in less than speed-optimal languages, so long as they are willing to accept some stylization. Consider Minecraft, easily the hottest indie title in years, and it's written in straight-up Java. (As far as pure numerical computation is concerned, Java is actually a pretty good match for C++ these days, but 3d graphics remain a fairly serious bottleneck.)

If we're shooting for the stars, though, I'd personally prefer something more ambitious than Go, like GOAL[1].

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp>

<comment> tomh- Game developers don't only use it for speed. Mainly for portability. With c/c++ they can make (portions of their) code run on xbox/ps3/nintendo wii/ds/iphone/whatever.

<comment><USER18> Very true.

Syntax doesn't really matter in terms of performance - what matters is compiler optimizations. Theoretically someone, if they had a mind, could optimize a Python compiler to run just as fast as C (or at least as fast as a non-statically typed language can run).

With that in mind, perhaps some sort of modification to the JVM (or a competing VM that isn't controlled by Oracle) that provides an aggressively raw metal code would be an ideal future - the advantages of whatever language you want to use + speed and portability would be awesome.

<comment><USER19> > Syntax doesn't really matter in terms of performance - what matters is > compiler optimizations.

Yes and no. Slight semantic differences can close off optimizations. There was a great discussion on LtU that pulled in a lot of JIT developers. Mike Pall (LuaJIT) tossed out some optimizations the Tracemonkey developers could exploit, but Brendan Eich pointed out that js can't use them:

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3851#comment-57767>

<comment><USER18> Huh, cool - I never really looked into what goes into doing compiler optimizations.

What sort of gains would we be looking at with syntactic language differences taken into account?

For instance, suppose I wrote some program in C, compiled, and ran it with the latest GCC/LLVM. If I wrote a program in Python (or Lua) and compiled it down to bare bytecode with a comparably optimized compiler - no interpreter or JIT happenings - would there be a large number of optimizations that just couldn't happen for one language or the other?

<comment><USER7> You have to think about what invariants the compiler is capable of recognizing in your code, and can prove are valid: "If I guarantee X, it can do optimization Y behind the curtain, but will still run as if things were compiled normally."

For example, if all variables are immutable by default, they can be inlined at point of use, skipping a lookup. Functions whose arguments are all known can potentially be run once at compile time (partial evaluation). Collections can potentially be handled in parallel if each cell's processing is independent. Etc. This sort of thing is why languages with strong invariants (such as Haskell or Erlang) can do really interesting optimizations.

On the other hand, if the language semantics require that everything is polymorphic and has to be looked up at runtime, that adds extra overhead, and it's not always provable what those values will be at compile-time. A JIT- compiler can compile at runtime, when the information is available, but since they're usually not able to pause execution for long, they can't do extensive analysis. JIT compilers can also make optimizations not statically available because they can revert to the non JIT'd code and recompile differently, whereas static compilation is permanent. (Method lookups can also be cached, of course.)

Incidentally, normal Lua (i.e., not LuaJIT)'s compiler doesn't do much analysis - it's tuned for vacuuming up huge dumps of structured data, rather than trying to generate optimal bytecode. Lua usually still runs significantly faster than Python or Javascript, but that has more to do with the the clean language semantics and high-quality implementation.

Also, a good comment by Mike Pall (the LuaJIT implementer): [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/badl2/luajit_2_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/badl2/luajit_2_beta_3_is_out_support_both_x32_x64/c0lrus0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For game development, I think it will diversify with the increasing ease of developing and selling indie games that do well. There are lots of languages getting perfectly good game development libraries that can definitely be used for the (often simple looking) indie game market.

However I don't think the big players in the industry will be able to. To deliver games of great scale (WoW) or intense graphics/effects you're going to need something that can deliver the absolute best performance.

</comment><comment><USER21> The world is already filled with hundreds (and probably thousands) of programming languages, most of them fantastic in one way or the other.

Some people will prefer to stick to one language, some will dabble in others, but... most of the time, if the language is not radically different from everything you knew before, learning a new one isn't that hard.

I don't see this pattern changing in the foreseeable future. I mean, some areas always had their niche programming languages (heck, most areas do, anyway).

</comment><comment><USER22> The language of the future is Lisp. always has been, always will be. (which is a shame, because APL and its children J and K would be a better foundation).

<comment><USER23> > J and K would be a better foundation

A better foundation for...what? Many important programming domains don't fit naturally into the array-oriented model.

<comment><USER22> The array model fits the relational model way, way better than the object oriented model (no "o/r impedance mismatch"). I think most domains fit just as well (if not better) with arrays.

And specifically, the APL/K/J focus on data makes it a better foundation for optimization, parallelization and reasoning about program behaviour.

<comment><USER23> >And specifically, the APL/K/J focus on data makes it a better foundation for optimization, parallelization and reasoning about program behaviour.

I'll give you the first two points (though some heavy-weight optimizations become necessary to eliminate big wasteful temporaries), but certainly not the last. At least not in general--- recursion is a terrible pain with arrays! Even stateful object-oriented languages deal with inductive structures better than array languages.

What does tree processing in APL look like? I'm it's possible and I'm also sure it's hell. The K/Q approach of nested vectors is a first step towards making recursion tolerable in an array language, but it's still a kludge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As Sir A. C. Clarke said (or at least to paraphrase)-- predicting the future is at best a crap shoot. That said I know what I'd like to see. As suggested elsewhere, much of what we see in 'new' languages is syntactic sugar bolted on to existing approaches; new on the outside, same old on the inside. I'd like to suggest that, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider what 'syntactic sugar' is--- a tweak or rephrase of an older approach to accomplish some task in the language in question. What if these were recognized as less sugar and more substance. The purpose of a computer language is to communicate with the computer first, innocent bystanders second. SS preserves the one and enhances the second, a win-win if you will. I'd like to see a language designed from the bottom up with that approach in mind. See if we can't come up with something that more clearly bridges the gap between programmer and machine. By now we know the variety of things that should be built in, now lets concentrate on the interface...

<comment><USER25> They tried that. What came out was Perl. Lots and lots of layers of syntactic sugar layered on syntactic sugar layered on more sugar, so you now have lots of sweet ways to do the same thing. But between all the sugar it's becoming harder and harder to see the real substance which it was about. The computer doesn't have any problem crunching through the sugar (it doesn't have any teeth to worry about), but as a programmer it doesn't become easier to recognize the vegetables if your cauliflower is sometimes covered in marshmallow, other times drenched in syrup, and the third time someone made a half hearted attempt to caramelize it. (Of course nobody servers the cauliflower as just plain cauliflower anymore.) So yes, you cook for the computer first, innocent bystanders don't need to know what went in to your program.

In the real world, the innocent bystanders matter, code is written as much for other people to understand as it is for computers to execute. I think that instead of plastering over all your content with sweeties, languages should be designed in such a way that the sugar is not necessary by choosing the right fundamental concepts, so programmers can understand what's going on. Learn to cook with the right ingredients, and learn when to add spices. And when not to.

For another example of a syntactic sugar friendly design, have a look at C macros.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think we'll see greater use of type-inference in statically typed languages. I hope that we get rid of the "kinda strong" type systems (like C++). While I appreciate the convenience of such type systems, I think greater type safety is a worth the trade-off.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ok, I thought it was interesting enough to do my own take on it:

[http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/11/10/the-future-of- programm...](http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/11/10/the-future-of-programming- languages-economics)

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't know how the future of programming language will be, but I hope functional programming will take over the world, more and more people will try to prove their algorithms are correct (with Coq, for exemample) and cool type systems like System F or Dependent Types will be used more.

</comment><comment><USER29> The trend of niche-languages (e.g. Objective-C for iPhone) isn't actually a new trend. For example the high performance computing (HPC) community uses Fortran nearly exclusively for decades. The number of niches increases, though, so i expect further diversification of languages. E.g. game development is not C++/C# only. Most games include at least a scripting language (Lua, Python, Javascript) and many feature some online league, which may be implemented with typical web languages (Java,PHP,Python,Ruby,...)

In terms of programming language features i expect the next hot topics to be:

Dependent types, however, the question, whether a type system should be turing-complete is not answered yet.

Optional types for dynamically typed languages. Common Lisp had this for centuries of course, but now Python introduced the syntax and Clojure etc. also support this.

Various mixes of concurrency related concepts. There are lots of ideas currently (see X10, Clojure, Go, D, Haskell, ...), but no sweet spot is found yet.

</comment><comment><USER30> Mandatory: <http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html>

And the... result: <http://arclanguage.com/>

<comment><USER31> Arc was criticized when it came out for being basically a few macros on top of Scheme. I don't think that's a valid criticism. I don't know if Arc is the hundred-year language, but whenever the hundred-year language does come out, it might easily be some carefully-chosen macros on top of Scheme, macros that help write other useful macros.

<comment><USER30> I mean, arc hasn't really 'come out,' has it? It's still being worked upon... the front page of that site specifically says the only reason there have been releases is to improve the language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The language(s) of future will be fifth generation languages. Current languages are not able to support more than 100M lines of code in one project and more than 10-20 years of continuous development.

In future, we will have something like that:

#... We are wrote large project using HTML7, but HTML8 is just released ...

$ spm update

...

12826 source files will be updated, 2324 new source files will be added, 343 source files will be deleted. Proceed? [Y/n] y

...

Done

#... OK, let continue our development ...

PS.

I have demo. I hate developing in any 3/4GL language now. :-)</comment>


DNSSEC and DANE: No Traction Yet - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/20/dnssec-dane/ <comment><AUTHOR> Something you might not know if you don't follow DNSSEC: its primary use case --- the one thing it does that other protocols don't currently do already --- is SMTP TLS security to encrypt traffic between mail servers.

Mail servers, of course, use TLS to encrypt traffic between themselves, but it's "opportunistic" and falls back on unencrypted SMTP (so any MITM can force a downgrade).

The plan was for DNSSEC/DANE to be used as a way for Google to signal that it would only speak TLS SMTP and to disallow the downgrade.

If this sounds like a pretty marginal use case for a protocol that forklifts out a pretty significant chunk of Internet infrastructure, well, you're not in the minority with that opinion. The major SMTP providers have all decided not to wait for DNSSEC/DANE to work properly and instead to simply do an SMTP- specific version of Strict Transport Security.

This leaves DNSSEC with, by my current count, zero serious motivating use cases.

I'm biased, of course: I think DNSSEC is probably the worst protocol ever proposed by the IETF.

[https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against- dnssec/](https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/)</comment>


The Craigslist Reverse Programmer Troll - <AUTHOR> http://teddziuba.com/2011/07/the-craigslist-reverse-programmer-troll.html <comment><USER2> "This kind of shit lands on Craigslist so often that it makes you wonder what they actually teach at business schools."

Other than "business", they teach confidence, which for the most part is what wannabe entrepreneurs lack. Unfortunately, the salaries they provide (unless you are the cream of the class at Wharton, Harvard) aren't up to par with senior developer/engineer salaries, which is the reason many techs/developers that would otherwise do well in a startup because of their experience need an MBA to handle "everything else".

Many MBAs may come out of school wanting to start another Facebook, but they do have a purpose in life- and that is to have the education/experience/skill to handle the "business" side. Their purpose isn't (necessarily) generating ideas, though, which is a good point. Developers/engineers have plenty of ideas also, and not all of them good either.

<comment><USER3> "Many MBAs may come out of school wanting to start another Facebook, but they do have a purpose in life-" ... Actually, I'm not so sure. It's my experience that the business types that learned by the seat of their pants are much more likely to succeed than MBAs (although maybe the MBAs would be better at understanding why they failed?)

It reminds me of Rodney Dangerfield in "Back To School" - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlVDGmjz7eM>. Notice that everyone's taking notes on his comments?</comment></comment>


Amazon Offered Job to Pentagon Official Involved with $10B Defense Contract - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2019/06/03/amazon-defense-department-jedi-contract/ <comment><USER2> Of course they did. That's the only way government business gets done in this administration.

In other news, water is wet.</comment>


Django support for Sublime Text 2 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/squ1b3r/Django4ST2

<comment><USER2> I'm really liking sublime text 2. With TextMate 2 no where to be seen, I could see this taking over. However, the tab completion does not work for me, nor the go to anywhere (this is with a .java file).

I would like to see collapsible code (you know, where you can collapse a method or something to hide it).

I'd also like the console to be a full working python interpreter (for instance, currently for loops dont work)

Looking forward to more updates!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone try this yet? I haven't used ST (are people calling it that?) enough yet to consider switching from vim, but I'm always looking to try new things…

<comment><USER2> It's really nice considering it's still considered to be in alpha. The shortcuts are a bit odd and I would definitely need a cheat sheet to keep using it. I'm personally an emacs and textmate guy but I could see this definitely being my replacement text editor. Give it a try!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the greatest pain point you feel when hiring someone? - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in what the worst part of the hiring process is, from the employer's side. What's something you wish could be changed?
I've recently heard about how finding talent is one of the most important, yet difficult things a startup has to face. I'd like to investigate how technology might be leveraged to help this. So...
What pain points do you need alleviated  to make your hiring life easier? <comment><USER2> The most fundamental problem is the risk involved in making a decision. When you hire the wrong person it hurts badly. It's painful, stressful, and expensive -- usually for both parties.

One way I've found to mitigate this is by having potential employees work on a contract job first.

The trend right now is for job sites to employ programming tests and the like, but I don't think these answer most of the hard questions you have about a potential employee.

A hybrid Elance/Monster might be just the ticket though. Employers post _real_ jobs, like "Port our Oracle stored procedures to Postgres" or "Rewrite this Ruby server daemon to support XYZ", then they _work together_ with candidates on the project, while paying them. Employers would make full-time offers to people who do well.

Employers might pay three candidates to do the same job and then pick which one did the best. Still far cheaper than a recruiter.

Candidates that don't look good on paper might even _volunteer_ to do work for free/cheap just to prove they have what it takes. I know I would have before I had job experience.

<comment><USER3> I think they already have a hybrid Elance/Monster site to perform this- Elance. Once you have a rapport established with a contractor, there's nothing keeping you from sending them a job offer.

<comment><USER2> The vast majority of employers want to hire employees to work in their office. Elance is generally not designed around this goal.

I think a site like I'm imagining might restrict candidates to your local area and require that they be willing to work full-time and on-site. Maybe those would be optional, but that's the idea.

<comment><USER3> Elance does divulge where these people live- you can restrict your hiring/contracting patterns accordingly.

Similarly, if you are up for reloing candidates, you're not restricted to a local hiring area.

Also, you can make your wants and needs transparent up front. If a freelancer doesn't like the idea of working in your office for a salary, they're free to be honest about it before you hire them for the contract.

I think it's kinda silly to imagine a site that's a crippled version of what's already out there when the existing solutions are more than capable of sufficing in this limited case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unless you're google, hiring someone means not hiring someone else.

At any given time we would love to hire 3 people that are all as amazing as we can think, but the budgets never are that large.

Making a choice between 2 amazing guys is even harder than searching for one.

</comment><comment><USER5> Logistics. More time is spent making posts, culling resumes / cover letters, scheduling phone interviews, coordinating in-office meetings with the team, and following up than actual searching. Even with an admin assistant, it's a huge burden on me.</comment>


Ask HN: Any 'inclusionist' moderator candidates in Stack Overflow elections? - <AUTHOR>

Currently, Stack Overflow is holding moderator elections ( stackoverflow.com/election ). Most, if not all of the candidates are promising to be very strict, to close and flag even more posts the others.
I don't want to start another debate about Stack Overflow policies here, I know there re different opinions on this, but I've noticed that many HN readers are unsatisfied with the status quo. I regularly see comments like "this is what is wrong with SO" when a link to a closed question is posted here.
I was wondering, is there anyone in the list of candidates who is less deletionist and law-and-order, and more inclusionist and lassez-faire, whom I can vote for? I went through the list, they all seem to be making the same promises, but maybe I've missed something. <comment><USER2> They seem to be saying the right things to the right audience at the right time. Kind of like how politicians promise things they can never live up to.

Maybe you need to view SO in a different light in order to understand its usefulness. The SO site itself can be considered broadly as a solve-coding- problem site.

If you want more broad and debatable topics to be involved in your thinking, go with a specialized-forum.

I think the wisdom behind their strict policy applies when (say) a question that was answered in 2011 about some linux software issue provides an exact solution that can be applied by another 10/100/1000 more other people that come across this issue in the future. Therefore, it solves the problem and you move on.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it wasn't already too late I would nominate myself on exactly this platform. Unfortunately I suspect the people who would vote for a laissez- faire candidate have already gone elsewhere, or are sufficiently disillusioned that they visit only infrequently.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wanted to nominate myself but didn't have enough helpful flag. Which makes sense, because _I DON 'T ABUSE FLAGS_.</comment>


15 Candidates to Replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/228911/15_candidates_to_replace_steve_ballmer_as_microsoft_ceo.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Bill Gates actually makes a bit of sense. After so many years of Ballmer, I would expect the top two tiers of managers to be irreversibly damaged. Gates would be the only one that could command respect enough to create a significant behavior and process change without firing everyone.</comment>


MIT students create ketchup bottle that pours like milk - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2148582/Come-Heinz-catch-Enterprising-students-create-ketchup-bottle-pours-like-milk-took-months.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems already posted a while back

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010762></comment>


AI4SEO - <AUTHOR> https://ai4seo.github.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> An AI that analyzes your website and improves SEO by either modifying a given file or providing easily embeddable code snippets. I am validating this startup idea. Let me know what you think of it :)</comment>


Be Careful When Following Facebook's Development Roadmap & Recommendations - <AUTHOR> http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=15200

<comment><AUTHOR> Some background:

Facebook made a change to allow the use of iFrames in Facebook Page tabs. The development roadmap stated that no new FBML apps would be allowed by the 11th of March and Facebook encouraged developers to create iFrame applications even before that.

There is a critical bug that prevents iFrame applications from being loaded in Facebook Page tabs for users that are using HTTPS on Facebook. Since Facebook is encouraging users to use HTTPS for security, this is impacting developers that followed Facebook's recommendations.

To fellow developers out there, be careful. Wait for a while before jumping onto the iFrame bandwagon.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: The fix has been pushed to the Beta servers.</comment>


Is this applicable for American sports? - <AUTHOR> http://www.this11.com Hi all,
Me and my co-founder has been working on this for a while now. As both of us are moonlighting, it didn't go as fast as we wanted but anyway there we are.
this11.com is basically an online soccer tactics board, which produces a jpg file of a soccer formation. You are given a link to the jpg file a la imageshack and use it within forums, blogs or any other type of online content.
Soccer(or football as we call it) fans love discussing about tactis and formations over here in Europe. Is this the case for NFL, NBA or NHL fans? Can this concept be of any value in North America?
What do you think of our app in general?
Cheers <comment><AUTHOR> We have been working on this for a while now. As me and my co-founder is moonlighting, it took a lot longer than we anticipated. But, there it is, we have something that we can build a community on.

Soccer(or football as we Europeans call it) fans love to speak about formations and tactics. this11.com is basically an online soccer tactics board. It generates a jpg file of the formation and the user is given a link to it. The link can be used in forums, blogs or any other sort of user generated content that allows embedding images.

Is this idea applicable to North American sports like NFL, NBA or NHL?</comment>