Dad who live-streamed his son's birth on Facebook loses in court - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/dad-who-live-streamed-his-sons-birth-on-facebook-loses-in-court/ <comment><USER2> Good to see a win for fair use. Don't broadcast publicly if you dont want it to be public.

<comment><USER3> _> Don't broadcast publicly if you dont want it to be public._

Ah, to live in the 90's again. I remember when the motto was _" Don't share anything on the internet that you don't want to be public."_

<comment><USER4> Yeah, and especially "don't ever, _ever_ put your real name, phone number, or location into ANY online system".

It was the way to preserve the benefits of anonymity and free speech without opening the door to (much) serious abuse. Then people realized they could make money promoting their "personal brand" online, and companies realized they could get people to tell them everything about themselves and sell that data, so common-sense behavior that permitted a very free environment to thrive with few negative externalities was destroyed by the profit motive and... here we are.

<comment><USER5> Some of us still hold to those basic protective measures. I see it as the difference between using ATM's, and walking all the way home while flashing your cash at everyone who walks by.

<comment><USER3> I practice psuedonomity instead of anonymity. "Nadya Nayme" is just a play on "Not a name". It allows me to have an identity while speaking my mind and hiding my real self from the general population. I don't think anonymity against a state power is realistic, so I don't consider it a part of my threat model. Twitter users organizing to harass my employer into firing me is much higher on my list of concerns. Especially because I've had people threaten "they would if they could."

Some people still value privacy. But most only value privacy when it is convenient - and are willing to throw it away for more convenience.

<comment><USER6> I do the same thing. No one ever seems to pick up the play, so in a way I've developed a second full name that works reasonable well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Apparently, the father-to-be realised his film was streaming publicly on > social media about 30 minutes into recording, but decided to leave it that > way.

It would be one thing if he never realized he was broadcasting publicly. Once you realize something is public and decide to leave it up, I think you lose any moral authority to claim others shouldn't have any fair use claim to your public work.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. Here's a moral (not legal) argument: he was streaming something for free to share with friends and family, and decided that he was OK to share it with interested parties that were interested to witness a live birth.

ABC is a corporate entity that exploited the footage for purely commercial purposes, as a way to attract attention to their news broadcast so they could sell advertising in the middle. This is a fundamentally different purpose from sharing it freely, and seeks to privatize what was previously given away unselfishly.

I'm not going to spend time looking up individual cases now, but I can think of several examples of big media companies suing over equivalently short excerpts of their broadcast product were used by someone else, eg that time Fox demanded the producers of a documentary fork over some $$$ because one of the interviews took place in a room where a TV was displaying an episode of _The simpsons_ in the background of the shot.

So the moral argument rests on the vast disparity in wealth between the two entities. An individual human of modest wealth shared something freely in a spirit of generosity, and a aggregate entity of vast wealth exploited it for its commercial value but selfishly kept all the benefit to itself, callously ignoring the financial burden to the parents that typically entails upon childbirth. A firm run on more moral principles would have split the proceeds of the commercial activity with the creators.

<comment><USER9> Large media companies are not very ethical; news at 11. How is that relevant to whether he should have a claim on it?

<comment><USER8> Well, equity used to be a concern of courts and was important enough to be mentioned in article III.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's become common practice for news organisations to just lift video and pictures from people's social media without permission, attribution or payment.

Perhaps an effective technique against this is to make sure there's copyrighted music playing in your livestream. (Or does that get auto-killed by content watermarking?)

<comment><USER11> And I have the feeling that if you would use public content from said news organizations without permission, things would turn out rather differently.

<comment><USER12> I dunno - youtube is filled with clips from newscasts...

<comment><USER13> Is the content featuring those clips actually being monetized by the uploaders?

<comment><USER14> Yes, there are numerous examples of "news channels" on Youtube which report on things that more mainstream sources have said or reported on already. Some examples would be Philip DeFranco, Scarce, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _This week's ruling can therefore be taken to mean that if you use social > media in a newsworthy way, it could be seized and shared, however personal > the content._

Good. This isn't a terribly high bar to clear, and it's directly related to public sharing / public performance type issues. Not even close to violating privacy rights like with a mistaken email forward - this was done by the person, intentional or unintentional, they opened it up.

I'm glad to see Copyright still have merit in the court system when the case being brought - this one - clearly doesn't meet the standards for the purpose and intent of the law. Ex-post-facto-cash-grab still not strong legal strategy.

</comment><comment><USER16> The last paragraph mentions that apparently child protective services took the baby after a day because the father was alleged to have a history of domestic violence.

I was shocked when I read that. Does that actually happen? Is it common in the US that the authorities take newborn babies from their mother?

<comment><USER17> Remember that infanticide is a leading cause of death of infants, and accidental injury is another.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protective_Services#Chil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protective_Services#Child_Protective_Services_statistics)

> On September 30, 2010, there were approximately 400,000 children in foster > care in the U.S. of which 36% percent were ages 5 and under. During that > same period, almost 120,000 birth to five year-olds entered foster care and > a little under 100,000 exited foster care.[41]

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So they're mad that the stream they shared publicly was seen by the public?...

<comment><USER19> Read the article: CPS took their baby away.

<comment><USER20> If you read the comments below the article, the reason CPS was called was because someone recognised the couple from an earlier case. In 2015, they both were apparently arrested after blowing up a shed in their backyard while attempting to make "honey oil" (hash oil made using a solvent, typically butane or propane). Dome's kids (at the time) were taken away by CPS after the incident. Both Dome and her (now) baby-daddy were arrested, along with some other person.

<comment><USER19> Sure, but my point is that it's more complicated than "mad because FB streamed the thing they were streaming."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I the only one that thinks that taking a baby away from their mother one day after birth because of a domestic violence accusation by a third party against the father (and denied by him) is over the top?

<comment><USER17> That might be over the top. Does the US publish these court cases? It would be interesting to see what the case actually is.

Don't forget that infanticide is a leading cause of death of children under one Accidental death is another, and some of those are because the parents need help and support.

<comment><USER21> We have a situation where a third party has made an accusation of domestic violence, nobody has yet been convicted, the father denies it, and CPS takes one day to take the baby away from its mother? I would hope it would take more than an accusation from a potentially disgruntled ex-partner to cause this trauma on a mother and a baby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the Facebook terms of use it says:

"you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post"

...in addition to:

"When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture)."

</comment><comment><USER23> This story shouldn't surprise anyone here, but I can understand that the general public doesn't fully understand the implications of using a free platform to host/display their private information.

</comment><comment><USER24> That's gross and egotistical. For events like birth, privacy is what makes them special. Too much vanity in social media.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could we change the link to a better article, like [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/dad-who-live- str...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/dad-who-live-streamed-his- sons-birth-on-facebook-loses-in-court/) ?

The article on thememo.com leaves out key information, such as the fact that ABC broadcast only 22 seconds of the 45 minute video.

<comment><USER26> The linked article also leaves out the fact that somebody recognized the mother and called CPS on him (for her history of domestic violence), while the Ars one includes it.

It gives a different view to the incident.

Edit: Recognized the mother, not the father.

<comment><USER27> Actually, they recognized the father, it seems:

> Someone from a past relationship had recognized Kanongataa on Facebook and > reported to CPS that he had domestic violence allegations against him. > Kanongataa denies those allegations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> And this is exactly why, 2 weeks ago, I put Famipix for Schools online. _Free_ for all schools and institutions:

Info & docs here: [http://support.famipix.com/category/47-famipix-for- schools](http://support.famipix.com/category/47-famipix-for-schools)

Signup here: [https://famipix.com/schools](https://famipix.com/schools)

Available in 8 languages.</comment>


How 'truth decay' is harming America's recovery - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2020/5/14/21257661/coronavirus-masks-facts-data-truth-decay-rand <comment><USER2> Funny to see this from Vox, one of the least-true media outlets in America</comment>


Startup Quote: Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder, JibJab - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/3639205389

<comment><AUTHOR> If you make something good and put it out there, people will pass it along.

\- Gregg Spiridellis (@jibjabceo)

<http://startupquote.com/post/3639205389></comment>


Combining a phone and a tablet, anyone? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to get some opinion from you guys....
I am a startup developing a new kind of mobile device that combines a phone and tablet - putting a 7" screen on a less than 5" phone body. (It is not like the Galaxy Note, where the size is fixed.)
SO when you just want to make calls, check SMS and emails, just use the "phone mode" with a 4"+ screen. When you want to surf web, watch videos/photos, transform it into a 7"-screen tablet. All of this in ONE SINGLE device, no detachable parts.
Now my question is about the potential market for this device, as it seems that no company is creating a device like this, I am worried if there's no market for it.
a) For those of you carrying two devices (a phone and a tablet), are you feeling a bit inconvenient, annd would you like to have this device?
b) For those of you carrying only a phone, would you like to have a bigger screen, perhaps 7", while retaining the same portability?
c) Would you still buy a 10" tablet after you have this device? (assuming you already have a laptop)
Your help will be very much appreciated! <comment><USER2> I wouldn't be interested in something like this.

Having two devices for me is a feature rather than a burden. If I'm using my phone, someone else can use the ipad. I can also talk on the phone while browsing on the tablet. Two devices is a good thing for me. The weight of both is negligible, so I'm not worried about carrying both around.

Additionally, there is something to be said for the convenience of having a big screen to view things on. If I'm reviewing comps, it's a lot easier on the ipad precisely because of the 10" screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would like to understand more abt your behavior if you don't mind :) If you like to have a bigger screen to view/edit contents, isn't it better to have a macbook air/ultrabook? I ask this because of a recent survey saying that people now find less time to use 10" screen due to inconvenience in carrying around, and also no time to consume media for long time outside home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.asus.com/Mobile/PadFone/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply.

There are some aspects of Padfone that we don't think it will be a market success: 1\. You still need to carry the 10" screen, and it is not as portable as a 4+" phone 2\. When the phone is inside tablet, you'll need a headset to receive and make calls

Anyway our product is not in compete with padfone, although we have something in common - to combine devices from different categories. The key difference, besides the size, is that we emphasize on PORTABILITY; while they probably emphasize on versatile performance.

Our device is small and light and easily slip into pocket, yet comes with a beautiful 7" screen.

BTW, I think the combination of device (our device + laptop/ultrabook) is more reasonable than (Padfone + laptop/ultrabook), because Padfone size is already very similar to laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> as I see it, you must think of cost, how much of a bargain would it be to have me the potential buyer purchase such a device, and not have two separate ones instead. Another key aspect is the battery life, big screens mean your battery won't last that long, and it would suck to have both your phone and tablet dead.

I think if these 2 are resolved, people will consider buying such a device.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. We will take these to heart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would love such a device. But how does your screen expand? Does it fold or slide out? How bulky is the device in phone mode?

<comment><AUTHOR> All I can say now is it's a slide-out design. We will keep the thickness as thin as possible, but its thickness in phone mode should be standard as other Android phones.

<comment><USER5> Is the OS going to be Android? If you actually pull this off, I'll buy two.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will be using Android. But might also consider other new OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For a bit more info, have a look here: <http://angel.co/i-flo>

</comment><comment><USER6> How do you go from a 4" screen to a 7" screen?

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a tablet and no phone. I mostly need a phone to occasionally call my mother but there are also times people ask me for a phone number for some reason. I can text with it, I think, at least get texts but not actual calls. I can't understand that. I am not a phone person. I used to be but I am much more an email person these days. It annoys me that I can't also make calls with a tablet. I really do not want yet another device, especially one I use so little.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks...So may I know what's the best tablet size for you? Do you prefer a 7" or 10" tablet while on the go?

You can think of our device as a 7" tablet that can shrink and turn into a smaller sized phone and make calls :)

<comment><USER7> I have a 7".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask WTF: Learning The Business - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Ask-WTF-Learning-The-Business.aspx

<comment><USER2> This kind of story seem to come up over and over in the programming world. I'd like to add something from my experience working in large development companies.

The first months or so, it's perfectly understandable that a new developer doesn't "get" the application, how it works, or even what it does. The myth of the ninja programmer turning things around, applying a mix of beautiful elegance and sharp efficiency to save the business big bucks, is just that, a myth.

Actually, during this period, a new recruit should focus on one thing only: survival.

Deliver the mindless code, even if it doesn't make sense (or seems plain wrong), but deliver it on time. Do not slack off on your hours, show up (at least) ten minutes early and leave (at least) ten minutes late. You may be the genius programmer who delivers in an hour a day's worth of an average programmer's productivity; but now's not the time for cleverness. Now, I repeat, is the time for _survival_.

It is also the good time for getting to know (and being accepted by) your colleagues and your direct managers. Coffee/cigarette/you-name-it breaks are important. Do not miss those.

So when do you get the chance to behave like the great programmer you always thought you were? From experience the milestone has always been the same: The next batch of recruits (which in my case has always been around 8-12 months in large enterprises).

As soon as you're not the "new guy" anymore, things automatically change. Not only have you already earned the acceptance and trust of people around you, but you've also seen enough of the code and interacted enough with business analysts. You have much more elements in hand to be creative and take initiatives.

In short, I'd add one thing to this article: Be patient. It's true that you can never see the whole picture, but as time passes, you can definitely detect the places where you can have an impact. Until then, you simply have to turn on your survival mode.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes it feels that the more you know about "the system" as a whole, rather than your section, the less likely you are to be pigeon-holed into one role or another.

This can be both a positive and a negative - your career won't follow the normal "developer to senior developer to team lead" path, but you will end up being given tasks as a developer that would normally be assigned to someone with a much more senior job title would get.

The negative is that getting paid for your extra knowledge is extremely hard, and your extra knowledge it worth much less outside of your industry (or even outside your building), so moving jobs won't help so much.

</comment><comment><USER4> Been there done that. Only thing I can suggest is that you keep notes, very good notes. You start looking into the WhatchaMaCallIt.java class to fix a bug you've been assigned? Write down in a text editor what you think it does in human understandable sentences. Then see how it interacts with other objects in the application. Draw squiggly lines with notes on them. You get briefed by a very experienced senior developer with absolutely no time? Keep notes of what he/she is saying and try to ask questions if something doesn't make sense. Also thank them for their time, always appreciated since I'm that guy now. I remember filling up notebook after notebook at my first job out of college. I then moved on to text editors that I could keep open in a second monitor (hidden whenever coworkers came by because I was embarrassed, which was stupid in hindsight).

<comment><USER5> Cannot emphasize the note taking process enough. I did this quite often early on. Don't forget to review them either. After a point it starts to sink in. I'm still a pen and paper person but would highly recommend either method

<comment><USER6> Why not commit your notes as comments in the file (or docs or wiki, etc.)?

<comment><USER5> I'm slowly migrating to electronic form but sometimes habits are just plain hard to break. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From one of the featured comments:

>Yeah, if it were up to me, 10% of our time would be spent on training-- teaching, learning, research, etc. But the higher-ups will often veto that, because on paper, it looks like it takes them 10% longer to complete their projects. Never mind that well-trained people work better and faster-- that's difficult to measure.

Actually, the effects of training are very easy to measure, compared to most of the other stuff involved in management; the problem is that very few are willing to put in the time needed up-front before you can get anything to measure.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thought i'd add my story, just started my first 'grown-up' programming job as well recently, three months ago.

I manage my company's internal management software, it allows the sales, support, development, testing, HR and contracts departments to operate as a 'paperless office'.

The first week, one of the first tasks I was given was to spend some time developing a simple plugin that displayed all the employees. From that, I had to research how the Entity Framework data models map to the object models within the software, how these models C/R/U/D and then how the 'snap-in' (the software uses a plugin based system, allowing different plugins to be updated specifically over updating the entire client) works with the host 'shell',

Although, I disagree with #1. If you're only doing the bare minimum, you're digging a hole in this massive system that'll come back to bite you. To make sure Contracts can send quotations to our customers, I had to learn how the quotation price will change if we're discounting a regular customer, and if we're doing that, do we keep the units of sale from the last quotation?

That's only one 'snap-in' of the system, replicate that over the other departments, and you understand how everything clicks, and you can write better software.

(Sorry for the long read, thought i'd post my tale!)

</comment><comment><USER9> > But the bank… was different. No one could give an overview of the wholesale > mortgage management system.

As a side note: The fact that few folks understood the global mortgage ecosystem lead directly to the housing bubble. For the bankers, it was not a bug but a feature.

</comment><comment><USER10> "it's all about finding balance"

I was thinking that the whole time I was reading. You can only eat knowledge as fast as you can chew it. Digestion takes time too.</comment>


Pre-Socratics: A Painless Introduction - <AUTHOR> http://lukemuehlhauser.com/pre-socratics-a-painless-introduction/ <comment><USER2> Those who are interested in Philosophy should also look at Indian Philosophy. India has a rich and unbroken philosophical tradition pre-dating Greeks. This Podcast by LMU in Munich and at King's College London covers Indian Philosoply in great details.

[1] [http://historyofphilosophy.net/india](http://historyofphilosophy.net/india)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, my favorite pre-Socratic is the sophist, Gorgias and in particular his Encomium of Helen.

[http://myweb.fsu.edu/jjm09f/RhetoricSpring2012/Gorgias%20Enc...](http://myweb.fsu.edu/jjm09f/RhetoricSpring2012/Gorgias%20Encomium%20of%20Helen.pdf)

We don't have much from the pre-Socratics. We have Plato. History is selective that way.

<comment><USER4> Mine is Heraclitus, "the weeping philosopher". All we have of his writings are fragments, my favorite being:

      He who hears not me but the Logos will say: All is one.

I have hope that with new archaeological discoveries, and with new technology being used to recover old, formerly unreadable documents like burnt paper which can now be read, that there will be more writings of the Pre-Socratics available for us to read in the future.

<comment><USER5> A mention of Heraclitus is not complete without also mentioning Parmenides[0]. Together, these two are the champions of their respective sides in the millennia old _Being vs Becoming_ [1] debate. _Being_ took a few blows at the hands of modern philosophers but I think there's plenty of room to explore the idea in the contemporary setting. The ideas we have access to now concerning relativity, quantum mechanics, space-time, and the holographic universe make it fun to explore Parmenides's idea of a static, unchanging reality that we are only able to perceive in a limited way due to our fundamental limitations as finite humans.

As a side note, I find it amusing how closely this debate parallels one of our own debates in the programming community: functional vs imperative programming.

[0] [http://seop.illc.uva.nl/entries/parmenides/](http://seop.illc.uva.nl/entries/parmenides/)

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_(philosophy)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_\(philosophy\))

<comment><USER6> To drag this debate down, I find it interesting that in the Marvel universe you could have put "a static, unchanging reality that we are only able to perceive in a limited way due to our fundamental limitations as finite humans" into the mouth of Doctor Doom word for word and it would fit right in ("Books of Doom" has him saying pretty much exactly that to his physics teacher as a teen), perhaps with a few minor changes ("our" to "your", probably, as the character would not want to include himself amongst mere "finite humans").

When the right writers get hold of one of the more interesting characters, there's a surprising amount of nods to philosophy to be found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article already mentions it but I highly recommend "The History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, if you are interested in any type of philosophy or philosophers. It gives a good overview from the pre-Socratics up until the beginning of the 20th Century.

<comment> barry-cotter From the author's _Best Textbooks On Every Subject_

Subject: History of Western Philosophy

Recommendation: The Great Conversation, 6th edition, by Norman Melchert

Reason: The most popular history of western philosophy is Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, which is exciting but also polemical and inaccurate. More accurate but dry and dull is Frederick Copelston's 11-volume A History of Philosophy. Anthony Kenny's recent 4-volume history, collected into one book as A New History of Western Philosophy, is both exciting and accurate, but perhaps too long (1000 pages) and technical for a first read on the history of philosophy. Melchert's textbook, The Great Conversation, is accurate but also the easiest to read, and has the clearest explanations of the important positions and debates, though of course it has its weaknesses (it spends too many pages on ancient Greek mythology but barely mentions Gottlob Frege, the father of analytic philosophy and of the philosophy of language). Melchert's history is also the only one to seriously cover the dominant mode of Anglophone philosophy done today: naturalism (what Melchert calls "physical realism"). Be sure to get the 6th edition, which has major improvements over the 5th edition.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subj...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Kirk and Raven" is the standard textbook in English. Gives and discusses the principal testimonia and fragments in the original Greek (or Latin) with English translations.

As it happens, there's a pdf of an early edition (1957) here: [https://archive.org/stream/presocraticphilo033229mbp](https://archive.org/stream/presocraticphilo033229mbp)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Ephesians be rich. There is no greater curse" Heraclitus

</comment><comment><USER10> Will use this as a referencem good article.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wonder why Luke Muehlhauser is interested.</comment>


ANTLR 4.6 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.antlr.org/download.html <comment><USER2> I'd be interested see pointers to ANTLR-based languages people are developing. I found it to be a powerful tool, but also limiting.

As far as I know, ANTLR v4 is even more of a "framework" than v3, in that it dictates your program structure and always outputs a full parse tree. It appears to have lost the ability to verify the value of k for LL(k) grammars, due to a more powerful underlying algorithm.

I think that simplifies it for most use cases but makes others hard or impossible.

<comment><USER3> I work on implementing languages and I often need new parsers. Either for full languages or little embedded languages or expression syntaxes of various kinds.

I often think 'right, this time I'm going to write a really nice little Antlr grammar and do it properly'. But every single time I regret it because there's always some complexity that means things don't fit into the Antlr model, and making things work the way Antlr works means more complexity than just writing a simple lexer and parser by hand.

My most recent example is that Ruby strings can't always be safely converted into Java strings, but Antlr wants to parse Java strings only and not a byte[]. So I had to copy my Ruby byte[] into a Java string a character at a time and just use the character as numbers pretending that they had no encoding.

That's just one example. It's always some other new problem that means it's more ceremony to use Antlr than the tool saves me later one.

Despite lexing and parsing being an entire sub-field of computer science, to be honest I'm not sure that in practice lexing and parsing are really problems that are so complex in the first place that a tool is ever needed.

<comment><USER2> I have this "meta-language" rant brewing for my blog[1], and I feel like you took the words out of my mouth!

Are you saying that ANTLR makes some unwarranted assumptions about Unicode? Does that just depend on the generated Java code, and would it be different for generated parsers in C++? I don't know the JVM very well, but my understanding was that the JVM makes some Unicode assumptions that aren't always appropriate.

The last "rant" was here, about meta-languages only being suitable for toys: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13040682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13040682)

vidarh also responds with his problems parsing Ruby (a "real" language): [http://hokstad.com/compiler](http://hokstad.com/compiler)

The blog is based on my experience in writing a parser for bash. I ported the POSIX shell grammar to ANTLR, but it fell ridiculously short of being a production quality parser.

I believe it's essentially impossible to write a bash parser with ANTLR. But I don't hear about any alternatives. All I heard is yacc/bison for bottom up parsers, and ANTLR for top-down. Shell needs a top-down parser because it's an interactive language (the PS2 prompt) and for completion. But it doesn't appear there is any other "serious" meta-language for top-down parsers other than ANTLR? It certainly is the best documented and longest-lived, but I am surprised how far short it falls for many tasks.

Part of the rant will be a survey of "real" language parsers (i.e. take the top 20 TIOBE language implementations) and see that they almost all use hand- written parsers, or bespoke parser generators. For example, Python has its own top-down parser generator in the tree, pgen.c.

[1] [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/20.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/20.html)

<comment><USER4> > it doesn't appear there is any other "serious" meta-language for top-down > parsers other than ANTLR?

Have you explored Perl 6 and its Rules sub-language and engine?[1] The Rakudo Perl 6 compiler is written in Perl 6 using Rules.[2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules)

[2] [https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/src/Perl6/Grammar....](https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/src/Perl6/Grammar...).

<comment><USER2> I have heard of this feature of Perl 6, but not used it. One obvious difference is that ANTLR is language-agnostic in that you can generate parsers in C++ or Python too, while I assume Perl 6 doesn't have that functionality. So that limits its appeal.

(Although honestly ANTLR is pretty skewed towards Java; the generated code is kind of like Java-in-Python or Java-in-C++.)

I'm curious what algorithm Perl uses to match grammars. ANTLR uses a few algorithms, like the one to generate lookahead tables for LL(k), and then the LL( _) algorithm, and apparently a new one with ALL(_ ) in ANTLR v4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice to see C++ and Go in 4.6 mainline. I've been stuck on ANTLR 3 in order to use C++ and it's great to see the new target finally mainlined. Go is good and I'd like to see a Rust target sometime soon.

<comment><USER6> At the risk of sounding inflammatory, what would be the point of using a parser generator over a powerful applicative-style combinator library like [https://github.com/Marwes/combine](https://github.com/Marwes/combine) ? I've used both in the past and personally massively prefer parser combinators, but I'd be interested to know what the benefits are of parser generators.

<comment><USER7> I think one advantage of things like ANTLR is that the grammer is described in an abstract fashion and that you can then generate parsers in multiple target languages with it. With a parser combinator library you are only targeting a single language. I also think that for project outsiders and beginners it's easier to look at and understand a grammar instead of a parser in combinator style.

I personally have worked with parser generators (Irony for .NET) as well as parser combinator (fparsec) and enjoyed both a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just curious if anyone has used ANTLR on Android lately; I recall it was easy to run out of stack because the runtime relies on very deep recursion.

Also I think there were some dependencies on AWT or Swing for debug console.

[https://github.com/antlr/antlr4/issues/744](https://github.com/antlr/antlr4/issues/744)

</comment><comment><USER9> More detailed changelog: [https://github.com/antlr/antlr4/releases/tag/4.6](https://github.com/antlr/antlr4/releases/tag/4.6)

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice to see Swift added to the list of targets. Any idea about the performance of generated parsers in Swift vs other targets?

</comment><comment><USER11> Compiler design was one subject that I struggled with when I was an undergrad. I feel this has held me back from creating DSLs. I am looking for a gentle introduction to ANTLR that can take me from newbie to mastery. Any books anyone can recommend would be helpful.

<comment><USER12> The Antlr-4 book is terrific:

[https://pragprog.com/book/tpantlr2/the-definitive- antlr-4-re...](https://pragprog.com/book/tpantlr2/the-definitive- antlr-4-reference)

<comment><USER13> Indeed. As someone with no real language background it allowed me to get to a state where I can create my own DSLs.

An alternative would be to use something like Xtext (which also allows you to create langauge tools, not just the language itself). I played around with it and it's very nice (granted you'll kind of need to embrace Eclipse) but ultimately decided that ANTLR was "enough".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Mostly notable for my purposes because it includes golang as a code generation target.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Ya ANTLR (+TParr).</comment>


Is Sim-City's Homelessness a bug or a feature? - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/is-simcity-homelessness-a-bug-or-a-feature

<comment><USER2> I find the question posed by the title, and reflected by the text, to be puzzling:

"That is, can we fix homelessness in SimCity, or because we haven't fixed homelessness as a problem in real life, therefore we are bound to lose?" Bittanti asked. "Is SimCity a reflection of what's happening in reality, and therefore is very realistic, or is it a programming issue?"

A reflection? "Sim" is for "simulation", correct? It seems more relevant to write about the accuracy of the simulation algorithms, which seems praise- worthy given how the author and participants are struck by how realistic the simulations' results are, and quite notably by how the participants' response to their "homeless problems" are similar to those we see in real-world municipalities, too. Then, a discussion of using SimCity (or the like) for testing eco/socio models would be interesting. To talk about it as a software "bug" or "feature" in seems really off-the-mark, and misses an opportunity for a fruitful discussion. Perhaps the author is coming more from a perspective of class issues and hence a bias?</comment>


Show HN: What car are you? Take the quiz - dan-jackson https://driverbase.com/recommendation/step1 <comment><AUTHOR> Performance is not zero to 60 times.

I want a car than can handle well. Going 200mph, drag racing ability is not a useful feature or qualifier.

</comment><comment> dan-jackson set your preferences, rate a current vehicle and get personalized recommendations with links to top rated local inventory.

the url to your results page is shareable please feel free to post your link here to discuss / debate accuracy.

we want feedback good and bad to continue tuning our recommender system. thank you.

dan jackson ceo driverbase

<comment><USER2> I don't currently own a car, so I can't complete the process.

<comment> dan-jackson good point. you can just put in a car that you have driven in the past (but don't own) and we will add an "i dont have a car" option.

thanks for the input.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

I put in the last car that I owned (nearly 5 years ago!), and here are my results: [https://driverbase.com/recommendation/results/88da2bc5-ab23-...](https://driverbase.com/recommendation/results/88da2bc5-ab23-4b34-bb5e-b8c2fb11c8b4)

I'd say that they seem pretty accurate -- I could see myself in all of the recommended cars except the PT Cruiser.

<comment> dan-jackson AWESOME! We'll see what we can do about that PT Cruiser :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk says he will fund fixing Flint's foul water - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/elon-musk-says-he-will-fund-fixing-flints-foul-water/ <comment><USER2> I'm saddened that the US citizens are so abandoned by their government that they have to rely on the random goodwill of a PR-hungry billionaire to restore what is fundamentally a human right. Access to clean water.

This is not a solution to this problem. It's a stopgap that muddies the underlying issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> I saw this tweet right after his Thai kids rescue submarine was a day late and a dollar short.

[https://twitter.com/HelloCullen/status/1016659144823197696](https://twitter.com/HelloCullen/status/1016659144823197696)

<comment><USER4> The rescue effort was weeks early.

There's plenty to criticize about Musk without distorting the record.

<comment><USER3> Honestly I was very impressed that he immediately went out trying to solve the problem and put his money where his mouth is. I wish more people were like that. His biggest problem was that he was on the opposite side of the Earth and he doesn't have Thunderbird 2 to deliver it in time, nor did he have much chance to get input from the actual rescuers as to what they actually needed.

The world would be a much better place if more billionaires were like him and Bill Gates.

<comment><USER4> The rescue may have wound up using something similar to the sub idea.

There are reports that the kids were administered an anti-anxiety drug so they wouldn't panic, and strapped to a stretcher wearing a full-face dive mask. That would kind of be an open submarine.

There are conflicting reports on this though, as an earlier report said the kids swam through the deeper parts but were carried on a stretcher through the drier parts. However it seems like it would be easier to just keep the kid on a stretcher, especially if there was some risk of the sedative/antianxiolytic drug having an unusual effect on the kid.

<comment><USER3> The one constant about the Thai rescue was that the reporting was absolute garbage. I heard so many conflicting reports that I doubt anybody not at the scene has a total grasp of the details.

At one point I was reading an article on CBS about how the coach was first out because he was in the worst health, and hearing a report on NPR about how the coach was going to be last. Kids were out, then they weren't, then they were again, then they had contracted some kind of fatal disease, then it was a precautionary quarantine, etc...

Hopefully whomever writes the book gets his information firsthand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA)

</comment><comment><USER6> So he's basically going to pay for a bunch of people to go door-to-door in Flint installing water filters? Neat.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I sell an entire tech stack? - <AUTHOR>

What possibilities are there out there for liquidating technology/applications instead of websites?  We have developed a multi platform mobile technology for game development but would like to focus more on pure app development with the company in the future. It's actually very interesting for existing (social) game developers or for an entrepreneur that wants to have some building block to start from.
I'm actually not looking for a super high amount, more like 30-75k. Considering the year we spent working on this, I am merely trying to recuperate some of the costs.
What possibilities are there? I know that for websites there are sites such as Flippa -- is there anything similar for pure software/IP? <comment><USER2> Not that I have much experience doing this, I would think selling the entirety of a product including IP is quite a tricky process for which there is no real template in terms of how you should go about it. I know it definitely happens in the sphere of enterprise software where it is usually smaller companies selling some software which large firms have found happens to suit their needs at a particular time. But I think establishing those kinds of interested contacts would take time and a careful awareness of opportunities.

It might be worth considering other possibilities in terms of generating revenue, perhaps by licencing the platform.

It is frustrating when you have a good piece of technology / application and you know it would be useful somewhere, but struggling to make that sale. If the economy was in better shape, larger companies would probably be much more willing to invest in full software / IP acquisition.

One other route is that of making some aspect open source but sell consultancy and support.

I would definitely be interested in any success stories of the kind you are hoping to achieve.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm interested too if there is such site as Flippa to sell software. If not. We have to create one! :D

</comment><comment><USER4> You could try <http://www.binpress.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hadn't heard about that one yet! Thanks, will check it out. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You could try and license your entire toolchain, sort of like Epic Games does with the Unreal Engine.</comment>


Climate Scientists' Motivated Reasoning - <AUTHOR> https://judithcurry.com/2019/06/19/climate-scientists-motivated-reasoning/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, the people who need to see this most, likely never will.</comment>


UCSB researchers demonstrate that 15=3x5 about half of the time  - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-08/uoc--urd081712.php

<comment><USER2> That's really cool. I didn't realize how hard it is to factor large numbers. Looking at the Wikipedia page on RSA numbers, can you believe this number has not been factored:

12462036678171878406583504460810659043482037465167880575481878 88832896668011882108550360395702725087475098647684384586210548 65537970253930571891217684318286362846948405301614416430468066 875699415246993185704183030512549594371372159029236099</comment>


Ask HN: which Android devices to get for development? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an iOS developer considering branching out into Android development for my F2P game https://itunes.apple.com/app/alphabet-connection-logic/id560852073 . I have a limited budget for hardware, so I'm looking for advice on which Android devices to start with.<p>There is a lot of info out there but I'm asking this on HN in hopes of obtaining the most current information. Thanks. <comment><USER2> I would suggest the following:

Android 2.1-2.3 Phone (e.g. HTC Evo) Android 4.0 Phone (usually high def) (Galaxy SIII, Galaxy Nexus, and most other modern Android phones).

Those cover most of your situations as the Android SDK mostly changed after Android 3.0 and 4.0.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd buy a basic Nexus 7.

I'm an iOS developer, and next year I'll branch into Android development. I'll probably go with a N7 (and maybe the N4).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am happy to rent u few devices shoot me a email .

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very generous but information would be much more valuable at this point :)

What devices do you recommend?</comment></comment>


From blogging to monetized on YouTube – my experience - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/transition-blogging-youtube-my-experience <comment><USER2> Great shared. Thanks pal.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr - I've made a shift in my technical content from writing blog posts to producing YouTube videos, and there are some implications to doing so.

Writing for a blog and producing a video are very different things, and so aspects of my work suffer for it, but the tangible reward and audience can be (but often is not) better with a platform like YouTube or Medium.

The post explores some more of my thoughts on the transition and was inspired by a comment from a few days ago on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860041)</comment>