IBM System/360 Principles of Operation (1964) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/princOps/A22-6821-0_360PrincOps.pdf <comment><USER2> I did a tour of duty as a CPU logic designer at Amdahl. The POO was my bible, although it was the 370 version in those days. The thing to remember about ISA specs like this is that they are works of fiction. The contract goes: "If you programmers are willing to pretend this is how the machines work, we will build a machine that pretends to work that way." That concept is the key innovation of the 360 system architecture, attributed to Gene Amdahl.

After leaving Amdahl I worked for a while in Electronic Design Automation. One year at the IEEE Design Automation Conference I met a random person at a happy hour who was an ex-IBM OS programmer. He said that he once spent a year rewriting a part of the OS to use a particular instruction entirely because "Amdahl didn't have it yet." Says I: "When was this?" ... "Ah, at that time part of my job was adding that instruction to the Amdahl CPU."

The conversation felt like an old Mad Magazine "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon. We were both bemused.

<comment><USER3> By pure random luck and if you know, has Amdahl's UTS survived anywhere? Mainframe software seems to simply disappear into the void after its useful life is over.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I have no idea.

<comment><USER3> Had to ask. It's disheartening how much stuff that was so important to a lot of people just disappears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In 1970, I actually got paid a salary to write applications in this Assembler language. Abjectly inefficient, but what a blast!

<comment><USER5> I did about 5 years of assembler in the late 80's for a major bank (IMS and CICS systems). A set of structured macros supposedly from NASA, made it quite readable. These added if/else, case, loop constructs, etc.

Around 2012(?), working for another major bank, I was asked to make an enhancement to a funds transfer system written in assembler, as no one else left in the pool of programmers had any experience. I had to dig out my old text book which I luckily found, and my old yellow card, and relearned enough to make the change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When IBM introduced the AP (attached processor) and MP (multi-processor) systems, they had to add instructions that were guaranteed to be atomic since both processors had uniform access to main memory. Interestingly enough, they only added two instructions (compare and swap, compare double and swap) to support these configurations.

(I think there might have been one or two other supervisor mode-instructions, but there were weirdos like "stop the other processor", for example).

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember reading a similar document for my shop's IBM 4381.

When I started mainframe programming, I was given a pocket-sized 'yellow card' that listed all the machine instructions and arguments. It was invaluable for dump-reading.

My co-workers (who were all older when I started) had similar cards, except in different colors. There were white, pink and green cards, too. You could tell when somebody started programming by the color of their card.

I kept mine, still have it.

<comment> BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 The card is now a 116 page booklet aka Reference Summary

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Coincidentally, I finished reading "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems" earlier today. I highly recommend it and its predecessor, "IBM's Early Computers" from the MIT press. The business aspect is there, of course, but it's really about the development of the machines themselves, down to how they developed the transistors they used along with who did it.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Adolescence of P-1 was set on IBM System/360 mainframes.

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

>Reception

>BYTE criticized The Adolescence of P-1 for what it stated were unrealistic expectations for an artificial intelligence running on 1970s IBM mainframes. It suggested that the author could have set the novel in the 1990s and use fictional future IBM computers to make the plot more plausible.

[https://archive.org/stream/byte- magazine-1981-09/BYTE_Vol_06...](https://archive.org/stream/byte- magazine-1981-09/BYTE_Vol_06-09_1981-09_Artifical_Intelligence#page/n201/mode/2up)

</comment><comment><USER9> Heh - had to go look up storage protect, aka 'red light errors' . Kept getting in trouble in the beginning of my career when I didn't realize snooping about lit up lights on the front panel . :-)

</comment><comment> BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 That's the easy one. z/Arch is way more intricate. As noted in my moniker, you can do fun stuff with BXLE,as described in the "Difficult Code" section on FINCH (aka program fetching) in an OS/360 PLM (Program Logic Manual).

</comment><comment><USER10> This was my bible for many years. We called it POOP (Principles Of OPeration. I loved assembler on the 360 and the 370. I learned Assembly Language by cross listing my COBOL programs and using POOP to find out what the op codes meant.

<comment><USER11> System 370 assembler was the first language I worked in professionally. We called it the POPS manual. As I recall it was a paragon of technical writing. I learned how to read technical documentation on this manual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I dare say these boys will find the manual rather handy.

[https://ibms360.co.uk/](https://ibms360.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Fair warning: this is not an introduction.

<comment><USER14> It's a typical programmer's hardware manual for the period.

More or less until the IBM PC, it was normal for computer vendors to supply a detailed bit-level breakdown of instructions, memory operation, data formats, interrupt structure, and so on.

<comment><USER15> Things were different in the early days. In the 1970's I worked at a company that had an IBM S/370 and a clone, an Itel AS/5.

IBM supplied hardware schematics and microcode listings for their S/370 hardware. They were in the machine room and freely available for perusal by us.

In a bit of irony, they also supplied schematics and microcode for the Itel clone. That's because the Itel was a true clone. It was designed by copying IBM's circuitry, but implemented in Motorola 10K series ECL instead of IBM's proprietary technology.

You read that right. In order to debug a problem with the Itel, the Itel field service engineers used IBM's schematics.

I think a lot of this free availability was because IBM was facing antitrust pressure from the US government. I don't know all the details.

Here's more history about the clone: [http://www.silogic.com/NAS/NAS.html](http://www.silogic.com/NAS/NAS.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anybody got a year for this?

<comment><USER17> IBM System/360 Principles of Operation, 1964.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=OjUyDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1028&lpg...](https://books.google.com/books?id=OjUyDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1028&lpg=PA1028&dq=File+No.+S360-01+ibm+360&source=bl&ots=VLzlgPhVgC&sig=ACfU3U1EeYlMCF0Uind-L4qf7KT_vWeQhw&hl=en&ppis=_c&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXwIqPht7lAhUX7J4KHY0TAg8Q6AEwCnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage)

<comment><USER16> Added. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Latest EURO MOMO data shows excess all-cause mortality in some countries - _-___________-_ http://euromomo.eu <comment><AUTHOR> One interesting thing that I can see there is that the current excess for many countries seem to be no worse so far from a larger excess in the early weeks of 2017.

Another very surprising thing is to see no excess mortality in Sweden, a country criticized for a laxer strategy against COVID-19.

I was not expecting to see that.

<comment><USER2> Sweden is on the same track as Switzerland, but about a week behind. They will probably show up on the map in either 1 or 2 weeks.

[http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid- visualization/](http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/)

<comment><USER3> and deaths are up to 5 weeks behind cases.

<comment><USER2> My 'week behind' is from comparing per-capita cumulative deaths.

The number of confirmed cases doesn't track as well between countries, probably due to different testing strategies. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden all have similar per-capita cases, but Denmark has half the death rate as Sweden and Norway has half the death rate of Denmark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So Germany, which is right next door to the Netherlands/France/Italy, is experiencing no excess mortality. What did they do right and how can we have some of that.

<comment><USER5> We were mostly lucky to have about four times as many ventilators as France or Italy.

The numbers I read in two different sources: Germany has about 20,000 ventilator places, while France, Italy, Spain, and UK have about 5,000 each.

So in Germany, we didn't hit the "no more ventilators" situation and people didn't die.

 _Edit:_ Here a recent article confirming it: "Germany still has 10,000 free ICU beds" (in German: [https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/coronavirus-in- deutschla...](https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/coronavirus-in- deutschland-10-000-intensivbetten-laut-spahn-noch-frei/25729386.html))

 _Edit 2:_ Pretty sick, considering that in Italy and France thousands are dying because there are no ICU beds, and here in Germany they are just empty and unused.

<comment><USER6> Luck favors the prepared mind, so could it be just an indicator of something deeper?

Maybe Germany has 4x as much ventilators as France, but also k times as much of many other things that matter?

I wonder if countries like France will realize they have to improve and become more like Germany instead of doubling down on their downwards spiral.

<comment><USER5> > Luck favors the prepared mind,

Then the US should be much better off, because they have about ten times more ventilators than Germany has. But only four times the population.

But, the US was unlucky to have 50% of cases in only one city. So they ran out of ventilators in that one place, while having a surplus elsewhere.

They reacted quickly and correctly by sending hospital ships (much quicker than trying to put ICU beds on trucks).

Of course, compared to the EU, the US is still handling the situation way better.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately the hospital ships are equipped to deal with wartime problems, i.e. trauma victims. They don't help too much in a pandemic.

<comment><USER5> They are not there to treat COVID-19, but to lower the "day to day load" of hospitals, so the hospitals have more capacity for COVID-19 patients. At least that's what they said on PBS Newshour.

<comment><USER8> That changed about a week ago.

[https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/04/06/coronavirus- update-u...](https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/04/06/coronavirus-update-usns- comfort-hospital-ship-will-now-accept-covid-19-patients/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there anything in this data indicating that there is something going on more severe than the flu? I don't see anything.

<comment><USER8> "It's not worse than the flu _when_ we lockdown the entire global economy" is not a comforting fact, even if true.

<comment><USER9> We don't know how it would have been without lockdown. We just see this data and it looks totally normal.

<comment><USER8> > We don't know how it would have been without lockdown.

Sure we do. It's not hard to see the curves flattening once mitigation efforts go into place, and slow-to-react countries having a harder time of it. [https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid- visualization/](https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/)

It also stands to reason that a respiratory virus would be affected by a country going on lockdown, given the mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Being selfish and looking at the numbers for the UK.

One thing that is striking is the peaks in age. The total figures look like the peak has yet to arrive, but thats because the mortality in the 65+ range is climbing (Given that 13% and rising have cases, this isn't suprising)

but the 18-65 looks like it has peaked. This shows a similar pattern to spain, if a bit earlier on the slope.

However this is just a shallow observation.

<comment><USER11> Maybe the over 65s in the UK can't isolate themselves as easily as younger age groups. Knowing percentages of older people in nursing homes for different countries could be useful.

<comment><USER12> It's gotten into the old folks homes just as in Spain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's good to see how healthy people in Luxembourg became with all this pandemic!

</comment><comment><USER14> This isn't exactly a good rebuttal to "it's just the flu". But it's still important datapoint in itself.

<comment><USER15> It's really just another data point. Using absolute numbers of deaths, it is hard to differentiate between an epidemic where R0 is moderate (say, 2.5) and the IFR is fairly high, or another where the R0 is higher (e.g. 6) and the IFR is lower. Both get you a lot of hospital load and an increased number of deaths.

Some interesting studies coming out now supporting the iceberg theory. Depending on your perspective, that could be good news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thanks, but we already know there is a pandemic going on causing excess mortality. In fact depending on where we are in the world we are at the tail end of a solid 3 week block where this pandemic and its effect on the local society was the _only_ thing being reported on.

Or in other words: these excess mortality numbers _include_ Covid-19 deaths, it's not the sexy excess mortality that excludes the pandemic some media have reported on.

<comment><USER17> We didn't know that it's causing excess mortality, at least not from any data I've seen. It's all been COVID related deaths which is pretty meaningless in its own.

This is the important data that shows how bad it really is - albeit not normalised for the reduction in other deaths such as car crashes etc.

<comment><USER16> So have you read the stories about how hospitals rent cooling containers and some cities use ice rinks to get additional storage capacity for dead bodies and go "I wonder if there is any excess deaths going on"?

<comment><USER18> Have you read this thread where there are people still saying "covid-19 isn't that bad, it's about the same as a rough flu year"?

Data helps persuade those people that this is worse than most flu years in recent history.

<comment><USER19> But would a 10% worse flu worth a global recession due to global lockdown ?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bloomberg.com - Black or White (Safari vs Firefox) - <AUTHOR> http://noir.bloomberg.com/ I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what is going on with the Bloomberg website (www.bloomberg.com). I recently noticed when visiting this site from Firefox that the styling has changed significantly, specifically the background has changed from black to white and the layout has also changed. Now I much prefer the old style to the new, but more importantly I recently visited the same site from Safari only to find the old (Black Background) design still in full operation. When I visit www.bloomberg.com from Safari I am re-directed to noir.bloomberg.com
So, here I think I'm onto something and I return to Firefox, type in noir.bloomberg.com and wait for the magic - but no luck - instead I am redirected back to www.bloomberg.com and forced to endure their new (and crappy, IMHO) white background website.
What gives? Are they just subjecting me to an A/B test against my will? Is there anything I can do to get my precious noir Bloomberg back on Firefox?
Help! <comment><USER2> I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what is going on with the Bloomberg website (www.bloomberg.com). I recently noticed when visiting this site from Firefox that the styling has changed significantly, specifically the background has changed from black to white and the layout has also changed. Now I much prefer the old style to the new, but more importantly I recently visited the same site from Safari only to find the old (Black Background) design still in full operation. When I visit www.bloomberg.com from Safari I am re-directed to noir.bloomberg.com

So, here I think I'm onto something and I return to Firefox, type in noir.bloomberg.com and wait for the magic - but no luck - instead I am redirected back to www.bloomberg.com and forced to endure their new (and crappy, IMHO) white background website.

What gives? Are they just subjecting me to an A/B test against my will? Is there anything I can do to get my precious noir Bloomberg back on Firefox?

Help!</comment>


Show HN: Codi.vim – An interactive coding scratchpad for interpreted languages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim <comment><USER2> meta: If you can still edit the title, you can add a "Show HN:" to the title: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html), otherwise I hope a mod will do so.

content: looks very cool. Does it still work cleanly if you e.g. open and parse a file (I assume later loads come from the file system cache and are quicker, but still), or do complex operations? A lot of my use case for REPL programming is breaking down data from log-like files, where some steps take seconds.

Can I maybe "pin" lines that should not be rerun every time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice about "Show HN:" :) It's my first post here, so I really appreciate it.

Opening a file works fine, as well! However, further loads are actually not from any cache. I decided against caching, because it becomes very difficult to add new language support if state persists between evaluations. To retain speed, Vim's asynchronous jobs are used if available. Complex operations will obviously take longer to show, but they will not interrupt typing. There's a big warning about trying to print infinite lists in Haskell, though ;)

The typical use case for Codi is trying out short code snippets to see if they do as you expect, or as a calculator where you can use your favorite interpreted language. Processing a lot of data is not really a good use case, but it's possible because the previous job is cancelled with every keystroke; it shouldn't be any slower than running it normally.

Pinning is a great idea. I'm not sure how it would be implemented, as anything you type in the buffer could be interpreted as a line to evaluate. Maybe a special directive like `!pin`, and escape exclamations via `!!`?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> P.S. If anyone's interested in the process I used to record the gif:

[https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim/blob/master/assets/pl...](https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim/blob/master/assets/playback)

Note that some characters I've typed like <esc> and ^A won't show up in your web browser. I recommend you edit with a text editor to see everything properly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, I wonder what are the performance / overhead on "long statements", I see there is support for async. Is it vim's own async system or NeoVIM's async system is supported as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> The performance is the same as if you ran everything you've typed on an interpreter - that's what it's doing behind the scenes, anyways. That means if you write `sleep(1)`, it's going to take a second to show the results. Previous jobs are cancelled on keystroke though, so (if there aren't _too_ many bugs) it should be only running one interpreter at any given moment.

But yes, it does use Vim's async system (if you have +job and +channel), so your keystrokes aren't interrupted even if the code takes awhile to run. If Vim doesn't have support for those, it falls back on synchronous execution on CursorHold events. Currently, NVim's async is not supported, but it's in the works on an experimental branch @ user/metakirby5 :) Check out the discussion at [https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim/issues/5](https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim/issues/5)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't Amazon the largest online wine, beer & spirits merchant? - <AUTHOR>

What is it about over the internet alcohol sales that prevents Amazon from being the largest online seller of wines, beers and spirits?<p>I would imagine that it would be trivial for them to add an age verification process where a user verifies his or her age with government issued ID and takes a photo of his or her face, then at checkout, they take a photo of the user at checkout with the getUserMedia API to confirm the person buying alcohol is the same person who verified their age. <comment><USER2> I think a big part of it is regulation. Namely, the difference in regulation between countries (and even local laws), their need to follow regulation (not only age verification, but also licenses) and then also duty of care and insurances. That is of course on top of sourcing, storing, distributing, shipping, warehousing, training.</comment>


The 85 ways to tie a tie - <AUTHOR> http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~tmf20/85ways.shtml <comment><USER2> Tying a tie is a fairly useless skill but surprisingly it is a skill because it can't really be broken down to a foolproof algorithm.

I have tied a tie almost every weekday of my adult life (granted that is not much grounds for authority as it's probably 10% of the population) and whilst I love those kind of whimsical books I can confidently say that tie classification (and named ties in particular) is not very useful unless you wear one tie and you have to tie it about once every few years when you get married or go to a funeral.

Each tie you own will likely be different in width, length, geometry and hardness but with experience you will know how to always end up with the right length by improvising the moves as you go and evaluate the remaining length and desired rigidity of the knot. Each move has different effects on the knot and you can finish a knot at the correct length regardless of starting point. Otherwise if you just follow the named ties algorithms you'll end up doing trial and error until you find the correct starting point for the tie+knot combination.

I've made some trivial comments on HN but this is probably the longest.

<comment><USER3> I just up-voted you to an even 1,000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A very cool paper! But it has in fact been superseded by subsequent research: the actual number of tie-knots is much larger—at least in the tens of thousands. The insights that led to that research on top of the Fink and Mao paper are described in this essay that then uses those ideas to illustrate the idea of language-oriented computer security: [https://medium.com/message/necktie-knots-formal-languages- an...](https://medium.com/message/necktie-knots-formal-languages-and-network- security-2f703632a527)

The paper itself is titled, appropriately, _More ties than we thought_ : [https://peerj.com/articles/cs-2/](https://peerj.com/articles/cs-2/)

<comment><USER5> In particular, I like that they produced a random tie knot generator: [http://tieknots.johanssons.org/](http://tieknots.johanssons.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel it's appropriate to link to a Python module I wrote some time ago exploring this book and the systems behind it: [https://github.com/subsetpark/necktie](https://github.com/subsetpark/necktie)

(The link in the read me is unfortunately expired)

</comment><comment><USER7> Does it feature more recent knots like the Eldredge or Trinity? I wonder how a formal description of the "tricks" they use would look like.

<comment><USER8> Here's a paper about them: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.8242](http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.8242)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And complimentary, 18 ways to tie your shoelaces: [http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/knots.htm](http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/knots.htm), Ian's Shoelace Site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Normally I'd take the number out, but here it's the title of the paper and of the book and of the wikipedia page.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_85_Ways_to_Tie_a_Tie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_85_Ways_to_Tie_a_Tie)

<comment><USER10> If it makes you happy, note that you are following strictly the guidelines:

> _If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous > adjective, we 'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To > Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the > number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."_</comment></comment>


How to Think Real Good - <AUTHOR> https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think <comment><USER2> I'm struck by the first part of the Feynman quote:

>Consider an object... What is an object? Philosophers are always saying, "Well, just take a chair for example." The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about. Atoms are evaporating from it from time to time...

Note how deftly Feynman takes his own objects for granted: what is an atom? But that's the basis of his own paradigm, so it goes unquestioned. This is, broadly, the problem with these sorts of exercises, that people seem to be able to notice things others take for granted, but their own sacred cows remain invisible.

You basically have to have this level of dissonance in play to be able to acknowledge the deep problems of rationalism, but stil carry on with formal methods.

<comment><AUTHOR> But that's precisely Feynman's point, isn't it?

I doubt he idealized the atom, he's just giving a simple example of a model "the object" that is objectively wrong but still useful. He's really just saying "all models are wrong, some models are useful".

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's Feynman's point, no. For one thing, it would be impossible to be a theoretical physicist without having a tremendous amount of buy-in to mathematical realism. That he, for example, believed in things like particle symmetry points to a far-more-than-contingent belief in the reality of mathematical/scientific objects. I think Feynman was just the archetypal "everything is a subset of physics" physicist, who thinks philosophers just play at science.

This is obviously not from the linked article, but it's the sense I have of him from his memoirs.</comment></comment></comment>


Tunologist - <AUTHOR> http://tunologist.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Tunologist is a little web app that's supposed to help you learn to read music well enough that you can quickly sing or play the notes you see written on the screen. Before I settled on the tunologist domain, my working title was "Mavis Beacon For Music".

The app actually listens to the notes you're singing or playing, and figures out in real-time if you're hitting the correct pitch. It's implemented as a very simple game, where you score one point for each note you hit correctly.

I've taken a radically different approach to the development of tunologist. Whereas I would usually "crunch" for a few weeks, working late at night or early in the morning for a few hours a day, tunologist was the project I started working on just after my daughter was born. It was actually an experiment to see if I could still work on a side-project in addition to helping to look after my daughter, and working a day job. It turns out I can!

I wrote tunologist in increments of less than 30 minutes per day - I would guess my median was actually about ten minutes. Before doing the project I never would have thought it possible to do good work under that kind of constraint. But it's not so bad as you might think. It forces you to spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking, and planning your next move, for example while commuting.

I've spent a little over 130 days on this project (about 22 hours total, assuming an average of 10 minutes of work per day). I'm happy with the result, and I think it's time to let other people play with it.

If you're interested in the development process, I blogged the whole thing at <http://prehacked.com>. My first post was <http://prehacked.com/28852894> (I wish posterous had a way to put "next post" buttons on individual posts, so that it would be easy to read the whole thing in order).

Please let me know what you think (and feel free to post your high scores!).

</comment><comment><USER2> This is really cool. The only problem i saw is that you could sort of trick it by singing a few wrong notes around the correct one.</comment>


Misa: a digital guitar - <AUTHOR> http://misadigital.com/index.html <comment><USER2> Electronic music still hasn't found anything near an ideal mode of performance -- this guy's guitar may provide a glimpse into how that can be achieved. Imagine a dionysian Jimmy Page up on stage, orchestrating a wall full of synth processors on this light-saber of an instrument. Much more compelling than the DJ-style performer stuck behind a control console.

<comment><USER3> This is far from state of the art for electronic music controllers; really it looks like a toy. Synthesizer controllers / triggers that look like normal instruments have been around (and used in performance) for 50+ years. And then there are things like the theramin, which came out in 1928, which is a physical synth controller.

<comment><USER2> What's great about his axe isn't that it looks like a normal instrument -- it's the way it maps touchscreen interfacing to the guitar form. I'm an electronic musician too and have seen plenty of history and modern experimentation; something that takes his touchscreen-guitar idea to the next level (full touchscreen neck?) has much more expressive potential than a normal guitar with a MIDI-transcribing pickup.

Plus it doesn't throw away one of the biggest lessons of rock: people will scream for a guy with a guitar in a way that they won't for someone behind a piano (or god forbid, a theremin).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It reminds me of a dirty hack I made with a gtk guitar tuner. It's called fretboard and it's supposed to let you use your guitar as an input device under linux.

<http://github.com/khamidou/fretboard-old>

</comment><comment><USER5> Moog has a pretty interesting digital guitar guitar too, a fancy midi controller:

[http://www.moogmusic.com/moogguitar/?section=product&pro...](http://www.moogmusic.com/moogguitar/?section=product&product_id=21130)

</comment><comment><USER6> More like Starrlabs' Ztar rip-off, really.

<http://www.starrlabs.com/>

<comment><USER7> They are clearly in the same genre of "MIDI controller in a guitar body". But I wouldn't call it a rip off. The MISA is touch-screen based while the Ztars include many different kinds of controllers.

From the looks of it, I think the MISA would make quite an interesting addition to a stage show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, this is really cool... but I am not so sure I look forward to the day things like this become mainstream.

It'd be _SO_ easy to fake even ridiculously complex performances, as by design you can offload a lot of the skill onto the computer inside your guitar!

But, then again I suppose this is the same problem we have always had, and always will have- computers vs. art and creativity.

<comment><USER9> _But, then again I suppose this is the same problem we have always had, and always will have- computers vs. art and creativity._

This is a false dilemma; computers and technology enable true producers and artists to do more amazing things. The poseurs will get wrapped up the technology and try to use it to paper over their lack of creativity, but the real artists will find a way to harness it. Look at Pixar.

<comment><USER10> I agree with you but I do sympathise with one creative dilemma I've run into over and over again with digital music.

The number of options you have is overwhelming. On a certain level I appreciate the number of options I'm afforded. On the other hand I feel like 'tweaking this' and 'changing that' takes a front seat, and the actual production of something worthwhile gets left behind.

Take a look at all of the overproduced albums you hear these days. It's not digital music's fault-- but it's a common problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's as much a guitar as a 'keytar' is. Still cool though.</comment>


Show HN: A Blockchain-based land and property registry - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8kHoLd5fq3rcFVCSkJiQ2RZYVU/view?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> I haven't had a chance to read and digest this through completely yet, so maybe it's in there, but how do you solve the problem of gaining adoption? The real estate industry is a complex web of stakeholders with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Do you envision enlisting property owners as the driving force of adoption? Even there, there are likely to be some issues. Many property lines aren't clearly defined, and may require a survey to determine the geographical coordinates which define a property. This cost would likely fall on the property owner, but may be a point of dispute when the records are being recorded into what's declared as the official record.

Good stuff thus far. I look forward to reading the rest.</comment>


Living Plants That Glow Like a Lamp (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.physics-astronomy.org/2018/11/mit-just-created-living-plants-that.html <comment><USER2> I signed up for the original Kickstarter version of this, which failed spectacularly when it turned out genetic engineering was slightly beyond the capabilities of the college kids who started it.

Eventually an actual scientist (one of the originators of the technology) started his own glowing plant company, and they actually delivered. I had a real live glowing tobacco plant that lived for about three years.

It was dim enough that to view it, you had to go into a completely dark room and let your eyes adjust for about ten minutes.

Pretty cool though.

<comment><USER3> What was the name of the company that delivered? Any chance they're making progress on better output?

<comment><USER2> Gleaux. Their website appears to be down though, so it's possible they went under at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Michael Strano, professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior > author of the study, said: 'The vision is to make a plant that will function > as a desk lamp — a lamp that you don't have to plug in. The light is > ultimately powered by the energy metabolism of the plant itself. Our work > very seriously opens up the doorway to streetlamps that are nothing but > treated trees, and to indirect lighting around homes.'

Someone help me... I can't make the numbers work. How can you create plants with enough energy to provide light to read or make your neighborhood safer without sharply increasing their food supply & metabolism? They'd have to photosynthesize vastly more than they do already.

Also those pictures, if genuine (and I don't think the picture of the tree is) are definitely long exposures.

<comment><USER5> Sunlight is about 1000W/m^2. The efficiency of photosynthesis is about 0.2% [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency)

So assuming a 100% efficiency in the conversion of the products of the photosynthesis to light, a 12h+12h light/dark cicle, 100% canopy coverage, ignoring the branches, ignoring that plants need energy for other activities and ignoring that the plant will release 1/2 of the light to the sky instead of to the floor, we get 2W/m^2 for illumination at night.

For a 3mx3m room (10ftx10ft), I'm happy with a 18W LED lamp, and streets are usually darker. (I can't find the official recommendation.)

I'm ignoring a lot of inefficiency sources, so assuming a 100% efficiency after photosynthesis is too optimistic. Organic reactions are usually far from 100% efficiency. I think that a 10% is still optimistic, but it's difficult to give an accurate estimation.

So I think it's not ruled out by the laws of physics, but I don't expect it to be viable as a street illumination method. (On the scale from 1 to Nessie, I'd rate it as Yeti.)

<comment><USER3> That sounds like a figure that reflects how little energy a plant needs. Becoming an active light source requires more energy than the evolved requirements of plant life. So you have to engineer the whole cycle into the plant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of the $40 I gave to a kickstarter project 6 years ago to get seeds for a glowing plant made by a team of researcher at Stanford. I'm still waiting for my seeds, i believe the team has been disbanded since...

Here is the kickstarter project: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing- pla...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants- natural-lighting-with-no-electricit)

ps: t

<comment><USER5> At least in they project the plant would glow forever. In this project they add the reactives submerging the leaves in a liquid with nanoparticles that have the reactives, so it locks like they will glow only once.

Also, in spite of the photoshoped tree and the photo that has the brightness so high that the noise level is evident

> _The light generated by one ten centimetre (four inch) watercress seedling > is currently about one-thousandth of the amount needed to properly read by, > but it was enough to illuminate the words on a page of John Milton 's > Paradise Lost._

this generates a tiny amount of light, don't expect to use it to illuminate the streets like they hope in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> header photo: blindingly bright tree, woe betide those who look directly upon it

first paragraph: trees will someday light our highways

halfway down the article: okay, a book being lit by a plant, cool

near the end: "The light generated [...] is currently about one-thousandth of the amount needed to properly read by"

</comment><comment><USER8> If you inject glowing nanoparticles into a watercress, the glowing nanoparticles will continue to glow.

You can also inject them into hotdogs. Or, for that matter, just about anything.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER9> A little bit. Your hotdog would have to be alive. These nanoparticles are the enzymes and substrates for a luciferin reaction, which uses the plant's energy in the form of ATP to power the reaction, giving off light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is definitely cool, but If every tree were to glow, there is a possibility of interfering with nocturnal habits of birds and other animals.

</comment><comment><USER11> That first picture seems misleading. At risk of stating the obvious, it seems to have a lamp shining on the tree from behind. I mean, the tree has a shadow going towards the camera...

</comment><comment><USER12> Off topic: this website is unreadable without ad-block

<comment><USER13> Yes. Just about to say the same thing. I just clicked back and came to the comments hoping someone would explain what the content is all about.</comment></comment>


Blockchain Under the Hood: The Only Way to Adoption - <AUTHOR> https://blog.smartdec.net/crypto-under-the-hood-the-only-way-to-adoption-6544eee81b20 <comment><USER3> Bitcoin is about taking responsibility of your own money. If you don't know how Bitcoin works, you don't actually own it. It's like "not your keys - <USER2> your coins", but "not your knowledge - not your coins".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that kind of instrument (with crypto under the hood) would not be perfect or "pure". However, people use cash or banks, which are perfect neither, and benefit from it. Anyway, we should better try to build it than try to guess how it will be used.</comment></comment>


Podcast sponsorship revenue continues to fuel NPR's financial growth - <AUTHOR> https://current.org/2019/09/podcast-sponsorship-revenues-continue-to-fuel-nprs-financial-growth/ <comment><USER2> I love NPR. I'm glad they're doing well, and hope they will continue to make quality programs.

But one of the major advantages which has set them apart for me is that they aren't as advertising dependent as so many of their alternatives.

Avoiding ads makes it easier for them to be independent, and able to report without fear of corporations withdrawing their support.

It's also just much more pleasant to listen to. I try to avoid advertising as much as possible, and it's sad that they are one more place it's invading.

I know they've had corporate sponsors for some time, but the podcasts really feel like an escalation.

I don't blame them; I'm sure they felt this was the best choice for them to grow and survive, but it feel like a disappointing loss.

<comment><USER3> > _I try to avoid advertising as much as possible, and it 's sad that they are > one more place it's invading._

It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid.

Oh, but you will gladly pay for quality, ad-free content, you say?

Unfortunately, based on the numbers I've seen at media companies I've freelanced for, this only works out for a tiny minority of creators. Unless you are the NYT (housing 1000+ journalists) or Ben Thompson (an outlier with a super high income audience), the number of listeners/readers/etc willing to pay is astonishingly low.

When people say they will pay in surveys, most of them are flat out _lying._ Here's a recent example:

[https://tim.blog/2019/07/11/why-im-stopping-the-fan- supporte...](https://tim.blog/2019/07/11/why-im-stopping-the-fan-supported- podcast-experiment/)

It turns out, a vast majority of people who complain about ads will not put their money where their mouth is.

I say bravo to NPR for looking out for the sustainability of their excellent work. I happily listen to ads to sustain their content. I have full confidence they will continue to report with the same independence they've always had.

<comment><USER4> > It turns out, a vast majority of people who complain about ads will not put > their money where their mouth is.

Not quite.

If the baseline is that ads can provide enough revenue, and you're specifically paying to remove the ads, then that's a much smaller number. He has what, two ad slots, repeated at start and end? If that's $30 CPM at two per week, that's 26 cents a month.

The minimum subscription was $9.95 a month.

As somewhat of a tangent, I would like a way to pay $5 a month in a single spot and have it be apportioned to all the podcasts I listened to in that time, but that doesn't really exist as a service. Even though that's _much_ more money than my listens are worth in ad revenue.

<comment><USER5> I think your tangent is describing youtube red. Assuming all your favorite podcasts are also on youtube.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, if they were on youtube. Youtube red is a good model, and there's a reason I've complained in the past about how the very broken 'google contributor' should just copy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to love NPR but then I realized their content is exclusively liberal. Now I am disgusted by how partison they are. It's like if you listen to the news you don't get a fair report on things but a one sided view, mainly those who suffer under conservative government.

<comment><USER7> It can be argued that large majority of Americans have liberal values. Many of them have non-liberal identity that makes them think they are non-liberal.

For example:

61 percent of Americans, 42 percent of Republicans, approve of labor unions

66 percent of Americans think money and wealth should be distributed more evenly.

80 percent of Americans think some corporations don't pay their fair share of taxes.

78 percent think some wealthy people don't pay their fair share of taxes.

76 percent believe the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes.

60 percent of registered voters believe corporations pay too little in taxes.

87 percent of Americans say it is critical to preserve Social Security, even if it means increasing Social Security taxes paid by wealthy Americans.

67 percent of Americans support lifting the cap to require higher-income workers to pay Social Security taxes on all of their wages.

[https://prospect.org/power/americans-liberal-even- know/](https://prospect.org/power/americans-liberal-even-know/)

<comment><USER8> Amazingly, when voting time comes, the country tends to appear center right. Could there polls be wrong?

<comment><USER9> No the polls are correct. Many people's overriding concerns don't show up in any of the parent poster's numbers. Poll after poll shows the majority of Republican voters concerns are for more "cultural" than economic. Especially when you take into account how electoral votes are distributed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want a contrary take on NPR and particularly how their political coverage is awful, Erik Loomis, a professor of union labor history and about as far left as you can get, has a number of articles on how NPR fails the national discussion

[http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/07/our-worthless- me...](http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/07/our-worthless-media)

<comment><USER11> I think the main problem with NPR news is they always play dumb. If somebody tells them "2+2=5," they just repeat it, if even it's been proven a lie, even if they've been saying the same lie for 30 years. It's not objectivity, it's just enabling liars.

<comment><USER12> Yes. Recently they've been corrolating the deaths from bootleg THC cartridges with the banning of flavored nicotine vapes, which is nonsensical but they've parroted it multiple days in a row. There's clearly a propaganda campaign against vaping by big tobacco, with anti-vaping ads everywhere, Trump speaking about it, etc. they are playing along.

<comment><USER13> Big tobacco owns a hefty minority share of the major nicotine vape companies.

<comment><USER14> They could just be hedging their bets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Listening to NPR with my dad on the weekends growing up in Tulsa was my favorite thing on the planet and basically the reason I wanted to become a journalist.

But like everything else in digital disruption that seeks to "make the world a better place," there are unintended consequences.

NPR's immense success with podcasting could come at the expense of local public radio affiliates around the country. They pay great sums of your donated dollars to NPR (and American Public Media and Public Radio International and BBC, etc — NPR is sort of the Kleenex of public radio in the United States) for the rights to shows a whole lot of Americans still listen to the ol' fashioned way in their cars or at work over the air.

Eventually we'll listen to only streamed or internet-based content, I'm assuming. So the question is what happens to the affiliates most people are far less familiar with than the NPR brand?

("I heard it on NPR." You technically heard it on KQED, or KUT, or WGBH, or whatever.)

One suggestion for their future is to take advantage of the strong community trust and ties many of them enjoy and beef up local coverage where newspapers are fading away. Stream the content and broadcast it over the air.

Share resources between stations like several have done in Texas for the morning program Texas Standard. There are numerous stations in other states doing this or attempting to do it. And of course, be savvy with social, and even consider experimenting with targeted ads and paid (or donated) search.

Support these efforts, or better yet, join them. Digital affords an enormous amount of local potential with a relatively small team and budget where newspapers traditionally faced gargantuan printing and operational costs.

<comment><USER16> As far as I can tell, IPR (Iowa Public Radio) is doing basically exactly what you are suggesting. Their big thing during pledge drives is that they are currently growing their team rather than cutting back like traditional news media.

I think IPR used to maybe be several different stations that conglomerated a decade or so ago. Not sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> NPR is such a national treasure.

Here in Minnesota, Minnesota Public Radio is one of the few places that does detailed stories on rural area outside the cities.

<comment><USER18> That's MPR, not NPR. NPR is basically just a content provider, much like when you read a national AP story in your local paper.

<comment><USER16> Isn't that like saying that CBS is a content provider? Obviously the big parent company is the one providing content for the local stations.

<comment><USER19> NPR isn't the only content provider. There's also Public Radio International (PRI) and American Public Media (APM), both of which were apparently founded by several public radio stations. And many public radio stations produce and syndicate their own shows independently.

Suffice it to say, NPR doesn't own any of these companies or stations.

<comment><USER20> Just to fill out the confusion roster, there's CPB, NPR, APR, PRI, and PRX, at least:

CPB: Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

NPR: National Public Radio.

APM: American Public Media.

PRI: Public Radio International.

PRX: Public Radio Exchange.

I won't go into histories and distinctions, but those are the major organisations within the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been thinking for a while that the podcasting business is ripe for disruption in terms for revenue models.

From my understanding, podcast creators have to track down and get potential sponsors to sign on (if you're lucky and already have a big audience maybe they come to you). Then you splice in the audio of their ad into your podcast.

Whereas I've thought that an easier model for everyone would be to have an ad service that automatically serves ads into your podcast. Similar to how web site advertising currently works. As a creator you simply tag locations in your podcast where you want ads to appear and the duration of the ads. You also give the ad service a set of key words it uses to serve the most relevant ads to listeners. No chasing money and negotiating payments. Just sign up to the service, tag the audio stream, and provide relevant keywords.

An argument against this way of using ads in podcasts is that you lose control over the content and quality of the ads. I think we've all seen the broad range of quality in ads seen on websites...

The other revenue model is a packaged subscription model through some kind of syndicate. It's difficult to get people to pay for a single podcast, but if you packaged up a few under a small monthly fee maybe keen podcast listeners would be more willing to pay. Could be a good way to capture people who want an ad free experience, but don't want to pay for each podcast individually.

Perhaps I'm not aware and these models have been tried already?

<comment><USER22> > I've been thinking for a while that the podcasting business is ripe for > disruption in terms for revenue models.

Don't worry, your widely known ideas for making podcasts bad have already been considered and implemented.

> Perhaps I'm not aware and these models have been tried already?

Yes. The former is DI / DAI through podcasting platforms (rather than the more artisanal and self-hosed podcasts, whether it's baked-in or DI). The latter is subscription platforms like Acast Access, Spotify (which bought several podcasting studios like Gimlet and Parcast) or Luminary, or "premium podcasts" features (with either subs or one-off buys).

<comment><USER21> Spotify bought Gimlet? Wow. I haven't listened to podcasts for a while. Sounds like a lot has changed.

<comment><USER9> Gimlet has become NPR lite. Overly scripted, no spontaneity and everything is over produced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I really wish there was some option to pay for ad-free NPR podcasts. I do this with a few others via Patreon, but some quick Googling didn't find anything similar for NPR.

<comment><USER24> I'd do this for my fav podcasts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have mixed feelings about this, since on several NPR podcasts Exxon has sponsored and advertised their carbon capture investment, despite it being a greenwashing campaign that comprises such a tiny percent of their overall new investment.

How can NPR not ultimately be captured by corporate interests with for-profit sponsorships?

<comment><USER26> Because it's already a state-media propaganda apparatus?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_\(United_States\)#CNN_and_NPR_interns_incident)

<comment><USER27> NPR is not perfect - in particular, I have some issues with the artifical equivalency between our two major parties implied by NPR interview programs.

With that being said, your claim is 100% complete and utter bullshit, unsupported by even your own source.

<comment><USER28> Claiming they're a PYSOPS unit is overcomplicating the matter. NPR basically practices access journalism ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_journalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_journalism)) and claims not to.

<comment><USER29> Access journalism ??

Oh, you mean Terry Gross' excellent and astonishingly comprehensive interviews with virtually all movers and shakers of the last 3-4 decades?

That's what I like about NPR the most. Prairie home companion, wait-wait don't tell me... BORING. it's time to change the station.

<comment><USER26> Terry Gross' excellent and astonishingly comprehensive interview of each and every member of the E Street Band.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Shameless plug: I built adblock radio, for radio and podcast ads

[https://github.com/adblockradio/adblockradio](https://github.com/adblockradio/adblockradio)

Support is mainly for radio streams though, more work is needed to make it work on podcasts.

</comment><comment><USER31> this pleases me in so many ways.

as a former public radio listener, who grew increasingly tired of finding something else to listen to during the all-too-regular fund drives, i very much appreciate the ability to skip forward on podcasts.

i'm also happier paying for good audio content than i am willing to pay for a dozen different news site subscriptions. my regular day is full of visual- attention-required tasks, and having an audio-only source of information and entertainment is worth paying for.

it's nice to know that it appears to be a successful business model for NPR.

<comment><USER27> They've experimented with "silent" fund drives lately in Iowa, where if they raise a target amount then the full fund drive is skipped. I like that a lot, as well as the fact that their programs are all podcasted.

<comment><USER16> I find the silent drive to be soooo painful. It's the most passive aggressive form of fundraising. I think they've gotten better at it the last couple times around, but the first one was rough.

"We're just going to keep this silent drive going until we get the money!" ... A month later "Come on people, going to have to do a real pledge drive since no one is paying up..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> One beef I have with NPR podcasts is that they often crank up the loudness of the ads way higher than the rest of the podcast.

When I already have the volume adjusted so I can hear the podcast over local background noise, the commercials are genuinely painful. Especially when I'm wearing earbuds and can't instantly lower the volume.

I'm sure they have reasons, but it really pisses me off.

</comment><comment><USER33> I love NPR since I was a little kid. High quality information, also and especially on financial topics.

[GERMAN] I also love listening to the German counterpart of NPR/ SeekingAlpha > AlleAktien.de ( [https://www.alleaktien.de](https://www.alleaktien.de) )</comment>


What's up with the black bar on top? - <AUTHOR> Anyone else find it distracting? <comment><USER2> [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/technology/gene-amdahl- pio...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/technology/gene-amdahl-pioneer-of- mainframe-computing-dies-at-92.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER3> Sorry if this sounds bad, but without having to read the article, what exactly does the bar signify?

<comment><USER4> It is done from time to time on Hacker News during a significant death in the computer/hacker world.

There was similarly one done for John McCarthy years ago [http://web.archive.org/web/20111025011711/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20111025011711/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's appropriate. Unintrusive, noted by readers. It should link to a notice of the death tho.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's:

Don't know why.

<comment><USER7> Rereading the thread, it's like a flag at half mast or an armband. HN does it to acknowledge tragic events.

On a side note, I was quite stunned when I poked around in the HTML recently and discovered that the site still uses spacer gifs. (I was poking around because the spacer gif had started 404ing and I was wondering why I kept seeing random image placeholders.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> YC has always been a supporter of technology. I don't know the history of the black bar, but I have been around for quite some time in HN and Ive only seen it twice now. So it makes me think it started when Reddit founder Aaron Swartz killed himself. This black bar is a way of morning such tech pioneers.

</comment><comment><USER9> From Dang though, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558802) ?</comment>


I don't have any connections - <AUTHOR> http://ninjasandrobots.com/i-dont-have-any-connections

<comment><USER2> Heh. A rant, if I may:

I lived in a small town in northern Canada until I was 17. I had had an interest in programming since I was 11, but the job most relevant to "computers" you could get up there was repairing them at BestBuy. My parents weren't particularly rich, and didn't encourage me to strive for high academics or anything of the sort; in fact, the only thing they really wanted me to do was to get a driver's license, so I could have a fallback job as a truck driver. I hadn't a single role-model for the "white-collar dream" I found myself pulled into from playing with Linux and reading Slashdot. I just knew I couldn't manage it living where I did.

At 17, I finished high-school and, with virtually no separation, moved to a more reasonably-large city (Vancouver) and began taking courses at a community college. I believed, at the time, that taking my first two years at a "cheaper" school would be good for my future student-loan-debt load, and optimized for this instead of, say, networking opportunities. The community college was full of unmotivated students just trying to squeak by, teachers who knew less about CS than I had learned from the Internet, and in the end, I didn't feel motivated enough† to make the grades to manage a transfer into the CS program of the "state" university (UBC.) My student loans cut off, and I dropped out.

I started attempting to do software-dev contracting. (It's very hard to get full-time employment as a developer without a Bachelor's, whether or not you're an autodidact with 8+ years' experience in some technologies.) I moved from one gig to another, never really finding that fabled "word of mouth" that would let me lever one contracting job into another. I always worked alone, and remotely; I was never hired onto a team. I looked on eLance a lot.

I still haven't made, in all this time (I'm 23 now), a single "programmer friend" who would qualify as a connection, nor met a programmer in person from whom I've learned a single fact, rule, or concept I wasn't already familiar with, or been introduced to any neat new technology. This isn't bragging about my talents--rather, just painting a picture of the bottom-of-the-barrel places I've been hanging out. I'm sure I would feel out-of-my-depth (in the best way) sitting in any arbitrary coffee shop in Silicon Valley‡, or in any even- somewhat-modern startup here or elsewhere.

If you want to talk about lacking connections, first imagine the closest thing to a "programmer" in your Facebook friends list being your friend from high- school who does accounting at an oil-and-gas firm. Imagine everyone in your family saying that the one time you got paid $50k was "a fluke and won't happen again; you should just work at a gas station like your mom and your aunt do" (leaving alone the fact that you don't have enough customer-service experience to be considered for that job in a competitive market.) Imagine having no major portfolio pieces you can show off, despite years of coding, because you've alternated between struggling to survive on a total dry-up of income with no savings (no time for side-projects), and doing programming jobs for capricious clients who take your backend system and give up on the idea before hiring a front-end guy, relegating your efforts to only be examinable through API calls and doodles of wireframes. (And while you're at it, imagine having a few friends in the US, who have perfectly good job opportunities available for you with their companies, but who can't help you out until you go back and finish school--which you can't, at least yet, afford to do.)

But there is that app I made two years ago that I still have in closed beta, the browser-based-collaboration-environment one with an active community even when I don't check in on it for weeks at a time. No time to remodel it into something good enough to launch to the public... but it lets me call myself a startup founder nevertheless. I'm just in stealth-mode, that's it. Heh.

\---

† Having undiagnosed ADHD may have had something to do with that as well. I imagine, having detected and compensated for that flaw, I would be quite better at slogging through that remedial-feeling workload if I had to do the same now.

‡ I'd love to move there, actually... if I had American citizenship. Or an undergraduate degree to legally qualify me for an H1B or TN work visa. Blocked on all fronts, there.

<comment><USER3> I waffled on whether or not to reply here, due to the personal nature of some of what I have to say, but here it is.

First; quit making excuses and having regrets. Either get off your ass and make it happen or be satisfied with not doing so. This is the only life you are going to get. It is short, and people in far worse situations have gotten further because they aren't afraid to try.

I grew up in total poverty, surrounded by poor uneducated friends and family, mostly who had defeatist attitudes that nothing better was possible for them. We were a family of poor white trash the whole time I was growing up. Everyone at school looked down on me and mine. Some of my immediate family, friends, cousins I grew up with are now addicts, thieves, pushers. Some of them are in rehab, some of them are dead; one in a shoot out with the cops. Most of the rest are working dead end jobs and drinking their way to early graves.

During my junior year in high school, my friend Mike looked at me and asked, "What are you going to do after high school?" I told him I was going to go to college, get a good job; and eventually maybe start my own business. Mike said, "That's a nice dream, but you're just going to end up hanging around here getting high and drinking yourself to death like the rest of us, because that's who we are. We're losers."

As a child I was beaten, stabbed, ate food out of dumpsters. On top of all of this I have terrible ongoing chronic medical illnesses and have had since I was a very small child. I can say, emphatically, my situation was worse than yours.

Now I have been writing software for 15 years, and I am not the best, but I'm damn good at what I do. I make enough money; I live a good life. I have connections. None of this was given to me. I worked and sweated, I gave, and I took back. And when everyone said, "You can't."; I said, "I will."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cold emailing / cold calling definitely works. But it's a Good Idea to do your homework first. Here's a little tip I learned some time ago, and have been working on implementing lately:

Say you want to sell something to Foobar, Incorporated. But you have no warm contacts there. OK, you can go to Hoovers.com, or use LinkedIn, Jigsaw, etc. and get names, contact info, etc. BUT... and here's the "tip" part... on LinkedIn you can also find people who _used to work for Foobar, Inc._ and contact them first. Why? Because there is a good chance they'll offer to talk to you (people like to be helpful and it makes them feel important) and they have little to lose (they don't work there anymore), but yet they can still give you TONS of valuable inside information (depending on how long they've been gone) to help you establish credibility when you do call.

Example: The info on LinkedIn, Hoovers, etc. can be outdated. So let's say you have a list of 15 names of people at Foobar, Inc. Some of those people probably aren't there anymore, or have changed titles, etc. When you talk to an ex employee, you can run through the list with them and find out what's going on.

You also get a chance to ask things like:

"Who is the _real_ power broker over there?"

or

"Are there any big landmines I should know to avoid walking into"?

or

"What are the main strategic issues management is grappling with there"?

etc.

Of course, not all ex employees will want to talk to you, but for any reasonably sized company, you should be able to find a few. And, you do have to be aware that they, in turn, have their biases and misconceptions, etc., and so you can't take everything they say as Gospel truth. But go through the exercise with a couple of people and you should be able to get pretty clear picture.

Now when you call somebody at Foobar, you can start off sounding very credible:

"I know companies like yours often deal with issue X, and may have tried solutions like Z that didn't work... I'd like to talk to you about another way of solving that problem..."

Where you learned about "X" and "Z" from those "ex employee talks".

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure if I'm alone here but I just lack social skills. It's like everyone but me has this secret book of how to interact with people. I'm not autistic or anything but I had little social life when growing up. I was actually rather popular at the Internet but that didn't translate well to real life. I'm now trying to catch up in my early twenties. I meet interesting people every day but connecting with them non-superficially is the hardest part. I am too shy to talk about anything and I have low self-esteem. I literally start to mumble when telling a story if I don't know the person well. So far rationalizing about it hasn't helped.

It's a wonder I managed to get a few friends.

<comment><USER6> This is something I see pretty often. I'm a business co-founder, so this stuff is pretty much my bread and butter.

An idea I've been kicking around is some kind of "Social Skills Primer" type product, probably done by video for ease of explanation and to capture/explain nuance.

I haven't fully decided on doing this yet, but would that be interesting to you, do you think?

As a side note, I would highly recommend reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm still a bit wary of this kind of advice, because it's mostly pushing against the technological meritocracy. The loudest in the room gets the light, the most outspoken is raised as an example. All this effort is still not spent building the right product. I live in France, where the tradition is that money, marketing and sales people run the company. The only successful startups here now are selling advertisement, optimizing advertisement (or whatever retargeting is), dealing personal data and other user-bothering technology. Nobody is optimizing mousetraps or producing media content anymore. But hey, they worked their connections while you where making smoke in the lab.

<comment><USER8> You forgot another company runner in France, and a very important one: the procurement people.

These guys make it incredibly difficult to build new businesses. In their mind contracting a company with less than a hundred people is heresy.

<comment><USER9> Not heresy; it's risky. If you do it and stuff goes wrong, your boss will ask you wtf you hired this puny company and not a large one. No matter the reputation of the large one (bad or good) or the reputation of the small one (bad or good).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know connections between people can be quite awesome and important. It is even more awesome if they can discuss about something important and give their opinion and listen to your opinion without starting a fight. When there is a problem it is good to have someone to ask help from.

I maybe have one true friend and we mutually keep our friendship active. Then there are those who may drink coffee or have a beer with me now and then, but we never really talk about anything important. Then there are those so called social media friends who really do not care what you do. Then there are these few people who use my kindness quite often for help as they have found I will most likely help them anyway I can.

Seriously I have tried to keep in contact with people who may some day become great people. The problem I have is that I lose motivation to stay in one way contact when the other does not seem to care a shit how my days go even though I try all kinds of things to get them active even though I am not in need of any kind of help at the moment, but in future I might be.

It's not like I want to be liked, but maybe a call to a bar and have fun once would be nice. Why it always has to be me who initiates almost every damn discussion or happening where I could take part in this tiny circle of my so called friends. These days I don't even care to try and just let them be and answer them if they have a problem.

When talking about these connections with famous people you could take advantage of I often do not even press the send button because I've realized my own stupidity after explaining my problem in the email. I'm not looking for help. I'm just stating that lonely people can solve problems and have fun too, though if someone would see me having fun alone they probably would say I'm going nuts.

Good Friday from Finland.

<comment><USER11> That's just human nature. People don't care how you're doing unless it benefits them now, or possibly in the future. I just learn not to rely on human interaction for my life satisfaction.

<comment><USER10> Yeah there is so much entertainment around these days that we really do not need friends anymore to just hang around and waste time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Making contact with people isn't the hard part, I don't think. Motivating them to help you is the hard part.

<comment><USER13> Thanks a ton for the comment on this and reading the article!

But see, I don't think motivating someone to help you is really that hard. As I mentioned in there, there are so many places where there's oodles of people who'd love to help. Want to ask Alexis Ohanian something? Pay attention to when he hosts another AMA on Reddit. Or use Clarity or Public Beta. Or really just email them. I answer a ton of questions I get over email.

There are a couple reasons though sometimes I don't reply to an email "looking for help":

1\. The email is thousands of words long. I don't have time to read that. Very few people do. Keep these intros and notes and questions to 5 sentences or 500 characters, or try your hardest to get close.

2\. Ask something. I get too many emails looking for help, but when you read the email, there's isn't actually a question inside. What do you need help with? Be specific. "Feedback" is way too open. You want Feedback on design, or features or marketing or what? It's best to focus me on something so I can save time figuring out how I can actually help you.

And if you really want to use some extra encouragement to get people to help you, flattery gets you everywhere. Mention what you've been reading of theirs. Quote their stuff on Twitter.

<comment><USER3> Totally in agreement. I've emailed business owners relevant questions to projects I'm working on and 8 times out of 10 they reply back. I keep it short, to the point, and thank them up front for their time.

Also, I see too many people that say something like, "No one wants to help me." Everyone WANTS help; to get help you need to give some. Start networking like crazy, find out what someone else needs and provide that. It takes time and dedication, but you will be reciprocated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure that for many people even such cold email can be intimidating. On rational level they know it's the necessary thing to do, but the fear of rejection drags them toward "I'm not ready yet. I'll mail them a week later when I build/write/learn more".

<comment><USER15> I agree, or you lose hope in the process. You're not going to get a reply the first time or even the 100th time, but if you believe that it works and keep modifying your approach in the email, it can work. I've tried sending cold emails and I got a reply after the 12th time. I try to tailor the email to each person. It's more time consuming and I can't send them as often as I want, but I find this more effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some of my best personal & business relationships started with a cold email and a random coffee meeting.

<comment><USER13> One thing I'll probably cover in the future is one of the things that have made these cold emails and random meetings successful is simply being clear about what I want.

I've made the mistake many times of simply saying "I'd love to chat for 15 minutes". Even "I'd love to get your feedback" isn't enough usually.

Specific questions like "I'd love to hear how you'd design this" or "What would you do next here to get more traffic" or "Would you try this with a collaborator and see if it makes your life easier" generates better hits and more useful conversations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think a lot of the problem when it comes to making new connections is unwarranted shyness. If you know the other party is open to new messages/meeting requests from strangers (which they sometimes are!), it becomes less intimidating to reach out. Online dating sites like OkCupid have dealt with this problem really well by creating a community of people open to receiving messages _of a particular kind_ from strangers. It's totally appropriate to ask a stranger out on OkCupid. It isn't so appropriate on Facebook.

I'd really appreciate people checking out my first web application, called Treatings (treatings.co). It's a community of professionals open to meeting strangers over coffee to discuss their work. No one is guaranteeing meetings with anyone, but everyone is open to meeting requests and the possibility of being treated to coffee/a drink by a stranger interested in their background.

treatings.co/activity

</comment><comment><USER15> We recently secured a small investment from an angel investor without prior connections. Having graduated from an Ivy League 12 years ago, I realized that more than school affiliation, it was our team, product, vision, and perseverance that made a difference. I used to regret not networking more in school, but quickly realized that in the startup world, you have to be a problem solver. No time for regrets or to crib about the present. Thanks for this article. I'm going to distribute this to my team.</comment>


Twitter Exec Is Questioned About "Learn to Code" - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwIYHwbojQo <comment><USER2> The guest who speaks after Vijaya, Tim Pool, got my fight or flight reflex up just by listening to him talk. It's hard to engage with someone when it feels like an outlet for their aggression rather than a discussion.

His words were saying "by having twitter delete #learntocode tweets, you've muted a protest", but his tone was more like "I want to fight you".

<comment><USER3> >got my fight or flight reflex up just by listening to him talk

Same thought but didn't have the words for it.

I haven't listened to his JRE episode yet from a couple of episodes ago, but I don't really want to feel like that the whole couple hours.

<comment><USER4> He's just being tough on them because there are a lot of people who are legitimately frustrated and concerned with the recent shift in policy these giant social networks are adopting to combat the backlash being thrown their way for their platforms influence over the 2016 election that gave Trump the slight edge he needed to win the election.

I can sympathize somewhat with their position being a conservative because I understand that their job is to create the most profitable product and its hard to take a more conservative position on things when frankly our base tends to be of much less volume because were often defending unpopular ideas based on higher order philosophical principals we feel are worth protecting no matter the cost.

For example, I dont like white supremacists or racists, but at the same time i think its important we allow those ideas to persist in a democracy because we see any censorship as a slippery slope that it might seem like a good idea at first to go down but just because it seems to be the quicker and most straight forward path to get down off the mountain (which btw is where we all want to get to in a polite society) that doesnt mean we dont end up tripping halfway down and tumbling to the bottom with broken bones.

In other words if we start down this path with seemingly good intentions whats to say were not going to be trying to take further steps in this supposedly moral direction just because in order to be continuously progressive and push such an agenda that gets you the votes, you need to invent some new issue and solution to progress towards.

In other words what do democrats campaign on to remain in power when they actually achieve a Utopia?

Isnt that kind of a conflict of interest for democrats then if they want power for the sake of just being in power?

Btw in all fairness i should point out that the Republicans are all about creating crisises for them to campaign on being to solve as well. (hence the fact we dont take libertarians very seriously within our caucus)

All im saying is that at the end of the day, we need conservative and liberal ideals to promote a healthy democracy and sometimes the liberals get it right and sometimes the conservatives do.

When it comes to my gut feelings on the issues of free speech we need to be less concerned about the individual's voice and whats being said and be more concerned by the volume we give to select voices to say things so loud they can drown everybody else out.

<comment><USER3> I don't think those ideas (white supremacy or racism) should persist at all. Intolerance should not be tolerated.

The slippery slope is a fallacy, but for some reason, people seem to be okay with using it in their rhetoric.

As for your question, I am not sure. If it truly is a utopia (a place where everything is perfect) what would there be that should be changed? I would think that everyone is cool with the status quo.

It's not a conflict of interest if they (Democrats) still see that there is progress to be made. However, that won't be the case assuming there is a Utopia; maybe they'll campaign based on what color people have to wear. Who knows what the exact campaign issues in a Utopia would be?</comment></comment></comment></comment>