You broke the Internet. We're making ourselves a GNU one [video] - <AUTHOR> https://gnunet.org/internetistschuld <comment><USER2> For the tech savvy, there are plenty of solutions to "fix the internet". From Tor to I2P, I use many of these tools regularly. Many more can be found here. [https://gist.github.com/postmodern/5018337](https://gist.github.com/postmodern/5018337)

We don't need more tools, we need tools that non-geeks can use. For example, ten years ago, I worked at a company with a policy to use PGP with Symantec PGP software installed on PCs. Even the engineers sill failed to use it regularly. On several occasions I had to use logmein because the other company's IT department was incapable of setting up PGP for their own users. Ten years later and the Ask Slashdot is how get someone to send them their public key. [http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/08/10/0028235/ask- slashdot-...](http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/08/10/0028235/ask-slashdot-..).

I only have 2 contacts that I can use PGP to communicate with. Usability is the issue. Unfortunately most GNU Projects have never excelled in this area. It's too bad Mozilla dropped support for Thunderbird. Tight integration with GnuPG + a Mozilla cloud Public key directory could have made mainstream PGP a reality.

<comment><USER3> > _I only have 2 contacts that I can use PGP to communicate with. Usability is > the issue._

This is why Bitmessage is so promising. Everything is encrypted and anonymous by default. The PGP/GPG setup is a huge barrier. With Bitmessage you just need to install it and it just works.

<comment><USER4> Bitmessage is a bad idea, read the white paper. Every message is retained forever by every BM client.

<comment><USER5> > Every message is retained forever by every BM client.

That is not true.

From the white paper [0] under section 6:

> We propose that nodes store all objects for two days and then delete them.

It's also on the FAQ[1]:

> Yes. However, if you go offline then they must come back online within 2 > days of the message being sent. Nodes delete data, and do not accept data, > older than 2 days.

The sender will not delete the message until it's received an acknowledge from the receiver. It instead will recompute the proof of work and resend in an exponential growing interval. This is also in section 6 of [0].

> If a node is offline for more than two days, the sending node will notice > that it never received an acknowledgement and rebroadcasts the message after > an additional two days. It will continue to rebroadcast the message, with > exponential backoff, forever.

[0] [https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf](https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf)

[1] [https://bitmessage.org/wiki/FAQ#Can_I_send_a_message_to_some...](https://bitmessage.org/wiki/FAQ#Can_I_send_a_message_to_someone_that_is_offline)

<comment><USER4> The proposal in section 6 is somewhat redundant given section 5:

> ...all users receive all messages...

It would be trivial to modify the BM client to archive/save all messages it receives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Didn't know this project (gnunet).

I see it provides file sharing and vpn.

VPN will fix some ISP level tracking issues.

Private file sharing will protect some cloud surveillance and limiting laws.

This is great, to minimise surveillance. It's nice to be able to share files properly, but it's not my "typical" internet usage (neither it's on my family members). It's nice to be able to go out through a sane VPN.

Still I miss important things to fix my "internet":

* DNS and search. * Email service. * Browser.

These are my main problems today. I can workaround my ISP when I want, and I can share files in the way I like... but I see the problem in my previous 3 points.

Also I wish so many interesting initiatives could be separated of the "pirate" "trademark".

It's not a problem for me, but I think it's not a proper "image" for general purpose projects, just because of how people brain works in "general" (in special people not literate about what this really is).

Nice talks, and thanks for the link.

<comment><USER7> If you're already willing to sacrifice privacy for convenience, they already have you.

If you're using OSX or that wacky hybrid kernel system from Redmond, WA, You're basically screwed anyway because your endpoints are compromised from day one.

Here's the thing, if you jump at every convenience then blame people working on the vast and complex software required to support privacy, absolutely nobody will come to your defense.

I set my bar very low, if I can obscure the source location of my IRC and email traffic, then I'm all good; All other channels are secondary, and are not worth bursting my basic network node anonymity over if there's no other option.

<comment><USER8> As someone who cares about security and privacy, I'd like to know why I'd want to obscure the location of IRC/email traffic.

On IRC I can see that you could come across adversaries on some sketchy irc networks - but, in my case, as just a random developer idling away on freenode (using a host cloak) should I really care that I'm trusting freenode?

And what about email? Is that because your ip will be visible on the mail headers if sent from localhost?

And if you're using a VPN or Tor, aren't you just displacing the trust to those providers?

Another thing I'd like to know is just how much more of a potential target you become once you use the tor network. I speculate that tor has a lot of blackhats fishing for potential targets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like that the player gives out (right click) the location of the video and even offers an option to download it. That may be more important than the permissive license.

The server, however, seems to be a bit overloaded at the moment. Is there a torrent somewhere? Maybe an HD torrent?

EDIT: Fist English talk starts at 4:10.

<comment><USER10> Right-click download is an implicitly inherent feature of the HTML5 <video> element that is used, not an explicit choice by the creators. I love it, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this is it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lcauMH70cA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lcauMH70cA)

[http://internetistschuld.de/](http://internetistschuld.de/)

edit: Could have used a sock over the microphone.

<comment><USER12> The Youtube video is only the first hour. The real video is two and a half hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Defeating traffic analysis has too many downsides for most users, I think the perfect is the enemy of the good here. Having at least working confidentiality and integrity to the content of communications in messaging would be a step up. The NSA will still be able to see who you're talking to, but the crypto- libertarian utopia is not about to arrive any time soon, especially with FreeNet like systems, but getting most people on a better system that reduces the amount of snooping, is better than building an idealized system which the great unwashed masses won't use.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have a little different take. So, let's assume that you can combine 5+ encryptions / encryption points and hide the contents of you communication on someone else's network. IT IS STILL SOMEONE ELSE'S NETWORK. What happens when the network owner becomes China (game already over), UK (now blocking porn, next political speech, etc. >> game over), USSR, USSA, etc. and decides that your packets look like something we don't transfer. Or what about the old proposal to require a license to use the Internet? -- see [http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100204/1925188060.shtml](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100204/1925188060.shtml) and [http://business.time.com/2010/01/30/drivers-licenses-for- the...](http://business.time.com/2010/01/30/drivers-licenses-for-the- internet/) and a million other links.

Solutions built on top of some existing (OWNED) platform are inherently fragile until there's a private (P2P-like HAM radio to smoke signal) transfer pipe.

<comment><USER15> You should try to make a tiny effort to check the link before commenting.

<comment><USER14> OK - here's another. [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/internet-attack- defense...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/internet-attack-defense- license-and-registration-please/6934)

"Yet the reality is, governments may have to reconsider such an requirement. It may not fly today, but don't be surprised if it becomes reality in the near future. Every device connected to the Internet will have a permament license plate and without it, the network won't allow you to log in."

The point is that people have been calling for this for 10 years and it's going to happen SO why would you expect that the "Internet police" would allow you to move around in any manner (speed, intoxication level, destination, type of transport, etc.) that you see fit?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Although I admire the smart people who build these tools, the issue at hand is not technological. We all know that it takes two to tango and we also know that the other person will not be able to use all these privacy tools. The NSA has infinite resources and will get to you or your data. You can't protect yourself from an evil government. You will loose. Using these privacy tools only makes you a target (child pornografy, terrorist) and will give them an excuse to further target you. With the resources NSA has at hand, how many 0-days will they have at their disposal for any software product? I believe we can never resolve this issue in any other way than through politics.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is this going to be like the Hurd? Because ideology and functionality seem pretty orthogonal to me.

[http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html](http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> I went through the steps of building the GNUnet stack yesterday - a nice idea, but they have a long way to go.

BTW, I watched the video of the conference in Germany yesterday and blogged my summary of what Richard said: [http://markwatson.com/blog/2013-08/fsf-more- relevant-than-ev...](http://markwatson.com/blog/2013-08/fsf-more-relevant- than-ever.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> The other "darknet" options: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29)

The most complete one seems to be [http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/](http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER20> Retroshare is F2F (darknet) network. But Freenet and GNUnet provide generic anonymous networking (with efficient caching!), without you setting up contacts with your peers beforehand. Network where you can access only preknown resources isn't that useful after all. At least for finding new peers. Think about web browser, if you could only open pages which urls you already know. Who needs Google for anything? With retroshare all resources are gone if you delete those, with Freenet & GNUnet you simply can't delete anything. Very different design. Plz read white and design papers.

Also see: [http://secushare.org/](http://secushare.org/)

<comment><USER19> > With retroshare all resources are gone if you delete those, with Freenet & > GNUnet you simply can't delete anything.

Sure, that's true and the advantage of Freenet and GNUnet. The flip side of the caching is of course that this comes at a cost: It takes a lot more resources to have this kind of redundancy.

RetroShare btw _does_ let you download files anonymously from friends-of- friends etc. if the "owner" agrees to it. (You only have to know your immediate friends.)

<comment><USER20> Yes, but redundancy also means that resources are never unavailable due overload etc. As hacker news users know, sites with most interesting new content are often down. With efficient caching, that simply won't happen. Btw. BitTorrent could utilize caching also much more efficiently.

I know RS allows TurtleHopping, which is extremely inefficient method of transferring data, compared to GNUnets solution. With GNUnet you can transfer data directly with the source anonymously, while also at the very same time creating new sources for that data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here is a higher bandwidth link to the same video

[http://www.nimbusvid.com/mega/#!xAEGXQiD!ez8HoC- LS4m2k2YYGZP...](http://www.nimbusvid.com/mega/#!xAEGXQiD!ez8HoC- LS4m2k2YYGZPyIjZahYFX6dGG44Mr3yGU9pk)

</comment><comment><USER22> I wish they had one more, more universally appealing, bullet on the "Everybody has secrets" slide:

* Personal and family information

</comment><comment><USER23> Too bad the secushare slides are completely unreadable.

Or is it part of some obfuscation strategy?

</comment><comment><USER15> So, do you still want to donate to ACLU instead of FSF?

<comment><USER18> I support both. A good investment.</comment></comment>


'Spastic' Transformer: Reasons to research product names before launching - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1330994/Transformer-Spastic-UK-launch-scrapped-fears-cause-offence.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

<comment><AUTHOR> Image of 'Spastic' Transformer

[http://www.seibertron.com/images/toys/uploads/1289368510_PCC...](http://www.seibertron.com/images/toys/uploads/1289368510_PCCOverload.jpg)

It seems they have no plans to launch this in the UK or Europe, but still - not sure why they think it's OK to launch a product this this name in the US - what does it mean to you?

Also: [http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/847753-transformers-toy- called-...](http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/847753-transformers-toy-called- spastic-wont-be-sold-in-uk)

It seems that 'spaz' and 'spastic' are used as /light hearted/ insults in the US.

In the UK this is a derogatory term referring to someone who has cerebral palsy, and is extremely offensive. It is ranked as the second most offensive disability-related term (Source: BBC Ouch!, 2003).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/18/transformer/>

The company replied:

 _Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention and for the opportunity to respond. The TRANSFORMERS brand intended no offense by use of the name "SPASTIC" for one of its products which has not and will not be available via traditional retail channels in Europe, including the UK. Thank you once again for notifying us about your concern. As a marketer of children's products, input from parents, families and fans regarding their experiences with our brands is extremely important to us. Our goal is to have all families who enjoy our brands feel good about their purchases and experiences._</comment>


Show HN: Coinmon – Check Bitcoin Prices in Terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bichenkk/coinmon <comment><USER2>
        $ coinmon() {
        >     curl "https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/?convert=$1" | jq ".[0] .price_$1"
        > }

        $ coinmon eur
        "6988.4723188"

In case you don't want to install 61 packages [1] :)

I don't know when/where nodejs development went wrong, but there's definitely something wrong.

[1] [http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/coinmon](http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/coinmon)

<comment><USER3> You are so right. When I saw the link I thought: "That could be fun, lets take a look how it displays the data". But when I saw that it uses node.js I thought "Oh my god, who had this brilliant idea to write it with node"...

Hey guys, please use rust, golang, haskell or whatever you like, but please do not use nodejs to write CLI tools.

And I am not one of the guys who is against JS in general. In fact, I like building PWAs and other JS heavy apps/websites a lot. But there are so many tools do a better job at building cli programs.

<comment><USER4> I don't get the hate here, Node works great for CLI tools.

Easy and quick install, supports colors and icons in the terminal, has several easy and useful table libraries to choose from, and it runs plenty fast enough for it's use case.

What benefits would rust, golang, haskell, or whatever you like provide over node in this situation?

<comment><USER5> Also a NodeJS fan in general, but prefer to install/develop cli's with golang instead of node just because you get a compiled, static binary that works cross-platform. Faster for users to install, less bloaty and works on all platforms without any dependencies.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I personally usually use Python, Bash, or C, but there is a utility for packaging NodeJS tools into executables. I think it does some tree-shaking as well. Disclaimer: I haven't used it, so I'm not sure of the results. But it is possible.

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/pkg](https://www.npmjs.com/package/pkg)

edit: For the curious -- Just tried on a really simple script that just takes one argument and writes it with some text to STDOUT and it _still_ came to 35MB. So it must package a bunch of Node with it. I won't be leaving my go- to's for it anytime soon unless usability and development speed necessitate it. Going to have to go with the, best to not use NodeJS for general cmd-line utils outside of the NodeJS environment. The one perk is that it will, by default, output executables for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Source:

        (function() {
        'use strict';

          function main(_string) {
            console.log(`${_string} was read from STDIN.`);
          }

          main(process.argv[2]);

        }());

Output file:

        35088858 Nov 20 11:36 index-linux
        35717043 Nov 20 11:36 index-macos
        23137020 Nov 20 11:36 index-win.exe

<comment><USER6> Thats because PKG is including the Node runtime in the binaries, this way users don't have to install Node itself to run them.

I'm using it myself and besides the fat binaries and the fact that you have to write Javascript, it is really good. (Working on replacing this daemon with Go ASAP)

Edit: just read your last line, I'm kinda stating the obvious here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Last week I listened to an interview with a man that has written some books on Bitcoin and other crypto currencies and in it he stated that he lives as much of his life on bitcoin as possible. He asks to be paid in bitcoin, he pays his employees in bitcoin, and generally uses it wherever possible.

I was thinking about this and to somebody like that, it must seem like the USD is crashing. If bitcoin is your currency, then deflation is happening everywhere! Does he look at the housing market and marvel how everything is now around 80% less expensive than it was at the start of the year?

<comment><USER8> Sounds like Andreas Antonopoulos. [https://antonopoulos.com](https://antonopoulos.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> By the way, what is up with Bitcoin? Why did it rise 10x this year?

<comment><USER10> I would really like to read a well-researched answer to this question. I've heard various theories around instability in Puerto Rico, and people using it to move money out of China. I have no idea if there's any evidence to support those theories.

I really want to understand some of the economics behind the value of a Bitcoin. Some people say that it's actually worthless, but that can't be true. It lets people move practically unlimited amounts of money anywhere in the world for a relatively small fee. It also provides immutable data that can be used to verify records.

I actually spent this weekend adding blockchain verification to my document generation service [1]. It was actually pretty amazing to look at a Bitcoin transaction [2], and realize that this data has so much authenticity and permanence. Not only does it guarantee that my document existed at a certain point in time, but that hash will probably be preserved in the blockchain for the rest of human history.

That one bitcoin transaction cost a lot of money (0.000846 BTC, or $6.95 USD), but it verifies a large number of records by using a merkle tree. [3]

I have no idea how these fees relate to the fiat price, but that must be one factor. Also the price of electricity around the world. There's a lot of speculation and "tulip mania" too, but even if you ignore all of that, I think it's a very interesting thing to research.

[1] [https://formapi.io/](https://formapi.io/)

[2] [https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/4dc1ef829128355fdbbf3afb...](https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/4dc1ef829128355fdbbf3afbf0de854778e0e027481e9a5ff53a64d9ab39a78c/)

[3] [https://chainpoint.org/](https://chainpoint.org/)

<comment><USER11> The fee size is relative to the amount of competition to get transactions into the next block. Because the block size has been capped at 1MB, not every transaction in the preceding 10 minutes will fit. So miners sort by the fees attached to the transactions when selecting them. (I think the block size is supposed to be increased to 2MB shortly, if it hasn't already.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks cool. Live updating would make it even better.

I've reported a very minor bug that I'm experiencing: [https://github.com/bichenkk/coinmon/issues/1](https://github.com/bichenkk/coinmon/issues/1)

<comment><USER13> You could use `watch -n 1 coinmon`.

<comment><USER12> That's true (with `--color`). An alternative way would be to connect to one of the various websocket APIs that stream pricing data, might be a bit friendlier than constant polling... but that'd be quite a lot of work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just made a tool for you to check bitcoin prices on terminal for fun!

<comment><USER14> Good stuff! Works nicely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was bored, so I decided to make a Nim equivalent using only the standard library. Turned out to be exactly 55 lines [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e3d7045de67f59c676135fead...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/1e3d7045de67f59c676135fead3aa66a)

</comment><comment><USER16> Awesome stuff :D I'm founder of [https://bitbank.nz](https://bitbank.nz)

I would love to see someone build something based on the live crypto forecast data we have,

I'm happy for you to reverse engineer/use the same api that our frontend uses, we also have a firebase API so people can subscribe to live updates,

Let me know your email if your from HN and ill give you some free time to use the platform :)

We also have a referral program where you can make .003btc each paying user.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's my almost pure Python equivalent [1].

[1] [https://github.com/SeanDS/cryptoquote](https://github.com/SeanDS/cryptoquote)

</comment><comment><USER18> Idea: Show bitcoin prices in terms of my hour's worth!

        $ coinmon -c X EUR/month
        You have to work Y hours for a bitcoin!

I think this aligns just _a little bit more_ with the idealistic view of BTC. Next step would be getting paid in BTC, and then, getting a fixed amount of BTC.

<comment><USER19> Not sure why you're being downvoted (maybe offtopic I guess?) but this is how I view pretty much all transactions I do. If I buy a fancy craft beer in a bar for £5 then that's not £5 to me but "X minutes" depending on where I'm working. I've also been comparing "time to earn X for Y bitcoin" when I purchase on gdax to give me a sense of relative grounding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wrote something similar with Go a while back which is configured via a json file and runs in the terminal [https://github.com/markustenghamn/golang- cryptotracker](https://github.com/markustenghamn/golang-cryptotracker)

</comment><comment><USER21> This is cool. It would be nice if it live updated.

</comment><comment><USER22> Awesome work! I'll no longer have to keep a browser tab with coinmarketcap open.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hi can you explain this in plain English please?

</comment><comment><USER24> > 61 packages

That is truly disgusting. WTF are we doing?

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice work, I like it!!

</comment><comment> onion-soup why?

<comment><USER26> How else would you check Bitcoin prices?

Launch a whole web browser and visit a random site?

<comment><USER27> I have these in my zshrc

btc='echo "Btc(usd): $"$(curl -sL [https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/bitcoin/](https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/bitcoin/) | jq ".[0].price_usd" | cut -d\" -f2 )'

eth='echo "Eth(usd): $"$(curl -sL [https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/ethereum/](https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/ethereum/) | jq ".[0].price_usd" | cut -d\" -f2 )'</comment></comment></comment>


Harlem Shake - For Website - <AUTHOR> http://hsmaker.com <comment><USER2> Very clever and original spin on the craze. I tried NewYorker.com and the butterfly (of the Eustace Tilley logo) was the first to shake... Seemed fitting.

<comment><USER3> Very similar to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5219782> which did the same thing a few days earlier and was on techcrunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Confusing if you try to go to hacker news, I recommend imgur.com :-)

<comment><USER5> I second the imgur recommendation :-)

<comment><USER6> I third the imgur recommendation :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For some reason if you visit facebook.com chrome won't allow you because it claims the site is a phishing site.

<comment><USER7> Tough but fair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I run a YouTube Stats website so my audience is loving this :) Nice job =]

[http://hsmaker.com/harlemshake.asp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsocialbl...](http://hsmaker.com/harlemshake.asp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsocialblade.com%2Fyoutube%2Fuser%2FSocialBlade)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great for a laugh. Nicely done :)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome. Worked really well on several sites. The only thing that'd make it better is if, at the end of the song, it faded to black and put up a YouTube-style "Replay" button in the center, just like the videos.

</comment><comment><USER11> Put a smile on my face :) [http://hsmaker.com/harlemshake.asp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fharpb.co...](http://hsmaker.com/harlemshake.asp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fharpb.com%2F)

</comment><comment><USER12> Works great on Apple.com [http://hsmaker.com/harlemshake.asp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapple.co...](http://hsmaker.com/harlemshake.asp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapple.com)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm a fan

[http://hsmaker.com/harlemshake.asp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vati...](http://hsmaker.com/harlemshake.asp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vatican.va%2Fphome_en.htm)

<comment><USER10> Interesting how it just accentuates the fact that they use images for most of the text and menu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ok, you win.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ha! Amazing!

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there a script available? we would like to integrate this in our website:)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is an perfect example on how _not_ to do url validation. I tried it on <http://hs.fi> (Helsingin sanomat, Finnish news magazine) but the site says it is an invalid URL.

<comment><USER18> To be fair:

        $ curl --head 'http://hs.fi/
        HTTP/1.1 301 Object Moved
        Location: http://www.hs.fi/

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very awesome!

</comment><comment><USER20> Genius.gif

</comment><comment><USER21> Awesome work! :D

</comment><comment><USER22> oh god I laughed - funniest post on HN

</comment><comment><USER23> Awesome work!

</comment><comment><USER24> you sir, just won the interweb!

</comment><comment><USER25> Neat! Makes for a good time after boatload of work! :-)</comment>


Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success - <AUTHOR> https://dariusforoux.com/skill-stacking/ <comment><USER2> I don't find these sorts of articles valuable.

The template is simple: Write generic advice that sounds nice, and is never controversial. Make sure it's super vague so you don't have to take any accountability for it, you can move the goalposts of what you're saying.

If we remove all the filler in this article (more or less the entire article), it amounts to "be okay at multiple things rather than trying to be good at something".

As per usual with incredibly vague life advice from unaccomplished people, this isn't always a good idea to apply. Being excellent at something (or at least very good) has its merits. For example, I don't want someone who can write "Hello, World!" in 30 programming languages. I want someone who understands even just one programming language inside and out, and really puts the effort into improving.

> "Every Skill You Acquire Doubles Your Odds Of Success"

No it doesn't.

Bonus points if you have a modal that pops up to sucker you into a free mailing list in hopes of converting you to an over-priced life advice seminar / program / book.

There is no secret bullet to productivity, and paying $197 for this snake oil salesman's course (how long do you want to bet that "sale" has been going on for?) is not going to help you. Eat well. Sleep. Maintain relationships with people you care about. Work hard, pay attention to what you're doing and think critically. That's all there is to it.

> "Read over 500 books"

Someone bragging about the number of books they read is hilarious.

Congratulations on $1.2m in revenue and a business degree, but that doesn't make you worth listening to.

<comment><USER3> >The template is simple: Write generic advice that sounds nice, and is never controversial. Make sure it's super vague so you don't have to take any accountability for it, you can move the goalposts of what you're saying

In technical terms, what you are suggesting is that the article is making a claim which is unfalsifiable. But actually it is falsifiable. All you have to do is find a person who has diverse skills but is unsuccessful.

<comment><USER4> Finding a single counterexample works in mathematics to disprove a theorem, but not in this situation. It is silly to claim that having diverse skills guarantees success. The article doesn't even claim that; it explicitly mentions increasing the _odds_ of success. To "disprove" this claim, you'd need to design and run a study that looks for a statistical relationship between success and skill diversity, both of which you'd have to quantify somehow.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't guarantee it, it doubles the probability, and it is stackable. So there is a metric to measure (somehow).

Now, the author is probably just bullshittng things out of his fingers, an assumption I make based on the lack of any evidence being provided.

Nonetheless, since stackability and doubling at each turn mean you can trend toward 100% very quickly, then you can look at people you see as very successful, no matter what is your favorite measure of success, and observe for yourself.

Now I like "social impact" as a measure of success, but it's a lot easier to go with "f'ing rich people" because data is being compiled every year by different business magazines. So when you take the list of Billionaires, you can realize that only one thing, sometimes two, where involved.

Now if someone would like to apply a statistical analysis to this, I think it would favor The null hypothesis, which is: there is no relation between the number of skills stacked and the amount of money in ones' bank account

<comment><USER6> >Now, the author is probably just bullshittng things out of his fingers, an assumption I make based on the lack of any evidence being provided.

Also based on the author talking about "doubling probability". What does that even mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure if I really believe this.

I'm someone who likes to pick up new skills for fun & fulfillment. And yet, when it to _career success_ , roughly 80% of my net worth is attributable to two, maybe three skills: being really good at Javascript, and having solid CS fundamentals in data structures and algorithms. Together they got me into Google, where I picked up the third skill (knowing the full Search stack from the crawler to the browser), which made me very valuable to Google and got me a bunch of stock that's done quite well since.

Now, I _also_ picked up a bunch of other skills while I was there: visual design, interaction design, product design, empathy, management & leadership, some machine-learning & data science, distributed systems, how to approach a vaguely-defined problem with no clear answer and make forward progress on it, how to balance lunch & a drink on your laptop and show up late to a meeting without spilling, etc. And I had some skills from before Google: investing (professional, not just personal; I worked for a company that wrote software for hedge funds for 18 months), game design, compiler design, Django, even some PHP from my college days. And I've learned even more since leaving Google: entrepreneurship, corporate structure, identifying markets, Android development, iOS development, watchOS development, blogging, YouTube video production, Photoshop, how cryptocurrencies work, a lot more unstructured data mining & data science, what risk actually means, etc.

But when it comes to cold, hard economic returns, nothing seems to beat identifying an in-demand skill, doubling down on it until you're noticeably better than the vast majority of people a company will interview, and finding a wealthy buyer who will pay you for it. (On a corporate level, this translates to finding a growing and potentially large market, doubling down on it until you're noticeably better than every other company in that market, and finding a wealthy buyer who will pay you for it.) I kinda wish it wasn't so, because I really enjoy the learning-new-things part of life, and I enjoy learning hot new technologies or algorithms more than obscure proprietary frameworks in a megacorp. But people pay you for the portion of your skillset that is relevant to the problem they want solved, not the portion that is personally fulfilling.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing.

I think it all comes down to the role and career path. Engineers that are specialized are way more interesting for large corporations, because they have a lot of engineers and most of them work on very specialized problems. A CTO of a tech startup should be a decent engineer, but with a much broader knowledge-base than someone, let's say, optimizing V8.

I'm currently finishing my master's degree and got a contract for after graduation for one of the best management trainee programs in Germany for a technical R&D management career path (the company has roughly 1 such position across all roles and departments for every 4000 employees) and it pays over 50% of the average starting salary. I see that as a very successful career start.

What made me interesting for the company wasn't just my internship/work experience as a software engineer (equivalent to about 2 years full-time work) that should place me among the top 10-20% of my fellow students, but my broader experience as a leader in several clubs. The best fit for the role wasn't someone specialized in engineering, but someone with a genuine interest in leading that is still capable and at least somewhat knowledgeable of software engineering.

My skills in hacking LaTeX to do my bidding or knowing the insides of Office Open XML format were absolutely irrelevant or only marginally emphasized that I can learn some niche stuff. Broadening your skillset only helps career success, when the learned skills supplement the requirements of the position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I rode my bicycle across the USA from LA to NYC I met a dude named Ryan through WarmShowers. Over pizza and beers at a local joint in Tempe, AZ, Ryan told me about this blog called _Semi-Rad_ - "you don't need to be a rockstar in something, you just need to be semi-rad. Semi-rad people have the most fun, they achieve the most, they experience the spice of life. They're not so caught up in perfection, but they still achieve a degree of greatness."

I approve this message, Darius Foroux, and I encourage others to consider the trade-offs of "perfection" vs. "semi-rad".

<comment><USER10> In several fields, people at the top 1% of skill level earn many times those at top 10% and the mediocre ones may barely get by. This phenomenon is spreading because better technologies enable top performers to serve more people.

(See: the Superstar effect for the most extreme examples. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superstar_Effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superstar_Effect))

How would the average workers or even 'semi-rads' in generally less lucrative fields like arts or cooking save enough for their retirements if they settle for that skill level?

<comment><USER11> How sustainable is that model going to be? It's mathematically impossible for _everyone_ to be in the top 1%.

<comment><USER12> Not if we create 10 billion different specialties.

<comment><USER13> I think what makes it a 1% is the disparity of demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Those interested in the generalist/specialist debate could do worse than to read Isaiah Berlin's classic essay on the subject, The Hedgehog and the Fox: [https://www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/crag/files/2016/06/the_hedgeh...](https://www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/crag/files/2016/06/the_hedgehog_and_the_fox- berlin.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Do you mean to say it's a good read or a useless read? Your choice of words confuse me.

<comment><USER16> "You could do worse than this" = "There are many of lesser quality than this" = this is of high quality

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I disagree with this. In my experience as a generalist, most hirers are like customers in a tool store. They're looking for a tool to do a thing. Trying to interest them in a Swiss Army Knife is a waste of time. If they're shopping for skill x, they'll look for the best specialist. Hirers who are metaphorically stocking up for an expedition in the unknown, or who will admit to themselves that they are already lost in the wilderness, are going to be interested in generalists. That's a much smaller (but more interesting) market.

<comment><USER18> While I mostly agree with you, I am a generalist who has gone deep in a few things (old fashioned symbolic AI, deep learning, and NLP). But, I have lots of experience in many other areas. I have mostly worked as a consultant for the last 25 years, and remotely, and having a lot of breadth has helped a lot. I have different resumes that stress different types of experience and when someone would contact me to possibly do work, I would give them the resume matching what they needed at the time. From my web site anyone hiring me would see the broad range of things I am interested in so I was never trying to misrepresent myself - I just wanted to give the person contacting me the right material to help them get me approved for a project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's rare to see arguments in favor of being a generalist over a specialist. In the end, they both have their pros and cons.

> You simply have more chance of career success if you have more skills.

I think that depends on how one intends to apply those skills. Being a generalist means that you don't depend on any one particular skill to always keep you in demand, and you can do more on your own to do tasks that specialists need to do in groups. However, I think a group of specialists will always outperform a lone generalist. Because of that, I imagine specialists are in general more preferable in a company environment.

EDIT: I'm curious if there are people here that have chosen to practice a wide breadth of related skills, as opposed to lasering in to one very specific skill. Do you feel glad/happy about it, or have you regretted it?

EDIT 2: What is a generalist or a specialist is of course very relative. One's specialist is another's generalist. I also get the sense that, in the tech world, what is a specialist today, is a generalist tomorrow. Maybe that's just natural of an expanding industry.

<comment><USER20> Undergrad in physics. 7 years in the military. Medical school, self-taught computing (mainly Unix, web stuff, and python), surgical internship, more programming, residency, more programming. Now medical director of a clinical lab with 40 staff and major research in progress, published, overseeing clinical and research employees across 10 timezones, working across 13 time zones, have briefed to highest levels of government. Stayed married and my kids seem to be doing ok.

And the sword of Damocles hangs over my neck ever day. Worth it? Probably, but still not actually clear.

<comment><USER21> Jesus Fucking Christ. As someone who's 19 years old and struggling with life (see my post history if you want to know more, but it ain't pretty, heh) you've sure done a lot of things and congratulations for you success!

You seem to have an unlimited thirst for knowledge. I envy that at a personal level.

<comment><USER22> If you're still 19 years old you'll get there.

Especially if you want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One concept I appreciate: you can bridge two common skills together in a way such that you are uniquely qualified to practice this combination of skills and you have zero (or near-zero) competition.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is article is really good. It could have been better if it was in a little detail.

In short people skills, money/investing skills and work skills. You can't go wrong and the author is largely right.

Its always a mistake to assume that merely your programming skills will take you places, well may be if you are Jeff Dean.

If you are anybody else, people skills matter way above anything you can contribute anywhere. Corporations are large places, where your growth and development largely lie with the people you work with. Influencing, persuasion and in general a myriad of people skills are always what's going to make it rain. In most places what work you do is largely irrelevant to your bosses/stakeholders, in fact you could build the best possible software on earth, but their(bosses) salaries or careers aren't going to see much change because of that- There fore they largely don't care. You have to get them to like you, that's how career progress is going to come. On the same lines they can award you a good raise, a bonus or a promotion, nothing much is going to change in company financials. At their unit levels, the things they give you will largely vanish without a trace because they look at reports by a GROUP BY statement. So what does this mean? It means, while paying you great rewards they can hide you, however if you want these rewards you have to be visible to them in a good way.

There fore influencing, persuasion, psychology and range of people skills like Charisma play a huge role in career growth. No mater where you are. This is a whole different skill set which unfortunately most don't even know exists.

The other ones are obvious. It always helps if you have good skills in the work you do. Always read books on the state of the art, do projects which are in trend etc etc.

And personal finance, of course. Because the money you earn has to be useful to you.

</comment><comment><USER25> > When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.

While I agree with a lot of the author's statements, that part is wrong in my opinion. I think it is more along the lines of:

\- every skill has a value

\- some skills complement each other

The value probably rises exponentially with the progress (similar to how much effort you have to invest, to reach a skill level). So having many shallow skills is probably not as valuable as being very good at one thing. Likewise being more skilled than the average (median) person on multiple skills can result in a high value.

In essence: If you want to reach a good value/effort ratio spend your time on a skill set and not just on a single skill.

</comment><comment><USER26> Agree that you need a balanced set of skills. However the advice in the article is pushing it too far.

Being a generalist is great in terms of broadening you career options, at an early stage anyway. But until you truly master something most of the higher tier opportunities remain closed to you.

These opportunities are much rarer and often not advertised. But the competition is also less intense and arbitrary. It is also in human nature to enjoy getting better at something. This path is actually not as hard as people think, and way more fun than keep picking up new mediocre skills.

</comment><comment><USER27> In contrast, i think just become average in many things is counterproductive than the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER28> The amount of people plagiarising Scott Adams to sound smart is staggering

<comment><USER29> Using an attributed quotation is not the same as plagiarization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yes, self-help article alert. But, what is interesting is to point that it's true that soft skills are usually underrated. Of course, being a specialist makes you one of a kind, but I don't think everyone can be that person (meaning, you will become very unhappy just struggling, because normal people has different passions not only one). Actually, this person is the 1%, and trying to be them can be frustrating, so we can be mid-rad. Also, in technology, yes, you want an specialist that solves the problem in 5 seconds, but multiple skills make interconnections and new ideas or relations to other important, not that technical, questions. Meaning, is the 1% because those problems are, maybe a 20% for the company, the other 80% is focused on multiple problems related with reality. For example, Agile, how things are tested, communication, visibility, goals... Anyway, I found the reflection useful. Here, speaking:

\- Advertising graduate, ex copy writer, ex music producer, ex bartender, ex journalist writer, QA analyst, now self-taught programmer, now kind of in testing automation and managing infrastructure and devops.

Future is bright

</comment><comment><USER31> Rather than stacking it should be lining up a variety of skills, because it is horizontal integration rather than vertical.</comment>


Show HN: Replace links with text to improve readability - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/elemenofi/unlink

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes, when I want to study a subject in Wikipedia, I end up hopping in between articles because the links are just too damn tempting.

I made a little chrome extension to replace all anchor links with plain text to increase readability and concentration.

It also has the option to restore the links, although sometimes images and such need a full reload :(

I will keep on improving it in the future, this is just a 0.0.1 which works.

Thanks for your time and I hope at least on of you will find this useful.

adios

[http://github.com/elemenofi/unlink](http://github.com/elemenofi/unlink)</comment>


Show HN: Unspent for iPhone and Apple Watch (My First App) - <AUTHOR> http://unspentapp.com

<comment><AUTHOR> My name is Nick Cochran, and I just developed and launched my first mobile app. It's called Unspent. I would love to get your feedback and answer any questions you may have about the app's design.

Quick Summary: Use Unspent to track your spending money and one-off budgets. Designed to be simple and efficient for when complex budgeting software is too much overhead. No bank connections, no fancy charts, no decimal places. Unspent is for people who want to track spending balances, but don't want to overthink it. You get an intuitive & fun interface, quick access via Apple Watch or Today Widget, and optional Touch ID protection.

Thanks for taking a look!</comment>


Ask HN: What are some important things to memorize? - <AUTHOR>

I've been trying spaced repetition and was curious what are some good things to always have at your fingers tips or know off the top of your head?<p>Ideas:<p>* Conversion metric to imperial * NATO phonetic alphabet * Powers of 2 * International Phonetic Alphabet <comment><USER2> Theres a whole list here

[http://mnemosyne-proj.org/card-sets](http://mnemosyne-proj.org/card-sets)</comment>


Photon Micro GUI - <AUTHOR> https://www.cycfi.com/2019/07/photon-micro-gui/ <comment><USER2> Please, please, _please_ don't use a GUI toolkit like this, that draws its own widgets rather than using platform standard ones, when developing a plugin for a digital audio workstation (e.g. VST or Audio Unit), as this author is apparently doing. Unless someone puts in all the extra effort to implement platform-specific accessibility APIs for said toolkit. Inaccessible DAW plugins are a problem for blind musicians and audio engineers because of GUI toolkits like this one. Maybe screen readers will eventually use some kind of machine learning to provide access to otherwise inaccessible GUIs, but that's probably still a long way off. So for now, we need application developers to do their part.

I don't actually know what the best cross-platform solution is. Is wxWidgets fully functional in a context where it doesn't own the event loop? I suspect not on Windows in particular. Yes, yes, I know it's ugly 90s C++, but really, what's more important, code aesthetics or usability?

<comment><USER3> > Please, please, please don't use a GUI toolkit like this, that draws its own > widgets rather than using platform standard ones, when developing a plugin > for a digital audio workstation (e.g. VST or Audio Unit), as this author is > apparently doing.

Um, I have normal but aging sight, and I still can't get a DAW that actually scales its widget to something other than 200% (or 150% if I'm _reaaaaally_ lucky).

I have no GUI that renders at useful speeds using OpenGL or Vulkan.

The Photon author didn't just create this to be contrary. Modern OS GUIs don't work very well for things like DAWs because DAWs often operate much more like a game wherein the screen is animated and has 60fps of stuff going on.

Rather than complaining, write us all an open source GUI that doesn't suck and people will happily use that and then people will write the accessibility hooks for it.

<comment><USER2> > DAWs often operate much more like a game wherein the screen is animated and > has 60fps of stuff going on.

This is puzzling to me. Do sighted DAW users really rely on such a high- bandwidth, continuous flow of visual information? What kind of information? Mainly volume meters, or other things as well?

FWIW, I'm just starting to dabble with a DAW myself. But I know that blind people have successfully done all stages of music and other audio production using a DAW. From what I understand, they do it by concentrating solely on the audio itself during real-time playback and recording. But the UI does need to be accessible for non-real-time work, e.g. plugin configuration, switching tracks, switching instruments, or making precise edits.

<comment><USER3> > This is puzzling to me. Do sighted DAW users really rely on such a high- > bandwidth, continuous flow of visual information?

Yes. Volume meters, equalizers, beat counters, loop counters, etc. I can go on and on.

There is a reason why people use specific DAWs for specific purposes (Hip-hop guys seem to gravitate to Ableton Live, for example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too many skeuomorphic elements.

He needs to take the controls people know and understand and replace them with cryptic methods that require new learning, and are hidden from view by default. Otherwise no one will take it seriously as a modern UI.

<comment><USER5> The mobile and web people are probably triggered at this ui lol

<comment><USER6> To be fair, knobs as shown in the screenshot are afwul in an usability's point of view (how do i rotate this, how to fine tune the value), but they convey the information in the context of music plugins really well for the person most likely to use them.

<comment><USER7> Yes, how _does_ one adjust the setting of a knob?

Gestures?

<comment><USER8> A lot of DAWs use these. With the ones I have used you click the knob and then drag (up to turn the knob left, down for right). It's really horrible actually.

<comment><USER7> Ah, so a slider, posing as a knob.

<comment><USER9> Yes, except taking up much less space.

<comment><USER10> Which is exactly the purpose of a knob in meatspace too :)

<comment><USER7> Right. Physically, potentiometers are semicircular sliders.

But another advantage of knobs is the ability to turn them, quickly and yet accurately, with thumb and first finger. Some even have push-pull gear reduction, to go between fast and accurate.

So you'd think that a GUI knob would use some analogous two-finger twisting gesture. With thumb and first finger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Was confused for a moment because the Photon UI for QNX is also called a "Micro GUI".

[http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0/index.jsp?topic=%2F...](http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.qnx.doc.neutrino_sys_arch%2Fphoton.html)

<comment><USER12> Same here. Such a shame I need to go into my car to run QNX...

<comment><USER13> Hi I'm Joel, the the author of Photon. It seems I have to change the name. Bummer :-) Anyway, I didn't know. Thanks for pointing it out.

<comment><USER12> All good names are taken

<comment><USER13> Just a stupid mistake, really. I know QNX, but I haven't used it and I didn't know the QNX Photon name. You guys are right. I should've done a 3 minute Google. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the author "Photon has its own HTML5 inspired canvas drawing engine using Cairo underneath".

That means it should render nicely at any resolution, the author says, "resolution independent and allows for HDPI displays".

But using Cairo means it should not have a good performance at high resolutions. I have yet to find a fork of Cairo GPU accelerated that supports all the API. So it may fit the bill if you are coding a simple interface, but it will be too slow to render at 60FPS and at high resolution.

What comes closest for me is Dear ImGui, but I never saw an interface with those nicely rendered buttons in real-time done with Dear ImGui.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious if you have come across (and recommend) any framework which lie in between Photon (Cairo) and Dear ImGui.

I'm trying to follow all thr efforts in native desktop GUI tools and am currently using Dear ImGui for something which will only be used internally.

<comment><USER16> You might try Scenic. It's more embedded oriented but does run on desktops using OpenGL. Also it's new so the component library is pretty small still.

<comment><USER15> Yes, have been excitedly following Scenic since Boyd Multerer's talk about his experiments a couple of years back. Haven't tried it yet as I somehow kept putting off wrapping my head around Elixir and FP

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny how there are a few domains where the same problem is solved over and over again. Probably an indication that a good solution is truly missing.

A long time ago I wrote a tiny audio synth. And yep, I wrote my own minimal GUI which had stuff like sliders, and most importantly knobs which general GUIs typically don't provide.

Now I'm working on a non-audio webapp, and I have a problem where a knob would be the ideal solution. Searched far and wide for a Vue knob, and what I found was not usable. It worked if you "rotated" it circularly, but it didn't work if you pulled it up/down like a slider. You might say "use a slider then if you want to pull it up/down". True, but a slider takes a lot of UI space which sometimes is very precious. More importantly, the slider resolution is limited to it's height, while a knob could for example use the whole screen height for a full turn.

<comment><USER18> > minimal GUI which had stuff like sliders, and most importantly knobs which > general GUIs typically don't provide.

They don't provide knobs because they're a bad idea for input. Holding mousedown while drawing an invisible arc with the cursor is an awkward way to change a value. Sliders are generally better but still not great on interfaces with cursors (they're better on touchscreens). Skeuomorphism can be a useful visual design cue but it needs to be secondary to the input capabilities of the device.

Up and down arrow buttons(or plus/minus, or whatever makes sense for the value) are very compact and operable with a variety of input methods. Buttons need a way display the value but there are many options including putting them in the center of a ring of numbers like a knob would use.

<comment><USER19> In a good knob it's not an arc but just clicking and dragging straight up or down that makes it move. A lot of VST audio plugins work like this and they get a lot of controls into a small area like this.

<comment><USER18> But then the gesture doesn't correspond to the interface at all. You could get the compactness plus a visual that corresponds by having something like a vertical slider that appears when you mousedown on the spot.

<comment><USER20> > But then the gesture doesn't correspond to the interface at all.

I remember learning soft synths when I was 11 - 12 years old and back then it maybe took me a few minutes to get it. Come on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My current fantasy is that Apple would open-source SwiftUI and the industry converges around that for native UIs, adding support for custom third-party skins/themes later.

If they can already do it for such distinct devices as Mac, iPhone, iPad, TV and Watch, there's no reason it can' be adapted for Windows, Linux and Android as well.

This is something that should have happened 5 years ago, before Electron etc. had a chance to fill in a obviously much-needed need.

Really, why do we need anything more than "Button" to describe a button, or "List" to describe a list, on any GUI? HTML solved this a trillion years ago, it's a wonder it took so long to be wholeheartedly adopted for native UIs. I know Microsoft tried with WPF/XAML but it didn't seem to catch on.

<comment><USER22> It certainly did catch on Windows, served as influence to JavaFX and QML design, and the WPF grid layout landed on the Web as the initial CSS Grid proposal.

<comment><USER21> Are most Windows apps currently designed with WPF or something else?

I have always looked to things like the Calculator and Notepad as a signal of confidence; I know there's little _reason_ to rewrite them, but the proof of the pudding would be if Microsoft updated something as "simple" as those applets to their championed UI framework.

I know Visual Studio (and their abandoned Expression Studio) is/was built with WPF, but what's the score in the "wild"?

<comment><USER22> Most greenfield enterprise apps are WPF/UWP, some still insist on using Forms though.

No one uses MFC/ATL for greenfield applications on Windows.

When C++ comes into play, it is plugged via DLLs or COM into .NET applications (or even via C++/CX, C++/WinRT or C++/CLI).

As for pure Win32 C style, for greenfield apps, only if are feeling masochist.

Not counting 3rd party alternatives here like Qt, Delphi or C++ Builder.

<comment><USER21> What's the distinction between WPF/UWP/WinRT/.NET?

What's the Windows' analogue of Swift+SwiftUI? i.e. telling someone new to the platform about what to focus on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks promising. Some things I'd like to see explained:

\- How does rendering work? Is it using retained mode or not?

\- Does the system prevent unnecessary work, such as repainting of certain elements (even when scrolling, since scrolling can be implemented using a less expensive bitblt)?

\- How easy (natural) is it to change the UI hierarchy once it is running?

\- Is memory management natural? Is there a form of garbage collection or reference counting for UI elements? How easy is it to accidentally refer to deleted UI elements?

\- Does it make use of a GPU if available?

<comment><USER13> I'll do that in a follow up post. To be honest, I wasn't ready to release this yet, not in this form, so the info is very preliminary, as noted in the introduction: "Let me tell you a bit about Photon… From my previous post about Ascend, some folks noticed its existence and actually found the github repository. The repository is rather underwhelming, I thought to myself, devoid of any documentation of any sort, other than a very terse description: "Photon Micro GUI library". I figured perhaps it's good to post preliminary information about it, maybe starting with some history and basic architecture and design principles and code snippets. Just enough to give it a bit of justice that it deserves."

And then one of my Boost ([https://www.boost.org/](https://www.boost.org/)) peers twitted about it, and ended up being posted here.

It seems I have a lot of work to do...

<comment><USER24> Hey thank you for your work. Giving the world a permissive Plugin-capable GUI library is a really special thing, so from us plugin developers I hope you know we appreciate your efforts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice screenshots; but doesn't seem "FFI friendly", unfortunately.

<comment><USER26> what does that mean? a google search proved fruitless

<comment><USER27> FFI = foreign function interface[0], a way to call functions written in one language (generally C) from another. By "FFI friendly" I think the parent meant that Photon Micro GUI isn't something you can easily use from languages other than C++.

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

<comment><USER28> Bummer. Higher level low footprint languages such as Nim and Crystal would benefit a lot from bindings for this GUI. Probably Lua too, but that's a different context and Lua already has Tekui and others.

<comment><USER29> You can still write Crystal wrappers for it, just not using FFI. This looks like it might be polished enough: [https://github.com/Papierkorb/bindgen](https://github.com/Papierkorb/bindgen)

The bigger issue is that Crystal really needs first-class Windows support before people will use it for GUIs...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> IDK about y'all but the main page ([https://www.cycfi.com/](https://www.cycfi.com/)) this post is on has a bunch of interesting audio hardware/software posts. Pretty neat company!

</comment><comment><USER15> NanoGUI[1] is another GUI framework which uses NanoVG underneath. Interested to know if the author is familiar with that and what's their take on it.

[1]: [https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui](https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui)

<comment><USER30> This reminds me of the look of Blender's GUI, which is also OpenGL based.

<comment><USER13> Hi I'm Joel, the the author of Photon. Yes, I know NanoGUI. I actually started with NanoVG. I had problems embedding in a plugin, IIRC. GLFW is not embeddable, IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> No mention of accessibility makes it not enough for more generic applications. That's my main pain point. I would love to have a modern alternative to wxWidgets - something in higher level language than C++. Something that would use GTK+ on GNOME, Qt on KDE, Cocoa on macOS, Cocoa Touch on iOS, Android APIs on Android. Android is the trickiest probably, because I would like it to run without NDK, so compiled down to Android JVM or DEX bytecode. Then it could fit every environment just right. Could means, that it's a first step, because those environments have different HIGs etc.

What's interesting is that Lasarus is closest to it, but I would prefer higher level language. Is there a Tcl interpreter written in Java? Then Tcl/Tk could be also an option.

Sorry for a bit off-topic rambling, but I would love to see something like it.

<comment><USER32> Out of curiosity, why isn't Free Pascal high level enough?

Also FWIW my LIL scripting language, is sort of Tcl-like and has a Free Pascal implementation (and also a C one) with a (optional) Lazarus drag-drop component: [http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/](http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/)

I also have a Lazarus component for FPLIL for exposing a Tk-ish (well, not exactly, but on a similar spirit) API: [https://i.imgur.com/G8hto0N.gif](https://i.imgur.com/G8hto0N.gif)

Though that last one isn't available anywhere... perhaps i should upload it at the LIL site above. It is just that it hadn't had much testing (i mainly wrote it for my 3D world editor so that scripts can expose simple UIs on the sidebar or in dialog boxes but haven't used it much elsewhere).

EDIT: i decided to take a few minutes and upload the LILGUI stuff to the site above.

<comment><USER33> At first glance, LIL does look very similar to Tcl. Do you consider it a stripped-down Tcl or are there other language features you added?

<comment><USER32> Probably just a stripped down Tcl. Most of the code was written years ago in a week or two, i've only added minor stuff (like a few new functions), improved performance a bit and fixed bugs since then. And the Free Pascal implementation, of course, but that was also done years ago. I've used it in a bunch of my own projects and i've heard a couple of others using it too.

TBH i do not have much experience with Tcl itself outside of writing a few Tk utilities to automate a few bits on my job some years ago. I followed its approach mainly because it sounded like a good combination for being very simple to implement and very flexible to work with, making it ideal for a hosted scripting language (though it doesn't fit all tasks - far from it, especially in places you want even a hint of performance).

So i can't really judge how exactly it differs from Tcl language-wise. It is not compatible as it provides much fewer functions and those work in a different manner. For example there isn't uplevel, but there is upeval which works in a similar manner (though the depth is always one but they can be nested) and there is also downeval (used through upeval to evaluate code back at the environment from where upeval was called), topeval (like upeval but at the toplevel environment), enveval (eval in a function-like environment with optional variable passing in and out) and jaileval (eval in a new, optionally clean, LIL context). Also there isn't much in terms of state notification outside of watch (which i think it works like Tcl's trace but only for variable writes).

I _think_ the syntax is compatible with Tcl (i haven't done any excessive testing to be sure though, LIL was done mainly by "eyeballing" Tcl) so it could be possible to write shims in LIL to be able to write code that works in both, but TBH i wouldn't rely on that.

So i call it just "Tcl-like" in the same sense that JavaScript is a C-like language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Photon was the best I've ever seen. Not the most brilliant desktop environment UI (clearly modern Win7/Unity/Mac-like panels + Mac/Ubuntu-like keyboard features are better, let alone tiling WMs but these are only good with big displays) but the most cozy controls look&feel styling and a great C++Builder- like visual RAD IDE.

</comment><comment><USER35> Awesome, that looks like an attempt to replace QML by native C++. Would be great if there was a SwiftUI inspired C++ UI framework (well, of course C++ might not lend itself so well for the job, but I'm just very curious what it would look like if someone makes a real attempt).

</comment><comment><USER36> Name collision--QNX's gui was/is also named "Photon MicroGUI" and that is what I thought this post was going to be about: [http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0/index.jsp?topic=%2F...](http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.qnx.doc.neutrino_sys_arch%2Fphoton.html)

<comment><USER37> Can confirm. Came in expecting the other Photon MicroGUI ("now there's a name I've not heard in a long time"), was surprised/disappointed. Man QNX+Photon made for a nice GUI operating environment. Rivaled only by BeOS on my "GUI environments/systems I wish had made a bigger splash" scale.

<comment><USER38> Totally agree with you. While I've been away from QNX for a long time, I did enjoy this API and system design. When I saw it go EOL, I made an appeal for them to open source it. Never heard a peep.

<comment><USER39> QNX is EOL? Really? The last release was only in 2017. I hadn't heard this was happening and I can't seem to find any reference to it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deprecation Notice: MIT and BSD licenses - <AUTHOR> https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice.html <comment><USER2> I feel that Kyle E. Mitchell places an immense focus on the U.S. and neglects the situation in other countries to a certain degree. His MIT license explanation was fairly U.S.-centric, citing primarily U.S. sources (e.g. referring to the UCC, books published by U.S. publishers) and kept going on about the debate about contracts and licenses, which probably does not ravage quite that hard in Europe -- while the patent aspect can effectively be ignored over there because software patents don't exist.

I get it, Silicon Valley is important. But there's other places, too. I don't feel like they have been given enough attention in this new license.

Meanwhile, the Blue Oak license leaves unadressed the problem of European moral rights in copyright[1]. Similarly, the issue of someone simply _not_ reading the terms and just taking the code, similar to EULAs, is left unexplained. The Blue Oak license assumes acceptance and agreement, which may not actually hold up in court and lead to a different result.

[1] cf. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors%27_rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors%27_rights) for an introduction

<comment><USER3> Does he have professional expertise in law outside of the US?

I think lawyers generally don't comment in their professional capacity on things they aren't experts on. Engineers could learn to do the same!

<comment><USER4> He may not but claims they were more than one lawyer involved in drafting it.

Perhaps they should have involved someone from our side of the pond into the discussions around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like an ad for this new Blue Oak licence. I don't have any problems with ads but I think the article should be a little more objective about the comparison.

Also that's a pretty bold title.

<comment><USER6> I would also have dismissed the article given how much it seems to advertise Blue Oak, but Mitchell is a good "argument from authority" on licenses.

More info on Blue Oak: [https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/07/Blue-Oak- Council.h...](https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/07/Blue-Oak-Council.html)

<comment><USER7> Don't take a word I say "on authority".

Read the license. Read what others say about it. Read about the law. Apply your mind.

<comment><USER8> It isn't listed as an Open Source licence which rules it out for most purposes. [https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical](https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical)

<comment><USER9> To be fair, it appears to have hit 1.0 just hours ago, so this may just mean that OSI doesn't know about it yet.

<comment><USER10> OSI generally requires that the license steward/author submits the license for review if they want it to be approved.

Upon being asked about this by OSI President Simon Phipps, Kyle Mitchell responded that Blue Oak has no plans to seek approval ([https://twitter.com/kemitchell/status/1104579340732264448](https://twitter.com/kemitchell/status/1104579340732264448)). I would have found anything else surprising, given that last month Mitchell had this to say about the OSI (in the context of SSPL review):

> I've lost confidence in this body's ability to make rigorous decisions, or > even facilitate focused debate, […]. So I've otherwise stopped responding, > and focused my efforts where collective time and talent have hope of > yielding practical results.

Source: [http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license- review_lists.o...](http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license- review_lists.opensource.org/2019-February/003978.html) Context: [https://opensource.org/LicenseReview022019](https://opensource.org/LicenseReview022019)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At first glance it Blue Oak seems like a decent license, and the points he makes about MIT and BSD seem valid.

My major issue with adopting a new license however is how well known it probably isn't, so there is not yet a clear legal consensus on it.

In all software companies I've worked in there is a clear list of licenses that have been pre-approved and I can just log the inclusion of any open source using those licenses and everything is fine.

However, if I want to use anything not already on the list it requires a manual approval process from the legal department, which is usually time consuming, and often just results in a 'no' because they are too risk averse to asses the licenses properly themselves, but are happy relying on the consensus that licenses like MIT and BSD are OK for commercial use.

Edit to add: Also, while a lot of his crtisisms of MIT seem valid points about uncertainty I think there is a lot to be said for the long length of time it has stood and the general consensus on it's intentions. If I see an MIT license, I can basically know I can do whatever I want with it, provided I give attribution, and there is no warrenty. I'm not going to worry about being sued over someone's interpretation of "deal in the software" because AFAIK, that has never happened in the 40+ years the license has been in use. I think I'd actually feel more at risk using Blue Oak just because of the lack of commentary and consensus on it's terms. The only really substantial point he makes is about variants under the same name, but the lesson here is to just do a diff on licenses to check it's in the standard form. And anyway, doesn't the same problem apply to Blue Oak and in fact all licenses, if you don't do a diff on the license text someone could easily produce and use a variant without you noticing.

<comment><USER7> There is a chicken-and-egg problem with any new license, especially when the new terms aren't written for a specific, important release. But there's no improving the situation for future projects without new terms.

For what it's worth, Blue Oak Council didn't set out to write a model license. That fell out of our effort to compile a list of permissive licenses:

[https://blueoakcouncil.org/list](https://blueoakcouncil.org/list)

[https://blueoakcouncil.org/2019/03/06/model.html](https://blueoakcouncil.org/2019/03/06/model.html)

That list was compiled in accordance with our mission, as 20% solution to cover 80% of needs for organizations, especially nonprofits, that can't find or afford specialist licensing counsel. Our list is also published as JSON data, for ready inclusion in automated compliance tooling:

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/@blueoak/list](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@blueoak/list)

Everyone involved in Blue Oak so far also has programming experience, and many of us have contributed to standards and software for compliance. For example, I contributed documentation clarifications and validation code for license metadata in RubyGems and npm, and maintain a command-line utility for automated license audit of npm-based projects. Blue Oak's license list leverages SPDX license identifiers, same as many package metadata specifications.

> I think there is a lot to be said for the long length of time it has stood > and the general consensus on it's intentions.

I wish that were enough. Unfortunately, it's not.

There is a serious debate ongoing _right now_ around the patent coverage of the old academic forms, and what that says about what "open source" means. Compare:

[http://stlr.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/Kappos- Ha...](http://stlr.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/Kappos-Harrington- Truth-About-OSS-FRAND.pdf)

[http://stlr.org/wp- content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/Lindberg....](http://stlr.org/wp- content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/Lindberg.pdf)

> I think I'd actually feel more at risk using Blue Oak just because of the > lack of commentary and consensus on it's terms.

That's natural and understandable. There will be early adopters and wait-and- see kinds of folks.

> And anyway, doesn't the same problem apply to Blue Oak and in fact all > licenses, if you don't do a diff on the license text someone could easily > produce and use a variant without you noticing.

That's true, but there are mitigations. We've opted into at least two: submission to SPDX for a license ID, so folks can specify in standards- compliant metadata, as well as a permalink for the license text itself, like Apache 2.0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has the author ever heard of Blue Oak? The text was unclear on this point.

EDIT: Sorry, sarcasm got the better of me. However I do think Kyle Mitchell should have put this disclaimer at the start of his post instead of the end:

> I had a hand in drafting the Blue Oak license, and I'm executive director of > Blue Oak Council, the license steward.

<comment><USER7> No license is perfect, but I do not apologize for promoting use of this one! Humility's no virtue here.

However, I made a conscious point to note my role before the call to action. I'm under no illusion that my word will be enough for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The headline is poor (and misleading), so I understand negative reactions to this.

But I enjoyed the opinionated nature of the post by someone who understands licensing, the clear descriptions of the problems with existing solutions, and that the author has done a lot of work to create something that he perceives addresses those problems.

<comment><USER7> > the author has done a lot of work to create something that he perceives > addresses those problems

I was but one lawyer putting hard work into this project. I'm proud of my role, but can't stress enough that I was just one contributor.

<comment><USER13> > _I was but one lawyer putting hard work into this project. I 'm proud of my > role, but can't stress enough that I was just one contributor._

Thank you! Your article made that clear, so apologies for my unclear wording.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The fact that MIT and BSD are decades-old licenses that don't address things like patents or that, generally, are not tightly-written legal documents isn't especially news.

I find it a little curious that Apache is pretty much mentioned just in passing (to point out that it's written in legalese) given that's mostly the preferred license for significant (as in corporate/foundation-backed) new projects wanting a permissive license. It feels a bit like critiquing a strawman.

<comment><USER7> Both Blue Oak and Apache are relatively modern permissive licenses, but they differ intentionally in design. In the short to medium term, I foresee that many projects will continue to choose Apache where contributions from large software patent holders are essential, because of Apache's complex rules on patent scope. At the same time, I think large software patent holders will prefer to _receive_ code under the uncomplicated Blue Oak patent grant, even as they insist on Apache's mazelike compromise for outbound contributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Legal department flagged everything under MIT, BSD, Apache are OK to use. Not a word about Blue Oak in our guidelines

(this is pretty much state of affairs in every company I worked for last 15 years)

</comment><comment><USER16> Buried at the very tail end of the article, is that the author cowrote Blue Oak:

 _> I had a hand in drafting the Blue Oak license, and I'm executive director of Blue Oak Council, the license steward._

In case, like me, you're wondering whence the mention of Blue Oak every single damn paragraph: this is an ad for Blue Oak.

Not that promoting Blue Oak is a problem. I am sure Bloa Uek is a great license! Blue Ook deserves fair attention. Blua I do feel Oak maybe, Blue would have been foak to mention blue at the oak, bluestead oak bottom?

</comment><comment><USER17> IANAL but doesn't unclear but known quantity count for much more than clear concise, but untested, in legal circles?

</comment><comment><USER18>
      Reliability: No contributor can revoke this license.

What does this mean in practice? That once something is released with this license it cannot be revoked?

Would this allow for a scenario where v1 was released under Blue Oak and v2 was released under a different, more restrictive license?

</comment><comment><USER19> Reporting as spam for Blue Oak</comment>


Amazon's New Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/?redesign

<comment><USER2> Beyond the new header, the giant grid of products below still looks pretty ugly. It's probably based on sales, and it makes sense to not lose any money for looks but it's a little depressing to think that an uglier design gets more sales.

</comment><comment><USER3> Correction: Amazon's new header.

</comment><comment><USER4> I had it for a long time (about 2 months probably) by default already.

<comment><USER5> Ya, me too, maybe longer. If I sign in on someone else's computer, it sometimes has shown the old design recently.

It has been a gradual rollout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It still looks like somebody threw up design blocks and poked the pile of vomit with a stick trying to make it look nice.

It has a shit ton of random blocks that 99.99% of the visitors don't care about and will not bother to read.

The titles of blocks are different colors and sizes (right column vs main area).

There are 3 levels of navigation at the top, plus one multi-level menu on the left-hand side (which is insane too - try to figure out the order of the items).

EDIT:

I can tell you exactly how it happened. Amazon slowly matured, they experimented a bit with their landing page. Every time they want to revolutionize, the following happens.

Some clueless manager looks at the current page and gets the list of all the blocks that he/she thinks are important. If they think like they are super- smart, they will look at the CTR rates for individual links, and throw away the least important ones. Then his bosses look at the report, and shit all over it (referring to the "business needs" or some other bullshit like that), and add more stuff. So the clueless manager adds more stuff to the page and gives it to a graphic designer (and if they are smart enough, a UI-designer will be involved). So two weeks later the designer comes up with some nice- looking version of the pile of crap he was given. There are 10-15 meetings with the executives of all levels discussing it for months, including the colors of the links, and shitting all over designer's artistic decisions. All of that costing them a ton of money, by the way. So in the end they all get sick and tired of it, and end up with the piece of garbage that they hate the least.

Repeat in 2-5 years.

I've seen this at large corporations at least a couple of times.

<comment><USER2> This is the home page of Amazon. It's data driven. Every pixel is probably calibrated for sales.</comment></comment>


Swiss to vote on proposals to treat bitcoin as foreign currency - <AUTHOR> http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=25521 <comment><USER2> The title is super misleading and needs to be changed.

It implies that this is a referendum, which is supposed to be voted on by the public. However:

      Politicians in Switzerland are set to vote on proposals submitted by 45 members of the Swiss Parliament for bitcoins to be legally recognised as a legitimate foreign currency, like the euro or dollar.

It is a _proposal_ by a group of 45 MPs towards the two houses of parliament.

my personal take is that chances are slim that this goes anywhere. Let alone towards a popular referendum.

<comment><USER3> You're right that the title overstates the situation, but I wouldn't rule our a referendum.

The Swiss have a lot and they're easy(ish) to trigger - it's an intrinsic part of their voting system. e.g. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2013](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2013)

<comment><USER4> You can absolutely rule out a referendum:

In the Swiss political system, a referendum is a mean against a new law. However, a new law on or against e-currencies is not even on the horizon in Switzerland.

In a nutshell: No new law, no possibility for a referendum.

<comment><USER3> Not true, the mechanism allows for constitutional change. This includes:

\- Same-sex marriage \- A ban on building new minarets \- Phasing out Nuclear Power (defeated) \- Limitations on Executive pay and payouts \- Abolishing compulsory military service

Frankly. I have limited insight into what the average Swiss person thinks of crypto-currencies.

However, I did find the average citizen has (relatively) strong views on finance, cash and the integrity of their financial system.

<comment><USER2> He's right.

A referendum is _always_ called against a law enacted by parliament.

What you are referring to is called an initiative. Those are popular requests to change the constitution to (for example) allow same sex marriage.

even though the outcome may be the same (a popular vote) the mechanisms are quite different. (In German: Referendum vs Verfassungsinitiative).

A referendum on federal level requires 50'000 valid signatures, an initiative double as much.

<comment><USER3> I was just using the term you used in your first post - which seemed representative enough for me.

If your point was to argue that mechanism can't be used (but another can) then that seems unusually specific/technical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it is actually a bad idea for bitcoin to be treated like a currency. People should not push for it to be treated like a currency because then that only leads to regulation. It should be treated like a financial vehicle or commodity because that is what it is. Just like people openly trade Treasury bills or other bonds on the open market, people now openly trade bitcoins. I can take T-bill certificates anywhere in the world and they will most likely be able to find someone to trade with for real currency just like I could take bitcoins and trade them for other currency. The difference is that T-bills can be freely traded without being controlled banking regulations. There are already problems brewing in china from the government rulings about banks rejecting bitcoins as a currency

<comment><USER6> Not only that, why should bitcoin be enshrined as the only special crypto- currency worthy of recognition?

Not until we know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Until then, bitcoin is just another internet clusterfuck.

Don't tell me it's not relevant who he/she is. It _is_ relevant. It's a clear demonstration of our own incompetence. Without that information in hand, we're nothing more than rats following a pied piper.

<comment><USER7> > why should bitcoin be enshrined as the only special crypto-currency worthy > of recognition?

I agree, but the reason you state has nothing to do with it. Who the fuck cares who Satoshi is? Why does it matter, given that the protocol operates independently from its original author and research can be done on it without his/her permission? Finally, who is this _we_ you keep talking about?

<comment><USER8> The point here is that Satoshi is believed to have access to wallets with a great number of early-mined bitcoins. The wallets were unused since a few years and can be used to suddenly increase the amount of bitcoin in circulation, which'd devalue it significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a good time to point out that the Swiss government really likes to vote on things, and they vote on all kinds of crazy things. Simply coming to a vote in the swiss parliament doesn't mean a whole lot. If it passes, then it becomes something interesting.

<comment><USER2> You got that quite backwards.

The Swiss government does usually not put things to a vote. Like any other government the parliament legislates and the executive proposes laws and executes.

If parliament enacts a law that parts of the population doesn't like they can call for a referendum. If they gather 50k signatures within a specific timeframe then there will be a popular vote about th law.

The other way issues can come to a vote is by an initiative. This is usually how the "crazy" issues come to a vote.

Note, however, that most issues are not crazy at all. The crazy ones are the ones that you hear about in the international press.

An initiative on federal level requires 100k valid signatures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=370709.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=370709.0)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why are countries in such a hurry to decide one way or the other, when Bitcoin's market cap is still very small in many of these countries? Can't they wait a year or two longer, and see where it goes and pass more appropriate laws after they've had a while to think about it? I imagine most people in Parliaments didn't even hear about Bitcoin until last month. So why rush to a decision _now_ then?</comment>


New Procedure Allows Kidney Transplants from Any Donor - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/health/kidney-transplant-desensitization-immune-system.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-4&action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article <comment><USER2> I was an anonymous living donor who kicked off a donation chain. I don't think it's a big deal. Recovery sucked for a couple weeks, but when you consider the benefit alongside the developments occurring in medicine all the time, it's almost nothing.

This is fantastic news. People should not need to die while being stuck on a waiting list. Super happy to see this news today.

<comment><USER3> It's so amazing that it works! (Donor here as well.) I would love to see the support system expanded. Even with the recipient's insurance footing the bill for the surgery, there's still a significant burden on donors to be able to provide the time off to do the transplant in many cases.

I'm starting with my own state to help find ways to lower that threshold for potential donors here: [https://www.change.org/p/minnesota-state-house-give- minnesot...](https://www.change.org/p/minnesota-state-house-give-minnesota- living-organ-donors-a-guaranteed-week-of-paid-time-off)

<comment><USER4> How about just paying people for their organs? Let the market work. Is that really such a bad idea?

<comment><USER5> There's a reason you can't sell your kidneys...

Poor people are the most likely to be exploited and the most likely to use their donated organs. It's been shown that empirically economically incentivising organ donation crowds out altruistic organ donation, a non negligible source of supply and that those who donate for money do not experience a long term economic benefit but do experience long term health consequences.

<comment><USER4> So what? That's up to them. People who buy organs are paying a fair price. Why do you want to infantalize poor people by denying them the opportunity to participate in the market?

<comment><USER5> By ignoring the reality of the situation you create a demand for people to cause severe risks to their health for short term problems, preying on the least educated group of people who have a severe information asymmetry... You also crowd out an altruistic source as it no longer becomes a societal issue but rather an economic one.

You also create an unnecessary class problem as middle and upper class people have access to organs, but not poor people who are the actual source of supply...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The procedure is called 'Desensitization' where they filter out the existing antibodies in the patient's blood, and then infused external antibodies for protection while the body regenerates new ones. Then the strange part is the new antibodies are less likely to attack the donated organs which results in more available donors for patients.

The procedure is $30k, but in the long run is cheaper than $70k for dialysis every year. The life expectancy appears to be longer than using cadaver organs.

<comment><USER6> That's really neat, does the procedure work with other organs too? I think something similar happens with bone marrow transplants when they kill all of the original marrow too doesn't it (not by design but by the nature of what you're doing).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes there is a similar procedure for marrow transplants. It is called 'Haploidentical Transplant' where you only need a half match for marrow transplants which opens the door to parents and children as donors.

The procedure requires a 'rebooting' of the immune system which is analogous to the "remove then let it regenerate" approach mentioned in the kidney procedure. I guess the insight comes from the immune system changing to accomodate new organs after it reboots. Its a really interesting area of research.

[http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/kimmel_cancer_center/centers/...](http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/kimmel_cancer_center/centers/bone_marrow_transplant/haploidentical_transplantation.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Dr. Segev mentioned in the article is an awesome guy. His wife Dr. Sommer Gentry is an operations research professor, and they worked together on this stuff.

Here's a fun and educational video they did on the math behind transplant matching. If you are interested in integer programming or real world combinatorics, check it out:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttMQECKQ3DQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttMQECKQ3DQ)

<comment><USER8> Very nice video. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if the person looses all acquired immunity - for example do they need to be revaccinated for childhood illnesses?

Just a shot in the dark: Would this help autoimmune illnesses?

<comment><USER10> No, immune memory is provided by memory T cells and B cells. Losing all your antibodies but nothing else would only leave you temporarily immune- compromised until your body has a chance to replenish its supply.

<comment><USER9> That what I _would_ have thought. Except something is happening here that causes things to be different.

Simply filtering out antibodies _should_ not have any effect on organ rejection, since the antibodies are just regenerated, yet for some reason it does.

<comment><USER10> The immune system has mechanisms to rein in self-reactive immune cells (look up anergy). My guess, in broad strokes, is that the immune response in the absence of antibodies results in a sufficiently weak immune response that the cells that _do_ react are flagged as "false positives" and become anergized. Then when the antibodies return later, tolerance has already been induced among the T-cell population, so the B-cells don't get activated, and the immune response remains low persistently.

<comment><USER9> So that would mean 'yes' it might help with auto-immune disorders. (But no to childhood vaccines.)

<comment><USER10> Possibly, but it would depend a lot on the specifics.

<comment><USER9> Maybe I'll get in touch with the researches and ask if they might be willing to study it.

Edit: I sent them an email asking.

<comment><USER10> The problem with the autoimmune case, though, is that the immune system has already raised and activated specific T-cells and B-cells against itself. In contrast, your immune system can't possibly have specific defenses against a new graft, only general defenses. It's possible that this technique only prevents the formation of immune memory on initial exposure to a foreign antigen but cannot erase that memory once it is formed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting. Dr Dorry Segev is a personal acquaintance! He also was involved in getting congressional approval for HIV+ -> HIV+ transplants (which were technically illegal till recently).

</comment><comment><USER12> I just finished reading Parasite Eve. While the horror aspects of the novel are questionable, I found it was a very interesting way to learn about kidney transplants and mitochondrias. I had no idea, for example, that even with a compatible donor the recipients have to take immunosupressants for the rest of their lives and are always at risk of rejecting the organ.

So, it's really amazing to hear that this could be a thing of the past!

</comment><comment><USER13> What's the difference between the 62.9 and the 43.9 groups mentioned in the article ? They're both "on the waiting list".

"After eight years, 76.5 percent of those who received an incompatible kidney were still alive, compared with 62.9 percent who remained on the waiting list or received a deceased donor kidney and 43.9 percent who remained on the waiting list but never got a transplant."

<comment><USER14> More people survived after getting the immunity suppression treatment and a kidney transplant than those who only got a transplant. More of both groups survived than did those who never got a transplant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> sounds like a new website that matches, those people in society that truly want to give a kidney to a stranger for nothing but alturistic reasons, and people who need kidneys would work. Like ebay for kidneys but less crass than that. You could really market it just right to apeal to everyone's good side, be an angle etc.

<comment> nommm-nommm You mean an organ registry? That exists already.

<comment><USER15> yeah but this new thing where anyone can donate to anyone is very new. A whole new take on the organ registry "industry" could make a big profit.</comment></comment></comment>