The End of Men - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/ <comment><USER2> For a fun exercise, try replacing "men" with "black people" and "women" with "white people" throughout this article, and speculate on whether The Atlantic would have published it.

 _"What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to white people?"_

 _"White people live longer than black people. They do better in this economy. More of 'em graduate from college. They go into space and do everything black people do, and sometimes they do it a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way—these white people are going to leave us black people in the dust."_

 _"Researchers have suggested any number of solutions. A movement is growing for more all-black schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of black people. Some people think that black people should be able to walk around in class, or take more time on tests, or have tests and books that cater to their interests."_

<comment><USER3> _try replacing "men" with "black people" and "women" with "white people"_

Well, try replacing "women" with "black people" and "men" with "white people" and they would most certainly publish it. In fact, any time the slightest improvement in the fortune of _any_ allegedly-mistreated group occurs (women, blacks, whatever) it is trumpeted and paraded endlessly.

Anyway, the article didn't point out two salient facts:

1\. Women still lag in almost everything that matters (engineering, entrepreneurship, science, math) and

2\. Parents prefer girls over boys for the same reason they used to do the opposite: Because that is the gender more likely to take care of them in their old age. No one wants girls because of "empowerment" or whatever PC bullshit journalists happen to be obsessed with.

<comment><USER2> _Parents prefer girls over boys for the same reason they used to do the opposite: Because that is the gender more likely to take care of them in their old age. No one wants girls because of "empowerment" or whatever PC bullshit journalists happen to be obsessed with._

I'm not sure to what extent people think that far ahead. If there's an expressed preference for girls over boys it's because:

a) Girls are often easier to deal with as parents than boys are (I'm thinking in the 7-10 age range and then again in the 14-17...)

b) Mothers prefer daughters while fathers prefer sons, but fathers tend to keep their mouths shut about it.

<comment><USER4> > _Mothers prefer daughters while fathers prefer sons, but fathers tend to > keep their mouths shut about it_

Hahaha, so true.

Myself I couldn't care less ... I actually wanted a girl because I see girls being more close to their parents (a selfish thought) ... but now my wife is carrying a boy, and I started thinking of all the father-son stuff we can do, and I'm really excited.

About the article ... I wouldn't be too worried, unless there is a provable reason for the current bias towards girls. In other countries women that don't get pregnant with boys are getting abortions at an alarming rate, making it very hard for men in their 20-ties to get mates (guess they should come to the US :))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?_

What if modern, postindustrial society is simply hostile to males in return for all the past hostility to females?

edit: apparently axle replied while I had my lament on the state of scholarships. Summarized: out of literally thousands available after pre- filtered (however poorly), I had to toss out all but a dozen or two because I'm white and male.

<comment><USER6> The problem is really that you likely have not been anything else apart from a male WASP. See, there is no institution working against you. These things you are complaining about not getting are not the main product, they are shortcuts. A scholarship is not the normal way of studying, it's a shortcut way, for people who have something working against them.

A woman (and a black guy) have institutions against them. They go somewhere, and they are instantly assumed to be less competent. That's why these things are given to them - to help out the weak, not to push YOU down. Those things are legs-up to equalise the playing field - you, as a WASP already are at the starting line, asking to get those things is to get another 10 yards.

And no, it's not a socio-economic program. If you took a white bum and a black bum, and you cleaned them up and dressed them nice and sent them to interview, the white will likely get more jobs than the black guy. There is an inherent issue that non-WASPs have to deal with.

A poor black kid from a farm and a poor white kid from a farm don't have the same chances of succeeding in life. The white kid is neutral (everything is always open to him), but the black kid has things working against him right from the start.

It's going to be difficult for you to understand because you have never BEEN a woman in a managerial position. You have never BEEN a black guy applying for jobs.

Let's do this test: Imagine I say you'll get ALL the perks that black people get from the government, do you think you will have a better life being black?

<comment><USER7> > the white will likely get more jobs than the black guy.

All else held equal, that is simply not true in modern America. There are very powerful incentives to hire the equivalently qualified black guy in order to avoid lawsuits.

Anyway, all this affirmative action stuff will have to be dismantled in the next twenty years when whites are a minority. It will simply become impossible for institutions to function if they have to make sure their loans/admissions/hires correspond to the new population profile.

<comment><USER6> An the lawsuits are there because people recognized that if the place were left as it were, discrimination would persist.

<comment><USER5> Replace "are" with "were" and nearly everyone would agree with you.

For _today_ , "are" is what's in question. A _vast_ amount of laws exist simply because they _did_ exist. How many worthless laws lie around, outdated by 100 years? Is it really _that_ hard to believe that a law could obsolete itself in the past low-double-digit years?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is okay, _somewhat_ sexist. I'm surprised it passed the first round of editorial review. Imagine the uproar if a man published an article flirting with "the end of women" in a major publication. This is a feminist claptrap with a lot of anger behind it, and intended to push buttons. It amounts to "girls are better than boys HAHA!"

I'm quite sure men will do just fine over the coming decades, thank you kindly, Ms. Hanna Rosin, and sorry to disappoint. :)

In the meantime I'll make a note not to do any more reading over at the Atlantic. Sad for me; they were once a great rag.

(edited for tone)

<comment><USER9> I am surprised you saw the article as angry. I've read it as being very sympathetic towards boys and men. I thought it factually presented the decline of male participation in college and at work as well as in family life and sounded an alarm at what's happening. All the anecdotes were along the lines of, what do we do to involve men more?

<comment><USER10> For example, try reading it with a woman's voice trying to encourage her dog. "Awww, look at the poor little puppy, errr man."

<comment><USER9> You mean sort of like suffering from paranoid delusions, but on purpose? Are you saying that since the article isn't mean in and of itself, we should see what kind of imaginary voice we can assign to it so that it _does_ begin to sound mean, and then we can rest in peace knowing that the universe is a lonely and hostile place bent on humiliating us? Knock yourself out dude :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?

Alternative theory: Society is failing our boys.

<comment><USER12> I'd argue not failing but carefully emasculating. Old-fashioned masculinity has been systematically devalued, and many of its' traits demonized.

<comment><USER13> I've seen this asserted dozens of times before, and even though I agree with the observation, the way I see it phrased invariably drives me nuts. Out of all the traditionally "masculine" traits that are in decline, the ones most worth saving are ruggedness and personal responsibility, yet the subtext of your assertion is a portrayal of men as helpless victims. Social change is not a conspiracy. There's nothing "careful" or "systematic" about masculinity being devalued. If men don't like it, and we shouldn't, then the way to reverse the trend is simply for us to stand up for ourselves and refuse to take part.

<comment><USER12> How would you phrase it?

I know it's not a conspiracy, and I know there's no orchestrating hand. I was phrasing it the same way as the 'Invisible Hand' theory of economics. There sure as hell is no Invisible Hand, but we call it that because that's what it sometimes looks like.

<comment><USER14> Of course there is an orchestrating hand. This is what teachers are taught to teach in teaching colleges. This is why men who want to become teachers (here in the UK at least) are forced through the humiliating process of proving that they are not paedophiles.

Perhaps the political theorists behind it haven't thought it through, but emasculating men _is_ policy.

<comment><USER13> _Perhaps the political theorists behind it haven't thought it through, but emasculating men is policy._

The first part of this sentence contradicts the second. Emasculating men is not policy. Emasculating men is an unintended side-effect of policy. The creators of that policy, in turn, were shaped by their own education, and so- forth in a cycle of positive feedback. Even if you want to find some ruling class to single out and assign blame to, which I don't think is a worthwhile exercise, then the number of bad actors is too large and their individual crimes too slight for an "orchestrating hand" to be anywhere close to an appropriate metaphor.

<comment><USER5> Policy A is explicitly intended to cause B and C.

Policy A _also_ causes D.

How is D not part of policy A?

If there were a policy where vehicles were not allowed to be within X miles of the coast (to prevent pollution / damage to the flora), wouldn't it also be a policy against living that close to the coast? Sure, some people would still do it... just as some men are still teachers in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Women currently make up the majority of workers and college graduates because of corruption. Colleges decide admission and grant scholarships based on grades from high school that are 75%+ non math/science * and 90%+ taught by women, who like women more. They then graduate and go into jobs, like teachers or bureaucrats, where being a pedantic, to-the-letter PITA is good for your career.

*Of the 25% that is "science", the bulk of it isn't really, it's just memorizing definitions. I remember in my 9th grade physics class we had to memorize that the definition of a "virtual image" was an image that appeared behind a mirror. They never went into any detail about the physics of lenses, they just found a science term and made everybody memorize it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Who gives a crap? Even if there are measurable statistical differences in competence at various activities between the sexes (which is far from proven), the average variation between two individuals is far, far more than the average variation between the sexes at large.

In other words, treat people like the individuals and stop ANY form of discrimination based on irrelevant categories, sex-based or otherwise.

Also, the article makes much of the fact that women are getting more education. But this is probably because it is both harder and less necessary for them to jump into the workforce straight out of high school, not because they're any better or more prone to academia. I have no hard data to back this up, but I strongly suspect that your average woman in her 20s is FAR more likely to be at least partially dependent on a husband or parents than a man of the same age.

<comment><USER17> > the average variation between two individuals is far, far more than the > average variation between the sexes at large

You might want to stop and think about how the world would have to look for the above statement _not_ to be true. I don't think it's as strong as you think it is.

<comment><USER16> I didn't intend it to be a strong point. It's actually more of a truism.

But you'd never know it from reading the subject article, so I felt it needed to be restated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Choice Quote: "Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer"

<comment><USER12> All the more reason for men to work as hard as they can to introduce more women to the field of engineering. What could possibly be more engineer than replacing yourself?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, the modern society is less like the savanna, which was the environment that shaped men throughout the evolutionary history of our species, and more like the cave, which was the environment that shaped women. Less physical confrontation, more squabbling. Less concrete, immediate dangers, more abstract worries. Less ass-kicking, more cooperation.

Heck, even spatial abilities are so last-century, now that everyone has a GPS.

So then you get things like men's constantly decreasing fertility, for decades now. Decreasing testosterone levels, again trending downwards for many years now.

I'm not saying this is either good or bad, I'm just saying this is an environment which creates different evolutionary pressures, and our species is responding to it.

I'm not sure I can imagine the destination, though.

<comment><USER20> Half a century--two human generations--is not nearly enough time for evolutionary pressures to have the sort of effect you are talking about. Least of all in a society of abundance in which the majority of members reproduce.

Instead, I'd suggest you look at the various changing environmental factors for an explanation of these phenomena: BPA in plastics (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A>), the growing use of soy in human diets (with its attendant phyto-estrogens), and the growing quantities of synthetic human estrogen in the environment (already known to have effects on fish, see for instance <http://www.seattlepi.com/local/124939_estrogen04.html>).

<comment><USER19> Sure, phyto- and xeno-estrogens are strong suspects in this case. But here's another data point:

Measure the testosterone level in your bloodstream.

Then for a few weeks start doing heavy squats (weight lifting) every other day, go car racing, skydiving, etc.

Now measure T again. See the difference?

There are all sorts of things like that. The bottom line is, the more secure the environment, the less the need for men to be "men".

Also, I was not implying that the new evolutionary pressures have already made changes, I was just saying the changes are being made now - but how long before they will become visible, I have no idea. Probably not tomorrow.

<comment><USER20> I agree that lack of physical activity is another likely factor for changing hormone levels and their secondary effects.

However, I know of no reason to think that these changes are heritable, or that naturally low T is actually a reproductive advantage in our society. (Indeed, given that we have inverted the more typical historical trend of the wealthy out-reproducing the less wealthy, and the selection of low-T for wealth here asserted, one might expect that this society actually reflects reproductive pressure against low-T, rather than in favor of it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, for the academic insuccess of men I have an easy explanation: nurture.

Look at any movie, telefilm, sit-com ecc where the main character is a youg boy. He's always a good-looking,athletic, funny,street-smart guy. And at school sucks.

The smart guys are always nerds, losers.

The girls are always pretty, shy, serious and very good at school.

I think that for a school boy there is a lot of social pressure to be good in sports, get many girls and be the leader of your class. They can't afford to lose time studying.

For the "good" girls there is social pressure to be more serious and academically good.

</comment><comment><USER22> I actually spent a bit yesterday writing a short response piece to this. Here's an excerpt:

"The problem with "The End of Men" is that it isn't an isolated problem, putting males today and males tomorrow out of jobs. Instead, it's part of a larger pattern. That pattern is the replacement of human labor with automation."

Check out the whole thing here: [http://www.intellectualpornography.com/2010/06/one-oclock- da...](http://www.intellectualpornography.com/2010/06/one-oclock-daily-the- end-of-men-part-2.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> being a white male sometimes feels like the entire fucking universe is suffering from some sort of inferiority complex.

<comment><USER24> that's funny, because it seems to me like the entirety of white males have some sort of superiority complex.

<comment><USER25> As a human, it seems to me like other humans, especially those who identify as part of a group, have some sort of superiority complex.

<comment><USER2> I'm so glad I'm better than those identifying-as-part-of-a-group people!

<comment><USER5> Hear hear, fellow-group-person!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> On the bright side, I don't think many people reading Hacker News fall in to the category of brutish, construction worker-type. :)

I did work construction when I was younger, and I must say, I enjoyed it immensely. I always love to help out someone build a shed or throw up some drywall.

It's just plain fun to build things with your hands, even if you're mainly doing the work with your finger-tips these days.

<comment><USER18> Not to say that physical work is always great, in fact many times it isn't, but i find the devaluation of it a little troubling, I did physical work on and off several years, there is immense value and satisfaction in building and creating with your hands.

<comment><USER27> Very much agree. I've really come to accept the best way for me to work is with my brain sitting at a desk.

If I want to create with my hands the fight for free time becomes imperative. I've been working to find a sustainable lifestyle that has room for a little extra time off for years. Free time has the single biggest effect on quality of life in my opinion. Having time for physical work is great, but the beauty is free time can be used for anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It will be very interesting to see if the arc of human development begins with primitive matriarchal societies and ends with hi-tech matriarchal societies.

It will also be interesting to see if history bears out the current theories that men skew to the extremes. In 20 years women may make up the majority of the white-collar workforce, but will they also dominate at the executive level?

<comment><USER2> What makes you think that human development started with primitive matriarchal societies? There are anthropological studies of thousands of stone age tribes, very few are matriarchal.

Wikipedia goes even further than my hedged and uninformed "very few" statement and says:

 _There are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal,[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] although there are a number of attested matrilinear, matrilocal and avunculocal societies, especially among indigenous peoples of Asia and Africa,[9] such as those of the Basques, Minangkabau, Mosuo, Berbers or Tuareg. Strongly matrilocal societies sometimes are referred to as matrifocal, and there is some debate concerning the terminological delineation between matrifocality and matriarchy._

which is no doubt enough to keep anyone occupied for hours, but anyway, I see no evidence that early societies were matriarchal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> _Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else: nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation._

The entire premise of this article is pretty weak, which isn't surprising for The Atlantic. While more women may be employed than men, the jobs they have are associated more with support than with production. As long as our economy doesn't become based on social work and child care, men don't have too much to worry about.

In fact, it seems to hide the real problem of getting more women involved in math and science. Technical skills will be even more important 20 years from now, and women are sorely underrepresented in those fields. I think the society that has the most women involved in tech will be big winner in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER30> I can't help but think that the trends in this article are only medium-term cultural changes that'll be countered by demography in a century. Fertility rates for highly-educated women in first-world countries have fallen to too low a level for this to be a permanent societal change.

</comment><comment><USER27> The article touches on relationship desire among professional women a bit.

I know a few recent nursing school graduates, they tell me the running joke in the medical profession is that all the successful women are merely hunting for a successful mate(with a doctor being the brass ring).

Career as means to long term relationship might seem misogynistic, but there's also the common male stereotype of men chasing money primarily to attract women.

I'm not presenting real evidence here, maybe a survey of professional women and their relationship goals would be enlightening.

</comment><comment><USER31> Single page: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/the-end- of...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/)

</comment><comment><USER32> This article just makes me want to scream Correlation is not Causation!

</comment><comment><USER33> This article is doublepluspink. Right honey?

GTG girls, Big Sis is on the screen, and it's time for the two-minute bitch.

</comment><comment><USER34> The End of the World

</comment><comment><USER35> Is this a duplicate submission <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416811>

</comment><comment><USER36> So what is the point of this article? Wymin will or have already taken over and men are either puppies or thugs. End result: a whole bunch of feminists running the matriarchy of the USA and possibly south Korea, they decide men are beneath them and become lesbians. Then the USA either starts a war and drafts some of the wymin and recovers or stagnates and turns into a failed socialist state, like Canada.</comment>


Ask HN: What systems allow remote code execution as a feature? - <AUTHOR> I recently learned of Telescript[1], a programming language, design to allow clients to execute arbitrary code on servers.
SQL databases also have a similar architecture, with the code being executed being much more restrained but still powerful.
What other systems were designed with remote code execution as a feature?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_language) and I got it from this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLF7yfXFmUk <comment><USER2> I've heard that early versions of the Dropbox client allowed engineers to remotely open a Python shell on users' computers, for debugging purposes.

</comment><comment><USER3> The combination of scp/ssh.

dtrace, if you consider the kernel to be 'remote'.

The Voyager spacecrafts (in general, unassisted remote firmware update is a form of remote code execution)</comment>


Why nerd culture must die: Not everyone can teach themselves - <AUTHOR> http://computinged.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/why-nerd-culture-must-die-not-everyone-can-teach-themselves/

<comment><USER2> No. Go away. Nerd culture needs to be cultivated and rewarded. Full stop.

We, at least in the US and in Western Europe are no longer making anything. We are no longer makers. Sure, a few places make stuff, but the risk/reward idealism from being a nerd is now discouraged in favour of simply accepting what is by people who "know better than us". Sorry, most of what I know in life is because I cared enough to learn and grok stuff. I'm curious by nature and so are most nerds/geeks. If the sheeple want it easy, let them subscribe to those ideas, but never ever discourage those of us who want to be nerds/geeks to give that up.

I use *nix precisely because I don't want it to just "work". That's boring. This is why my kids are getting Raspberry Pi sets and Lego Mindstorm sets. They need to think it out and do something. Make mistakes. Learn along the way. Who knows. Maybe one of my kids will invent the warp drive or cure cancer. The nerd culture is what encourages the risk takers and the outliers with the ability to think for themselves. This is a gift and should be cultivated to the highest extent possible. Education today, sadly is delivered to the lowest common denominator in the class. This is why the West is losing... kids that cannot hang need to go to remedial learning like they used to, not drag the smart kids down. Damned liberals running the education the West.</comment>


Pumping Gas? Google is There for you at the Gas Pump - <AUTHOR> http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/5280239.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Next up: FaceBook-enabled pumps.

"I'm pumping gas now. Looks like I need a quart of oil."

"Be sure to buy a YooHoo Bob. 75% of your friends drink YooHoo and they will accept you more if you are absorbed into the giant YooHoo-FaceBook collective"

<comment><USER2> Sounds more like Twitter.</comment></comment>


Apple App Store user review frustration - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codecropper.com/2011/04/apple-app-store-user-review-frustration/ <comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts, suggestions or question are appreciated.</comment>


Mothers, Tell Your Children to Be Software Coders - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/articles/andy-kessler-mothers-tell-your-children-to-be-software-coders-1411770575

<comment><USER2> I have very little difficulty believing that Google offers $280k salary packages routinely and that $8 million has been offered in GSUs to at least one engineer, but that being a routine enough offer to flummox a recruiter strikes me as unlikely.

Anybody at AmaGooFaceSoft want to provide a little color commentary here?

[Edit to add: I've been told, by multiple people I trust on the matter, that my sense of this was largely correct. $2 million a year is within the realm of feasibility for top contributors -- a handful in a year out of tens of thousands -- but very, very much not a standard offer for a generic 28 year old engineer.]

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a probability game.

Being a software engineer and working at Google significantly increases your chances of such an offer versus not being one and not working there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I always find myself irked by this kind of message - aside from looking like a cheap shot to drive labour costs down in the long term, I wonder if we are truly unable to find a middle ground between "follow your dreams (and die in a fire)" and "go do X right now because X is growing and pays nicely". What about "do what you'd like to do without losing sight of the reality"?

</comment><comment><USER4> Paywall fail.</comment>


Tom's Hardware's take on SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.com/news/toms-hardware-sopa-Stop-Online-Piracy-Act-PROTECT-IP-Senate,14393.html

<comment><USER2> thanks for posting this - it's probably the most coherent, straightforward, and relatable piece i've seen so far on SOPA.

<comment><USER3> "It would require web services like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to monitor and aggressively filter everything all users upload."

False. It's the opposite actually. A site continues to have existing safe harbor protection UNLESS it does this. Even Congress knows you can't put this type of burden on sites.

"It would deny site owners due process of law, by initiating a DNS blacklisting based solely on a good faith assertion by an individual copyright or intellectual property owner."

False. Individuals and corporations cannot DNS blacklist, or block from Google results. That's only allowed based on a request from the Attorney General, requires approval of a Judge, and only applies to foreign companies that explicitly and solely exist for the purpose of copyright infringement.

In short, it's the worst article I've ever seen on Tom's Hardware. And like watching something on CNN when you clearly know more about it than they do, I'm left to wonder if they're this wrong on everything, or it's just a rare case of them talking about something they know absolutely nothing about.

But I do see why we're so worried about politics affecting the web. We're not good at it and we're too lazy to actually read the proposals. We sure are great at moving incorrect information around, though!

<comment><USER4> Instead of calling out hearsay with your own hearsay, why not cite the relevant pieces of the legislation?

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately you can't really cite something that isn't there. My point is that there's nothing in SOPA that says what Tom's Hardware claims.

The bill breaks down into two main sections.

Section 102 covers foreign sites only. It grants the government the power to tinker with DNS and remove sites from Google search results. It only applies to sites registered overseas that have no US points of contact. In other words, it's an attempt to deal with sites that moved overseas to avoid the DMCA. This is the core of why the bill exists. Debate the DNS technical issue all you want, but since Tom's Hardware isn't overseas, none of this applies to them.

Section 103 extends the DMCA to allow individuals to send takedown notices to payment providers and ad networks. Again, I can't cite something that isn't there, but you can read the bill (it's really rather short) and see that it explicitly does not mention DNS. That stuff requires action by the Attorney General and separate approval by a Judge (section 102).

Both section 102 and 103 powers further limited ONLY to sites that "primarily designed or operated for the purpose of, has only limited purpose or use other than" copyright infringement (17 USC 501), circumventing copyright (17 USC 1201), or trademark infringement (18 USC 2320).

Is Tom's Hardware a site that is primarily designed for the purpose of copyright infringement? Not at all. The bill doesn't even apply to them.

There are certainly parts of the bill worth tweaking and debating, but it's going to be hard to make progress on that in the total absence of facts.

I also think it was a huge mistake for PG to boycott and uninvite people from the demos over SOPA.

If a company stands up and expresses an opinion which matches its business interests during the debate over an unpassed bill -- that somehow renders them unworthy to talk to entrepreneurs who have a different opinion? The bill is in flux and the debate is heated (and, as shown above, largely uninformed).

If anything, the way to fix some of these idiotic, outdated copyright laws is to combine great tech with the IP assets held by the old guard and open up new opportunities. But PG doesn't want the two sides even talking while the debate is under way? That's premature and shortsighted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hadn't taken the time to learn anything about SOPA (mostly ignored the protests) until this. This article was great because its a straightforward account, and it prompted me to write a SOPA letter to my representatives.

</comment><comment><USER6> Any UGC-based site should be very, very concerned. It is beyond worrisome that something as described in the article (the UG video upload and the potential legal implications) could be made into law.

This article really brings it home.

<comment><USER7> Something that occurred to me when reading this that had not occurred to me before.

This could open up a new channel for attacks against web sites. Forget about those that are just posting content with the intent of sharing. What about those that simply post/upload copyrighted content with the sole intent of bringing your site down.

Another thing that occurred, was that there is so much of this going on today, that unless people drastically change their habits, or courts are very selective with who they prosecute, every owner of every site on the web will end up in court.

<comment><USER8> While the wording isn't set in stone yet, SOPA targets foreign entities, meaning the site has to be owned by someone outside the US. It also creates private rights of action, meaning individuals and corporations bringing their own suits in court, not just government prosecutors.

So if SOPA passed today, every site on the web won't end up in court, but a big rightsholder with good crawling technology like Getty (the stock photo company with a litigation machine already in place) has a whole new way to prosecute-en-masse... this time with the ability to cut off payments and advertising for domains that would've simply ignored their threats in the past.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Privacy-Focused, No-Uploading, None-Tracking Online Photo Editor - <AUTHOR> https://ediker.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I have created a privacy-focused, no-uploading, none-tracking free online photo editor. I'd love to get feedback on the site as whole. Do you find it easy to use and useful? Do you have any recommendations? How can I promote it and collect users? If you have time, let me know your thoughts!

[https://ediker.com/](https://ediker.com/)

Thanks for reading!

</comment><comment><USER2> Hello, this is a great product. Is there any file size limit? and how it works if i upload gif files? Thanks</comment>


A Working Definition of Business Logic, with Implications for CRUD Code  - <AUTHOR> http://database-programmer.blogspot.com/2010/12/working-definition-of-business-logic.html <comment><USER2> I don't think his definition is completely satisfying, but I love this discussion since developers so often use the term "business logic." It's one of those terms that we can't immediately define, but we _just sorta know_ what it means. If it looks like business logic, talks like business logic, you know the drill.

I've noticed a similar idea when trying to classify issues in an issue tracker for a software project. We realized that using tags called "cosmetic" and "feature request," it sometimes gets hard to distinguish between the two, especially in GUI (or web) applications.

<comment><USER3> A terrible amount of the effort in modern enterprise software engineering is bridging the gap between business logic and code. Layers upon layers of diagrams and modeling techniques and pseudo-code systems are all purely intended to try and take a very high level and abstract business concept and bring logic and discipline to those concepts until they reach a level they can be instantiated in code.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Execution_Lang...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Execution_Language) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArchiMate> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOGAF#TOGAF_8_Certified_Tools> etc. etc. etc.

All of the above (and more) are the wild shots in the dark to not only bring engineering discipline to business folks, and to supply a common language between equally intractable engineers and business people but also to prevent blame coming from both sides (which can get really ugly at times as engineers try and interpret wildly abstract and often contradictory business ideas into a working system, and business folks thinking that engineers don't understand basic business concepts).

That all being said, I don't think it's entirely working (as several very high profile, very expensive, Enterprise Software failures have demonstrated). It requires business people to learn a modicum of technical and logical skills to fill out the high level models, and it takes engineers out of their development time to drag it down through the rest of the levels of abstraction to get to actually getting down to working. Then they have to validate conformance to spec with entire trips up and down the abstraction stack.

 _sigh_ Of course this is probably the best way we know so far to build monstrous systems but it's clear we still have a long way to go.</comment></comment>


64-bit Firefox for Windows should be prioritized, not suspended - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/64-bit-firefox-for-windows-should-be-prioritized-not-suspended/ <comment><USER2> I think Mozilla is misapplying its development time on stuff like social integration [1] and Firefox OS [2]. I would say these types of projects would be fine if they weren't ignoring their mainstay, by first canceling the process per tab project Electrolysis and now abandoning 64bit builds on Windows says to me that Mozilla seriously has its priorities screwed up.

The web browser has become the most important app on the PC, with more and more web pages demanding more and more resources, I really wish Mozilla would refocus on making the best web browser available.

A few weeks ago I tried to delete some of my history from Firefox, I opened the history window, hit Shift and selected about 6 months of history and hit delete, and it took Firefox about an hour to delete the history all the while the UI going from responding to not responding back and forth. Firefox has some serious performance problems.

[1]. [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/20/firefox- introduces-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/20/firefox-introduces- new-social-api-and-previews-integration-with-facebook/)

[2]. <http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefoxos/>

<comment><USER3> Developers are not fungible. The social integration work was mostly HTML5 and JavaScript, and Firefox OS is partly kernel and OS work (B2G), and partly HTML5/JavaScript work (Gaia). 64-bit builds on Windows requires Windows developers, who are focusing on the Metro UI.

EDIT: I'm responding to your edit here:

> A few weeks ago I tried to delete some of my history from Firefox, I opened > the history window, hit Shift and selected about 6 months of history and hit > delete, and it took Firefox about an hour to delete the history all the > while the UI going from responding to not responding back and forth.

I would imagine the Firefox developers spend their time optimizing the parts of their browser that users would most likely use. I suspect that they are not terribly worried about an action that users would take (at most) once every six months.

EDIT2: I guess I'll respond to this one too:

> The web browser has become the most important app on the PC, with more and > more web pages demanding more and more resources, I really wish Mozilla > would refocus on making the best web browser available.

Making the best web browser is not Mozilla's goal. Their goal is to "promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web" [1]. Integrating social features into the browser is part of that, in the sense that users will be able to control their social presence from their browser, rather than being locked-in to a specific social provider's web site. Mozilla's actions are not inconsistent with their stated mission. (Whether you agree with that mission is another argument entirely).

[1]: <https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/>

<comment><USER2> According to W3Schools[1] ~84% of web traffic comes from Windows users. In light of that wouldn't it make more sense to hire more Windows developers? If cuts have to be made it doesn't seem reasonable to make cuts to your main source of revenue.

edit: In response to your edit:

>Making the best web browser is not Mozilla's goal. Their goal is to "promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web"

If Mozilla's goal isn't to make the best web browser then no one will end up using their browser, and if no one uses their browser then they wont be able to "promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web", no market share = no voice. During the days of IE6's dominance Mozilla got its large user base because it _was_ the best browser available. Mozilla is in danger of hemorrhaging users if it continues making these sort of decisions.

Us "hackers" got Mozilla its user base, we started using it first and convinced our family, friends, workmates/workplaces to switch. If the power users leave, the rest will be soon to follow.

[1]<http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp>

<comment><USER4> This is off-topic, but you should know that there are a number of significant issues with W3Schools that prevent it from being a reputable source: <http://w3fools.com/>

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I didn't know W3Schools wasn't trust worthy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretending this was a political decision (vs just being what the Windows hackers decided to use their time on)...

Let's tally the arguments so far for prioritizing 64-bit Windows development.

Pro: The Ars article lists some Win64-specific security-bug mitigation features, unclear how significant these are.

Con: The Windows PC is a declining platform, and the current 32-bit product covers all of the platform currently. There's probably a shortage open source developers working on Windows-specifics. 32-bit is much more memory-efficient. 64-bit breaks compatibility with plugins. Address space shortage will likely be covered by the tab unloading feature mentioned in the article, before it becomes an issue in practice.

Overall sounds to me like You Ain't Gonna Need It.

<comment><USER6> > The Windows PC is a declining platform...

That must be the reason I get am getting more .NET contracts than Java ones I suppose.

<comment><USER7> > That must be the reason I get am getting more .NET contracts than Java ones > I suppose.

The kind of contracts you have is entirely dependent on your skill set and your network. The last time I was paid to write C# code was 8 years ago.

You need cooler friends ;-)

<comment><USER6> Lets put this way then.

Our consulting company does mostly Fortune 500 and DAX 30 customers.

After 5 years of almost only Java projects, most of the new contracts are coming from .NET land.

Better explained?

<comment><USER7> I work for several very large telcos and I have been, so far, able to avoid both .NET and Java. Last time I wrote C# code was because Microsoft (then a client) demanded we run our application on a Windows server. I wrote a proxy that sat in front of the application (which ran on a Linux machine).

Again, you need cooler friends.

<comment><USER6> > Again, you need cooler friends.

The ones I have keep my account manager very happy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With moves like this is it any wonder why Chrome basically hit the ground running with market share as soon as it hit a stable release? I got tired of the Mozilla bureaucracy a long time ago when they failed to acknowledge there were some serious memory leak issues with addons and the browser itself slowly consuming hundreds and eventually gigs of memory the longer it was left open, it wasn't until later builds (this year) they released a version that fixed this by sand-boxing the addons or something to that effect.

I still remember the time Mozilla developers were fighting about removing front-facing version numbers from the browser, it's also at that point I realised there are some issues with the Firefox development team all while Chrome and even Opera gained more market share.

Remember where your loyalties lay, Mozilla. I think they're starting to spread themselves too thin with wasted development of a Firefox OS and social integration. Halting 64 bit versions of Firefox for Windows for the time being might seem like a small, trivial thing, but it's not and I think it's a bad move.

<comment><USER9> > With moves like this [...] Chrome

You mean the Chrome which can't even be arsed to provide 64b builds on platforms where it's _easy_ (Linux) or _trivial_ (OSX), let alone _hard_ (Windows) ones?

<comment><USER10> > _You mean the Chrome which can't even be arsed to provide 64b builds on > platforms where it's easy (Linux) [...]_

      $ file /opt/google/chrome/chrome{,-sandbox}                                                                                [10:47:39]
      /opt/google/chrome/chrome:         ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, BuildID[sha1]=0x2df3f5f435cb5747ea72be922c428b9a0017cb50, stripped
      /opt/google/chrome/chrome-sandbox: setuid ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, BuildID[sha1]=0xd02cf32515390b01af9aa5b1a53cd1dfb4fb7a35, stripped

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For comparison, Chrome is 32-bit on both Windows and Mac OS X. Chrome's multi- process architecture means memory limits are less critical, but Chrome doesn't benefit from any of the 64-bit security features mentioned in the Ars article. (Firefox is 64-bit on Mac OS X and Linux.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Suspended != Abandoned

Sometimes it saves a huge amount of effort to wait for things to mature otherwise before proceeding.

If your firefox is using more than 4gb of memory ( >2gb via LARGEADDRESSAWARE) you have other problems, and 32bit code is almost always faster than 64bit with current CPUs.

<comment><USER13> No, 32-bit code is not faster with current CPUs. x86 apps are more register- starved than they are cache-bound. I don't know who started this urban myth about x64 applications somehow being slower than equivalent ones running under WoW64, but it needs to either be backed up with specifics -- what apps are slower, and why? -- or stop being propagated.

(Source: extensive firsthand experience with performance-sensitive C/C++ development for Windows.)

<comment><USER14> 64-bit Firefox is slower for some workloads because the JavaScript heap is dramatically larger (Due to the doubled pointer size). As it happens, large portions of Firefox are written in JavaScript...

I'm sure there are some use cases where it's faster, of course, but having your heap be 50-100% larger (yes, really that much, I've measured it) is pretty hard to overcome just by adding a few extra registers.

I expect this is why Java has support for using 32-bit object pointers in 64-bit mode. Features like that would probably help Firefox tremendously.

<comment><USER15> Heap growth moving from 32b to 64b is rarely on the order of 50-100% larger. 20-30% is much more common (100% would imply that your application stores no actual data, only pointers and sizes; I know that pointer-chasing is very much in style these days, but that's ridiculous. Even the 1:1 ratio implied by a 50% figure is an extreme outlier).

Further, raw heap size typically has marginal impact on performance; locality of reference and size of working set are far more important. It doesn't matter if your raw heap usage grows by 30% if the majority of your accesses are to the same working set of data either way.

At the same time, a well-crafted interpreter or JIT (which people seem to think is important in browsers) benefits heavily from increasing the size of the register set. Even in more typical use cases, even without aggressive optimization, speedups of 10-20% are common in moving from x86 to x86_64.

<comment><USER14> You can tell me what your think the behavior is actually like, but I can point you to a HTML5 game that uses 50-100% more JS heap and runs slower in 64-bit builds of Firefox :)

You say a larger heap has marginal impact on performance and that locality and working set size are what matter. If larger pointers make the heap bigger, then the working set is going to grow as well, and locality will be worse because the larger pointers mean less objects fit into a cache line.

<comment><USER15> I'm not saying 50-100% growth doesn't happen, I'm saying that it's an outlier (based on complete system data from multiple platforms).

If it's really a common issue with firefox's JS implementation for some reason, there's nothing to stop them from using a compressed pointer scheme for JS that uses 32b pointers and a known offset; it's a common technique. You give up one register to keep the offset around, but you've still netted 7 registers from the switch to the 64b ISA, and adding the offset is either a simple OR or can be folded into an LEA (nearly free or free).

Let's not confuse "they haven't had a chance to tune the 64b JS engine, and the 32b one has been worked on for years" with "x86_64 is slower than x86_32".

<comment><USER16> Is your "complete system data from multiple platforms" from JS apps?

Let's also not confuse "a sufficiently smart compiler..." with real-world observed performance :)

BTW data layout transformations like compressed fields would also be useful on 32-bit. The vast majority of object graphs would be happy with 16 or even 8-bit identifiers, not to mention JS numbers which are all 64-bit floats even on 32-bit platforms.

<comment><USER17> Let's also not confuse differences caused by 32 bit engines having more developers with differences caused by the platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As the article mentions, the same security arguments apply to Chrome for Windows and OS X - especially on OS X, where 32-bit applications really get short shrift of hardening measures. Right now on my Mac, there's some argument to be made that Safari is the most secure browser, simply because it has sandboxing (unlike Firefox) and is 64-bit (unlike Chrome), despite Chrome's healthy obsession with sandboxing and good security record.

</comment><comment><USER19> Has anyone tried WaterFox? <http://www.waterfoxproject.org/>

<comment><USER20> In light of this recent development that's what I just switched to.

I was using the 64-bit builds over at <http://wiki.mozilla-x86-64.com/Firefox:Download> when Adobe first kicked out a 64-bit beta of Flash. Later I switched to the official Nightly builds when they went 64-bit.

Unfortunately I'm not able to offer much insight into if it was better. Aside from a couple of short strings of bad builds that caused crashes I never had any issues with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not too long ago, there were hardly any 64-bit hardware in the market for average users, until they flooded the market and now every other Ma and Pa owns a Windows running on 64-bit.

<comment><USER7> While Windows certainly did arrive late to the 64-bit party (not entirely true - NT ran on Alphas), 32-bit processors (and limited address space) are a distant memory to most Unix (and Linux) users.

<comment><USER22> I still run 32-bit Linux on both computers, despite having 64 bit processors. One has 2GB of RAM, the other 3GB, so I see no reason to switch. Computers bought 3 years ago are hardly 'a distant memory'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Any Mozilla devs wish to weigh in? The article sounds reasonable but is speculative without a first-party response.

<comment><USER3> I believe the idea is that there aren't enough Windows people to work on both 64-bit and the Metro UI for Firefox. Metro is a priority, so 64-bit is getting mothballed for the near future.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/jpX_z5zieD4/dUp- FnItf8cJ)

<comment><USER24> That's kind of a shame, because I don't think Metro will be sticking around for very long.

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure it won't stick around. People said that about Aqua (OS X) and the Gnome 3 shell.

<comment><USER26> MFC, Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight ... all of them still around, but all of them being obsolete by whatever Microsoft's du-jour UI framework happens to be.

Gnome 3 is not the same thing, as Gnome 3 is just a window manager, based on the same X, the same APIs and the same GTK, just as Unity and Gnome 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not surprised at all, and IMO a good move. Mozilla needs to focus on its Firefox OS development. By the way, MS doesn't want 3rd party browser on its Windows RT, that could be a very discouraging factor.

</comment><comment><USER28> Am I the only one who can't believe firefox updates itself and add-ons when it starts?

I just wanted to check something on the internet and now is when you decide to stop and delay the user?

<comment><USER29> The opposite is also true: "I just wanted to shut down and go home, and now is when you decide to stop and delay the user?"

This is an old problem. Chrome solved it the right way by stepping out of the startup/shutdown dichotomy and doing everything in background. Just one of the many areas where Google ran circles around Mozilla (with the benefit of moving from a clear slate, and probably also of staying away from the Gecko clusterf*ck).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Firefox needs to grow up, or be suspended altogether. IMHO, its horribly behind. Technically behind on WebKit, behind usability wise on almost any browser.

Yesterday I ran into a 5 year old bug in Firefox (<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=405761>) that required me to write Firefox-specific JavaScript workarounds. I used to accept that from IE, but from Firefox, never.

</comment><comment><USER31> That's what I call irony... So it seems that Internet Explorer will be soon, at least on Windows, (again) the technological most advanced browser. Microsoft did their homework.

</comment><comment><USER32> IE10 and Opera 12 are the only two browsers shipping 64-bit Windows binaries today in preference to 32-bit: take from that what you will.

</comment><comment><USER33> As long as Mozilla is 95% or so dependent on funding by Google, there's a conflict of interest present that will very likely not lead to Mozilla's Firefox being a competitive browser. If you think otherwise, you're a hopeless romantic...

As a conclusion, it is not surprising at all that Mozilla is focusing on developing products that do not compete with Google's browsers and other software.

<comment><USER34> You seem to believe that Google cares about Chrome more than their Firefox contract. I don't see this being likely. Chrome makes Google no money besides having Google as the default search. Firefox makes Google money in exactly the same way. Firefox is just as important to Google's revenue as Chrome is.

All Google needs is search results to show advertisements on and a browser capable of running their applications. Both Firefox and Chrome meet this requirement.

<comment><USER33> > Chrome makes Google no money besides having Google as the default search. > Firefox makes Google money in exactly the same way. Firefox is just as > important to Google's revenue as Chrome is.

You forget that Google pays Mozilla a lot of money for something they can get for free every time a Chrome installation replaces a Firefox installation. So the potential savings for Google is (currently) $300M/year once they have killed off Firefox completely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Or maybe you could stop using windows since its a substandard OS with an embarrassing new release.</comment>


The Facebook Gaming Phenomenon and the Morality of Social Gaming Mechanics - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamespot.com/news/6284524.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=topstory&tag=topstory%3Bmore

<comment><USER2> Microtransactions have been around since 1887 with the invention of the first slot machine. Social Games are the distilling of the same motivation slot machine players have when they almost hit a jackpot. They focus on the exact moment a player feels compelled to reach for their credit card, then exploit it.

Traditional game developers feel like they're taking the high road by lambasting social developers, when in reality all those developers are doing is fusing the two together.

It's understandable tho that developers who make games out of passion for the medium feel disgrunthed by social game makers with budgets similar to indy games making multiple millions of reoccuring dollars.

Ultimately, this is the same as any other hardcore vs casual gaming debate. If people enjoy them, they'll pay. If people don't enjoy them, they'll go away.

</comment><comment><USER3> He lost me when he started talking about alcohol sales as morally questionable.</comment>


Axel Springer wins partial victory in German ad blocking case - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/25/axel-springer-wins-partial-victory-in-ad-blocking-case/ <comment><USER2> I still don't understand how there is a market for adblockers that accept money from advertisers to be whitelisted.</comment>


Show HN: A better way to track and organize your job search - <AUTHOR> https://jobhuntbuddy.co
The job search has been a kick in the teeth, I started building JobHuntBuddy to keep my sanity while hopefully helping others with their search Job hunting can be a long grueling process. I love coding and making new projects.
JobHuntBuddy started as a way to show employers what my work is like, while letting me dogfood it for my own job search. It also gave me a (productive) creative outlet while being unemployed.
I know I'm not alone in this, lots of people are losing their jobs and struggling to find employment with everything going on in the world right now. This is my way of using what I know to try to help people.
Of course, I would love for this app to turn into a sustainable business and allow me to be my own boss, but right now I want to help as many people as I can. I've added a free tier that lets job seekers track 10 of their applications and use all of the tools available.
If you're having trouble managing and organizing your job search maybe JobHuntBuddy can help you. Creating an account is free and I'm actively adding tools and features based on feedback, so don't hesitate to reach out and ask for help.
Happy Hunting <comment><USER2> This seems like a great idea (I had something similar built on a personal level using org-mode)! Luckily, I've just managed to find myself a position, but this would have seriously helped me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yea this was my solution after trying a ton of different ways to keep track of applications I sent. I'm a compulsive note taker and try to prepare questions & answers for all the individual interviews. Made a mess of it using Evernote</comment></comment>


Expressing Business Flows Using an F# DSL - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/jettech/microservices-to-workflows-expressing-business-flows-using-an-f-dsl-d2e74e6d6d5e <comment><USER2> Thanks for the write-up, very interesting! Reading it I had a few questions:

1\. How can DAG based workflows express events that are iterative in nature, ie. would result in a cycle? For example I have an empty shopping cart as a start state and I want to put X items in it?

2\. Is undo/rollback possible? If so how does cleanup work and does an undo/rollback means forking into a new state as opposed to going back to a previous state we logically want to be in?

<comment><USER3> cart { let! item1 = item let! item2 = anotherItem … }

No cycle there! You'd use some kind of state monad to keep track, and each let! simply adds something to the state. For example, you could end up with the computation expression producing a `Cart = Cart of Item list`, which contains a list of the things that were added.

Your question about going back to a previous state: it depends on what style you're using.

* At my day job, we use the "initial algebra" style (which is something of an abuse of F#'s type system but which gives you absolute power). In this style, your computation expression produces a structure isomorphic to a list of "this was added, then this was added, then this was removed, then this was added, …". It is then the job of some further processing step to convert this into more useful forms, like deduplicating carts which have the same contents.

* One could instead produce the cart as you went, and it would Just Work (tm). Note that in F#, most data structures are immutable, so "rolling back" to the list [item1; item2] from the list [item3; item1; item2] is _exactly the same_ as taking the tail of that input list. You won't fork the state by producing another list which happens to have the same contents; they are the same list. In general, F# structures tend to do structural equality.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I probably wasn't clear in my initial question. What I meant is how do DAG based workflows deal with computational graphs that contains cycles? Eg. we have 2 states: Cart and Payment and 2 events: PutItem and Checkout. A simple (external) DSL describing this graph could look like:

      Cart --PutItem--> Cart
      Cart --Checkout-> Payment

Does the workflow engine in the article exclude situations like this?

Regarding forking what I meant is that if you have:

      A --event--> B
      ^           /
       \--undo---/

then if your invariant is to be a DAG then you could "unroll" the cycle into some new state C that you would make semantically equivalent to A.

      A --event--> B --undo--> C

This works but causes state explosion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an excellent article.

The thing I noted that bears true with my experience: it's an evolution. As you come to understand the business better and better, you naturally evolve through some of the same steps.

To me, the steps feel something like imperative->repl->functional->pure functional->microservices->DSLs

I think if you keep to your code budgets at each step of this, it works out quite nicely. F# is a great tool for this kind of evolution because it's both multi-paradigm and plugs into a ton of other stuff.

Thanks guys!

ADD: It would be a mistake to read articles like this and jump into a DSL, in my opinion. I know a lot of guys who read some really cool books out there on things like DDD and want to start there. What's missing in articles and books like this is the backstory. These folks ended up where they were and were able to do what they're doing now because of a ton of learning. Not learning code. The business, the tech, and the customers all learning from one another. I don't see any way that this doesn't take a good bit of time.

</comment><comment><USER5> F# language has a concept called "computation expressions" which are related to monads. They are also sometimes called workflows. But the article is using "workflow" in the more common language way which was confusing to me at first.

<comment><USER6> IIRC they are essentially Monads, but someone decided that was too scary a name. The result is confusion for experienced programmers, ironically the ones more likely to use F# (!)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Declining quality of Google search results - <AUTHOR> Recently, I have noticed spammy / mined content sites are appearing in search results more often on Google (for any topic). Some examples are searching for programming questions / answers - usually SO is ranked near the top, lately sites have been mirroring SO content and are getting mixed in near the top. Next time I see the URL I will write it down. This has also happened to me while searching for open source packages; I found some spammy looking sites farming Github repo metadata / npm index metadata and those were near top results.<p>Has anyone else had an issue with this? <comment><USER2> This has been discussed in several HN threads recently. Often some insight can be gained by following the money. SO doesn't carry Google advertising, so there is no way for Google to profit when people go there. The spammy and other low-quality sites that persistently show up near the top of Google's search results invariably carry tons of Google ad boxes.

Of course Googlers claim that there is a firewall between search quality and ad revenue sides of the business, and, from the perspective of a Google engineer, that might actually appear to be the case.

</comment><comment><USER3> I seem to be getting results that are largely tied to what I've searched for previously (based on their algorithms for past searching). It may have worked for a while, but I now seem to be getting inaccurate results for a lot of things.

Like if I want to set something up on Ubuntu Desktop, all the server-based solutions will come up, even with desktop as a keyword.

DuckDuckGo does deliver reasonable results though.

</comment><comment><USER4> One trick I've found is to do a reddit search instead of a google search for anything where you want advice, or general tips.

For example searching google for "how to start a garden" is going to give you a lot of junk like wikihow, etc.

But if you search reddit you'll get actual advice from actual gardeners.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think "declining quality" needs to be quantified over time. There are so many spammy sites - basically completely and totalled scraped sites (often from SO) - but it's not new. I also don't notice more than I used to - it's about the same for me. They come, they go.

The biggest one that I don't get is BigResource.com - they are nothing except a search engine yet Google _loves_ them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Examples ?</comment>


Sheryl Sandberg and the emptiness of leaning in - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sheryl-sandberg-leaned-in--to-shut-the-rest-of-the-country-out/2018/11/15/ab922800-e916-11e8-b8dc-66cca409c180_story.html <comment><USER2> Finally the Pied Piper is revealed. This stuff is nothing but drivel that someone creates after being in the right place at the right time in history

<comment><USER3> This</comment></comment>


Why we need more Hacker Meetups, by Ian Hogarth of Songkick - <AUTHOR> http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/08/21/hey-hackers-need-friends-too/

<comment><USER2> I've been planning to make it out to one of the London meetups, but it becomes a little problematic that by the time the meetups are announced all of the cheap plane tickets are already snapped up.

I've been kicking around getting the same thing going here in Berlin and have talked to a couple of the locals. We've got a couple of good business oriented meetups, but not one with a real hacking atmosphere. I'm always the weirdo that can't keep his laptop closed for the whole time. ;-)

If you see this and are based in or around Berlin drop me a line (and aren't already tracking one of my various feeds), and if we get something going we'll be sure to get you on the invite.

<comment><USER3> Don't think about it. Do it. See what happens.

Worst case is they are poorly attended and fail. In which case, learn, reset, and try again. Use a different approach (free beer & pizza generally works, or some sort of interactive/engaging/competitive experience).

Building momentum and traction becomes easier with each iteration. If you can stay alive long enough, good things can happen. Output is a function of input.

It may be worth doing a presentation at BarCamp Berlin (<http://barcampberlin3.mixxt.org/>, 13 October 2008) to launch the endeavour and get going. Better still, you can do an event ahead of BarCamp and talk about what you _have_ done and are doing, not what you will do.

Lastly, there are many talented groups/people in and around Germany who will be interested, appreciate, and attend such an event. London does/should not have the European monopoly.

<comment><USER2> Yep, already in the Mixxt group for BarCamp Berlin.

Poorly attended is fine -- you can have an interesting gathering with just a few folks. More what I've been trying to do is to make it around to the other entrepreneurs meetups to make sure that there's not something with a similar character already going on -- there's no sense in splitting things up. Business & Beer and OpenCoffee are quite a different atmosphere, WebMontag is the last one on my checklist, which I've missed due to scheduling conflicts the last couple goes around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a London based hacker this chimes with me. There are groups such as the BCS that are supposedly there to nurture IT networking, but their events schedule looks a bit dry.

I've found some of the entrepreneurial networking events (OpenCoffee and Geektails) to be interesting, but you don't get much of a chance to talk about the technical challenges at those.

I'm looking forward to coming along on the 4th anyway. But update the "news" section on the Facebook group with the details please!

<comment><USER5> Updated! Sorry about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been going to a Hacker meetup for the past few months here in the Silicon Valley. It's totally a refreshing experience to build relationships with the community. I also helps me stay motivated and excited about building my app!

If you guys are interested:

SV Facebook Hacker News Group [http://www.new.facebook.com/inbox/readmessage.php?t=10089105...](http://www.new.facebook.com/inbox/readmessage.php?t=1008910548889#/group.php?gid=22574669893)

Silicon Valley Hackers and Founder Meetup <http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/>

<comment><USER7> I hear ya. It's been a blast.

I have a hunch though that if things keep growing, we're going to need a bigger space to get together in.

Any offers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In certain places, there might be enough people to have a Hacker (centric) Cafe, like super happy dev house, constantly. Imagine it -- coffee, high speed wifi, a library, talks, ramen, small meeting rooms, late hours, whiteboards.

<comment><USER9> Have you seen this?

"Building a Hacker Space" <http://imakethings.com/Hacker-Space-Design- Patterns.pdf>

.. this is something I'd absolutely love to set up.

<comment><USER8> Are you in the Bay area? I think I can contribute some help; I have a lot of friends that are looking for a space like this. Gabe and Andrew (from Kirkland North) and I have been hosting these dinner parties that attract quite a few people: the secret seems to be good cooking. I could cook for a few 'fundraising dinners' to get the ball rolling (for, say, a deposit on a lease), though I don't think I can be a main person on the project (have a lot of hardware hacking to do...)

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately not.. I'm in Melbourne (Australia).

I love the idea of luring people with good food though. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want to get something rolling in your area, maybe hacking society is the answer:

<http://www.hackingsociety.org/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Why the link to the comments anchor?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's strange, I'm sure I submitted it without that since that's a pet peeve of mine. Any mods feel like fixing it please?

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed, thanks</comment></comment></comment>


Sword-fighting game hits funding target - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18768907 <comment><USER2> Clang isn't as much a game as it's basis to build better sword fighting games.</comment>


GPS Tracking Disaster: Japanese Tourists Drive Straight into the Pacific - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/03/gps-tracking-disaster-japanese-tourists-drive-straight-into-the-pacific/

<comment><USER2> That is why I always stick with maps and instinct.

<comment><USER3> that is why I keep at least one eye in the road when driving...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you use RSS feeds to read your news? - <AUTHOR>

I am wondering what do you do about the fact that the comments etc. are not available through RSS feeds. Aren't the comments equally important part of the news itself? <comment><USER2> Starting at the top of HN and reading down comment thread by comment thread is a recipe for hypertension. Instead, pick a couple commenters you like (my list is on my profile) and follow them. I have a list of bookmarks for each of the users in my profile.

An advantage to this approach is that those commenters also screen stories for you. You can glance at the front page and click only the very most interesting stories, then go read all of 'potatolicious's comments to get a glimpse of what he found interesting without having to click from thread to thread.

</comment><comment><USER3> I actually mostly read the stories directly in my email client, and only then I may now and then check the commenst on specific stories. Like tptacek said, reading all comments is a good recipe for hypertension and since HN has become more or less very prone to flamewars et all.</comment>


Drawing Autism: A Visual Tour of the Autistic Mind from Kids on the Spectrum - <AUTHOR> https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/28/drawing-autism-book/ <comment><AUTHOR> The full title is "Drawing Autism: A Visual Tour of the Autistic Mind from Kids and Celebrated Artists on the Spectrum".</comment>


Facebook Admits Hiring PR Firm To Smear Google - <AUTHOR> http://everythingnew.net/technology/facebook-admits-hiring-pr-firm-to-smear-google/

<comment><USER2> Please don't link to linkbait blogs.

Their source, complete with sentences that actually make sense: [http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- stories/2011-05-12/fa...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and- stories/2011-05-12/facebook-busted-in-clumsy-smear-attempt-on-google/#)</comment>


Tell HN: My healthcare provider got my data without my consent - <AUTHOR> It shouldn't be possible for a company to hand a healthcare provider tons of data about you without your explicit consent -- but it is and I want you to know.
Arivale (arivale.com) was a wellness company that abruptly closed yesterday. The data they collected included whole genome data, clinical blood markers, microbiome, and lots more, including a lot of experimental data extracted from biosamples that the end user never saw and didn't know existed. A small transition team is staying on for a short time to move data over to Providence. Providence is the third largest healthcare provider in the country. There's a good chance you get your healthcare through them, even if you don't realize it. I do. And now they own lots of data about me without my explicit consent thanks to this massive final data dump.
The moral of the story: Don't give your health data out as freely as I did. You don't know where it will end up. I wish that we were better protected in this arena than we are. <comment><USER2> Are you American or Canadian?

<comment><AUTHOR> American

<comment><USER2> You should be protected by the HIPAA legislation.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: The average HTTP response code - <AUTHOR> https://amtunlimited.github.io/average-response/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the README:

> The Average HTTP Response

> As calculated from the most recent daily batch of telemetry data from the > Firefox nightly build.

> But y tho?

> I was looking over some logs, trying to see if a new feature I had made had > resulted in an increase of errors/non-200 responses as a quick and dirty > "Did I break something" metric. I decided to throw the data in a spreadsheet > and do stats at it before trying to do anything Python-y or whatever, but > forgot to turn the error codes into strings, so they were treated as just > values, meaning I got back things like averages and the like. I had just > learn that Mozilla puts out public telemetry data, so I threw that into a > spreadsheet, texted a friend the entire story, and he responded

> > Wow! That is AGGRESSIVELY useless!

> At that point I knew I must tell the world...</comment>


Girl geek appeal: Women's movement online  - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8663593.stm

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... Our logos are all pink and that is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. It's friendly but it walks the line between the serious issues and gathering to have fun. ..."_

This is an interesting point. One of the quickest way to stop women according to _"Sapna Cheryan"_ (Uni.Washington) is _"You can get a message about whether you want to join a certain group just by seeing the physical environment that that group is associated with,"_ For men, it was reported, decor made no difference.[0]

 _"... "The feminist movement was incredibly important to people like my mum who had to argue with people like my programming teacher so that I could stay in my course," explained Judith Lewis ..."_

That is really sad.

[0] Wired, Lisa Grossman, _"Star Trek Stops Women From Becoming Computer Scientists"_ ~ [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/star-trek-keeps- wo...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/star-trek-keeps-women- computer-science/#ixzz0nF5aekTY)

<comment><USER2> I wonder how old Judith Lewis is, or if this varies by area and subject? My mom was a chemistry BS and MS major in the late 60s / early 70s, and she seems to think that when she started in 1966, there were a lot of "women don't belong in science" dinosaur professors, but by the early 1970s they were almost all gone, or at least had been "encouraged" into keeping quiet.

<comment><USER3> Maybe they went into engineering. I started uni in the late 90s, the natural sciences already had a nice mix of men and women, except physics. Engineering was still a man's world even then. Then one of my professors dropped the proverbial bomb in class, declaring that "women don't belong in engineering".

It was a fiasco for a little while, the university stated its disagreement but couldn't fire him. He retired a year later (the guy looked like he was on death's doorstop).

The school has been trying, for years, to get more women and minorities into engineering but it's usually just a modest bump in good years, when they have money to actively search. Leaner times, like now, may mean small drop in an already small pool of viable candidates.

<comment><USER4> _more women and minorities into engineering_

More minorities into engineering? What school did you go to that the engineering classes weren't almost entirely Asian and/or Indian?

<comment><USER5> I believe they mean Latino and Black students, which are underrepresented. NACME for instance, is trying to get a engineering racial makeup much more similar to that of the US at large.

<http://www.nacme.org/NACME_D.aspx?pageid=96>

And while many of the sub-continent students (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi) would love to stay, many of them are foreign nationals, and will likely have to leave (or choose to).

<comment><USER4> So out of all the hundreds of minorities, only the two biggest minorities count as "minorities"?

I love US racial doublespeak circa 2010.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How many girl geeks here?

<comment><USER7> Quite a few <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749617> , lots of them in 'stealth' mode to ward off unwanted attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> me :)</comment>


A NOSQL evening in Palo Alto - <AUTHOR> http://www.infinitegraph.com/information/a-nosql-evening-in-palo-alto.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A great two hour primer on everything NOSQL moderated by Tim Anglade of <http://nosqlsummer.org/> and hosted by InfiniteGraph and Scality. Very deep panel representing many of the major NOSQL players at the moment. Covering everything from history of to data architectures, operations and deployment.</comment>


Mystery poison in Kim Jong Nam's death baffles experts - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kim-jong-nam-deadly-poison-mystery-baffles-experts/ <comment><USER2> Article is only the speculation of people who have no personal knowledge of the attack, mixed in with random sensation from history. No useful information on the case.

</comment><comment><USER3> >>rubbing something in his face

Isn't this the premise of the Interview? Didn't know that kind of thing was possible.</comment>