How the US government bailed out the railroads…and made a profit - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0903.longman.html

<comment><USER2> _And while railroads had begun to lose their luster, they were still carrying more tonnage than ever before in their history_

The railroads had business at their door but were unable to run an efficient operation. By contrast, the auto industry has seen demand drop from 15M cars/year to under 10.

Also, the railroads were tied down to losing operations by government regulation. The auto industry doesn't have this problem yet, but mandatory CAFE regulations could have a similar effect.

The government can help auto industries by lending them money as a debtor in possession for a bankruptcy. If GM entered bankruptcy without government backing, no one would lend them money to restructure further and they would be forced to liquidate.

I am from Detroit and have seen how the UAW and the Big Three single-handedly created the middle class. But having worked in the Rouge Plant for a summer, I agree that people don't deserve to be middle-class for unskilled labor. The only way to break this view may be a bankruptcy.

<comment><USER3> Even when demand was high, GM was unable to run a profitable business. Same can be said for Chrysler and to a much lesser extent Ford.

The economy tanking was more or less the straw that broke GM's back completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Counterpoint:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373740>

I think there is a lot to be said for both sides. The one thing we don't want is a situation where we keep giving money to management that is unable or unwilling to become profitable. Nationalization and bankruptcy are both proven options, but the sort of bailout currently in mode is not.

</comment><comment><USER5> great article, made some very good points about the efficiencies of railroads vs. trucks.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg is Person of the Year? Where's the "dislike" button? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-is-time-magazines-person-of-the-year-wheres-the-dislike-button <comment><USER2> It seems that we're skirting the elephant in the room here - the POTY issue of Time is a huge deal for them. There's tremendous amounts of ad revenue associated with it and there's a lot of pressure on them to put together an issue people want to read.

Yes, Assange made a distinct impact on the news and world events this year, but his face has been all over for this reason and that for weeks, and I think people are kind of sick of it. On top of that, he's hardly what one would call _media friendly._

Facebook may seem like old news to us but, IIRC, it was this year that they crossed the 500M user mark. That's a pretty big deal. It sucks up 700 billion man-minutes a month, and that's only getting more out of control.

In hopes of avoiding a rant, let's just say this: if you had to write a major, year-defining (culturally, and for your publication) profile of someone, would you do it about the media figure with a hit movie "about" his life or the guy who has a tendency to walk out on interviews when he doesn't like a question?

<comment><USER3> I haven't known Assange to walk out. In fact, I'm listening to an interview between Assange and a BBC interviewer right now that basically constitutes hostile badgering and an utterly inappropriate line of questioning, including repetitive "How many women have you slept with?!?! Are you a sexual predator?!?!" questions, and Assange is taking it rather gracefully. I would have stopped the interview much earlier on if I had been asked the same questions in the same way. The interviewer interrupts Assange's answers and otherwise behaves himself badly, apart from the wholly inappropriate questioning.

Interview here: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9308000/9308216....](http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9308000/9308216.stm)

<comment><USER2> ABC: <http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=087_1292630413> CNN: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/23/julian-assange- walk...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/23/julian-assange-walks-out- _n_772837.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for those links. I think he acted quite appropriately in both situations. He gave the CNN interviewer repeated warning and clearly did not want to walk, but felt obliged after she persisted, for the fourth or fifth time, in asking the same question.

The ABC interviewer received no such warning, but one can hardly blame that; when an interviewer starts leading into prurient detail about alleged rape like "allegation that you forcibly spread her legs", Assange's reaction of an immediate walk is appropriate, even if the interviewer is oblivious to the impropriety of the question.

<comment><USER2> I didn't ever mean to suggest that his actions were inappropriate - if you are the target of what appears to be a smear campaign, it makes sense to simply excuse yourself from this kind of confrontation.

That being said, if you were charged with creating a portrait of the man, I can understand some hesitation.

Which brings me to another point. Though Assange is clearly both newsworthy and influential, looking at the news leaves one with the sensation that his story is far from being played out. The narrative for Zuckerberg is pretty much resolved at this point. History will likely remember him more or less as he appeared in _The Social Network,_ regardless of its accuracy. Assange's life and career, on the other hand, would necessarily leave off right before the exciting part, by virtue of it not having happened yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the FSF is off here. Time's _Person of the Year_ was never about positive or negative influences, just influences. To prove my point, former honorees include Deng Xaioping, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. Honoring Zuckerberg as POTY only indicates that they see him as the single most influential person of 2010 with regards to world events.

<comment><USER5> Even under that criteria, though, I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice.

Most of the stuff FaceBook did to change the world happened around 2007. Heck, the fact that the movie's coming out _now_ indicates that the important stuff happened long ago.

<comment><USER6> "I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice."

I have to wonder - Assange has only received _serious_ press attention for the last few weeks. Isn't this just a case of him being more fresh in our minds?

Asked another way, looking back 3 years from now, who will most people has made a bigger impact on the world?

<comment><USER7> If all goes accordingly, definitely Wikileaks. Imagine a world a fea years from now where every single country, and perhaps even cities have their own wikileaks site to keep politicians honest without doing bad things behind people's backs.

I'd definitely say that will have a much bigger impact. Besides what has Zuckerbeg doen this year that he hasn't done a year before?

<comment><USER8> You've _always_ been able to leak stuff that matters to the media.

Wikileaks's main innovation is publishing leaks of stuff that don't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand that the people involved with advocacy organizations like the FSF, ACLU, and NRA are going to be unusually passionate about the respective issues. But articles like this make me hesitant to support the organization.

Paraphrased: "This individual/company/group is the root of all evil and is against every thing this organization fights for. You should boycott everything they do and cover your personal space with warnings about them. Tell all your friends."

Rather than doing this, I wish advocacy organizations like the FSF would take (and project) a measured response. ("Facebook in useful to a huge number of people, but we are very concerned that they are using their market clout to seriously infringe on the privacy of their users. To improve, Facebook should...")

<comment><USER10> I agree with you about being hesitant to support FSF. I think that they should primary working on providing free software alternatives to closed software, not to fight closed software or promote dislike towards them.

<comment><USER9> Definitely, but I also think that one of their most important roles is policy advocacy. Most voters aren't technologically educated, so there are few lobbying counterweights to the tech industry, which will naturally lead to entrenchment of the industry incumbents at the expense of privacy and freedom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I suspect one really good choice would have been Steve Jobs. 2010 was the year that tablets really took off. 2010 was also the year Apple's market capital exceeded Microsoft's. Perhaps next year, if Apple crosses Exxon Mobil's market cap?

(I realize market cap isn't a great metric in itself, but bringing Apple out of the 90s slump to where it is today, is a feat in itself. Becoming part of our culture and daily life, is quite another.)

</comment><comment><USER6> IMO, this is a terribly-written piece, giving a very false impression of reality.

"Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other"

Nope - it just hurts our ability to connect _privately_. Not the same thing.

"The fact that Facebook's code is hidden from view means that its users are not connecting directly with each other. They are speaking to Mr. Zuckerberg [...]"

What does Facebook being open-source or not have anything to do with it? Does Word being closed-source mean that everything I write in Word is really a communication to Microsoft?

Even worse, that sentence leads to this:

"witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss."

I'm assuming this is about Facebook blocking links to Lamebook. According to Tech Crunch, this went on for only a few hours. It was probably a bug/mistake - I can imagine the same thing happening from Gmail or any other mail provider. TC article: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/>

<comment> loup-vaillant The lack of privacy do hurt our ability to freely connect, if only because of self censure. Surely you wouldn't tell the same things to your loved one if you were in public?

Facebook code being unknown let Zuckerberg be the man in the middle of every Facebook based communications. Facebook could log everything, for all we know. The sentence is accurate.

Censorship is a rather minor issue. It's ineffective because there are other channels, and it's risky because people are loud about that. I mostly worry about Spying, which is way less risky, way more effective, and way more dangerous.

<comment><USER12> You can only claim that Facebook hurts our ability to connect freely if that ability is less in the presence of Facebook than in its absence. I don't see how this is the case. Facebook provides new, less free ways to communicate, but these do not destroy the old ways. You're right that you wouldn't tell the same things to your loved one if you were in public, but that is why those conversations will remain in private.

<comment> loup-vaillant > […] _but these do not destroy the old ways._

Actually they do, indirectly. It's part of a nasty feedback cycle: the progressive centralization of the internet. The internet is supposed to have no centre. Centralizing it effectively mean shutting it down, and get back to something like AOL.

The feedback cycle itself is quite simple. First, people start not to use the whole internet. Like, they don't send e-mail (they ask their mail provider to do it for them), they don't host a web site, etc. Second, ISPs start to restrict their customers: they filter the SMTP port, they offer an asymmetric bandwidth, and some don't even give you a public IP! They get away with all those restrictions because too few people felt them in the first place. That leads to situations that would be unfathomable otherwise, like MegaUpload replacing Peer to peer for file sharing.

The ultimate conclusion of this trend is a connected world divided in 2 categories: (Big) companies, which will have full internet connexions, and the regular folk, which will have nothing but the outgoing HTTP port open. Which means that to do _anything_ , a user will have to find some central hub first, and go through that. Facebook is one of those hubs. Facebook is part of this trend.

With a quality network, some services wouldn't have any reason to exist at all: Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, MSN, MegaUpload… Give everyone a symmetric bandwith with all ports open and a Freedom Box, and those services are all toast. Give everyone a convenient, secured, asymmetric, pseudo internet connexion, and our _freedoms_ are toast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This Person of the Year thing is like Obama's Nobel Prize on a lesser scale. An organization with a fairly high level of public respect bestows an award/recognition that is unmerited and reeks of political bias. This causes many to question the organization's integrity, which upon further investigation never existed in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://a904guy.com/dislike?url=http://www.fsf.org/facebook/m...](http://a904guy.com/dislike?url=http://www.fsf.org/facebook/mark- zuckerberg-is-time-magazines-person-of-the-year-wheres-the-dislike-button)

<comment><USER15> That is one disturbing site, though it tries to make its point on how much it dislikes the article :)

<comment><USER14> The product of a bored afternoon... The article seemed like a prime target for its usage :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Close, but they failed to discuss the real problem with Facebook. Privacy is less than a nonissue. The real problem is that it is a black hole: anything more than 2 weeks old is basically irretrievable ('download your information' includes only wall posts, not comments). They also failed to mention why Facebook is successful: something like it is practically required for most women to communicate over the internet.

<comment><USER17> "something like [Facebook] is practically required for most women to communicate over the internet."

Can you please elaborate? I honestly don't know what you mean.

Do you mean that women prefer to communicate in this particular medium?

<comment><USER16> From the '80s until today, BBSs, the usenet, mailing lists, and other online interest groups have been overwhelmingly male. Myspace was the first large forum to achieve a high female/male ratio. The key ingredients seem to be: 1\. photographs to identify correspondents (rather than addresses) 2\. reciprocal relationships - women don't want anybody to be able to contact them 3\. many:many conversations (such wall posts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wish the Free Software Foundation would only focus on Free Software. I don't like Facebook, but I'd prefer that my donation money be spent on paying someone to work on Emacs rather than making "Dislike" buttons.

Facebook is harmful, but people don't care about being harmed or losing their freedom. Educating them is just a waste of money.

<comment> loup-vaillant One year ago, I used Gmail. So, even if you used free software and hosted your mail server at home, writing an e-mail allowed Big Google to watch you. Facebook is similar, though easier to avoid.

Now I host my mail server on a virtual machine on a small hosting provider that I somewhat trust. I'll host it myself soon (I've just received my new Sheeva Plug). So, if you write to me now, your privacy will be enhanced compared to one year ago. So, _me_ quitting Gmail could be a direct improvement to _your_ privacy.

And that's partly thanks to the FSF's advocacy.

<comment><USER18> I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a "don't let big corporations spy on you" foundation... I'm just saying that it hurts the Free Software message when all the Free Software Foundation talks about is why everything is bad except gNewSense.

I will just mentally pretend that the FSF is just GNU, then I am happy :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> According to the popular vote Mark is ranked #10 where as Julian Assange is ranked #1: [http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2028734_2029036_2029037,00.html)

Even if it wasn't Julian Assange... any of the other individuals in the top 10 list except for Mark Zuckerberg would of made a much better "Person of the Year."

<comment><USER8> I think we're all well aware that internet votes are not a particularly good way of deciding anything. This is why Hank, The Angry Drunken Dwarf was not in fact selected as Who Weekly's most beautiful person in... whatever year that was.

Seriously though, you reckon Lady Gaga and the Chilean Miners are more man-of- the-year material than Zuckerberg? One is a random pop star, the other is a feel-good story which nobody will remember in 2012.

It's true that Zuckerberg's impact may have been more in 2008 or 2009 than 2010, but since he wasn't honoured in either of those years I think he's a fair choice this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One can put together a very fair rogue's gallery from Time Magazine's persons of the year. For the top dozen or so, Mark Zuckerberg is not fit to unlace their jackboots.

</comment><comment><USER21> There were so many other stories this year bigger than both Facebook and Wikileaks.

What about the engineers who stopped the BP oil well? (Or it could negative about the engineers that screwed up the BP oil well?

Or Healthcare Reform? I know Republicans love to hate her but can anyone deny Nancy Pelosi's impact on passing that law? It will have the biggest long term effect on American's lives of anything that happened this year.

<comment><USER8> Unless it gets repealed circa 2012, which is what I'm betting on. (Or if not a full repeal, a major dismantling of large sections.)

<comment><USER22> Remember the massive uphill process, complete with 60-40 supermajorities in the Senate, horse trading, and earmarks that was needed to get health care reform passed? Any repeal would have the exact same uphill struggle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If FSF is right and Mark really "set a terrible precedent for our future", then something like that is exactly what makes a candidate for a "Time's Person of the Year". They basically admit that the choice was reasonable.

If we are talking about disliking something, what I dislike about FSF is their arrogance showed by criticizing various software creations, without being able to create worthwhile alternative.

<comment> loup-vaillant While the choice itself is reasonable by that standard, I doubt Times did it to criticize Zuckerberg. Most likely, they praise him.

One of the core principles of the FSF is that proprietary software is worthless regardless of its other merits. And they do work on alternatives. It's just more expensive and less visible than advocacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As usual, Wondermark said it best: <http://wondermark.com/368/>

</comment><comment><USER24> I think we're starting to need a "dislike" button for HN submissions. How does this get to #1? Time is a private publication. If you don't like its choices, don't read it. If you have to vent about it, you'll find a lot of friends in Reddit.

<comment><USER25> There's a certain irony in what you just wrote.

<comment><USER24> I don't think so - in HN we create the content. If Time editors have a discussion about the magazine's choice for Man of the Year, it's different then when readers do. (BTW how many commenters here actually read Time?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Would FSF _really_ use a "dislike" button if it were available?

</comment><comment><USER27> Not sure why inventing the electronic equivalent of crack cocaine is a good reason to become POTY.. Assange is no doubt more important and would have been the best choice.

</comment><comment><USER28> If nothing else the FSF is persistent. I think it's hard with social, social to be useful generally has to be all inclusive, so for a more complicated free version of social to take off everyone would have to be a lot more into programming and tech.

I think there will always be a small set of companies at the center of social, is Facebook a good gatekeeper? Questionable, we could have a lot worse though.

</comment><comment><USER29> Facebook is popular. So what? Internet porn is also very popular and changed the way many people live their lives. People use Facebook primarily to upload pictures of themselves drunk at some party and leave trivial comments on their friends' pages. How exactly is this a worthwhile contribution to society?

</comment><comment><USER30> I support the FSF's overall philosophy, and they raise important privacy issues here, but the "control over our data" part is dated. Things improved a lot this year. I think the FriendFeed acquisition had a lot of influence. Thanks, Bret Taylor et al!

<comment> loup-vaillant Last time I checked, Facebook stills stores your data on their own data centres, unencrypted (or at least they have the keys). You still have zero control over that data.

By the way, the same goes for web based e-mail.

<comment><USER31> What kind of control over the data on Facebook's servers do you need? If they rsync some of your photos from one place to another in their data centers do they need to drop you a note?

Keep in mind that you can always export all the data on your Facebook profile as a .zip file on demand. It's your data at the end of the day.

<comment><USER17> Honest question: does that really include all of your data? All the messages, comments, friends, any friend ID or contact info (email addresses, IM names, phone numbers, addresses, etc.)?

In other words, is it enough data that you can just export and jump ship to another social network without much interruption (assuming some reasonable transformation effort for the data)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Someone should give the PR Team at Facebook a big fat bonus for making this happen for 2010.

</comment><comment><USER33> Do we really care about who is person of the year?

<comment><USER8> The inevitable debate of someone-else-should-have-been-Man-Of-The-Year is part of the December news cycle.

I doubt Time will ever pick anyone that nobody complains about, and if they ever did then they'd probably be disappointed to find that their circulation was way down.

I think Zuckerberg is about as good a pick as any. If it were Assange then I'd accuse Time of recentism, since hardly anyone even know who he was back in June, and we may mostly have forgotten by next June.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Time's Man of the year no longer matters. Clearly it should've been Assange.

</comment><comment><USER35> Bradley Manning? Or do they have to wait until he goes mad in solitary?

</comment><comment><USER36> Where's the FSF dislike button?

</comment><comment><USER37> So does Zuckerberg have to give 200 million in "facebook stock" to Detroit schools to win the award next year?

</comment><comment><USER15> Not that I like or hate zuckerberg or face book, but just a point to think upong I wonder why it wants to use the facebook - analogy of (dis)Like on the facebook founder itself. If it wants to downrate the article, why didn't it use some other means to do it ? The image itself shows the impact of facebook.

</comment><comment><USER38> Perhaps in the past Time might have been a reputable news organization, but its just part of the corporate oligarchy now. Of course they awarded it to one of their biggest link feeds. Hell they probably negotiated some kind of kick- back.</comment>


Steady-state economics - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/is-gdp-the-right-way-to-measure-progress-one-economist-says-no/article10242590/

<comment><AUTHOR> _But the problem is that if there's an oil spill off the coast of Mexico or the U.S., this also contributes to GDP. If we have more crime in society and pay to deal with it, this contributes to GDP. If we have more war, it contributes to GDP. Our main indicator of economic progress doesn't distinguish between beneficial economic activity and dysfunctional economic activity._

This is my favorite paragraph, because it is key to make people realize why GDP growth does not necessarily improve people's lives.</comment>


White House: Share Your Thoughts on Strong Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/webform/share-your-thoughts-onstrong-encryption <comment><USER2> Here's what I wrote:

Expecting Americans to weaken encryption systems is analogous to mandating that all physical locks succumb to any copy of a government master key. This certainly violates the spirit of the fourth amendment--especially when you consider that the amendment explicitly guarantees the privacy of citizen's "papers, and effects".

Such a mandate would also be counter-productive in terms of reducing non- governmental intrusion. Building by-pass mechanisms into these systems inherently provides additional avenues for circumventing them. Returning to the master key analogy, if a copy of the master key was leaked into the public, the locks on every home, car and business in the entire country would have to be replaced or otherwise be rendered useless. Similarly, if, after significant research and experimentation a criminal or foreign organization was able to derive or otherwise reproduce the master key, no lock in the country could impede them.

The arguments of the few who oppose access to strong encryption as a human right imply that they consider it to be a weapon. If that's the case, then it's a right recognized by the second amendment.

Then again, while the pen may be mightier than the sword, communication is not truly a weapon. Sticks and stones can break bones but words and information are ultimately unable to cause direct physical harm.

The willingness of some men to overstep their rights and engage in violence is why we are called to count the cost of eternal vigilance and not give up our liberties for a little temporary security. This is government's raison d'etre: to protect us from the sticks and stones _while_ upholding our inalienable rights to free speech and voluntary association--rights which also clearly encompass access to encryption.</comment>


Tesla extends 'bug bounty' to energy products, increases payout by 50% - <AUTHOR> https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-bug-bounty-energy-products-increases-payout-50-percent/ <comment><USER2> > will not void your warranty for security research *

That's incredible!</comment>


Caml Trading – Experiences with OCaml on Wall Street [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/jane-street-caml-ocaml <comment><USER3> Quick question for the ocaml crowd: what keeps you with ocaml when you have a very similar and more easily parallelized f# available? I ask as an outsider to both, but a fan of ML-ish languages in general. Would Jane Street ever be open to using F# or Haskell or Rust or Scala?

<comment><USER4> OCaml is not my primary programming language, but I have been looking at it among many other options including all of the ones you mentioned.

The module system of OCaml is very powerful, and a similar module system is not present in F#, or anything else besides some variants of StandardML as far as I know. I was able to accomplish many things using Functors that I have not been able to accomplish in any other languages.

Here's a link to one of my previous comments regarding some of OCaml's compelling or unique features: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861033)

At the time of writing that, there were a couple of reasons why you still might consider Haskell instead of OCaml (assuming you were willing to accept complete purity and were willing to adapt to lazy evaluation). Those two primary reasons were type classes and a multi-core runtime (where immutability would really shine). I don't know much about Haskell, but this is what I've heard from other well informed people. I'm sure there's many other great reasons to use Haskell over OCaml, but these were the main ones from what I could tell.

But since then, it looks like there's been great progress on an OCaml multi- core runtime, and also something very similar to type classes (module implicits). We'll have to see how those develop but it's definitely exciting.

Also since then, Jeffrey Scofield has accomplished a lot to get OCaml working on modern iOS systems so you can build native iOS apps with OCaml: [http://psellos.com/ocaml/compile-to- iphone.html](http://psellos.com/ocaml/compile-to-iphone.html)

I've been building a small project in OCaml for a while now, and my experience hasn't left me wanting any core language feature that some other language has, aside from possibly a multi-core runtime (I haven't actually needed it yet, but I will soon). Most of the things I wish were different are very superficial syntactic gripes - but OCaml supports _arbitrary_ syntax via ppx extensions so I can just stop complaining and build the syntax I want to program in. (Haskell-inspired syntax? Swift-inspired syntax?).

The only other feature I'd like to see is a unification of the object system and record system: You could describe that as "row polymorphism" built into records (complete with pattern matching). No other major contenders support this, so it doesn't effect my language decision, yet it would be a welcomed feature.

<comment><USER5> > The module system of OCaml is very powerful, and a similar module system is > not present in F#, or anything else besides some variants of StandardML as > far as I know.

Scala's module system is very similar to ML's.

        Object        ≅ Structure
        Class         ≅ Functor
        Trait         ≅ Signature
        Abstract Type ≅ Abstract Type
        Refinement    ≅ Sharing Constraint

<comment><USER6> This is roughly correct, but see Andreas Rossberg's caveats here[1] for some considerations that may be important depending on what you're trying to do.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/a/23019436/82959](http://stackoverflow.com/a/23019436/82959)

<comment><USER4> Great point. And many of these distinguishing features mentioned in that post are the ones that I used in order to accomplish some very powerful abstractions that I couldn't have done in any other language that I've tried. (Functors operating on types _and_ values).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. I was very close to going all-in with OCaml a few years back when I made the switch to FP. I still love their module system -- and am very disappointed to see F# leaving its roots and becoming just another .NET language (which has it's good parts and bad parts)

What swayed me at the time was the fact that you had to roll your own libraries for so many things that you get out of the box with .NET. I understand that's changing, but in my mind it's just not ready yet. Maybe in a year or two. I'm still thinking of moving on to something else. It's either going to be OCaml or Haskell.

Would love to see some folks doing this same kind of thing with F#, talking about real-world production systems.

I've done some small app work with it, and blogged about it ( [http://tiny- giant-books.com/blog/real-world-f-programming-pa...](http://tiny-giant- books.com/blog/real-world-f-programming-part-1-structuring-your-solution/) ), but what the F# community could use is some fans like OCaml has with Jane Street.

<comment><USER8> Out of interest, what were some of the major things you found missing from the OCaml library ecosystem?

<comment><USER7> Remember, it was 4-5 years ago, and OPAM didn't exist.

I remember thinking, "Wouldn't it be neat to scrape some web sites?" I couldn't find anything in OCaml, but .NET had the HtmlAgilityPack written in C# for Windows. Pop over to github, pull down the source, recompile? Badda bing, badda boom, it's running in Linux. And I'm able to use it in F# without really having to know C# (Even though that's not the case). I realized that I could do that for literally thousands of different apps and utilities. So you had this entire ecosystem of programmers making open source stuff for windows that you could easily use in linux. That was the deal-closer.

Plus it looked like Mono had finished going through it's almost-ready-but-not- quite stage. I would still love to be able to permanently load .NET apps in Apache and call them a la fastCGI, but heck, even that might be a solved problem by now.

Finally there was the F# community, which was basically a bunch of old OO MS hacks like myself trying to find their way along mixed in with some really nice academic types who were helpful. OCaml, sadly, did not have that kind of feel. Instead there was a lot of French. And searching around the web for answers to how to do really simple things, like get started, write a web app, or cross-system develop.

The barrier to entry was just too high.

But, like I said, that's changing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> He also persuaded the traders to use emacs.

</comment><comment><USER10> I couldn't get the video or presentation to play, even in Chrome with Flash enabled, without using a mobile user agent. And you can't download the audio or slides without an account. Great web design.

[http://d1snlc0orfrhj.cloudfront.net/presentations/14-jun- cam...](http://d1snlc0orfrhj.cloudfront.net/presentations/14-jun- camltrading-2.mp4)

<comment><USER11> Works for me. Have you tried in p0rn mode?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My girlfriend found a jane street promo t-shirt in an Ithaca thrift shop - <USER2> has a nice starry sky pattern and reads something like "A more elegant language for a more civilized age". I'm enamored with the shirt! I don't know much about performant FP financial wizardry but appreciate their design dept.

[https://www.janestreet.com/blog/what-we- do/faqs/](https://www.janestreet.com/blog/what-we-do/faqs/) <-404's for me

<comment><USER13> Wow I would love a Jane Street shirt

<comment><USER12> I know, right? It's one of those companies that depresses me because I think I'd love working there but I don't consider myself a genius

<comment><USER14> I don't believe you need to be a genius. Just willing to move to New York. Give it a whack. How much can it hurt?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple note-taking and blogging platform - <AUTHOR> https://notepin.co <comment><USER2> I like the UI. Wish it supported markdown, but I'm not really a blogger/writer so my opinion prob doesn't matter :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful UI! I created a post in a few seconds, how does it stop someone else from editing that post?

</comment><comment><USER4> Not bad. I like some things, don't like others, but this is not important. What is important (beware, pessimistic comments):

1\. Too slow. Too many server-side steps with slow page reload for an app that should be simple. Perhaps you should do more on the client without reloading, or get a better server code. Write it in a compiled/faster language.

2\. I don't believe the world needs another note-taking app.

<comment><USER5> If we had to stop doing something every single time someone thought the world didn't need it, we wouldn't be doing much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very clean! If you don't mind sharing, what's the tech stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The product was built in PHP with a lot of JS/jQuery for the frontend :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Hello, HN!"[0] parked ;-P

> Notebook already exists!

P.S.: I'm so sad, because "WTF"[0] and "TL;DR:"[1] notebooks already exists... :-(

P.P.S.: "Hello, HN!" just archived[3]

P.P.P.S.: Okay[4]

[0] [https://notepin.co/hello-hn/](https://notepin.co/hello-hn/)

[1] [https://notepin.co/WTF](https://notepin.co/WTF)

[2] [https://notepin.co/TL;DR](https://notepin.co/TL;DR):

[3] [http://web.archive.org/web/20180331011401/https://notepin.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180331011401/https://notepin.co/hello- hn/)

[4] [https://notepin.co/app4soft/](https://notepin.co/app4soft/)</comment>


Meteor Raises $11.2M from Andreessen Horowitz - <AUTHOR> http://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/07/25/meteors-new-112-million-development-budget <comment><USER2> _No matter what else happens in the world, the core team will be able to focus entirely on Meteor for several years, without taking on consulting work or trying to create some other application on top of Meteor to sell_

Does that raise any red flags for anybody?

Do development frameworks built for their own sake ever really work in the wild?

I think of successful ways to build web apps, and the names that spring to mind are rails, django, php, etc. that evolved by developers who were using them to build stuff. In some cases (rails, django especially), they were the side product of a single application.

I think of overarchitected nightmares such as Fusebox and some of the magic frameworks that would be Meteor's competition, and they tend to share the quality of having been built as the Ultimate Solution to Everybody's problem (with the conspicuous exception of the developers themselves, who aren't actually dogfooding it for anything).

To be clear, I'm impressed by Meteor and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. But it makes me a bit uncomfortable to see a declaration like "we're _definitely_ not going to try building anything with it!" tacked onto their funding announcement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. We do use Meteor. Our own site has always run on Meteor, and we build other tools and personal projects with it. Dogfood is good -- we now have an experimental version of server side rendering in Meteor because we had the pressure to get www.meteor.com into Google's index.

It's not a bad strategy to build the framework alongside a product. But shipping real product is a huge commitment. We spent weeks just getting all the pieces in place for the first Meteor release in April: text, design, docs, a screencast, release engineering, community outreach. For now, we think we can move faster and build a better framework if that's our only _product_ focus, instead of trying to ship two great things at the same time.

<comment><USER3> It would probably be valuable to use some amount of that $11m to fund development of interesting applications/startups that showcase Meteor in the real world. For instance, you notice something interesting a community member is building on their own time, but you don't want to focus on it. In my experience close partnerships can work as well as dogfooding, as long as you trust the source and can make the right decisions based on the feedback.

<comment><USER4> I think that's a great idea. The ability to do creative things like this is the "silver lining" of having so much money in the bank (which, as I mentioned above, is something I generally consider a risk, or at best a hedge.)

I'd love to hear your ideas about how this could work, and when we should start doing it (it's probably way too early?) either here or on meteor-talk.

<comment><USER3> This will definitely require more than the two minutes of thought I put into this post, but. . . Large companies like Adobe, Microsoft, etc, often sponsor projects that will serve as good marketing for whatever initiative they're trying to push. Something similar could work once you see projects out there. In the spirit of openness you could setup and initially fund a non profit similar to Apache Software Foundation with a board that decides where the money goes. Doing something like Google's Summer of Code might spur some interesting projects. Or maybe even set aside the cash and do some sort of community voting contest thing. Like: "Build something awesome and win up to X in no-strings-attached cash, voted on by the internet." Put in caveats like it has to become a full time project, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I will take Meteor seriously when it is acknowledged and supported by the existing node.js community and the leadership. There is a large group of module authors who are cranking out beautiful, useful modules for both the browser and server at 1000x the rate of a normal human being. I am not going to list names here but check github or npm repository, etc. It is this team that makes node.js special, not simply 'javascript on the server'. If Meteor can gain support from this _established_ community I will start taking it more seriously.

Why not use the 11M in funding to hire one of these node.js leaders full-time? Outside of Meteor, what contributions has the Meteor team made to node.js and the ecosystem of modules? The founding team has no presence in the development community and yet their technology stack is built on top of it. I need to see that people I trust in the node.js community are driving and influencing the direction Meteor is headed. In fact, its almost a warning sign if Meteor can't staff any of the node.js leadership full-time as they certainly have the cash to do so. I will be watching who they are hire next very closely.

The lack of node.js leadership in their organization is already evident in the product decisions they are making which wouldn't stand a chance if they had a true representative of the node.js community on their team. A glaring example is the decision to build their own package management solution instead of adopting npm or working with npm to drive it forward if its missing useful features. Meteor is leveraging the output of the node.js ecosystem yet not recognizing its existence in their own product. They seem to be segregating themselves.

<comment><USER6> Bingo.

It has been uniformly dismissed/ignored by the larger node.js community. Take from that what you will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> At Throne of JS last weekend, Meteor stole the show in my opinion. The other frameworks (Backbone, Ember, Angular, etc) were about how to build rich JavaScript web apps on top of current backend technology, whereas Meteor is envisioning something new.

I'm not sure I want to write JavaScript everywhere but what they are able to demonstrate was super cool.

<comment><USER8> If anybody else is curious about said talk, here are the slides: [https://speakerdeck.com/u/ericf/p/advocatus-diaboli- throne-o...](https://speakerdeck.com/u/ericf/p/advocatus-diaboli-throne-of-js)

if there will be a video, i'd be interested in that

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> First Github, then Meteor. As Peter Levine pointed out in his blog (<http://peter.a16z.com/2012/07/25/meteor-magic/>) Andreessen Horowitz is making strides towards "help[ing] developers build the next generation of applications."

Are there any other VC firms that have had such a stong foothold on the foundation of application development?

</comment><comment><USER10> $11m (implying a valuation of of over $20mm) is a lot of money. (Although in a world of $7 rent, $150k developers, etc, it isn't as much as you'd think).

However, Meteor looks like it has some chance of being a huge platform, maybe the next big one. Even if it just dominates a niche, that is more than enough to justify the investment. A bigger series a reduces risk for the company, and a lot of the other interesting hard tech companies out there raise that amount of funding early (eg Bromium).

Red Hat does a pretty good job of demonstrating how open source companies can make a lot of money.

</comment><comment><USER11> Some naivety being thrown around in this thread:

Andressen Horowitz doesn't need to see a direct return from meteor. If they think that the _existence_ of meteor is a good thing for their other investments, then the indirect return they see from those projects is a good thing.

<comment><USER4> Interesting point, but if that is their thinking, they didn't share it with me :)

As far as I know, they're looking the billions of dollars a year that IBM makes on WebSphere and thinking, "all of this spending on middleware and applications servers, where is it going to go in the future, if the future is client-side JavaScript, native mobile apps, and other things that fetch data over the wire and render it locally?"

They're hoping that in the fullness of time, many corporations will build important apps on Meteor, and that when those apps go to production we'll get a slice of their operations budget. It's the same model as the relational database.

<comment><USER12> That's not our thinking :-).

I'd say our thinking is threefold:

* Meteor needs to exist. There needs to be a great way to build modern, dynamic client-server web apps. Meteor is a real breakthrough and deserves to be fully built out and supported.

* As Geoff notes, the market is actually very large. Much like we think Github can eat a lot of the market for source code control systems and developer tools (a multi-billion-dollar market today -- IBM/Rational etc.), Meteor at scale should be able to be a great business on top of a great technical and open source phenomenon.

* There's a lot of historical resonance for me personally -- I was the guy who kick-started the Javascript project at Netscape 17 years ago (originally called Livescript) -- the goal then was a single scripting language and framework on web client and server. Client worked great, server not so much. (Java was the opposite -- server worked great, client not so much.) Given that Javascript has become the most widely used programming language in history, I think the original idea deserves to be fully implemented, and Meteor is what we should have built back then had we known everything that we know today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been leaning towards DerbyJS because pages are also rendered in html (SEO, no-js)and it uses npm instead of making it's own repository... [http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take-on-derby-vs- mete...](http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take-on-derby-vs-meteor/)

But Meteor has the advantage now, looking forward to what they do with it. Congrats to them!

<comment><USER14> These two frameworks are _so_ similar, and _so_ close in developmental progress. Derby follows more closely the spirit of Node. Meteor's upper hand is its press/following/critical mass, Derby's its architecture and authors. There's some good discussion going on here [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/derbyjs/A...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/derbyjs/AMJ- FaYnMjI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congrats. Could someone please explain the business model of such open source based startups in general?

<comment><USER11> The business model is:

"Get acquired by somebody with a lot of money that wants to use your tech in their other projects"

which is exactly what happened.

<comment><USER4> By raising this amount of money, we've (semi-deliberately) closed the door on any possibility of an acquihire. The valuation is too high for the VCs to agree to that outcome, and one of the privileges of Series A shares is the ability to veto acquisitions.

So we have two choices: (1) build Meteor into a great development platform, get a lot of people to build apps on it, and find something that we can sell to the operations department of big companies that are using it (I wrote a bit about this in other comments), or (2) fail.

<comment><USER11> I think that AH just wants your tech. to exist. This is the same as any other company investing in OSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love the idea of Meteor and want to use it on some projects, the only thing I don't like is how language-centric it is on the back-end. node.js is okay, I'm not _completely_ adverse to coding server stuff in JavaScript, but I'd prefer having a choice of languages, for instance most of my server-side code is in Python. I wonder how friendly its architecture would be to supporting multiple language back-ends eventually.

<comment><USER4> The architecture is designed specifically to support your choice of backends. The Meteor client and the Meteor server speak a simple JSON-based protocol called DDP. A Meteor client can talk to any server that can speak DDP. A Meteor server can talk to any client that can speak DDP. In fact, clients can connect to multiple servers by calling Meteor.connect() to open additional connections.

We already have a demonstration DDP client that is written in Python :)

My prediction is that in the future, you'll often see a breakdown where the user interface team works in JavaScript, and some of their code runs on the client, and some on the server. Other teams will build backend services in whatever language is best for the job, and they'll talk to the JavaScript written by the UI team (sometimes interfacing directly on the client, and sometimes, for example when multiple services are integrated, going through some JS code on the server.)

That's just a guess though.

<comment><USER16> Sounds great! Thanks for that info, now I know what to look for in the docs :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If they can make Meteor as accessible as PHP, they have a great chance of success. It's definitely heading in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps a naive question, but how does AH envision getting its $11M+ back and in what time frame?

<comment><USER4> What they're dreaming of is: lots of big companies write their vital business apps on top of Meteor. They spend billions of dollars on middleware and application servers that helps them deploy, monitor, and control these apps across their 100 divisions and 5 data centers, similar to the billions of dollars they've spent in the past on Oracle, WebSphere, Tuxedo, Tibco, etc. Meteor does an IPO.

Failing that, they're hoping that we can replicate the success of JBoss ($420M to Red Hat), XenSource ($500M to Citrix), or SpringSource ($420M to VMware), all of which took open source software and sold it to the enterprise, and each of which did it under the direction of one of Meteor's new advisors (David Skok, Peter Levine, and Rod Johnson respectively.)

As for time frame, they are patient and expect it to take a long time. They know that it takes years for a platform to be adopted.

<comment><USER18> Thank you. Couldn't hope for a better reply.

(edit) I am honestly surprised to see a VC invest into (what amounts to) a fundamental technology. Though, given the valuation bubble we are in, it makes sense. VCs now have a choice between continuing to speculate by funding upload widget startups ($2-3M a pop, two years of runway) and putting money into the core tech. Fingers crossed, this becomes a trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really wonder the idea of putting $11M to a javascript framework.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow, congrats. Great work.

Anyone know if they are close to having proper auth in the client for DB work yet?

<comment><USER21> While it hasn't landed in the master branch yet, you can follow the progress of auth support in the auth branch: <https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/auth>

See also discussion in the meteor-core list: [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor- co...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor- core/g4Bsm3yFTe4) [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor- co...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor- core/PdwPNpMmlRU) and [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor- co...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor- core/-KHgLzb6xHo)

<comment><USER22> Thanks for sharing this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So far it seems like Meteor is focused on data syncing and live UI elements. That's neat when done well, but the main pain points for client-side heavy apps is the mismatch between the server and client and between the traditional URLs structure of web pages and the MVC structure of apps.

I'm looking for:

* Complete parity between server and client-side rendering for content. This is required both for first-page performance, caching, and SEO.

* URLs as the foundational organizing principle of the app. The mismatch between clicks, back buttons and external links makes code hard to organize and apps behave strangely without serious work.

* Database agnostic. Relational datastores remain incredibly productive and proven for the vast majority of apps.

<comment><USER4> IMO, this is dead on.

We group your first two requests together as a project called Routes, and it will be one of the big initiatives we take on once the authorization and account work is shipped to production.

As for your third request, we're been careful with this. Internally, Meteor is already database agnostic. For example, DDP, the Meteor wire protocol, is based on tables, and all of the code that performs latency compensation, etc, doesn't make any database assumptions. Mongo support is provided by a Smart Package that includes the client-side Mongo emulator and the server-side Mongo connector. Supporting SQL, Redis, Couch, etc, is a "simple matter of programming." We'll likely do Routes first since there's more technical risk there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> From my cursory review Meteor a few months ago, I got the sense that it could be a game-changer like Rails. However, by raising this money they're going a very different route than DHH and company.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.

</comment><comment><USER25> So, as I write Node.js and Socket.io based applications, lots of my code(on the server at least) focuses almost completely on protecting myself from bad data/malicious users. I know it works this way for almost any application, but how does Meteor handle this? I saw in the screencast someone opening their chrome console and touching the database directly. This seems like an absolute nightmare to protect! Currently, I only need to protect the individual web address that gets, puts, posts, etc. It's a single query with clear attack vectors that can be guarded against. How in the world do you protect a server and data using this framework?

<comment><USER26> My first reaction when I saw him opening the chrome console was the same, its going to be a nightmare to build and maintain secure apps with this thing.

<comment><USER27> I guess the theoretical plus side, security-wise, of pushing everything through one abstraction is the potential for simplifying security. Non-layered approaches like Meteor make me a bit queasy, though. Will be interesting when its auth mechanism undergoes community security review.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting idea.

I have questions about the following:

       > Database Everywhere. Use the same transparent API to
       > access your database from the client or the server.

Is this a good thing? I have been always under impression that separating data management and application logic is a good idea - basically a must. Meaning lets think about more complex way to look at the database (temporal, stream, event processing, etc.). How this can be then possible?

<comment><USER4> It's always a good idea to separate business logic from presentation logic. The idea in Meteor is that your business logic can run on either the client or the server as is appropriate in a given situation. For example, if you want to get the most recent 10 posts in the news feed, the exact same line of code works on both the client and server. Why have two APIs for this when you could have one? Of course the server still has to make sure that clients can't read or write to records they shouldn't (cf point 6, "Sensitive code runs in a privileged environment.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Congratulations! Talk at Throneofjs for Meteor was excellent, especially liked the

      meteor remove insecure

that was a great touch

</comment><comment><USER30> After their recent shocking Github investment and now Meteor, a16z are, IMHO, the most impressive VC firm in the US.

They have a very long-term vision, they put their money where their vision is, and that's the best thing founders can wish themselves when raising funds, may my investor will look as far as I and ever further.

Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER31> Why the NIH package system instead of npm? That's the main showstopper for me w.r.t investing time into meteor.

</comment><comment><USER32> What is their mobile native app story (if one has been announced)? -- I'm not sure how I'd integrate the meteor backend with a native client (can't use a phonegap-like sdk in my case).

</comment><comment><USER33> "we've arranged $11.2 million in funding for Meteor's continued development."

That's a nice arrangement. Do anyone know about other open-source web frameworks that have managed to get so much funding?

<comment><USER4> While I was fundraising, VCs told me that DHH could easily have raised a lot of money for Rails had he chosen to. I don't know for sure that that's true, but it certainly seems plausible given Meteor's experience.

Even though we chose a different path, I really admire what DHH did with Rails. We studied the original Rails screencast very carefully when were making the Meteor screencast.

<comment><USER33> Maybe. Good luck with Meteor. It's interesting to follow!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone know the planned business model on this one?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm surprised that people quickly adopt Meteor yet chastise PHP for enabling bad app developers, wouldn't Meteor do the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER36> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4052120>

</comment><comment><USER37> I expect to see some of this money used to purchase actual meteors: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/CANYON-DIABLO-IRON- METEORITE-140-gr-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/CANYON-DIABLO-IRON- METEORITE-140-gr-METEOR-CRATER-AZ-FORMER-UNM-MUSEUM-PIECE-/221080520933)

</comment><comment><USER38> Let's come back to this when Meteor is actually deployed in a real production environment handling 200 requests a second. Until then it seems like a lot of hot air.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well deserved! Congrats to the team.

</comment><comment><USER40> BUT CAN IT SHARE PICTURES???

</comment><comment><USER41> "$11.2 million is a lot of money. What it gives us is certainty. No matter what else happens in the world, the core team will be able to focus entirely on Meteor for several years"

Assuming you're not targeted with any software patent suits.</comment>


Show HN: I made a web scraper that you don't need to study for to use it - <AUTHOR> https://scraper.ai/#use-cases <comment><AUTHOR> We learned a lot when launching this, a lot of people were coming to us because the other scrapers out there are too complicated to use. They often require you to watch tons of videos to create these flows or set up functionality. Here we believe that UX is important and we want everything to be as intuïtive as possible</comment>


Universities and Economic Growth - <AUTHOR> http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth

<comment><USER2> Not really sure what to make of the article. Some anecdotal evidence of some book smart but not people smart interns. And attacking the very purpose of a university education. The author romanticizes the work office far too much. And while most people go to university to get a cushy office job some things (education) will never make sense in the office.

I've gone to company trainings and the curriculum and atmosphere is more like the university lecture hall than an office. Could you imagine sitting at your desk watching a powerpoint on the greatest programming language ever? His idea of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher education.

Highschools are great for this type of thing. The bar is particularly low. And once you've met it you never have to go back again. Colleges aren't designed that way. You go because you are looking for a detailed answer. And you are capable of understanding the answer.

And I know for a fact that professors have no qualms about F's.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Could you imagine sitting at your desk watching a powerpoint on the greatest > programming language ever?

I agree watching Powerpoint will be boring, but it is simply a supplement to real learning in his proposed system--working on projects. Also, you can skip unedifying parts, unlike with live lectures.

> His idea of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher > education.

Not really. The current system seems more like a degree mill than his. When you can get A's and B's in many courses just by reading a few nights before exam time, _that_ is a waste of four years. If you need to work on challenging projects while learning theory to make them work, you'll definitely learn more than just taking exams and quizzes (with occasional exercises).

<comment><USER2> I agree the low level courses aren't very interesting. But when you are teaching to a class of thousands there really isn't a better method. Project based work only works when the students are interested and can be engaged. This is what I was told the 100 levels were about anyway. Weeding out those that don't take the material serious from the ones that do. And it's very rare I've had a lecture that I couldn't skip. The professor posted the lecture online including pdfs and podcasts. Unedifying is highly subjective. A particular part of the material that might seem easy to you could be difficult for someone else. But cancelling the lecture all together won't be a solution.

>>

I assume this depends on the subject and the teacher. Courses that I thought were going to be easy (Intro to Art History for example) turned out to demanding than they let you believe. Maybe things have gotten worse since I was in college (even though SAT scores keep going up). When I left highschool projects and labs had to be dropped due to budget constraints. (School couldn't afford the glass nor the insurance from what I heard). When I arrived at uni, a technical uni, collaborative, project assignments were a major component. The midterm and final were used to pad out your grade. I.E. if you had strong project grades and 1 bad exam grade it couldn't be used against you. And I've heard of students only showing up for only the midterm and final, but I doubt you could get away with it for engineering or the sciences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Excellent article.

Embarrassing deconstruction of Robert Shiller's lecture; few awesome findings, such as:

"Focusing on homework has become much tougher. A modern dorm room has a television, Internet, youtube, instant messaging, email, phone, and video games. The students who get the most out of their four years in college are not those who are most able, but rather those with the best study habits.

No company would rely on this system for getting work done, despite the potential savings in having each employee work from home. Companies spend a fortune in commercial office space rent to create an environment with limited distractions and keep workers there for most of each day."

Highly recommended reading.

<comment><USER4> corporate work spaces always bothered me this way. i don't have any trouble focusing and working on stuff. in fact, i only started using hacker news (let's face it, it's procrastination) when i started working at a company after college.

it drained my moral to see others goofying off at work, and to feel my own self tired at, say, 3, but hanging around until 5 just to blend in. you can bet when i got home i didn't want to work, whereas when i contract or work on my own projects i'll happily go play tennis at 3 and then work in the evening once i've settled down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I stopped reading at _Someone who had just finished read A Farewell to Alms would respond "If American workers aren't better educated than they were in the 1970s, why would you expect their wages to rise?"_ (He hyperlinked A Farewell to Alms, which is a book he wrote.)

Whether or not American workers are better educated than they were in the 1970s, economists claim that productivity has been rapidly growing over the last few decades. Growth in productivity is direct evidence of room for compensation to grow as well. Therefore if wages haven't grown we need to look elsewhere than "the workers aren't good enough to justify higher wages" for an explanation.

The fact that he doesn't know basic economic facts about productivity and wages is enough that I have no interest in listening to his explanations of how to improve wages by making workers more productive.

I don't pretend to have anything like a full explanation for why productivity and wages are not more strongly correlated. But it is worth noting that during the last boom wages remained steady but money spent by employers on workers grew at a healthy pace. Unfortunately the growth in spending mostly got sucked up by higher health care premiums, so wages remained flat.

Unless you can fix economic trends like that one, I guarantee that the correlation between wages and productivity will remain weak.

<comment><USER6> I am trying to find the connection with Philip Greenspun and Gregory Clark who wrote the book in question. Are they the same person and Gregory is his pen name?

<comment> barry-cotter No connection.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Clark_%28economist%29>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it the problem that school teaches how to follow directions instead of think for ourselves? What does most of school consist of, even at the college level? Following directions. Make sure you paper is exactly 20 pages long, get the right answers to the even number math questions in the book.

Not until you emerge in the real world at age 22, do you finally get a chance to think for yourself. You lack street smarts but a lot of (questionably) valuable information on Political Science, Western Civilization, Algorithms, Data Structures and Cobol.

Most of my liberal arts education could be picked up (much cheaper) with a library card or a Kindle.

I think internships and apprenticing are a much better option.

How much did my computer science/economics/poli-sci education help me in the real world as a programmer/software developer? Not much.

On the job I Learned how to research and experiment on my own, while questioning everything (while being allowed to, without some crusty know it all prof shutting your down). Corporate culture is actually a little better for pushing the boundaries than academia.

<comment><USER8> Funny. There's a whole load of code out there that could've done with being created by someone who'd taken a data structures and algorithms class or two. I wouldn't exactly classify that as questionably valuable.

And, really, I don't understand university education being classified as following directions. It's far more self directed than earlier education, and indeed the jobs that follow education - unless my experience was massively atypical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _A student who has learned nothing will not receive an F because the professor doesn't want to admit that his teaching hasn't been compelling and/or effective._

That's not true. Professors would love to fail more students. But if you do, then you tons and tons of complaints, the university gets on your ass, and then you have to go back and change a few Fs to Ds. It's not worth the headache.

<comment><USER10> The biggest lesson I have learned was that if you fail people, you should make sure that those who fail correctly reflects the demographics (e.g. black people, women). Otherwise it is a fuck-up with some very nasty complaints.

<comment><USER9> And the problem is that at the university I teach at, being an ethnic minority is worth 20 pts of the 100 pts necessary for admission; the same number of points as a full grade point average. That means that the black students did a full grade point worse in high school, on average, than the white students they're competing with. I fudge this by grading my black students easier than my white students on essays/exams.

(based on the assumption that they score the same in other areas. That assumption is obviously not true, but the other areas where they might differ have such small point values it's close enough.)

<comment><USER11> Wait, so you compensate for group X getting in more easily by giving them an easier ride too? Is that not backwards?

I think whoever you work for ought to invest in some sort of double-blind marking system...

<comment><USER9> Why would they want a double-blind marking system?

It looks bad if you admit a bunch of black students and then fail a large number of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've read several articles like this lately, and they've all ignored the elephant in the room, which is this:

Professors hate teaching.

The best-respected professors in a university manage large research projects, occasionally doing some research themselves. No-one becomes a professor to teach - if they wanted to teach, they'd have left after their degree and gone to a high school. The way that we select professors works to further this - no-one got tenure at a 'good' university without a strong research record. And since the competition is so fierce, research becomes your only focus.

It may be the case that smaller universities, or less-prestigious colleges, can give tenure to university-teachers. But as far as I can see within the system, teaching is considered a second-rate activity for second-rate minds. Given that, no professor who is considered excellent will try very hard to teach, and students' education will suffer.

</comment><comment><USER13> "a genetic personal tendency towards future-mindedness"

That explanation seems very weak. And what about the difference in productivity between English and American weavers - also genetic? That seems very unlikely. Or maybe some other factor besides having access to the same kind of machines... Perhaps something was killing the motivation of the less productive workers (ie working harder might not have paid off for them).

</comment><comment><USER14> Blah blah blah... he can harp on the lecture system all he wants, but at the end of the day you need a couple things for "success": 1) a motivated student, 2) an interested, accessible instructor.</comment>


Question Answering AI demo - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0FBkxAt09o <comment><USER2> if I paste multiple articles, can it answer questions by finding the right article first? Is there a limit on the length of the article?</comment>


Is Your Job an Endangered Species? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116340050218236.html

<comment><USER2> The article doesn't properly distinguish between simple changes in the type of work that is done and structural changes.

Generally the change is n jobs paying $w / hour doing X being replaced by p _n jobs paying $r_ w / hour doing Y. The markets generally ensure that p*r < 1 long term (for constant market size); however, the values of p and r, and the economies of scale of new technologies have a profound impact on their overall impact on important societal outcomes like inequality.

For example, consider a technological advance which has relatively low barriers to entry, such as voice over IP. In this case, r < 1 (people doing VoIP work get paid less, on average, than people at telcos before) but p > 1 (access to telecommunications technology is easier, so more people do it, even at fixed same market size). This creates more jobs and reduces income inequality.

However, in other cases, new technologies have higher barriers to entry than the existing manual option, p < 1, r < 1; medical equipment that is prohibitively expensive to manufacture and operate except for big players; small clinics close down and a few mega-clinics open up; while production is more efficient overall, the market is less efficient, and profits are higher for the few that remain in business. There are less jobs and more inequality.

The best possible outcome is when technology that makes jobs obsolete is low- cost and accessible to everyone; jobs are lost, but people don't need to work as much to make ends meet.

The worst is where new technology creates economies of scale that mean few big companies control major production but don't need many workers, but still charge only marginally less than the more labour intensive alternative; jobs are lost but prices don't go down by much. The only solution to maintain income equality is government taxation of those big companies combined with government public good expenditure (e.g. hiring the people who lost their jobs to do research).

<comment><USER3> _The best possible outcome is when technology that makes jobs obsolete is low- cost and accessible to everyone; jobs are lost, but people don't need to work as much to make ends meet._

This is tricky because we constantly move the goalposts. What counted as "making ends meet" in 1950-1970 era is now counted as "poverty" today, and is mainly limited to a few unlucky souls living on Indian reservations and other such depressed areas.

(This report from the census makes that exact comparison: [http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:fuZGrQqyd9QJ:w...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:fuZGrQqyd9QJ:www.census.gov/apsd/www/statbrief/sb95_9.pdf+indoor+plumbing+1950+usa&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgWgD4J1TSjrFebCwZX5tuY6G1ARvizkLhGyclPfIR6dag1cG4LeDEIaT5DJwgmoGtaQTuMQ3k9PmYxlZ9XJXrMQHHXnPnYwN64RSOodAbrr8yzJ7w0DaR4ERd2c2PqcEyDfP8Z&sig=AHIEtbSiu12SP12LYDhTfU- GEsc-X-Vuug) )

If you truly want to make ends meet 1970's style, you don't need to work more than 26 weeks/year. Millions of people do this.

<comment><USER4> Would you care to elaborate on your point? If at all the US Census does not agree with the affirmation that "making ends meet is now easier than in the 1950's-1970's".

Median income per household (in 2008 CPI-U-RS adjusted dollars.) [[2008 : $50,303], [1968 : $41,995]] +19.8%

Consumer Price Index (CPI-U-RS) [[2008 : 316.2], [1968: 58.3]] +442.7%

To be honest, people below poverty line has not changed _that much_... [[2008 : 13.2%], [1968 : 12.8%]] +3.125%

source: <http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf>

<comment><USER3> Using CPI-adjusted dollars is an incorrect way to measure inflation. We know CPI overstated inflation a LOT (the Boskin report says about 1.3%/year, up to 1996). Correcting your figures for this, we find CPI+Boskin adjusted median household income is actually up 72%. (This assumes CPI was not overstated after 1996.)

<http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html>

We might have 13.2% of people below the poverty line, but on the other hand virtually all the people currently below the poverty line have flush toilets. That wasn't the case in 1968 (see the link in my previous post). In fact, people below the poverty line in 2007 have a standard of living comparable to the middle class of 1968. Most of the poor live in a house with < 1 person per bedroom, a complete kitchen, 1/3 have a dishwasher, 2/3 have a washing machine, about half have AC, most have a car.

<http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf>

My grandparents were middle class, and they didn't come close to that level of prosperity.

And the majority of people below the poverty level work less than half the year (by choice). Only 15% of poor adults work full time, 50 weeks a year.

<http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Creative destruction is a sign of great progress. There was a time when America was almost all factory workers and a time before that when America was mostly farmers.

While it is scary to be in the middle of a shifting trend in with a massive decline of old jobs, there will be a future that will take us completely by surprise. It will be unimaginable.

If you told someone from the industrial revolution that one day that people would pretend to be real people and then displayed in tiny little boxes and become the wealthy and elite of the world, they would think you were insane. The same would hold true if you told them that one day we would be able to all send our kids to schools and that they would start working in their mid 20's because their parents and the government could support and fund their development.

<comment><USER6> I partially agree with you. You're definitely right about the industrial revolution, and I hope you're right about the information revolution.

However, I think there's a real possibility that, in the near future, automation will lead to a permanent increase in unemployment. Even if general AI proves to be a long way away (which I think it is), a lot of service jobs are algorithmic enough that they could became automated in the next few decades. If true, you end up with a small elite business/management class which finds themselves far wealthier than before; a few people who managed to hold onto their old jobs (domestic cleaners, plumbers, etc) or find new 'creative' jobs; and a vast unemployed underclass.

In theory with all our new machine-created wealth the entire underclass could live very comfortably on welfare. However, the way most societies are set up, that's unlikely to happen. The economic pie gets bigger but the people at the top suddenly find themselves with even more power and get an even bigger slice, and the people at the bottom get screwed.

I think this guy makes a fairly convincing argument: <http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm>

If you have the time, his scifi novella about the social impacts of mass job loss due to automation is also OK (like a lot of amateur scifi, some of the writing and characterisation is pretty bad, but the ideas are interesting). Worth a read if you have the time. <http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

Season 2 of the Wire also touches on similar themes. (It's obviously not sci- fi, but it made me rethink my belief that "automation is fine, people just need to not be so picky about finding new jobs").

<comment><USER3> _The economic pie gets bigger but the people at the top suddenly find themselves with even more power and get an even bigger slice, and the people at the bottom get screwed._

So far, the exact opposite of this has occurred. The economic pie has gotten vastly bigger, inequality has increased significantly, and welfare has done nothing but grow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have never met a medical doctor or a nurse who was worried about not having a job — in fact this may be one of the few professions where they'd kill to work less. Even if efficiencies boomed in healthcare thanks to technology you still have to deal with increased needs of a booming elderly population. On the other hand I've met many folks with law degrees who look like they've made a bad career choice...

</comment><comment><USER8> i disliked the author's frequent right-ist propaganda memes like "all regulation is bad", and "government just prints up money" (as opposed to selling treasury notes to voluntary buyers; in essence, borrowing). came off as a crank or shill with an agenda.

<comment><USER9> I was put off by the derogatory terms for people doing legitimate work. If you feel these jobs are being obsoleted by technology, fine. Don't insult people who have them.

<comment><USER10> I agree. It was unnecessarily hostile. Seems like someone trying to establish his blogging brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "They're stealing our jaerbs!"

I ran the numbers, assuming a work force of _waves hands_ 150 million, a 4 million turnover represents 2.666% So if we apply that annually, the chance that you will keep your job each year is only 72.3% (NB: if you're going to tell me my math is wrong (a) don't bother and (b) you need to take into account that some people will lose more than one job in a year)

That might not seem too bad, but take a two year time span, and it looks more like only 52.3% of having continuous employment with a single employer.

However, even leaving aside the issue of calculating the size of the job seekers market (e.g. some people will have given up and not even register anymore), it doesn't take into account people leaving the job market due to retirement, people leaving the job market for other miscellaneous reasons (births, deaths, moving overseas) and people entering the job market for the first time or re-entering.

It just seems like a gross over-simplification to take only these two numbers in isolation, without even providing context.

<comment><USER12> And from the personal point of view, really, its how long you are without a job that counts. If you bridge, ok. If you lose your house and card, disaster. Matters more than what jobs exist and where.

<comment><USER11> _"The death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic"_

I was talking to a bloke today, nice guy, very capable. But he's out of work and his licence was suspended for excessive speeding. He says it is simply not worthwhile looking for work at the moment because without transport it is just too impractical.

Now, the Libertarian in me wants to say that the sequence of bad events that happened to him is simply the result of the consequences of his bad choices. Perhaps I would feel differently if he and his partner were in a truly desperate situation (they're not starving, they're not going to lose their home). Perhaps I'm less sympathetic because of his obvious bad choices that led him to this.

But what if the things that led him to this point weren't (or weren't so obviously) his fault? Bad things happen to good people too. The rain falls on the righteous and the wicked alike.

Of my circle of acquaintances, I think every single one of the blokes has been unemployed at some time in the last year except for this one guy who somehow hangs on despite having a really terrible boss.

On the other hand, of the working women that I know, _none_ of them have been unemployed in that same time span (some have taken maternity leave and then come back to work at reduced hours).

This gives me pause. Because in the workplace, especially large corporations, I always see the women being given the shitty demeaning jobs. Go post some letters for me, go get the birthday cake etc. It is never a bloke that gets sent to buy the birthday cake.

Oh, no, wait, there is one girl who keeps losing her job, but she is a mentally handicapped.

Anyway, the moral of the story is; unless you're willing to tug forelock and suck up to the man start your own business (doesn't mean you are immune to being fired, but generally if you do a good job the golden parachute is a better option than the leather boot on the neck).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What the article overlooks and seems to smuggle in is the idea that we don't have any problems to solve that actually _require_ jobs of the non-IT sort. Look around and see crumbling infrastructure everywhere. We need bridges replaced, highways mended, etc, etc. That represents millions of physically- intensive jobs.

<comment><USER3> _Look around and see crumbling infrastructure everywhere._

This is a common meme, but I just don't see it. Where is our crumbling infrastructure? At least in my area, the infrastructure works fantastically.

We had one bridge collapse due to a design flaw, which was so surprising that it became national news. Now we need to replace every bridge, potentially introducing new design flaws in the process? Seems like a massive overreaction to me, probably on the same scale as our overreaction to 9/11.

<comment><USER14> We shouldn't wait until after a piece of infrastructure collapses to fix the cracks in the foundation. The public capital stock has been allowed to age much more than the residential and private stock:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/12/age_americas...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2010/12/age_americas_infrastructure)

<comment><USER3> Measuring age is not necessarily relevant - if a bridge has a lifetime of 50 years, but the average age is 23 years (up from 16), we have a long way to go before it becomes a problem. Your chart is interesting, but hardly conclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > But eDiscovery is the hottest thing right now in corporate legal > departments. The software scans documents and looks for important keywords > and phrases, displacing lawyers and paralegals who charge hundreds of > dollars per hour to read the often millions of litigation documents. > Lawyers, understandably, hate eDiscovery.

Sounds like a job for Watson & Watson, LLP.

And lawyers don't have much to fear. They will win in the end; they always do...

</comment><comment><USER16> If you liked this article and enjoy Andy Kessler's writing, you'll probably be happy to know that he wrote a novel called "Grumby":

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/098271632X>

It's about a hacker who reprograms a Furby, finds that he's created the New New Thing, and then hangs on for dear life as his startup rises and falls.

It's "creative destruction", as told through a work of fiction.

</comment><comment><USER17> I suppose if we got rid of all the pesky technology going around we could all go back to subsistence farming or better yet hunting and gathering and then we'd have pretty much 100% employment. Would that make the wsj happy?

</comment><comment><USER18> Obnoxious set of labels for the jobs. But for that I would have enjoyed it more.

<comment><USER15> "What is the difference between a man and a parasite? A man builds; a parasite asks, 'Where is my share?'"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Abolish income tax and impose/increase wealth tax. This will create jobs in the economy.

<comment><USER20> [citation needed], as they say.

How do you know that this would create jobs? How would you actually go about imposing a wealth tax? Do you believe you could make such a scheme revenue- neutral? (Or, if you don't want to, have you considered the effect on public- sector jobs and on people who are currently benefited by what the public sector does?) Is anything remotely like this politically feasible? Do you have any actual economic analysis behind this, or is it just idle sloganeering?

<comment><USER19> You failed to suggest any alternative to current economic crisis?

<comment><USER20> True, though it would be more accurate to replace "failed" with "didn't see any need". Why would that invalidate my criticisms?

(A patient is feeling sick. Someone comes by and says "Recite a prayer over him, and paint his face green; that'll make him feel better". Do I need to have an alternative treatment in mind in order to say "You've given no reason to think that that will work. And if prayer is going to do any good, surely it matters just what sort of prayer to what deity." ?)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blockchain is best available mechainsm to protect the past from future tyrants - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQGQXy0RIIo&feature=youtu.be&t=40m46s <comment><USER2> We don't necessarily want to constrain future tyranny in that way. Voluntarily giving up certain degrees of freedom is the best way to solve tragedy of the commons type problems; we don't want to prevent future "tyrants" from enforcing pollution controls.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't wait for people to do things with blockchain but it's probably the most hyped technology for the least actual real-world use. The bitcoin paper was all the way back in 2008 so I'm curious when (or if) I'll see the first blockchain technology that will actually catch on outside of small niches.

</comment><comment><USER4> Block lchain is a great tool but the really important thing is to have the public ratify decision making.</comment>


Learn to program Python using a Logo-like turtle - <AUTHOR> http://www.learnpython.org Good for teachers who don't want to set up any programming environment. learnpython.org is a new website I've developed for the Python learning community. I would love people to help me out write more tutorials, or develop the logo turtle programming idea further.<p>Tell me what you think. Thanks! <comment><USER2> This—as well as Logo, however fond my memories of it are—are a bad idea because turtles graphics are by nature _imperative_ : you're programming exclusively for side effects.

What the world needs is an approachable version of a system like the image manipulation presented in _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_ , which takes a functional approach. (It may have only been in the first edition, but it is covered in the Hewlett-Packard videos.)

I'm not a functional programming absolutist, but experience has taught me to think functionally by default. The habit should be instilled in would-be programmers as early as possible.

<comment><USER3> I haven't finished SICP so I'm not sure which bit you're talking about, could you please point it out? [http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-4.html#...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-4.html#%_toc_start)

All IO is inherently impure, right? At best you're going to be composing funtions out of smaller functions that implement your graphics desires.

How can you get around having e.g. a circle(radius, x-pos, y-pos, line-color, fill-color) function that draws per your specifications? There's no reason you couldn't implement that circle function using turtle...

<comment><USER4> All the exercises and code in Section 2.2.4

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny coincidence. Just yesterday, I started teaching my 9yr old son programming - he kept pestering me for a while after the science fair at the school, where one of his buddies had a "programming" project.

Long story made short - I ended up choosing Python. Intuitively, I strongly resisted this conclusion. But in the end, it made sense: the syntax is clean (some would say too rigid, I say that's okay for a teaching language), it's pretty hard to obfuscate the code (unlike Perl), you can do "import turtle" and voila it's Logo, and there are plenty of tutorials and books geared towards beginners including young children.

We had lots of fun doing things like:

>>> import turtle

>>> t = turtle.Pen()

>>> t.forward(50)

>>> t.left(90)

>>> t.forward(50)

I showed him variables, a little bit about strings and lists. Next up: loops, if/else, etc.

I'm following this book:

[http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for- kid...](http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/writing/snake-wrangling-for-kids/)

</comment><comment><USER6> There's also a "turtle" module that came included in my Py3k distribution. Not sure about 2.x versions.

Giving commands like "turtle.forward(10)" opens an asynchronous tk window showing the "turtle" (an arrow, really) and a line where it has passed. The window remains open, the focus goes back to the python interpreter, and you are free to type new commands.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's in 2.x too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is cool. An interesting tidbit. We actually used Logo as a programming metaphor when creating our telescope observation software for the Green Bank Telescope (<http://www.gb.nrao.edu/gbt/>) in Python. The observation software has been in operation for about 8 years now and has been very successful.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Next Chapter button is not working for me in Firefox after completing the Hello World section

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll check that out. Thanks.

<comment><USER9> I'm having the same issue (using Firefox), but thank you so much for this.</comment></comment></comment>


Linuxbrew - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Homebrew/linuxbrew <comment><AUTHOR> Has somebody used it? It seems to be better to install software that is not supported by the distro, instead of dealing with PPAs.

<comment><USER2> Although there's nothing better on Mac and I use it daily, I really think Homebrew is a hack and doesn't really fit into Linux well.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agree with this.

The project's obsession with compiling from source by default is ridiculous - not only does it mean that installing trivial packages can take an age, it means that major OS updates can and do often break the ability to build a package, while a compiled binary runs fine.

Case in point: it is currently impossible to install the Homebrew package for casperjs, as it relies on the package for phantomjs, which will not build on Yosemite. The phantomjs developer/team have said that they WILL NOT be fixing phantomjs 1.x so it will compile on Yosemite, because their efforts are all on 2.x.. which is not stable, and also won't compile on Yosemite.

When I mentioned on twitter that (quote) "The more I use @MacHomebrew, the more I miss Apt." I was asked by one of the Homebrew maintainers to not @ mention them - because apparently I was being "not nice" by mentioning a far superior package manager in the same sentence as Homebrew.

The whole thing has given me renewed interest in researching a better packaging system using the built-in package installer.

<comment><USER2> I've been struggling with this all the time. For example, for months, gcc wouldn't compile on Yosemite, and all packages that depend on it (as there's no version on dependencies, it assumes it requires the latest), even if it's pinned, they still start installing the latest version! Compiling some packages takes hours on MacBook Air. Also, many binaries are hosted on SourceForge, and even upgrading to a point release requires a pull request that needs to be reviewed and approved! I've been waiting weeks to have Terraform upgraded, and I gave up and install all HashiCorp tools myself, not using Homeblew. That's why, I think, it just doesn't make sense in the world of Linux as it doesn't really have a true version and dependency management, it doesn't have things like virtual packages, and other basics, but I'm sure many people who are not comfortable on Linux, but are familiar with OS X and Homebrew, will use it on Linux. Gnome has PackageKit [1] (supposedly cross- Linux), and there's also Zero Install [2], but, honestly, I haven't used them and I don't know if they are any better and work for anything, but GUI apps. I personally started a Bash-based package manager, but having Bash 3.x as a requirement is tough as I cannot use associative arrays - I wonder if I should require v4 and above.

[1] [http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/](http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/)

[2] [http://0install.net/](http://0install.net/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The iPhone bug that lets anyone crash your phone with a text message - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/27/iphone-crash-bug-text-imessage-ios

<comment><USER2> To prevent this:

      Go to Settings.
      Click on Notifications.
      Click on Messages.
      Switch off 'Show on Lock Screen'.
      Set 'Alert Style When Unlocked' to None.</comment>