A map of the US where city names are replaced by most Wikipedia'ed resident - <AUTHOR> https://pudding.cool/2019/05/people-map/ <comment><USER4> Ah fuck, what a good idea and fun project this must have been.

How do people come up with awesome ideas like this? Whenever I have time for a personal project it'll be like... "guess I'll uh.... make this LED on a raspberry pi blink... wheee"

<comment><USER5> I would bet you probably come up with a really good idea about once a week, and that's being conservative.

The trick is just to store them in some always-accessible note taking app (e.g. Evernote, OneNote, Apple's Notes app) as _soon_ as they come to you (i.e. in the middle of a totally unrelated lecture), and accumulate them over a long period of time (talking years here).

<comment><USER6> OP here. This idea was from looking at this map. [https://www.wearedorothy.com/collections/music/products/u-s-...](https://www.wearedorothy.com/collections/music/products/u-s- a-song-map-open-edition)

<comment><USER7> Huh, it looks like the author of that older map might not have realized that "Pennsylvania 6-5000" is about the telephone number of a hotel in New York City (whose telephone exchange was named after Pennsylvania Station, which was named after the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was named after the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_6-5000_(song)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_6-5000_\(song\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEnnsylvania_6-5000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEnnsylvania_6-5000)

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_\(1910%E2%80%931963\))

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

<comment><USER8> "Washington Bullets" isn't about Washington state either, which seems like a thing he'd be likely to know, so maybe he wasn't trying to be that strict.

<comment><USER9> The map was designed to make money, not to be a historical record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's too bad there are so many duplicates. I think it would be more interesting if it was based on birthplace, since big cities that attract lots of businesspeople/celebrities just get tagged with someone really famous who doesn't have any particular connection with the city (e.g. Elon Musk on Los Angeles, Steve Jobs on basically everywhere in the Bay Area).

The Wikidata "place of birth" field would probably be a reasonably reliable source: [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P19](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P19)

<comment><USER11> The person for my hometown on that website seems to only have been born there but moved away before elementary school, so I'm not sure how that's really all that interesting.

<comment><USER12> I grew up in Visalia, CA which lists Kevin Costner, the actor. He was in my high school class in my sophomore and part of my junior year when his family moved away. Although his later fame is what puts him there, we had a Nobel Prize-winning physicist actually grow up there but he never won an Oscar. Seems unfair.

<comment><USER13> I don't think popularity contests (which is pretty close to what this is) are meant to be fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is interesting in large part as a demonstration of how bizarre/indefinite the idea of being "from" a place is. For instance, Cambridge, MA isn't headlined by a famous MIT/Harvard academic, or local political figure, or even Neil Gaiman- but instead by Bhumibol Adulyadej, the previous king of Thailand, who was born there while his father was studying at Harvard, and left at the age of 2. Meanwhile, Boston gets John Cena, who was born in a far-out suburb.

<comment><USER15> Another point is that in some parts of the country the concept of "city" breaks down. There is basically no meaningful difference between being from suburban neighborhoods of Glendale, AZ and nearby suburban neighborhoods of Phoenix. (People who are too young to be dealing with water bills, garbage collection, etc. often don't even know which one they live in).

Even the US Postal Service doesn't necessarily respect local political boundaries. I grew up in Phoenix, close to the Glendale border, and my address said "Glendale, AZ".

<comment><USER16> > Even the US Postal Service doesn't necessarily respect local political > boundaries. I grew up in Phoenix, close to the Glendale border, and my > address said "Glendale, AZ".

Oh what the heck! How does that even work? So the official city you live in is not the city that USPS considers you to live in? If a federal form asks you what city you live in, what do you put down (without committing perjury if there is such a risk)? Do you write something different for state and local governments? And how _does_ one figure out what city they officially live in then? Sorry I have so many questions but this one is just twisting my brain in so many ways!

<comment><USER17> Nope, the "City" in the address is the name of the Post Office that delivers the mail.

So you may be on the west end of one town, and the post office that's closest to you is in another town (or is just named after another town, the name of the post office can be arbitrary as well). That's your address.

It even affects property values. You can look at boundaries between post offices and people will pay more to have an address with a desirable post- office name.

<comment><USER18> > So you may be on the west end of one town, and the post office that's > closest to you is in another town (or is just named after another town, the > name of the post office can be arbitrary as well). That's your address.

it isn't even that consistent. when living in a rural area, the city in my address was the (very nearby) city. my post office was located in a rural area on the other side of that city, and its address had the name of a small town that maybe legally it was in, but wasn't thought of as being near there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The connection seems to be "a link to this city's Wikipedia page appears in the named person's Wikipedia page". It does not look like the contents of the city's page have any bearing, only the person's page.

<comment><USER20> That can't be right, or at leats not the whole story. For example, "Joaquin Pheonix" is the most searched person from Gainesville. But there's no mention of Gainesville, or even the state of Florida, on his Wikipedia page. But it does appear to be true that he was a "resident" (more or less) during his teenage years [0].

[0] [https://www.gainesville.com/article/LK/20040526/News/6041599...](https://www.gainesville.com/article/LK/20040526/News/604159905/GS/)

EDIT: However, he is on Wikipedia's "List of People from Gainesville, FL" [1], so I bet those lists were the primary source of information.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Gainesvill...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Gainesville,_Florida)

<comment><USER21> They explicitly say that in their "data and methods" blurb:

> Person/city associations were based on the thousands of "People from X city" > pages on Wikipedia. The top person from each city was determined by using > median pageviews (with a minimum of 1 year of traffic). We chose to include > multiple occurrences for a single person because there is both no way to > determine which is more accurate and people can "be from" multiple places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Expected Lansing would be Magic Johnson but instead its Larry Page. Magic comes back often and is active in local charities, even leading efforts to raise money for college scholarships.

On the other hand Larry Page has to my knowledge never returned or given a dime to local charities. So perhaps that makes people ever more curious about him.

<comment><USER20> It's not "The person people from Lansing searched the most." It's "the person from Lansing that people search the most". Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson.

<comment><USER23> "Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson."

This is HN bubble thinking.

Very few regular people know who 'Larry Page' is.

Almost everyone knows who 'Magic Johnson' is.

Have a look at Google search trends.

<comment><USER24> Not really. This is people looking at Wikipedia.

Guess: Who's the Alan with the most pageviews in Wikipedia? Who's the Steve?

I left the answers here:

\- [https://medium.com/towards-data-science/bigquery-without- a-c...](https://medium.com/towards-data-science/bigquery-without-a-credit- card-discover-learn-and-share-199e08d4a064)

Basically a show-off for BigQuery, but to answer this specific question: The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the ones closer to HN.

        SELECT title, SUM(views) views
        FROM `fh-bigquery.wikipedia_v3.pageviews_2019`
        WHERE DATE(datehour) BETWEEN '2019-01-01' AND '2019-01-10'
        AND wiki='en'
        AND title LIKE r'Alan\_%'
        GROUP BY title
        ORDER BY views DESC
        LIMIT 10

<comment><USER23> "Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson."

Is what I responded to.

Don't misconstrue how much people do not care about business people, and how much they do care about sports figures.

Nobody in my family knows who Larry Page is.

<comment><USER24> Ok, I see.

Just for fun:

\- In Silicon Valley... Magic Johnson has more google searches than Larry Page.

\- In India... Larry Page has more google searches than Magic Johnson.

\- [https://imgur.com/a/KwQ5wJt](https://imgur.com/a/KwQ5wJt)

Just checking Google Trends, as you suggested...

<comment><USER25> Larry > Magic might be the HN bubble, but Magic > Larry definitely is the US bubble.

Most of the world does not care about basketball at all.

<comment><USER26> In the US, the number one Larry that is a rival to Magic is not even Larry Page.

<comment><USER23> Hilarious: in the US, _Larry Bird_ a guy who has not played ball in almost 30 years (!) is still way more popular than _Larry Page_. At least according to G trends.

The the OPs point however, Wikipedia is a special place.

<comment><USER26> How many people ever paid money to go watch Larry Page at work for a day? Corporate executives have wealth and power; let the ballplayers have the celebrity :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder why James Earl Jones isn't listed for Jackson, MI. His page contains a link to Jackson, and Jackson's page contains a link to him. His page has more views than than Paula Faris'.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Michigan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Michigan)

[https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...](https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all- access&agent=user&start=2015-07&end=2019-04&pages=James_Earl_Jones|Paula_Faris)

<comment><USER28> Because the creators of the map got their list of names from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Jackson,_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Jackson,_Michigan) .

Paula Faris is in that list. James Earl Jones is not.

Yes, there is overlap between that category page and the "Notable people" under [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Michigan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Michigan) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Data and Methods

> Data for this story were collected and processed using the Wikipedia API. > The period of collection was from July, 2015–May, 2019, from English > Wikipedia. It was inspired in part by this map.

> Person/city associations were based on the thousands of "People from X city" > pages on Wikipedia. The top person from each city was determined by using > median pageviews (with a minimum of 1 year of traffic). We chose to include > multiple occurrences for a single person because there is both no way to > determine which is more accurate and people can "be from" multiple places.

<comment><USER28> There is a flaw in their method.

Take for example Santa Fe, New Mexico. I expected the most Wikipediaed person would be George R. R. Martin.

Instead, it's Murray Gell-Mann.

Odd. I mean, yes, famous physicist, coiner of 'quark', etc. But, c'mon, compared to _George R. R. Martin_?

Then go to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Santa_Fe,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Santa_Fe,_New_Mexico) . While Gell-Mann is on that page, there are also seven subcategories.

      - Actors from Santa Fe, New Mexico (2 C, 16 P)
      - Archbishops of Santa Fe (12 P)
      - Artists from Santa Fe, New Mexico (78 P)
      - Musicians from Santa Fe, New Mexico (16 P)
      - Politicians from Santa Fe, New Mexico (1 C, 26 P)
      - Sportspeople from Santa Fe, New Mexico (11 P)
      - Writers from Santa Fe, New Mexico

GRRM is in that last subcategory.

However, it appears to be an uncommon pattern. I tried another 15 or so cities and none of them used subcategories.

<comment><USER30> Well, Gell-Mann just died, so it could be one of those "whoever is in the news more recently gets the most pageviews" effects.

Sort of like how any mildly funny post on a growing subreddit will become top/all time simply because a lot of people looked at it that day. The next day, there will be even more people to look at it, etc.

<comment><USER28> "The period of collection was from July, 2015–May, 2019" and it seems unlikely that a one week bump due to Gell-Mann's recent death would be enough to change the balance.

I don't know how to get page view statistics from the Wikipedia API to double- check this.

<comment><USER28> GRRM's page views far exceed that of Gell-Mann over the years. [https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...](https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all- access&agent=user&start=2015-07&end=2019-04&pages=Murray_Gell- Mann|George_R._R._Martin) .

There is no way the news of Gell-Mann's recent death could cause the balance to change that significantly. Over 8 million people would have needed to visit his page in a week, for a page which normally gets 9,000 views each month.

<comment><USER30> Wow, it's not even close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is awesome. Fun to zoom in/out and see the names fade in and out.

<comment><USER32> I'm impressed by how responsive the zooming is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So it's not "this is the person most wikipediaed in this city" but rather, "this is the person amongst those who are affiliated with this city, who is the most wikipediaed"

<comment><USER34> Your two version aren't in conflict, although the first is ambiguous. Are you just clarifying that that, in the first version, "in this city" is supposed to be a modifier of "person" rather than the "wikipediaed"?

<comment><USER35> They are totally different things. The first is influenced solely by Wikipedia users in the city in question. The second is influenced by a combination of all Wikipedia users and Wikipedia's association of people with the city in question.

<comment><USER34> I understand the claim but I'm disputing it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm not opposed to renaming Minneapolis, "Prince Town"...

<comment> mark-r He shows up twice though, once for Minneapolis and once for Chanhassen.

<comment><USER36> Prince Town and Other Prince Town

<comment><USER37> ... and the town formerly known as ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Interesting.. I've literally never heard of Anna Kendrick before.

<comment><USER39> She's a B-list movie star who does some indie stuff.

* She was in two of the Twilight films.

* Pitch Perfect (trilogy).

* Mr. Right. The Accountant. (hitmen with a heart of gold movies).

* A Simple Favor. (stepford wife mystery).

* Drinking Buddies (a brewery drama, it's great)

* Scott Pilgrim vs The World

<comment><USER40> B-list is pretty harsh. She has an Oscar nomination (albeit 10 years ago), and the Pitch Perfect movies made $$$.

<comment><USER39> Most people can't name her. She's a great actress. That's not contradictory.

<comment><USER39> see: [https://worldwidevitalpr.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/learn- the-...](https://worldwidevitalpr.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/learn-the- difference-between-a-list-b-list-c-list-and-d-list-actors-celebrities/)

Nicholas Cage is definitely more famous than Anna Kendrick, for differing reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> They've got an interesting definition of city... Seattle is all one city, but DC has Georgetown, Capitol Hill, and Dupont Circle in addition to a label for the entire city.

<comment><USER42> Go look at how far NYC gets broken down. Weird choices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Curious. Why are they almost all men?

And, what's with all the wrestlers!?!

<comment><USER44> Probably because many of these people are historical figures and - <USER2> records exhibit significant bias toward info about men.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> That was surprisingly interesting; especially when you zoom in to the small towns.

</comment><comment><USER46> "Those connected to and victims of criminal acts" are supposed to be excluded, so Ted Bundy should probably be removed from Burlington and Salt Lake City.

edit: and while I'm looking at Lake Champlain, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are in Plattsburgh, NY, though the link doesn't work.

edit 2: Oops, I read "including" as "excluding" because that's what I expected, never mind!

<comment><USER47> Where do you see that?

I see this:

"Note: any person on Wikipedia is considered, including those connected to and victims of criminal acts. See more about our data and method."

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think it would be interesting if they filtered out any entertainment & sports celebrities to see who remained.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is interesting as an example of how a person can be well-known yet their biographical details unknown.

Andy Warhol is a good example. Almost everyone in America knows his name and yet (in my experience) almost no one knows that he grew up in Pittsburgh (outside of Pittsburgh, of course.)

</comment><comment><USER50> This is really cool! Something that would be nice would be an option to toggle "born in/native" vs. "any association." My hometown, La Quinta, California, has Phil Knight simply because he has a home there. No one I know associates him with La Quinta.

</comment><comment><USER51> Doesn't work for me in Firefox.

If web developers aren't going to bother with cross-browser compatibility it'd be nice if they at least went back to telling visitors which browsers they do support.

<comment><USER52> Me too. It likes FF 67.0 64 bit on win but dislikes FF 67.0 on 64 bit FreeBSD. The mapbox URLs aren't called on the latter. Are you also on a unix-like system?

<comment><USER51> Yep, Debian. Other map sites work fine for me (caltopo.com, ridewithgps.com).

<comment><USER52> Yup same here, other mapping sites are just fine. Do you have a User-Agent masquerader add on available? I have no connectivity to my freebsd box at home now (no, thank you Frontier) or I'd try it and report back. But for the browser dependency it's a good looking site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This was really cool to look at. This was really educational having grown up in a rural area where (I thought) no one of consequence came from. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER54> This is a super cool project. Spot checking WA state (where I was born and still live), the results are accurate and interesting! There are some comments about wanting to resolve duplicates (though duplicates are intentional), would be neat to include a "Born in this city" setting. I believe if the person was born in X city, they would show up in the "List of people from X" page - <USER3> not many changes needed.

Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER55> we sure do love our entertainers!

a little interest makes sense but i've never understood the intense interest that most people have with entertainers and celebrities in general. i'm more interested in people who have, and can, impact my life, like historical figures, friends, family, scientists, and local/regional leaders (political or otherwise).

</comment><comment><USER56> I was kinda surprised by the Los Alamos result. I was expecting Oppenheimer, instead it was some guy named Drew Goddard.

</comment><comment><USER57> Ok, that was way more interesting than I expected...

A few bits that are interesting to me (and probably no one else).

The two towns I've lived in are both renamed Grover Cleveland (he was born in one, and spent most of his childhood in the other).

Megyn Kelly attended elementary school in the next town over from where I live currently.

</comment><comment><USER58> This got me to update Edward Norton's wikipedia entry. He's most likely the most famous person from Columbia, Maryland, he just wasn't categorized as from the town. Though it was interesting seeing Randy Pausch (computer scientist) listed as the town's rep.

</comment><comment><USER59> Funny how a porn star is the #1 for Miami Beach. I would have expected some other kind of celebrity.

</comment><comment><USER60> Nitpick: Allen Iverson is from Hampton, Va. Hampton Roads is a name for the region that includes 5+ cities. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads)

<comment><USER61> The map seems like it doesn't specifically stick to municipalities. In New York City it gets granular enough to show that Sylvester Stallone was born in Hell's Kitchen. But for the city of Chicago, it only shows Barack Obama.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> What tools are used to create this?

</comment><comment><USER44> Interesting to see Elon Musk as LA.

<comment><USER63> Probably because of the Boring Company press about building tunnels under the city.

<comment><USER64> I think Spacex being located in LA is the more likely candidate.

<comment><USER35> SpaceX is located in Hawthorne (just south of LA), which has its own dot. It seems that there dataset is just Wikipedia's own lists of people from places. In this case, Elon Musk appears on [0].

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Using Wikipedia leads to some weird results. I checked my hometown in NC and would have expected Michael Jordan to be listed as the most famous associated person, but he doesn't appear on the main Wikipedia entry so we instead got James Taylor.

<comment><USER66> I saw the same thing, so I checked the Micheal Jordan Wikipedia page and it actually does not contain the text "Chapel Hill".

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Hm, I would also be interested in how cities look if your measure is "highest lookup rate relative to national average".

That is, sure, Dwayne Johnson is looked up a lot in some city, but who is looked up most _compared to everywhere else_?

<comment><USER68> It's not "people from here look up this person a lot", it's "who is the most- looked-up person that's linked to here <somehow>", where <somehow> is whatever dataset they're using to connect people to places (it's not birthplace; it might be lived-here-at-some-point? or "has the place mentioned in their Wikipedia page", or some composite). The location of the searcher is irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Some surprising holes, of towns with famous people but aren't showing at all. For example

* Jayson Williams, NBA player and murderer, Alexandria NJ

* Malcolm Baldridge, US Secretary of Commerce, Woodbury CT

Ninja edit: but I'm glad to see Dennis Ritchie in Summit, NJ

</comment><comment><USER70> TIL Samuel L. Jackson is the most wikipedia'd person who's ever lived in Washington DC. That's kind of wild considering the competition includes every US president ever, among many others.

</comment><comment><USER71> I'm from Utah....I love how Ted Bundy is #1 for not just Salt lake but looks like the whole state.

Edit: I'm living in utah, from Ohio, I do not claim Utah citizenship. I'm also not Mormon (ex-mormon/agnostic). Cheers!

<comment><USER72> Robert Redford comes up ironically enough for Provo. I thought his house was in Park City, but I guess it's a weird city limits thing. Hope he isn't letting any unmarried couples stay over!

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> It would be cool to see the same map for people worldwide, not just in the US.

</comment><comment><USER74> The controls are terrible. I can't figure out how to zoom, and if I right click I get into some sort of "tilt" mode that can't be escaped from without reloading the page.

</comment><comment><USER75> Doesn't seem to work in Firefox/Linux/Privacy mode.

(Ahh, WebGL)

</comment><comment><USER76> I'm surprised that George R R Martin doesn't show up for Santa Fe. Surely he's more-googled / wikipediaed than Murray Gell-Mann?

<comment><USER77> I think it has do with how they're pulling the data. GRRM doesn't seem to appear on the wikipedia category page for people from Santa Fe: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Santa_Fe,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Santa_Fe,_New_Mexico)

<comment><USER78> That has a link to here, where he's listed: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers_from_Santa_Fe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers_from_Santa_Fe,_New_Mexico)

Edited 2015. So they must not have pulled this data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Louisville, KY: Tom Cruise (born in Syracuse, NY, but parents born there) replaces Muhammed Ali (by far most famous native).

Seems a bit unfair.

</comment><comment><USER80> Well, you did miss Jimmy Wales, who grew up in Huntsville, AL, and attended Randolph School there. How did you select your data?

</comment><comment><USER81> Muhammad Ali was born in Louisville, KY and not Paradise Valley (CA?). Wikipedia says this. Noticed this right off the bat.

<comment><USER82> Birthplace isn't the criteria, residence is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Very cool, but...Murray Gell-Man for Santa Fe? Not George R.R. Martin? Drew Goddard for Los Alamos, not Richard Feynman?

<comment><USER84> Besides the physics, Gell-Mann is known for the place that makes Santa Fe known to people who have no idea where it is -- the famous Santa Fe Institute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Danny DeVito upsets The Boss in Asbury Park! Did not see that one coming. Any other notable upsets?

</comment><comment><USER86> It seems to be the person has lived there at any point in their life?

Southwest Florida is an interesting one...

</comment><comment><USER87> I think I'd go with largest Wikipedia article, probably in most cases the same.

</comment><comment><USER88> I love this! Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER89> Interesting, it should be fun to extend this to the rest of the world

</comment><comment><USER90> No fair, Ted Bundy gets Tallahassee AND Salt Lake City?

</comment><comment><USER91> Weird that they have Kurt Cobain in Montesano, not Aberdeen.

</comment><comment><USER92> This is very cool! Maybe you could add Puerto Rico as well.

</comment><comment><USER93> Marilyn Monroe -> Compton was unexpected…

</comment><comment><USER94> aah I always knew Sarah Palin was famous for something...didn't know until now she is from Alaska.

</comment><comment><USER95> Vienna, VA >> Robert Hanssen

</comment><comment><USER96> question : why do WWE-related queries account for so much Wikipedia traffic?

<comment><USER97> Wrestling is massively massively popular...on a scale that most people in upper middle class bubbles do not realize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Good job, Oak Harbor, WA.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't think Lynyrd Skynyrd from Jacksonville FL is a person.

</comment><comment><USER99> How do I zoom?

<comment><USER100> double tap to zoom in on my trackpad. don't know how to zoom out.

<comment><USER101> shift+double click zooms out for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Why US only?

</comment><comment><USER103> Really was expecting this to be an XKCD thing.

</comment><comment><USER104> Elon Musk has LA? hahahaha

</comment><comment><USER105> Why isn't Linus used for Portland?! Steve Jobs. Pfft.

<comment><USER106> Torvalds or Pauling?

<comment><USER105> Torvalds!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> I'm a bit disappointing that Mr Hands, the guy that died from getting penetrated by a horse, isn't the most Wikipedia'ed resident of Enumclaw

Story for anyone interested [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case)</comment>


Whales could help curb climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/whales-carbon-capture-climate-change/ <comment><USER2> Oh my. The cold numbers aren't good: whales just don't currently represent enough biomass to make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of Gigatonnes and Teratonnes of CO2.

If a rational team wanted to lock away as much carbon as possible using biological processes (BeCCS), going far up the food-chain doesn't seem like the most efficient way to do it.

Here a couple of the kind of options that seem to make more sense:

0\. When conditions are right, ferrous ocean seeding at scale to stimulate phytoplankton blooms because relatively little iron is required to have a massive effect. [a] It might make sense to have a floating system of self- replicating drone factories that can send out floating fertilizer drones went conditions are good.. easier said than done.

1\. Fertilizing and planting kelp wherever it seems to grow best. There is currently a massive kelp forest in the Atlantic and Caribbean between the Yucatan and Africa that is causing all sorts of havoc with tourist beaches. That kelp should be expanded, harvested, concentrated and sequestered on an enormous scale, either at the bottom of deep ocean trenches (cheaper) or below ground ($$ but more permanent).

Drastic actions that are efficient at scale must be tried. Even if it costs upwards of $50 trillion because survival is worth any treasure since there are no U-hauls behind hearses. What doesn't help is fixation over any comparatively-insignificant biomass like whales or planting a biomass- insignificant number of trees; virtue signaling is a cognitive-dissonant participation award, not solutions that move the needle enough to avoid a climate catastrophe.

References:

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

<comment><USER3> Isn't plankton seeding potentially dangerous? I mean, the Mississippi River has been "seeding" the Gulf of Mexico to the point that it has a persistent dead zone from oxygen depletion- algae and what not grow, die and sink, and the decay results in less than 2 ppm oxygen in the deep waters.

Can we actually meaningfully sequester enough carbon this way without drastically altering the subsurface ecosystems of an ocean?

Edit: to be clear, I am not trying to be contrarian, just genuinely curious if it would be any different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It says when they die, they sink to the bottom, "locking the carbon" at the bottom of the ocean.

But isn't a significant part of that carbon released into the water as they're eaten and otherwise decomposed and dissolved?

<comment><USER5> Whale corpses tend to reach the bottom of the ocean largely intact actually! It's hard for most creatures to eat them quickly enough, and they're typically largely eaten by sharks and scavengers on the ocean floor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This statement in the article is really dumb: "whales accumulate an average of 33 tonnes of CO2". Yes, but that's from eating other plants & animals that would otherwise accumulate that same CO2 themselves. Furthermore, whales (like all mammals) breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2 so the net effect of breathing and eating alone (ignoring the 'whale pump' phenomena) is an increase in CO2.

<comment><USER7> Please be more polite. You didn't comment on this part of the article:

> When they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, locking that carbon > away for hundreds of years.

<comment><USER8> ""The plankton absorb the carbon dioxide like a tree," Barton says, "and when they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and that carbon is locked away for thousands of years. "

[https://psmag.com/environment/global-warming-is-putting- phyt...](https://psmag.com/environment/global-warming-is-putting- phytoplankton-in-danger)

We are back to dumb again?

<comment><USER7> [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0012444)

"The carbon stored in populations of marine vertebrates is only a small part of the total carbon in marine ecosystems; however, the impact of rebuilding stocks of fish and whales would be comparable to existing carbon sequestration projects."

<comment><USER8> I find it strange after 40+ years of Save the Whales we are discussing using whales as a carbon sink.

But to me increasing animals that eat plants which are the actual cabon sinks would decrease the ability of the ocean to sequester carbon.

But I'd have to see a mathematical model. Animals hasten death but also reduce reproduction speed.

Edit - whales are carnivores so not applicable

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do I have to think of Star Trek IV?

In any case, one more reason to make sure that those great creatures have a future.

</comment><comment><USER10> From the World Economic Forum at Davos...

"Over a lifespan of around 60 years, whales ... accumulate an average of 33 tonnes of CO2 ... By comparison, a tree absorbs up to 48 pounds of CO2 a year."

The modern version of "apples and oranges" ? "whales and trees"

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised to see that whales are beneficial to phytoplankton, I would have thought that they primarily eat them.

The article isn't too clear... is their primary use in promoting phytoplankton growth just mixing of water?

<comment><USER12> I believe whales primarily eat krill, which eat phytoplankton. Phytoplankton eat whale poop. In the Netflix documentary Our Planet, the episode The High Seas discusses how the whaling ban in the 80s has led to a resurgence of the humpback whale population and how they help provide nutrients to promote phytoplankton growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Admittedly this is low impact, but it is critical to maintain rational optimism in regard to the challenge of climate change. Doomsday-ism doesn't help anything. If you feel the same way, come be productive and join the conversations going on at [https://collective.energy](https://collective.energy)

</comment><comment><USER14> > If we helped whales return to their pre-whaling numbers of 4- to 5 million > (up from 1.3 million today), researchers say they could capture 1.7 billion > tonnes of CO2 annually - with the cost of protecting them at just $13 per > person a year.

The cost per person in the world?

$13 per person year times global population is 13*7.8 = $101 billion a year.

</comment><comment><USER15> Click bait headline

<comment><USER16> We've edited it now.</comment></comment>


20 Years, One Standard: The Story of TCP/IP (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbi.umn.edu/iterations/spira.html <comment><USER2> ahem: Pouzin [1][3][4].

       Cerf: Incidentally, just for the record, the sliding window
       flow control for TCP came straight out of discussions with
       Louie Pouzin [ph?] and his people at INRIA.  So, in fact,
       Gerard Le Lann [ph?], who was part of Louis Pouzin's lab,
       came to Stanford University in 1974 and participated in a
       lot of the design work, and I remember Bob Metcalfe and
       Le Lann and I sortof lying down of the living room in my house
       in Palo Alto on this giant piece of paper, trying to sketch
       what the state diagrams were for these protocols.

       Nielson: Louis Pouzin arises all over the place?

       Cerf: Absolutely. [2]

[1]: [http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/6/6.3-C...](http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/6/6.3-CYCLADESNetworkLouisPouzin1-72.html)

[2]:[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/04/102658186-05-01-acc.pdf)

[3]:[http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/155666](http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/155666)

[4]:[http://pouzinsociety.org/about](http://pouzinsociety.org/about)

</comment><comment><USER3>
      Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?
      Yes, I'd like to hear a TCP joke.
      OK, I'll tell you a TCP joke.
      OK, I'll hear a TCP joke.
      Are you ready to hear a TCP joke?
      Yes, I am ready to hear a TCP joke.
      OK, I'm about to send the TCP joke. It will last 10 seconds, it has two characters, it does not have a setting, it ends with punchline.
      OK, I'm ready to hear the TCP joke that will last 10 seconds, has two characters, does not have a setting and will end with a punchline.
      I'm sorry, your connection has timed out... ...Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?

<comment><USER4> In the same vein I know a joke about UDP but you may not get it

<comment><USER5> Yes, yes. And I would like to tell an HTTP joke but I'm feeling slightly insecure about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Possibly not very on topic, but it might not be wise to call TCP a single standard when it has become to complex nowadays. The tangled mess of RFCs describing TCP has become so complex that an RFC is written to provide a roadmap of TCP[0]. And that roadmap references more than 150 other RFCs.

[0]: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7414](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7414)

<comment><USER7> > And that roadmap references more than 150 other RFCs.

I count eight RFCs in the "Core Functionality" section. [0] I count ~26 RFCs in the "Strongly Encouraged Enhancements" section. [1]

The remaining referenced RFCs are:

* Experimental extensions to TCP

* _IANA_ guidelines to follow when one is _extending_ TCP

* Documents referenced _only_ because of their historical significance

* Documents that provide implementation insights derived from TCP implementers' war stories over the years

Between eight and ~thirty-four RFCs is a damn sight smaller than "more than 150".

[0] This section is stuff that _must_ be implemented to speak TCP.

[1] That section is stuff that improves the performance and/or security of TCP implementations, but is not required to interoperate with other TCP implementations.</comment></comment>


Crowd-sourced translation engine for Rails - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/berk/tr8n <comment><USER2> It's a great idea, but on the internet there's this strange subculture called "teenagers" who think foreign swearwords are _hilarious_.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. Facebook (and Wikipedia) have to deal with this same problem. This is why tr8n provides a mechanism for translators to vote on the quality of translations. And there are also admin tools for suspending translators, adding a vote threshold for translations to go live and a block list as well. Also, users can report a translation, which immediately puts the translator on a watch list.

Also, don't forget, in a crowd-source environment, there will almost always be more language protectors than vandals.

<comment><USER3> Any thought to integrate with Mechanical Turk? Some sites with lower visitor counts may not have the user base for this to work. I've written a Rails gem that makes Mechanical Turk integrations fairly trivial for Rails apps. (<https://github.com/aantix/turkee>) Hopefully this could help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> lost-theory Something similar: Transifex

<http://www.transifex.net/>

Built with Django.

</comment><comment><USER4> This tool is _awesome_. I can say that having used it on my site. This is way, way, way better than Rails's built-in i18n.</comment>


Show HN: Windows 95 in an Electron App - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows95 <comment><USER2> Glad to see an Electron application that _finally_ has a decent, native- looking, unsurprising UI :-).

(Edit: sadly, I'm only half-joking. I was thinking about how fun it would be to extend this so as to bridge the host and the guest via e.g. a socket, so that I could get notifications about UI events inside the machine on the host, which would give me Visual Basic 6's UI builder and all the greatness of a 21st century machine, so that I could finally whip up an UI without yelling profanities at the CSS reference and in less than umpteen hours of tinkering with stuff that _clearly_ just wasn't built for this. Thing is, halfway through, I really began thinking this might make sense a little and that depresses me. /done editing)

That being said, if anyone's curious what else can be achieved in this manner, there's a bunch of nice demos here: [https://github.com/copy/v86](https://github.com/copy/v86) .

<comment><USER3> _> give me Visual Basic 6's UI builder and all the greatness of a 21st century machine, so that I could finally whip up an UI without yelling profanities at the CSS reference [...] that clearly just wasn't built for this_

Can I interest you in a VB6-y design/code/deploy tool with no CSS or JS? It's all in Python, even in-browser: [https://anvil.works](https://anvil.works)

<comment><USER4> Also the Lazarus Pascal IDE is still around and is keeping the old-school VB flame alive. Just looking at the screenshots will make you nostalgic.

[https://www.lazarus-ide.org/](https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

<comment><USER5> iBasic is, however, on permanent hiatus: [http://basic.mindteq.com/index.php?i=88](http://basic.mindteq.com/index.php?i=88)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A whole OS and it's still on the relatively small side for an Electron app...

<comment><USER7> LOLLL

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" keeps getting more and more real

<comment><USER9> Link for the uninitiated: [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth- and-death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)

Reference in above comment is to the future "metal architecture" Gary starts detailing about halfway through.

Gary Bernhardt's presentations are always masterfully done. This one is particularly funny.

<comment><USER10> On HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605687)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 37 MB for the deb package... Wow. That's incredibly small compared to some other Electron apps.

<comment><USER12> Well, yeah. It's just a complete operating system with an all new GUI that completely revolutionized the world of computing. It's not like it can send emoji to your co-workers.

<comment><USER13> When you contextualize it like that it makes sense - emacs is something like 38MB.

<comment><USER14> The default distribution of Emacs 26.1 x64 for Windows is 677 MB.

Emacs 26.1 for Mac, built from code via `brew install emacs-mac` is 136 MB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> * me, crying *

Please, no, you can't just Electron everything

* hacker news points at Windows 95 *

Electron'd

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone have a BonziBuddy download link?

</comment><comment><USER17> "Should this have been a native app?" \- "Absolutely" lol. love it. Brings back all the nostalgia.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is based on the javascript x86 emulator [https://github.com/copy/v86/](https://github.com/copy/v86/) , which has demos online running many older operations systems like Windows 1.01

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome. Immediately tried to jump into DOS by running 'command' and managed to break it.

<comment><USER20> Let me know when you get DOS running. Then we can work getting MechCommander working w/ SoundBlaster-compatible music.

<comment><USER21> I think this already works in DOSBox .74 with MechCommander Gold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There _should_ be some practical purpose for this, like some Win-95 only app I loved from my childhood that I can now experience again. But I struggle to think of any.

<comment><USER23> If Microsoft does one thing right, it's backward compatibility. After all, Windows is the operating system running old nuclear codes, hospital monitors, army navigation systems, etc unchanged from the 90's. So your retro games will play just fine on the latest version.

VirtualBox or QEMU will run Windows 95 more "natively" if you need serious Windows 95 emulation.

<comment><USER24> > Microsoft does one thing right, it's backward compatibility

Except for games. Between XP and 7 many games broke, and the same thing happened again between 7 and 10. There are numerous examples out there.

<comment><USER25> In fairness, they painted themselves into a corner with intracate APIs designed to skip the normal hardware abstraction layers. It probably takes a ton of effort just to keep old DirectX APIs working through architectural changes.

Also, supporting 16 bit software in long mode requires emulation, and they chose not to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Now we can bring back html based applications using html and vbscript and jscript.

[https://www.599cd.com/tips/hta/beginner/B1/](https://www.599cd.com/tips/hta/beginner/B1/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Has Win95's copyright expired?

<comment><USER28> No, it hasn't. Copyright expires a couple of decades after the death of the/all author/s.

<comment><USER29> So can I assume that any self-respecting company producing IP has an army of toddlers 'working' on its products? ;-)

<comment><USER21> Or that the company itself is legally the author.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Now I can test my websites on this old IE again!

<comment><USER21> In other words, now you can make decent websites instead of garbage! You're right, that makes this whole thing worth it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'd love a version of this running classic macOS versions (7,8 and 9)

<comment><USER32> You could run System 7 via Executor under Windows 95.

<comment><USER31> I wasn't aware of Executor, fascinating. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love traditional simplistic UIs like Win95 for their retro feel, and miss the days when you could skin apps. That ship probably sailed by now, but at least we get projects like this every once in a while.

But isn't Windows 95 not allowed to be used unless you purchase a license?

<comment><USER34> > But isn't Windows 95 not allowed to be used unless you purchase a license?

Technically yes.

Legally Microsoft has the absolute right to stop people hosting Windows 95's files for download/re-distribution. I'm guessing they choose not to since it is not-for-profit, and the cost of going after violators will be more than they make from sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was surprised. Completely on a different topic though.

I noticed that emoticons were used in git commit message titles as a prefix. I did not know that github rendered those. And using CLI it is still readable:

      :wrench: One more Forge fix

EDIT: formatting

</comment><comment><USER36> It's all about that SOL.EXE

<comment><USER37> That was running slow for me, so I defragged the drive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> What is a rationale for an Electron app when there has long been an online version of Windows 95? [https://win95.ajf.me](https://win95.ajf.me)

<comment><USER39> Can't you say this about 90% of electron apps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I just restarted it via Start Menu and it won't start anymore. Bug?

</comment><comment><USER41> The layers of VMs and interpreters involved in this gives me vertigo...

</comment><comment><USER42> This has made my day.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sucks that "Internet Explorer" can't browse websites. I just want to open aol, geocities, altavista may be?

</comment><comment><USER44> This brought back so much of nostalgia ...

Thanks, man! Thanks a lot!!

</comment><comment><USER45> This is simply delicious.

</comment><comment><USER46> Is this vaporwave?</comment>


Modern Ofis Mobilyaları - <AUTHOR> https://sites.google.com/site/modernofismobilyalari/ <comment><AUTHOR> Have a good day at first. I sent not spam the site links. We are trying to do business in the management of third world countries dictator. We're sharing a link to our site, but coming from you at one stroke. You are making it that we are Turks. Ultimately God provided me pick out where I was born. Our website our budget trying to make the diagnosis. We do not know how else. If you want to link to our site could help: Please help us [https://www.elsaofismobilya.com/](https://www.elsaofismobilya.com/). Thank you

</comment><comment><USER2> You seem to be spamming us with adverts for office furniture. Please don't do that.

Flagged.

Again.

If this is _not_ spam then perhaps you could take a few moments to explain why your posts are relevant to this specific forum. Thank you.</comment>


Go Rocks - How Can We Avoid Something This Bad In The Future? - <AUTHOR> http://acooke.org/cute/GoRocksHow0.html

<comment><USER2> No syntactically lightweight way of writing anonymous recursive functions? I can't make myself care about that; I just spent 30 seconds trying, and failed. That's just not a use case worth optimizing for in a practical systems language.

Also, it's true that the Go spec doesn't guarantee tail calls are optimized. If Go were designed to be a functional language, that'd be problematic. However, guaranteeing TCO isn't free in implementation, and in the presence of features like "defer", it becomes non-trivial to understand when it is happening. So, while I like TCO as much as the next guy, I agree with the Go designers decision not to require it. Just like with a pile of other languages, the lack hasn't stopped people from writing good code, and not even stopped them from writing useful recursive code. I think there's some code in the Go standard library (parsing code, mostly) that uses trampolining to simulate it, and that code would be better off if it could just do a tail call, but on the balance that code still works well and isn't convoluted.

Anyway, not a bad blog post; I agree with most of it. But, as someone who has written a fair bit of code in functional languages and a fair bit of Go, I find that the more Go I write the less I care about the language features (or lack thereof) that I was horrified by at first, and the more I see most other languages as overcomplicated. Go isn't a very good language in theory, but it's a great language in practice, and practice is all I care about, so I like it quite a bit.

<comment><USER3> I'm a full time OCaml dev these days and I run into OCaml's 'lack of lightweight anonymous recursive functions' maybe three times a year. It costs 3 lines of code to declare the function (called loop() or whatever) and then call it. I've never realized I was supposed to want to switch languages because of it.

Otherwise, this comment makes me more interested in Go than I have been before. OCaml has a bazillion features that I never use, and since every OCaml program can look completely different by using those features, the libraries outside the standard lib are all but incompatible with my code.

<comment><USER4> what about pattern matching? that is imo one of the saddest omissions from go - it's not a "huge" feature like continuations, but i find it makes a language significantly more pleasant to work with.

<comment><USER5> I asked Rob Pike why they didn't add pattern-matching given that it already has multiple returns and some other baby steps in that direction. His response was, "We considered it, but it turned out to be too much work in the compiler."

That was a huge WTF to me. Isn't your _job_ as a language designer to do that work so that I, the language _user_ , don't have to?

<comment><USER6> The cost of complexity in the compiler is not only to the persons implementing it.

Also I'm pretty sure the amount of work in the compiler was only one of the considerations, and while I don't doubt your account of your conversation with rob, I doubt it was the main consideration in this design decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I work on Rust, which is in a similar space to Go. IMHO this article is oversimplifying.

(1) Recursive anonymous functions: This is the first time I've heard this criticism. MLs usually don't have this functionality either. It's not too much trouble to give the function a name.

(2) Tail call optimization: TCO isn't free. It requires all callees to pop their arguments, which slightly penalizes _every_ call in the program. Rust is planned to support full TCO, but the current compiler only does sibling call optimization (a subset of TCO).

(3) Continuations (I assume call/cc is meant here): Again, these are expensive, because they interfere with the stack discipline. You end up having to garbage collect stack frames in the worst case. For this reason both Go and Rust have implemented exceptional control flow using stack unwinding and destructors. (For Go panic/defer/recover play the role of destructors, while for Rust we use a more traditional RAII system.)

<comment><USER8> (1) MLs allow to nest named functions. Go only allows named global functions, and lacks a feature that Pascal had.

(2) Someone has to do cleanup anyhow. Either the caller or callee. (I am no expert in calling conventions) Anyhow, isn't this practically free, because the stack is in the L1 cache?

(3) To implement lightweight threads (ala. Erlang, Go, Stackless) you already can't allocate your activation records on the C-stack. So the main cost for call/cc is already paid for. Besides, Go lacks any form of non-local jumps, so escape continuations alone (setjmp/longjmp) would already be an improvement.

<comment><USER9> > Go only allows named global functions, and lacks a feature that Pascal had.

        func main() {
        	bar := func() {
        		fmt.Println("Hello, 世界")
        	}
        	bar()
        }

What do I lose by doing that versus having 'func bar()'?

<comment><USER8> this:

        func global(some_arg_to_close_over Bar) {
        	func walk_tree(node Node) {
                ...
                walk_tree(left(node))
                walk_tree(right(node))
        	}
        	walk_tree(something)
        }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> God what an annoying troll.

It's a very new language, and things are being improved + fixed all the time, I would be very surprised indeed if tail-call optimisation + the ever so vital self-recursive lambda issue weren't fixed at a later date. To treat these things as permanently a part of the language is disingenuous at best.

Rob Pike (part of the core team) has said that what puts a lot of PL people off is that it is _not_ theoretically exciting, it's just designed to be very useful [1].

The funny thing about go is that it seems like an uninteresting language when you first begin, but as you write more code you begin to appreciate its simplicity and orthogonality and realise that these are extremely nice qualities.

Language design is as much about saying no to things as it is to saying yes to things.

On a related note, I don't like the implication that there is now a scientific method to language design which obviates the need for practical considerations - that strikes me as class A ivory tower bullshit.

[1]:[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i0hat7pdpk&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i0hat7pdpk&feature=player_detailpage#t=2372s)

<comment><USER11> I wonder what the author means by programming language "academic research". None of the mentioned deficiencies of Go (anon lambdas/TCO) is the product of any new academic research and have been around for a very long time (see Lisp).

Most PL academic research goes into Haskell/ML , and we know how useful they really are. (Monads/Type inferencing , anyone?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wrote a bunch of go code this morning. It's definitely got a few really neat ideas in it.

I tend to write erlang or c++ mostly for my day job. I do really wish the designers had a bit more erlang experience. Just a touch. Just enough so that I had a way to propagate the death of a goroutine through a bunch of other goroutines without building all of that manually.

For example, code I wrote today:

<http://pastebin.com/Zp6eqqTa>

That infinite loop is really infinite. If the goroutine feeding the channel dies (e.g. if the connection is dropped), this thing will keep reading on the channel. In erlango, I'd do something like "go_link client.Feed(ch)" and the right thing would happen. Here, I really need to spin up a second channel to send out the death spurt, select across the channels in my loop and send my death message with defer.

defer is awesome, and I wish every language had it (C++ has something that looks like it if you write enough code and squint hard enough). Still, I've got a lot of code like the above and I imagine it's not an uncommon thing.

Every language has something that just feels unjustifiably wrong with it, though. go certainly isn't one I'd be pained to use if I had to every day.

( __Edit __: couldn't figure out code formatting, tossed it over to pastebin)

<comment><USER13> > I do really wish the designers had a bit more erlang experience.

I feel the same way. I had this hope that this would be what I would learn instead of Erlang. You know it has goroutines and channels -- kind of like processes and casts. Well except that it is not the same. Erlang's processes that have explicit pids and messages are cast to those processes by referring to their pid, make a lot more sense to me than a bunch of channels. Maybe it is just me, but I really just prefer the Erlang way. (Is the the "actor" vs "CSP" paradigms?).

Then it is what you mentioned, exit signals. Anyone who wants to promote concurrency as first order feature in the language and expects it to be useful in the real world, would have to have something like supervision trees & OTP. In other words when you have lots of little goroutines doing stuff concurrently, it is expected some will just crash and then you'd want to do something reasonable, which is not always to just crash the whole application (OS process).

<comment><USER14> Go is something quite different to Erlang, despite some small similarities. If you want Erlang, just use Erlang.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really wanted to learn something from this post, but it's mostly just hyperbole and whining.

"It turns out that, in Go, you can't write a self-recursive anonymous function - there's no way to make it refer to itself. Well, you can do a dirty hack that's the "official work-around" (I'll let you google for the bug report)."

To summarize this argument: 1\. It is impossible to have a self-recursive anonymous function in Go. 2\. Oh wait.. It is completely possible, but far too ugly to soil this blog post.

I looked up the temporary solution (<http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=226>). It is this:

        var recurse func()
        recurse = func() {
          recurse()
        }

The proposed _permanent_ solution is allowing recursive function definitions, because that is the proper solution instead of adding a magic self keyword like other languages do.

(tl;dr The author just doesn't like the fairly-simple work-around proposed while the language is still developing)

Edit: There _definitely_ are far more important things in Go I dislike, and would change, however this blog post is essentially fluff.

<comment><USER8> This is what they want:

        func outer(a int) {
            func inner_helper(b int) {
                ...
            }
        }

Pascal allowed nested functions 40 years ago...

<comment><USER16> When saying "nested functions" in 2011, people expect you to mean lexically scoped nested functions.

Pascal's nested functions really just scoped the name of the function differently, but they were equivalent to a function definition on the outer- most level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't think Go's creators are as ignorant of academic ideas as you say. I've seen Rob Pike refer to OCaml a lot for instance. They just don't seem to like many of those ideas.

<comment><USER18> I cannot recall him ever saying the word "OCaml".

<comment><USER17> It's possible that I am mistaking Pike for someone else on the Go team.

<comment><USER19> Or the language? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Go's performance isn't good enough to broadly compete with C++ yet, and for everything higher level I don't see a strong enough advantage over Java or Scala to start all over with a new library ecosystem.

That said, I'm keeping an eye on it. If it takes off I'll learn it but it doesn't make sense to make it a priority yet, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER21> I still think the major stumbling block for Go is the syntax. I can't put my finger on it, but from the first time I saw it I thought it looked wrong.

Can anyone who shares my opinion chime in on what things they think cause the syntax to suffer aesthetically?

<comment><USER14> I'm amazed by this particular criticism of Go. Compared to many modern languages (Erlang or Ruby, for example), Go's syntax is barely different to Java or C. But I think it's better than either of those (It's certainly more regular).

Try it for two days and you'll change your mind.

Also, see: <http://blog.golang.org/2010/07/gos-declaration-syntax.html>

<comment><USER22> It seems some programmers just will not accept new syntax at all. I think it's a waste of time trying to please these people and, contrary to popular belief, you don't need their blessing to make a successful new language. Coffeescript is an example that supports this.

<comment><USER21> It's a valid point, but it paints with too broad of a brush. For example, I have enthusiastically moved from JavaScript to CoffeeScript, in part because I love the syntax.

While I know there _are_ programmers who act just like you described, my complaint is with Go's syntax specifically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've played very little with GO, and it seems to be a nice language overall.

Anyway, it's designed to allow easy parallelism. It's a system's language for parallel work.

The only thing that I don't like about it is that the built-in types get special treatment (if you want to write a map yourself, you can't use the same syntax). This indeed feels like a design smell.

GO is still very useful this way, but I do hope that it gets generics/templates sometime in the future.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think Go is a pretty mediocre language overall, one that would have been a killer early 2000, but this article basically boils down to: "Go sucks because it doesn't support tail call optimization and continuations".

Way to miss the boat.

<comment><USER25> I don't mind those as much, but what really kills it for me is the lack of separation between the language and the standard library.

<comment><USER26> Wait, is there supposed to be such a separation? Python's standard library is half the reason people use Python. Do I consider the MatLab matrix multiplication routine the library or the language? Because the abstract syntax and semantics of MatLab could certainly do without it. What about ODE solving? I wouldn't use MatLab without it. Is Lisp's (defun) library or language? In my own pylisp, I put (def) in the standard library. But you'll see little code that doesn't use it.

What about Haskell? Is Prelude library or language? Every Haskell file has it preloaded, so you can't code _without_ it (without effort, anyway); but it can certainly be implemented in Haskell itself. Is Haskell the language just typed lambda calculus with type classes and some basic syntax sugar? Is IO Haskell language or library?

What about C's varargs? Is it language or library? It seems like library, since you include a header file to use it. But it's also impossible to do variable-lenght argument lists in C without it. What about longjmp? What about sbrk? It seems like library, since different OSs do it differently, and thus it has multiple implementations, in C. But without it, you can't do heap allocated memory, which is something you can't do without it.

Separation between language and standard library? What language _does_ do it?

<comment><USER27> C is actually one of the few languages that gets the language/library separation mostly right. You can write pretty much the entire standard library in C, and you can easily write C without the standard library. It's very straightforward (if sometimes a bit annoying) to do this in Windows, and I believe neither EPOC/Symbian or PalmOS supported the ISO C library.

varargs, setjmp/longjmp and sbrk are 100% library. You can do varargs without stdarg.h; if you know the calling convention, you can just walk through the memory occupied by the arguments. setjmp is trickier but if you know the rules you could write it using assembly language, just like the library writers did. As for sbrk, I'm not terribly familiar with that I do admit, but judging by the man page it is not part of the C standard library, kind of proving my point. But you can definitely have a heap, and allocate out of it, and (where plausible) grab more address space, without having it.

<comment><USER28> I agree with your broad point that you can write a usable C library with a very minimal amount of assembly, but I am going to quibble on some of the details.

> You can write pretty much the entire standard library in C, ... varargs, > setjmp/longjmp and sbrk are 100% library.

If you're saying "These four functions can be written in C" then you are mistaken. If you are saying "These four functions can be written in assembly" then you are not saying anything interesting about C, because it is true of _any_ language that it is possible to write its library in assembly if it's possible to write it at all.

In more detail.

Whether you can write va_arg in C depends on the platform's calling convention. On most platforms you can (because the default calling convention has to support varargs, and the easiest way to do that is to push the arguments on the stack) but on x86-64 you can't.

setjmp and longjmp cannot be written in C on any platform I'm familiar with, unless you're writing them on top of something like setcontext, which has a slight superset of their functionality. They are, however, very simple to write in assembly.

You can write sbrk in one line of C, and the glibc implementation is only ten: <http://koala.cs.pub.ro/lxr/glibc/misc/sbrk.c#L29> But sbrk is simply a convenience wrapper around brk, which is necessarily a system call. And C doesn't have a "system call" statement.

(Actually, you can write brk in C too if you just want to allocate out of some fixed blob of address space, which is a reasonable choice on, say, a microcontroller.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> He lost me when he said "to understand that, you need to understand the academics".

There is a pretty sizable disconnect between what's going on in academic computer science today and what professional software engineers are looking for. Go explicitly sets out to solve practical problems, not provide an implementation of this year's trendiest compiler porn.

</comment><comment><USER30> For some reason I can't scroll this page on the iPad.

<comment><USER31> Use two fingers. It's still a pain, but you can read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I know that this is the wrong mentality, but I want to become an expert in a language that is as good as it can be. Can Go evolve to address some of these issues? Would it even be go anymore?

I tried Googling, but why are Scala and Haskell automatically classified as "academic"? Is there value in learning them purely for that reason? I walked through some Haskell tutorials after reading this, but I'm rather stare at the sun than read Scala.

<comment><USER33> I wouldn't call either Haskell or Scala academic. However, here a quick shoot from the hip stereotyping of each.

Scala gives me the impression it wants to be Java's C++. C++ is largely an extension of C. Sure you can use it entirely differently than C, but that C-ish core is still there. And Scala gives me that same feeling in relation to Java.

On the other hand, Haskell suffers from being a "pure" language. I mean "pure" in a wider sense than "functional". I mean "pure" as in being built entirely around a concept. For Haskell that concept is "functional programming". For Lisp, it's the "cons cell". And for Forth, it's the "stack machine". The benefit to being a "pure" language is there are all sorts of synergies you can take advantage of. The down side is when something doesn't quite line up, it gets ugly fast.

<comment><USER16> I think Haskell accommodates imperative programming so well that it surpasses many imperative languages and beats them in their own game.

I also think the name "purity" is misleading. In the context of Haskell it means:

* Referential Transparency: references to things are indistinguishable from those things. This helps a lot with equational reasoning about code, optimizations and all sorts of mechanical refactorings. I don't think there are significant disadvantages here.

* Typed effects: Haskell types its effects and requires explicit composition of effects and not just of values. This, in turn, turns "side effects" simply into "effects" because they are so explicit. This has some disadvantages, mainly regarding learning curve. If you get a pure function type, you are _guaranteed_ many of useful things about its behavior. The flip side of this, is that if you want to change a pure function to have effects and break these guarantees, you will have to change its type and somewhat restructure it.

Haskell doesn't "get ugly fast" in any circumstance I've seen. It accomodates an extremely wide array of paradigms as pretty encodings on top of its own functional paradigm.

<comment><USER34> I completely agree, in fact I've been trying to show people how well Haskell can encode imperative programs.

See [https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/Musings/blob/master/why_...](https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/Musings/blob/master/why_haskell_is_suited_to_io.md) and [https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/Musings/blob/master/comp...](https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/Musings/blob/master/composable_database_logic.md)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


http://ai/ - <AUTHOR> This is a real, working URL, even if HN doesn't recognize it.<p>http://ai/ <comment><USER2> That's an interesting find. Now I'm curious to know if there are more like it...

Edit: I've tried a few country codes, and [http://ca/](http://ca/) goes to ca.com, and [http://de/](http://de/) goes to de.com, but [http://se/](http://se/) goes to [https://www.schneider- electric.com/ww/en/](https://www.schneider-electric.com/ww/en/) so it's not that country codes default to the registrar. Weird...

<comment><USER2> [http://ad/](http://ad/) goes to [https://www.onebyaol.com/](https://www.onebyaol.com/)

[http://ae/](http://ae/) goes to [https://www.ae.com/](https://www.ae.com/) American Eagle

[http://mx/](http://mx/) goes to [https://data.mx.com/](https://data.mx.com/) MX Technologies Inc.

The list of two-letter country codes can be found here: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2)

Edit: I'm thinking this is an artifact of my web browser, as these work for me with Firefox but not Chromium.

OP, which web browser are you using?

Edit 2: The original one, [http://ai/](http://ai/) does indeed work for me in Chromium as well.

<comment><USER3> Or perhaps preferred DNS resolution purchased from ISPs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Send an email to the mods firstname.lastname@example.com . They usually reply in a few hours or less, and may repair it soon too.</comment>


"Run" the Python Data Science Handbook in your browser - <AUTHOR> https://notebooks.azure.com/jakevdp/libraries/PythonDataScienceHandbook <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks! we're getting the HN Hug [edit:Fixed]. If you want to check out the book, while we fix the issue, you can go to:

[https://notebooks.azure.com](https://notebooks.azure.com)

Then on the top "Featured" carousel click the link for Jake's book.

If you just want to view, try the 'notebooks' directory to see HTML rendered view of the book.

If you want to Run/Edit/etc the book:

1) Sign in - any gmail, outlook etc email will do. 2) Clone the book 3) Run! (Cell/RunAll)

<comment><USER2> HTML resource you can parse with wget here

[https://jakevdp.github.io/PythonDataScienceHandbook/](https://jakevdp.github.io/PythonDataScienceHandbook/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is the source material for the book. It was loaded by Jake to Azure Notebooks.

You can load any github repo by creating a Library (a repo basically), and +New / Load from github. It'll load the notebooks, data, etc. You can then run the notebooks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> BTW, if there are other book authors that want to publish here, please feel free to do so!

Also if you have a github repo and want to make it easily runnable, you can place a badge on your repo like this:

[https://notebooks.azure.com/help/libraries/sharing/create-a-...](https://notebooks.azure.com/help/libraries/sharing/create- a-github-badge)

Your users can then click it to upload+run.

</comment><comment><USER3> For more information you can check out the blog entry over here:

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/10/26/run...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/10/26/run- book-run-from-physical-paper-to-executable-online-books/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey - This is also hosted on Gryd if the other link has issues

[https://beta.gryd.us/notebook/published/gryd/PythonDataScien...](https://beta.gryd.us/notebook/published/gryd/PythonDataScienceHandbook/Index.ipynb)</comment>


We use a kid's story book to align product assumptions - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/4PhiNDzVGnY <comment><AUTHOR> Assumptions - we all make them.

During onboarding at Free I read a story book that is the epitome of every product team ever.

All those little assumptions we make, might get us to elephant or snake. When all we're trying to do is get back to mum.

And while we all communicate, if that communication gets us to dad, we're still in the wrong place.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is so good, well done

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much

Business is about people more than it is about product.</comment></comment>


'Strange pneumonia' seen in Lombardy in November, leading Italian doctor says - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076334/coronavirus-strange-pneumonia-seen-lombardy-november-leading <comment><USER2> Consider the source and also consider that this story has appeared nowhere in the Western press.

<comment><USER3> The "source" is based in Hong Kong and is routinely writing articles that harshly criticize China.

I'm not sure you understand much about them apart from a certain word in the name that has triggered such a response.

> appeared nowhere in the Western press

Took me 3 seconds of searching to find this was originally from US based NPR on Thursday interviewing The Lancet author and the South China Morning Post was simply repeating it verbatim.

Plenty of other places on the internet to stir up jingoism, please don't do it here.

[https://www.npr.org/transcripts/817974987](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/817974987)</comment></comment>


9 GIFs That Explain Responsive Design Brilliantly - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3038367/9-gifs-that-explain-responsive-design-brilliantly

<comment><USER2> Ah, so it's just a new term for live window resizing?</comment>


Show HN: Weightof.it – Compare JavaScript libraries by file size - <AUTHOR> http://weightof.it/

<comment><USER2> It doesn't seem to compare the minified + gzipped library sizes. That's the most important metric to me. Who still serves comments in JS?

<comment><AUTHOR> It compares the minified files so no comments. You raise a good point about gzipping though. I was operating under the assumption that the libraries would be compressed at the the same ratio so minified file size would be a good comparison. This probably isn't entirely accurate though. I'll have to look into it a bit more. Thanks for your feedback!

<comment><USER2> To illustrate this point, React min+gzip is about 40 KB: [https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/0.13.3/react.mi...](https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/react/0.13.3/react.min.js) not 121 KB.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think what I'm going to do is add a checkbox at the top that will let you toggle between the gzipped and non-gzipped weight.

After doing some research it looks like larger libraries with more redundancy will benefit more from gzipping than smaller libraries. So relative to uncompressed file size, React will be compressed more than say Backbone.

Definitely going to add this in. Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! I had fun with this, especially comparing Ember's half a meg footprint to Backbone's 20K. One helpful data point could be whether the library supports a (formal) custom build apparatus, since you can often get a sizable reduction that way. Full jQuery UI clocks in at ~242K, but using [http://jqueryui.com/download/](http://jqueryui.com/download/) you can often strip it down to 20K or less. Similarly with THREE.js and several others. Going in the other direction, a library that seems small (Backbone.js, @ ~20K) may actually end up being relatively heavy because of required external dependencies. A more explicit side-by-side "compare" function would also be nice here, comparing library size along with other metrics like script loader compatibility, maintenance frequency, different flavors of popularity, etc.

<comment><USER4> It's not very fair to compare Ember's size with Backbone's as Backbone implements just a very small subset of Ember's functionality.

Also, it seems that the sizes are outdated because the latest build of Ember.js is 478KB (see [http://builds.emberjs.com/release/ember.min.js](http://builds.emberjs.com/release/ember.min.js)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I was actually unaware that Ember has separate versions for production and dev. I was using the dev version which I assume has extra features for debugging. I just updated it with the correct version. Sorry Ember...

<comment><USER4> No worries, thanks for correcting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice comparisons site, but when I quickly mouse over thorugh list items, because of the animation it seems like a small earthquake is going on :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Really appreciate the feedback. Thank you. It's fixed :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just tried contributing a library but it's not showing up in the site. No error either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for contributing! I have approve them before they appear to prevent people from spamming. I just checked and was surprised to see 22 libraries awaiting approval. Awesome feeling. I was not expecting that. I'll be able to go through them tonight.

I did just add a flash message users will see after they make a contribution though. Thanks for the feedback. And thanks to everyone who contributed a library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Didn't look at the source- how are you determining popularity?

<comment><AUTHOR> GitHub stars</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Submit Please limit text to 2000 characters - <AUTHOR> I counted every character and it's 1986. Why does hn keep telling me to limit the text to a number that's higher? Should I make it exactly 2000 characters? <comment><USER2> Maybe it gets converted to HTML first. Each line would become a
...
, and italics are go from asterisks to ....

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't test this but ... , are you counting newlines?

<comment><AUTHOR> wc hn.txt 26 371 1986 hn.txt

are newlines special? There are only like 10 \n in whole file.

<comment><USER4> \r too ?

<comment><AUTHOR> \r too. I just don't get it. I think the error message is telling me the limit is 2000 but really the limit is like 1500 or something much lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> .........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........X.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........a.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........0.........2

<comment><USER5> The upper message is 2000 char width.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Legality of a Jan 18 SOPA blackout on Google? - <AUTHOR>

I heard some people at a coffee shop today discussing the possibility of convincing facebook and google to shut down all of their services for a day because of SOPA, including google apps. While the anarchist in me was momentarily giddy at the whole idea, the realist makes me assume that there must be SLAs and service contracts for their commercial customers and their larger content providers and advertising partners. As awesome as it would be for Google to shut down everything and confuse the heck out of the world I'm sure the losses due to lawsuits and SLA fines would be massive. <comment><USER4> I really doubt Google would do this, not just because of potential contracts or even the lost revenue but mainly because of how tentative their market share is.

The only thing locking most people into Google search is _habit_. If Google were to not work for a day, a ton of people would start using Bing and friends; a significant proportion of these would indubitably continue using them forever. Most people don't really care about which engine they use--until it fails. Once it fails, they'll flail around for a bit then use somebody else.

I think the damage to Google's reputation and market share would be too big for them to consider killing search for a day. I could see them doing a doodle or something though.

<comment><USER5> I totally agree. Blacking out is just stupid. Raising awareness via splash page or messaging is effective and important.

Please, let's not be retarded. If things black out one day, it'll just piss people off and the next day it'll be back to normal.

Let's encourage Google / Facebook / Twitter to use their huge audiences to spread awareness of the issue. When the public hears what SOPA is, they will reject it. The only way this thing will pass is if its sneaks in by the special interests.

Stop the blackout talk though

<comment><USER6> Please don't toss the word "retarded" around. Retards can't help being retarded. Using it as a synonym for "stupid" is crass.

It's no different from saying "SOPA is gay!!!"

<comment><USER7> _Adjective: Less advanced, esp. mentally, than is usual for one's age. Synonyms: backward - <USER3>

Seems fine to me, especially considering it's no longer socially acceptable to use the word to describe the mentally disabled. Using _gay_ however, is a completely different scenario. _Retarded_ reflects on mental performance, while _gay_ reflects on sexuality.

English already has so few words - we might as well use the ones we have.

<comment><USER6> > _Adjective: Less advanced, esp. mentally, than is usual for one's age. > Synonyms: backward - <USER3>

The OP doesn't use it to mean "backwards" , "delayed" or "less advanced". He means "stupid" and should just say so.

> _it's no longer socially acceptable to use the word to describe the mentally > disabled_

Looking on Wordnik [1], four dictionaries out of five list "retard" as having to do with mental retardation (Wordnet 3.0 actually doesn't mention it according to Wordnik, but a quick search reveals that it actually does [2]).

Wikipedia [3], in fact, argues that "mental retardation" is on a "euphemistic treadmill" [4]. I'll allow Wikipedia to take it away:

 _The terms mental retardation and mentally retarded were invented in the middle of the 20th century to replace the previous set of terms, which were deemed to have become offensive. By the end of the 20th century, these terms themselves have come to be widely seen as disparaging and politically incorrect and in need of replacement._

The term "mentally retarded" is no longer "socially acceptable", precisely _because it perceived to be "disparaging"_.

> _Using gay however, is a completely different scenario. Retarded reflects on > mental performance, while gay reflects on sexuality._

People who are mentally disabled are unable to change it. As far as I know, the same applies to one's sexual orientation.

The OP uses the word "retarded" by saying "let's not be retarded". My state of retardation doesn't change from second to second; it's fixed at birth. Insulting what one can't change is the most powerful type of insult. If you call me "stupid", I can always work to be less ignorant. If you call me a "chink" because I'm Chinese, I can't change that, and I feel more insulted.

> _English already has so few words - we might as well use the ones we have._

That's a horrible reason. Simply using the word "idiotic", "dense", or any other works just fine in the OP's sentence. None of those refer to immutable characteristics such as "gay", "retard", or "chink".

When communicating, there isn't any reason to use a _potentially offensive_ word, especially when there are a plethora of less insulting ones available.

Edit: Changed "sexual preferences" to "sexual orientation". Thanks emmapersky!

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

1\. <http://www.wordnik.com/words/retard>

2\. [http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=retarded&su...](http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=retarded&sub=Search+WordNet&o2=&o0=1&o8=1&o1=1&o7=&o5=&o9=&o6=&o3=&o4=&h=)

3\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_retardation#cite_note- is...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_retardation#cite_note- isbn0-415-95086-4-1)

4\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism_treadmill#Euphemism_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism_treadmill#Euphemism_treadmill)

<comment><USER8> > When communicating, there isn't any reason to use a potentially offensive > word

Unless you want to offend. You might want to offend to signal the intensity of your rage. Minor range can warrant words like idiotic or stupid, major range calls for words like "fucking retarded git"

> The OP uses the word "retarded" by saying "let's not be retarded". My state > of retardation doesn't change from second to second; it's fixed at birth. > Insulting what one can't change is the most powerful type of insult. If you > call me "stupid", I can always work to be less ignorant. If you call me a > "chink" because I'm Chinese, I can't change that, and I feel more insulted.

Unless you really are retarded, he clearly meant that you shouldn't behave _like_ somebody who is mentally disabled, so I don't see the similarity to the word "chink".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I doubt they'll really black it out. However, I could see them doing a doodle or something like that.

Or maybe they could have something that draws black censor bars all over random words in your results that fade away after a few seconds and put up a link explaining what's wrong? That would be relatively easy, especially for Google.

<comment><USER10> I like your idea of blacking out random words. I don't think just a doodle is enough though. They do enough of those all the time that I usually just tune them out.

<comment><USER9> I haven't done any JavaScript for a while now. I should see if there's a sensible way to hack something like that up. Maybe via lettering.js?

EDIT: Apparently Tumblr did something like this. That must be where I heard about the idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If Google wanted to do something visible they just have to flip the search page to a black background. Doesn't affect access to products but people will certainly notice.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't there be lawsuits against Google when content is taken down to comply with SOPA and other anti-Internet bills? Not to mention extra costs in complying, both in reputation loss and revenue.

I believe they will run it by the legal team anyway.

</comment><comment><USER13> If Google shut off only it's search in protest of SOPA, wouldn't they run into anti-trust issues? I know technically, there's still Bing, but since they command the majority of the market, isn't this essentially the same as Rockefeller's give oil away for free to harm competition? Now, for sake of argument, the competition could be defined as any web company that happens to be pro-sopa, and Google's shutting down search could be viewed as malicious acts against a competitor ... you see where I'm going with this. IANAL.

Screw SOPA! If we lose this, we lose the internet... and we built the damn thing... each in our own small way.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think Google would do a complete or even extensive blackout but I don't think SLAs would be the deciding factor (if Google has (m)any). I suspect if there was semi-consensus internally for Google to do something, it would figure out a clever way to participate.

This is why something like HackerNews deciding to participate matters. Not because of the HN audience but because of the momentum needed to get the bigger guys to go along.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think a Google blackout would be a good thing. They already make many Doodles for their home page. They can make one for SOPA to raise awareness.

</comment><comment><USER16> If Google does indeed do a complete blackout, it will cause chaos. Many people pay for Google services, many people use Google APIs. Then again a draconian bill like SOPA / PIPA may call for drastic measures such as a Google blackout.

I do feel that Google (along with other major Internet companies) should take a more active approach in opposing SOPA.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think their most effective move would be to black out google.com search, because that's what most people see. I see diminishing returns in shutting down their advertising and enterprise services.

<comment><USER18> I don't see how the API's would be affected in any way. They wouldn't shut down all their servers to do this. They'd just have to take down their home page and replace it with something else, like a message against SOPA. Only Google.com users wouldn't be able to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was wondering about this, too, if some people won't just sue Google.

<comment><USER19> People will sue Google anyway. They get sued over indexing embarrassing things that people have inadvertently published all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Separate from contractual issues, the cost in terms of lost revenue for Google would be enormous. I suspect Google would have more of a positive effect donating a day's profits to the right organizations/candidates.

This 'race-to-imagine-the-most-widespread-blackout' can make people giddy, with thoughts of solidarity and grand symbolic gestures. But giddy is not necessarily effective or lasting.

Shoot for an obtrusive anti-SOPA Google doodle – with links to both examples of government-takedowns gone-mad worldwide, and ways to fight SOPA. That'd make more sense (and might convince more 'normals') than a showy bit of profit-destroying self-flagellation.

<comment><USER21> a monetary payout to stop SOPA doesn't really work in the long run. It promotes the behavior we have today where the most money wins (usually), and doesn't disincentivize future attempts.

I agree more with the doodle idea, or that every click to a search result brings up a modal dialog with a "contact your congress members" button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They are obviously not going to willingly violate any SLAs. Also the gov't is never going to shut down Google. Their site being offline would not be an accurate preview of any blackouts to come. SOPA is going to cost google money and headaches because they will have to deal with so many upset users. It is our websites that don't have billions of dollars that are actually under threat of being completely shutdown.

<comment><USER23> > Also the gov't is never going to shut down Google.

Also the CHINESE gov't is never going to shut down Google.

Just adding a little perspective...

<comment><USER22> comparing the American gov't to the chinese gov't is jsut ridiculous in this context. american gov't cares too much about it's economy to do such a stupid thing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Google has been shutting down services to protest SOPA for _years_.</comment>