A Farm Grows in the City - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-farm-grows-in-the-city-1494813900?mod=e2fb <comment><USER2> Have you ever tasted wild herbs? There's just no way this will ever replicate wild herbs.

I recently ate an out of season "heirloom tomato" grown in Mexico and shipped to my local coop in Minnesota. It was "organic", and it looked like an heirloom tomato. But it had no taste. It was clearly grown in depleted soil. I've grown heirloom tomatoes, as well as beefsteak and other more conventional varieties. Food grown in a garden _tastes better_. There are _more nutrients available to them_. Plants are chemical-mineral-sun beings. They grow abundantly in diverse ecosystems and offer their fruits with no violence.

Why is this artificial shit necessary? It's not.

People don't appreciate the profound and beautiful foundations of "old" technologies. Paper. Knots. Gardening. Cooking. Woodworking. Compost. Herbal medicine. Music. Many of these artforms (sciences, really) are miles ahead of the fancy capitalist stuff in terms of their nuance, their simplicity, their integration with human wellbeing.

And they're _free_.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure the reason your fruits and veggies don't taste right is because they have to be shipped unripened to prevent spoilage. It's why fruit from the farmers market tastes better, it was grown until ripe and shipped locally.

Technologies, like the ones mentioned in this article, change the entire supply chain; fruits and vegetables become "in-season" all year round. They will no longer have to be shipped unripened, and should have a better flavour.

<comment><USER4> I really enjoy keeping a number of honey bee colonies in the summer on my rooftop in Boston. However, you lost me at "herbal medicine".

<comment><USER5> Just because something is natural does not mean it is healthy, safe or effective, but dismissing all types of herbal medicine that some people have been using for thousands of years seems too dismissive. I hate to be that guy, but the science is starting to pile up for the medicinal pot group.

<comment><USER6> There is a word for any herbal medicine that actually works: medicine. It gets studied and the active ingredient is extracted and synthesized by pharmaceutical companies.

<comment><USER2> That's the thing, there aren't "active" and "inactive" ingredients. There are webs of phytochemicals that have dynamic interactions with one another and with the human body. Reductive medicine is missing that point over and over again. It's not possible to extract single ingredients that have the same effects as the qualitative mixtures phytochemicals in plants. Not only that, interacting with the plants on a human, physical level is nurturing in and of itself. There are so many pathways for information to get into the body. I want to _drink lavender tea_ when I'm feeling a _particular kind of anxiety_. The smell alone calms me. The color is soothing. The way the tea feels when I drink it is warm. I enjoy the way it tastes. The taste and smell remind me of memories and moods. _It works very well_. It doesn't cover "general anxiety" for me. I wouldn't offer it as a prescription to someone who tells me they have "anxiety". It works better in cases of "spiritual crisis", to help maintain a bigger picture after a death or tragedy, than it does for acute frantic, nervous feelings. In those cases, I prefer valerian, chamomile or holy basil.

You're bullshitting me if you think I'm gonna prefer to take a pill with "holy basil extract" over a delicious cup of holy basil tea. Absolutely not.

And tell me how to "extract" rooibos? What parts are you going to put into pills? Can you extract the taste? Can you extract the nutrients? Would you make one pill for the antioxidants and another for the vitamin C?

It used to be thought that THC was "the active ingredient" in cannabis. Well, it turns out that THC and CBD, along with numerous other varieties of cannabinoids, interact dynamically in the body, modulating one anothers' effects. Studies have shown that CBD quells the psychosis inducing effects of THC very well. But CBD on its own isn't necessarily a strong antipsychotic. It'd need to be taken in large doses to have that effect.

The idea that "germs cause disease" is a similar misconception. Bacterial infections are symptoms of larger ecological imbalances in the body's microbiome. Sometimes infections are really _caused_ by antibiotics (if you wanna point fingers), as is the case with C. Difficile infections that take hold in guts whose flora have been nuked by antibiotics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> j-c-hewitt I think these kinds of stories play well to governments, the press, and some groups of people as _ideas_ or as cool photo opportunities, but they don't translate into meaningful agricultural production.

I encourage people to scroll around Google Maps (or better yet, drive) through some of America's most productive agricultural regions. The sheer scale of American farmland dwarfs any possible urban farm development.

I know from personal experience growing seedlings in my basement here that new LED grow lights make it much more cost and energy efficient to run a greenhouse than it used to be. But fertile soil is a massive input cost that you can't really get around for most full sized plants. I spent hundreds of dollars recently on garden soil for a small set of raised beds. I have a tiny flock of six chickens supplementing my compost pile.

Anyone can grow bad produce indoors. I think the real problem (having lived in urban, rural, and suburban areas) they're trying to address is the transportation cost of bringing quality produce to the city. Right now many cities are not really set up for affordable freight transportation. Cities like NYC are almost designed to make it pointlessly expensive and complicated to bring freight in from the country to the store. Commercial truck traffic gets redirected to cramped streets while personal car traffic gets access to the expressways and parkways. That's one of the reasons why it costs you 4x to buy a pound of worse quality bacon in NYC what it costs in many other US towns and cities.

So if you are trying to deploy technology to make quality food more available to American cities the solution is probably not just hanging up some grow lights and growing weak plants in trays. It is to attack the largest sources of the added costs. The 'local' label has salience to high end grocery shoppers because they believe that it indicates quality. If 'local' comes to be associated with tray farms using poor inputs, it will stop being associated with quality in the minds of Whole Foods shoppers.

It'd be great if America had the sort of urban freight network that was state of the art in Japan in 1980 instead of trying to come up with pretend- technology patches to much larger cost of living problems.

<comment><USER7> Cities have two things in abundance due to human input/output: fertilizer and water. They lack sunlight but with cheap energy LEDs fill that gap.

High density city-"farming" makes economic sense in certain contexts: \- high density living environments \- inefficient or expensive transport costs \- lack of available farming land relative to population (expect net-food- importers like Singapore to lead here) \- northern hemisphere (full-year growing cycle increases appeal and cost efficiency) \- cities not located in close proximity to farmland (e.g. Abu Dhabi, Dubai)

They don't replace organic, and subvert the "local" farm-to-table movement and I'll be surprised if they can match the taste of produce grown in a robust/diverse ecosystem. But they do provide a market need for controlled environments and consistent output that dials into local demand.

Pros and cons, but inevitable part of our agricultural future.

On a long enough timeline, I see this as the future of the industrialization/technology trend that touches everything, including ag. While the "old" industrial-ag model shows that bio-mass reduces over time with fossil-fuel inputs and mass production, so won't stay viable forever. Higher end consumers will support the fully-organic small farm sustainable rural modal, but it remains to be seen if/how they can scale and be price- competitive for mass-consumption vs cheaper alternatives.

<comment> j-c-hewitt Farm-to-table is a mark of quality for gourmets because the food tastes better and has more nutrition when it has more expensive inputs. Feed a pig nothing but acorns and he's gonna taste great, but he's gonna be really expensive. Feed a pig nothing but hyperprocessed nutrient foam or whatever and he's gonna taste bad but he's gonna be cheaper.

>On a long enough timeline, I see this as the future of the industrialization/technology trend that touches everything, including ag. While the "old" industrial-ag model shows that bio-mass reduces over time with fossil-fuel inputs and mass production, so won't stay viable forever. Higher end consumers will support the fully-organic small farm sustainable rural modal, but it remains to be seen if/how they can scale and be price- competitive for mass-consumption vs cheaper alternatives.

Why? When people can afford it, they tend to want to upgrade what kinds of food that they eat. The quality issue is not something that is easy to sidestep just because of the law of conservation. Output can't exceed input. It is a huge operation to move soil and fertilizer around. It is expensive even in rural areas. Hydroponics have certain fertility, plant type, and plant quality limitations and cost more money to set up. Not to mention the issue of devoting expensive urban real estate to agricultural production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Getting food to people who live far from farms—sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away—is costly and strains natural resources."

For many foods, more gasoline is used getting it from the grocery store home than is used to get it to the grocery store from across the world. Ships and trains and large tractor trailers are quite efficient.

OTOH using artificial light instead of the sun to grow food requires huge amounts of energy.

<comment><USER9> > OTOH using artificial light instead of the sun to grow food requires huge > amounts of energy.

I don't know if it's been tried or not for indoor gardening, but why not use heliostats coupled with reflection (mirrors) or refraction (lightpipes) to guide the sunlight indoors?

I know such systems have been used for general lighting and art works...

<comment><USER10> Because if you are growing 1 acre of lettuce across 10 floors of a building (1/10th acre per floor) now you need to collect 1 acre of sunlight from a 1/10th acre sized roof. Where do you get the other 9/10th of an acre of sunlight from?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a very interesting article and does the thing that the media often does of missing the point: these are the ultimate factor farms--literally factories that crank out leafy greens--and we're close to an economic transition on perishable, constant demand, high value items like leafy greens. Cannabis passed this point several years ago. This is a really hard transition though for the actual food supply that makes the bulk of our calories. Free water and energy from the sky is really hard to beat.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. See this video "Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career. Here he presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015)"

A copy of the slides can be downloaded here (the link shown on the youtube page is dead. correct link [https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787](https://cpl.usu.edu/htm/research/publication=15787))

<comment><USER13> Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I keep thinking all of these are designed as pre-emptive investments before marijuana is legalized. They figure out the problems of mass production and management and the second the laws pass they flip the switch as the biggest supplier with right down the street access.

</comment><comment><USER15> To me, the distributed version of this idea is the really exciting development here. With a decade it will be commonplace to have a totally automated bookshelf looking appliance that you do nothing more than put in your backyard, give soil+seeds+water to, and use as your own personal Grocery Store. And when it happens, we'll have companies like Farmbot.io and the other 3d printer folks like Adrian Bowyer to thank for it.

</comment><comment><USER16> What occurred to me reading this is that one of the biggest costs to urban farming is the real estate. But with self-driving car-shares on the horizon and potentially much lower needs for parking structures, perhaps this might be a good way to repurpose some old parking garages. Lots of sq.ft., structural support for heavy inventory, open to air and sun, etc. Might work.

</comment><comment><USER17> Where do I find up to date hard yield and input data on fully artificially lit hydroponic or aeroponic systems for various crops?

</comment><comment><USER18> I really wonder what how much food could be produced if all the lawn and empty lots in a city were effectively productive as vegetable plots. I know that it can't be used because people like their lawns and things but often there is unused space in densely populated areas.

<comment><USER11> It isn't even that they like their lawns. It is the cost of labor to do this. The Salinas and Imperial valleys (where 85% of US veggies are grown) concentrate labor and other inputs in a way that you never could in small plots.

It is the same thing as we could assemble cars in almost any workshop or hangar, but we build cars at scale in only a few places.

<comment><USER19> The trick would be getting people to have and grow their own edible lawns. Then the cost is the same as keeping the lawns of today, but there's a more useful return. It's only a values issue. In Russia for example small gardeners produce 40% of the nations food. [http://naturalhomes.org/naturalliving/russian- dacha.htm](http://naturalhomes.org/naturalliving/russian-dacha.htm)

And perhaps the evolution of tools like [https://farmbot.io/](https://farmbot.io/) An intelligent 'lawmmower' makes your permaculture for you.

<comment><USER20> _> Then the cost is the same as keeping the lawns of today_

By far, the biggest cost of my lawn is the 5 minutes per week I have to spend cutting it. How does an edible lawn compete with that?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Real War on Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html <comment><USER2> Political science is a joke. Scientists who supposedely study this science are nothing more than left ideologues. Consider this. According to the latest 2010 census, 72% of African American kids are born to single mothers. How is it not a failure of political science that in the 21st century the political science cannot deliver results, via appropriate legislations, that will actually be beneficial to black minority? By the same reasoning, it's a failure of representation by Democrats, who represent blacks through and through.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very well-written article. The examples he gives of studies which supposedly show right-wing prejudice are amazing in how biased the _studies_ themselves are!

> For instance, one study explored ethical decision making by asking people > whether they would formally support a female colleague's complaint of sexual > harassment. There was no way to know if the complaint was justified, but > anyone who didn't automatically side with the woman was put in the unethical > category. Another study asked people whether they believed that "in the long > run, hard work usually brings a better life"—and then classified a yes > answer as a "rationalization of inequality." Another study asked people if > they agreed that "the Earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn > how to develop them"—a view held by many experts in resource economics, but > the psychologists pathologized it as a "denial of environmental realities."

And, of course, this story gets downvoted on HN. Not big surprise. :/</comment>


Obama Announces Actions to Speed Deployment of EVs and Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/11/03/obama-administration-announces-new-actions-accelerate-deployment <comment><AUTHOR> Title edit for length from original, which was "Obama Administration Announces New Actions To Accelerate The Deployment of Electrical Vehicles and Charging Infrastructure".</comment>


ATM inventor John Shepherd-Barron dies - <AUTHOR> http://thebln.com/2010/05/a-man-you-have-never-heard-of-died-he-changed-your-life/

<comment><USER2> "...and cash machines have been largely the same ever since."

Cash machines are on of the things I desperately want innovation and customization. If I go to an ATM more than twice and get the same amount of money, _I want that as a quick select option_. Same with language selection. The reason this isn't happening (as told by bank employees) is the regulation and the way the infrastructure is set up. But some storage coupled with one- way encryption on the machine itself (no protocols or data-transfer problems) should be possible, no?

Also, I'd like big red warning stickers on ATM's that run Windows NT or 98 still, so I can avoid them at all cost ;)

<comment><USER3> Royal Bank of Canada has a quick selection option. You configure how much cash you want, from which account, and if you want a printed receipt, then after you've entered your PIN you have a 'My Quick Cash' button.

<comment><USER4> Not bad, but it should be implicit. Hell, even the Pizza Pizza IVR has an option to re-order the same thing you ordered last time.

<comment><USER5> Implicit? I think having to explicitly press the "Quick cash" button is much better than not being able to do a different transaction at all. Like, for example, change the setting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Those of us who are old enough to remember having to work to get to the bank before it closed may appreciate this more.

<comment><USER7> Yes. Being pedantic, he didn't really change my life since I was born well after ATMs were widespread and have never known a world without them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A little more detail and background here: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/20/cash-machine- invent...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/20/cash-machine-inventor- dies)

<comment><USER9> My dad was involved in the network architecture of ATMs/cashpoints for UK banks in the 80s.. not sure if this ever happened, but there was an urban myth of some early installations where one ATM was distributing 200 pounds no matter what was punched in on the keypad. No-one informed the local bank, but the next day there was just this huge queue of people checking out this new cashpoint thingy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I heard an interview with him on Radio 4 a couple of years ago. The pin number was going to be 6 digits but he tested it on his wife and all she could remember was 4.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just think. Without this man's contribution, professors would have no way of demonstrating threading/concurrency problems.</comment>


PHP Instagram Scraper - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/postaddictme/instagram-php-scraper <comment><USER2> Yes people still use and love PHP. Can we avoid the typical, "I don't see why anyone uses PHP when they could use _my_ favorite language."

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree! PHP is my scripting language of choice. Beyond web-dev, e.g. when a task is about text processing...</comment></comment>


How Putin's cronies seized control of Russia's Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronies-seized-control-over-russias-facebook-pavel-durov-vk/ <comment><USER2> Correct link: [http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins- cronies...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronies- seized-control-over-russias-facebook-pavel-durov-vk)

(trailing slash breaks it)</comment>


Ask HN: Wedding planning? - <AUTHOR> I recently got engaged.  Looking for recommendations for apps, services, etc to help smooth out the wedding planning experience. <comment><USER2> The #1 recommendation to have a hassle-free wedding is to get married in an 'off-month'. My wife and I got married in March, which is the second least popular month to get married in. It gave us so much leverage in setting our own prices. We got married in the city of San Francisco, which is a pretty competitive market. I would call and ask venues a year out and say 'We're getting married next year, do you have any availability'. Almost every one said 'no, we're completely booked'. Then I would tell them we're getting married in March, and they said 'we are free all of march.' Ultimately, we ended up getting a bunch of stuff for free. Like, my wife ordered flowers, and the company just threw in chair covers and ribbon. We didn't even want chair covers and ribbon originally (was too expensive when we researched it), but they just gave it to us!

Another tip is to not overthink it. We let each vendor handle their own deal. For example, my wife didn't tell the florist how to decorate. She said 'you are an expert with flowers, I want pretty flowers, make it look nice'. Along with this, I would choose pretty venues that are easily available or public. We had the reception on federal land, which means that the prices are somewhat regulated already. We also got married in one of the beautiful Catholic churches in the city, which needed no decoration whatsoever and was totally free (although, obviously, you have to be part of the community there).

Finally, do not waste money on a fancy photographer (probably my most controversial opinion). Photographers are expensive, and there's only one part that's super important to photograph (the ceremony). We could not afford a top-tier photographer for the entire thing. We instead hired a good photographer only for the ceremony. For the reception, I went on craigslist and hired a photography student. She wasn't as polished as the professional, but she gave us 1000+ photos which we later sorted through ourselves. Not only was this fun, but it was a lot cheaper. The professional photographer would have charged 3-4k for the entire night. Instead we spent $200 for the ceremony and $600 for the reception.

</comment><comment><USER3> Get a wedding coordinator. That person's job is to listen to what the two of you want, and then to make it happen - over everyone else's opinions, if necessary. The wedding coordinator is the bad guy (no gender implied) to everyone else. If, for example, the bride's aunt wants to sit on the bride's parents' row, the wedding coordinator shuts that down, _so you don 't have to_, so you don't have to fight with the bride's aunt.

</comment><comment><USER4> A wedding doesn't have to be a massive production. You can just have a party, with family and friends. You don't need special software, you don't need to spend huge amounts of money. Really.

<comment><USER5> This is very dependent on the families involved. To some, the most important event of someone's life is their child's marriage. For some, it's considered disrespectful to not spend huge amounts of money on it, and this can create resentment in the long run.

<comment><USER6> > For some, it's considered disrespectful to not spend huge amounts of money > on it

Then one should go the extra mile on purpose to make them feel disrespected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is an entire website based company based on this topic. [https://www.theknot.com/](https://www.theknot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Go on to your fiance's phone, computer, router, etc and block all of the wedding marketing engines from showing up in her google searches. This includes, but is not limited to, theknot, pinterest, etc. This will singlehandedly reduce cost and stress more than any other single action.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.perfecttableplan.com](https://www.perfecttableplan.com)

Last I knew this was a solo dev doing great work.

</comment><comment><USER10> Pinterest - inspirations, style, even share mood boards if you need. You can use "secret boards" to keep it for yourself.

theknot - hustle free website and many other tools

zola - if you need online registry

minted - physical cards, they're also integrated with the know so you can have some website templates in style with the cards.

paperless - decently cool emails instead of physical cards.

Congrats, and enjoy the process!

</comment><comment><USER11> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16123393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16123393)

</comment><comment><USER12> Am a guest to a wedding using withjoy.com. It's been nice from the guest side of the fence...</comment>


Ask HN: Why is iTunes difficult? - <AUTHOR>

I dont get everything about iTunes and syncing my iPad.
I have Movies, Podcasts and misc footage that I have downloaded. I sync content to my iPad.
An Example: I have about 30 TED talks  (hey show up under the PosCasts section) that I have on my iPad and when syncing them, they dont all sync to a single TED Talks item and when I click TED Talks it shows all the ones I have...
However my Apple Keynotes and events do sync under a single item and when I click it I see a list of the ones that I have.
It is sort of counter productive in my opinion. I use my iPad for a log of items. It has become me new device to carry around, have access to all of my stuff. I don't longer lug my laptop anymore. However I miss some organizational features.
How can I make iTunes allow me to group things my way? <comment><USER2> <http://www.apple.com/support/contact/>

<comment><AUTHOR> ha, yeah are you going to wish me luck?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News Clone/Social News software? - <AUTHOR>

I've seen a couple sites around here with very similar designs to HN, and a little while ago there was a small burst of roll-your-own hosted solutions once everyone heard that Reddit and Digg were kind of a big deal.<p>So here's me, thinking about creating a HN-alike for language and linguistics (the linguistics subreddit is pretty barren and I'm curious if I could do better). The barebones nature of HN is quite appealing of course; what do people recommend? I am open to suggestions for hosted sites as well as running on my own server. <comment><USER2> The code which runs HN is shipped with ARC.

<comment><USER3> As cperciva said, the HN code comes with Arc.

If you're looking for something on the MS stack, I believe stackoverflow just released their code and Kigg is decent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll be there if you set it up.</comment>


Lessons from the lockdown: What happens when everyday life suddenly changes? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/dj3jonuhi1/coronavirus-year-of-the-mask <comment> chupa-chups Why doesn't anyone question the intellectual ability of our politicians?

<comment><USER2> probably because we do it all the time in satire, and we got desensibilized to that.</comment></comment>


Google helps terabyte data swaps - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6425975.stm <comment><USER2> Old (7 March 2007) and outdated. The "Palimpset" program has since been canceled: [http://www.researchpipeline.com/wordpress/2008/12/28/googles...](http://www.researchpipeline.com/wordpress/2008/12/28/googles- palimpset-cancelled/)

</comment><comment><USER3> On a related note (already discussed here) <http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/></comment>


Papers Every Programmer Should Read - <AUTHOR> http://tarantsov.com/blog/2011/09/papers-every-programmer-should-read/

<comment><USER2> Hackers and Painters is indeed an interesting essay. For everyone who missed it:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html>

(Although I am a bit puzzled by the author's definition of research.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Flagged for lack of actual content. This is barely more than a tweet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great, gave me a good laugh!</comment>


Show HN: Header Headbutt - Removes "position: fixed" from site navbars - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/header-headbutt/mmpkmmbflaenfbeblocfbemjfnadjain

<comment><USER2> I see a lot of people complaining about this and as a designer, I'd like to have a little more information as to how it detracts from your experiences.</comment>


Why do some job adverts put women off applying? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44399028 <comment><USER2> Activists tend to conflate a visible change with a useful change. The problem with tinkering with the language is that you might get (some) people to change their speech superficially, and you're going to chalk that up as a success. But you have no real notion as to whether it's doing anything productive. We've had a host of gender-neutral terms in professional life for decades now, but when I'm reading stuff on women's issues, I don't get any sense that women feel better off because of this. It's just more linguistic landmines in the workplace.

And the article is counting stats on how many women apply. That runs headlong into the fundamental problem with diversity metrics: proportions in an organization not matching proportions in society are by themselves a genuine problem, but it's taken for granted that this means something terribly dire. Then when you do some stuff and those numbers change, you have no idea if it's due to anything you did, or if things are actually better. And you're playing tribal politics, so it's hard to see that "my tribe benefited!" is better for society as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER3> _" It's remarkable the number of job descriptions that are written with the same density and complexity as a Harvard Law Review article when you definitely don't need a PhD to do the job itself,"_

I have about six years of college. I have over five years of corporate experience. This detail is vastly more problematic to my mind than supposedly subconsciously gendered language.

I was a homemaker for a lot of years. I tend to feel like it's me, not the advertisement, as if I'm somehow missing important job hunting skillz or something. So I'm really happy to see that snippet in this article.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure there's a fair amount of signal there, but when they say 'we're not worried about why' I wonder how many false positives they end up going with.</comment>


One laptop, two guys, and a few days of #sxsw rails hacking - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidedicillo.com/social/one-laptop-two-guys-six-days-of-sxsw/

<comment><USER2> <http://foamee.com/>

Although to be honest, I've not tried either and don't know how they differ. I guess in the end it's that they built something randomly and had fun doing so.

<comment><USER3> Nice, I never saw that site before. Apparently it's more of a iou than ours, where the focus is the actual action of buying somebody else a drink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love it! Forget _just_ checking in, give the people a reason to buy another round. The internet is such an enabler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! What other check-in app wants to make you buy rounds for your buddies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> lolz</comment>


A viewer/navigation tool for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 virtual image (C++) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk#a-smalltalk-80-image-viewer <comment><USER2> Really nice. Also lots of good stuff in his other repositories (Oberon, Verilog, Ebnf).

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks quite interesting!

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome! :o</comment>


GitHub Protips- Tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets from Sarah Vessels - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2020-05-21-github-protips-tips-tricks-hacks-and-secrets-from-sarah-vessels/ <comment><USER2> The crux of this is that PRs should be small. The larger a PR is, the harder it is to work with: more difficult to review, riskier to merge, and more likely to conflict with somebody else's work. Making PRs as small as possible (but no smaller!) helps avoid this. The author gives a good example of taking a large task and breaking it into small but fully formed units.

</comment><comment><USER3> I usually do this kind of thing by making a new branch and interactive rebasing. Generally works well for me too!

</comment><comment><USER4> I like this approach but I'm not entirely sold on it. In her example, the `category-validations` is branched off from `category-db` and there will be two separate PRs. If you start receiving reviews for `category-db` PR and you make those changes then you'll have to rebase it onto the `category- validations` and resolve any conflicts. This will be many times harder if a different developer works on `category-validations` branch.

That being said, I can't think of any elegant ways to solve this.

</comment><comment><USER5> If anyone has the time and git skills to post the detailed git commands necessary for this type of workflow I (and I think others) would appreciate it!

<comment><USER6> Cli aside there are some good tools out there that let you do this with a gui. I personally like GitKraken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In a way I like the approach, and I guess I'd have to try it to actually fet a feel for it because it seems to introduce a ton of additional work figuring out sane ways to split the code in branches...

Although it has a great side effect of forcing atomic commits.</comment>


Upstart: Raise money for part of your future income - <AUTHOR> http://upstart.com

<comment><USER2> Note that Upstart is currently only reviewing applications from students at "Arizona State University, Dartmouth, University of Michigan, University of Washington, and Rhode Island School of Design who are expecting to graduate in 2013 or who graduated after 2010."

</comment><comment> Pirate-of-SV So, this basically the definition of selling your soul to the devil?

<comment><USER2> For 10 years, at a maximum of 14.99% of annual return.</comment></comment>


A Year of 379 Computer Days - <AUTHOR> http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/Y379/index.html <comment><USER2> > "A Year of 379 Computer Days" (Y379) presents a historical overview of > computing which sidesteps less compelling details, replacing them with > refreshing dollops of trivia and humor.

[http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/Y379/y379Info.html](http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/Y379/y379Info.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool project! I think the calendar interface linking to individual PDFs is kinda odd though. Why not just list it all in sequence on one html page?</comment>


Show HN: Quark-IDE and a JavaScript runtime to build cross-platform desktop apps - <AUTHOR> https://quarkjs.io <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20485978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20485978)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if its just me, but the site runs extremely slow on a pretty well-specced desktop PC. I think there might be too much going on. I gave up trying to scroll through.

This is on Chrome 72.

<comment><USER4> That's a fairly old version of Chrome, try updating. It's working well here on Brave (based on Chromium 76) but this is on a high end computer.

<comment><USER5> A release from May 29, 2019 is considered "fairly old?" If we were talking protection against the latest vulnerabilities, fine. But for tech compatibility? I think we just found the "hell no to backwards compatibility" web developer in the crowd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nicely done those who complained about dependency on the quark 'runtime' should note that it would be easy for the author to provide a 'release' button to create a dependency-free Electron bundled version that can be distributed to all.

</comment><comment><USER7> My desktop has plenty of features that aren't exposed to the Web, so no, it isn't desktop like.

<comment><USER8> That's not how it works. There's a native bridge that enables you to access and use virtually any native APIs that you'd like to via JavaScript et al. If the native API that you need access to isn't already exposed by the Electron framework, you can write the bridge code yourself

<comment><USER7> Ah it depends on Electron,....

<comment><USER9> It's a shared electron context, it addresses one of the many critiques of electron (that each electron app is an entirely separate instance of Chrome), so each "sketch" while having the capabilities of electron only have the performance impact of a browser tab.

This is especially useful for "utility applications".

<comment><USER7> Ah utilities of 100MB size then.

<comment><AUTHOR> ~100Kb*

Only as much as is the actual application logic and bundled dependencies. Which for most cases is usually a few kilobytes or a megabyte. You can checkout the Quark appstore ([https://dash.quarkjs.io/](https://dash.quarkjs.io/)). None of the apps is above 2MB.

<comment><USER7> My task manager shows otherwise for an Electron tab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I mean, there's already Visual Code, an Electron IDE pretty much.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not an electron IDE like VSCOde or Atom. But an IDE and a JavaScript runtime that helps you build and run electron applications.</comment></comment>


A primer on fingerprint identification - <AUTHOR> http://darrenkopp.com/posts/2013/09/12/A-primer-on-fingerprint-identification.html <comment><USER2> The problem is -- and the author explicitly states this -- this is all total speculation. This _may_ be wants happening, but it's certainly very _possible_ that Apple is storing something more closely resembling your fingerprint. Or that they aren't discarding extraneous information. Or ANYTHING, really. We just don't know. So while the info box at the top suggests that the author is trying to "Address some of the concerns" with Apple's fingerprint scanning, it does not do that at all. Only Apple can do that. And even then, you have to trust that Apple is telling the truth. And, further, that the NSA hasn't already served them some kind of sealed order that doesn't allow them to disclose the truth.

It's entirely possible the author is correct, too. We just plain don't know.</comment>


The Honey Launderers: Uncovering the Largest Food Fraud in U.S. History - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/153774-the-honey-launderers-uncovering-the-largest-food-fraud-in-u-dot-s-dot-history?src=longreads <comment><USER2> The largest food fraud in the US is not honey. It is the corporate farming conglomerates who take government welfare to not grow any crops at all many years.

$11 BILLION taxpayer money paid to not grow crops since 2003. Seriously, google it.

That and massive subsidies for ethanol from corn. Most massive scam in US history.

Oh and they de-coupled foodstamps from corporate welfare now so expect this to become more insane over the rest of the decade.

<comment><USER3> Actually, if the corporate farmers grew the same crops in the field year after year, the land would eventually not be arable. This payment allows for the land to recover from the disastrous methods the corporate farmers use.

<comment><USER4> > Actually, if the corporate farmers grew the same crops in the field year > after year, the land would eventually not be arable.

So you reckon corporate farmers, left to their own devices, will destroy their own ability to grow crops?

<comment><USER5> Happens all over the world that short termed farming leads to massive long term damage. Dust bowl etc.

Farming always focuses on the current and next year.

<comment><USER4> > Farming always focuses on the current and next year.

Citation needed.

I'm a (admittedly small-scale) farmer myself, and I've yet to meet a farmer who had that mindset. Further, I simply can't see a good reason why a farmer would destroy his most precious asset - his land.

<comment><USER6> Because it's cheaper to get a new one. If you don't happen to have your house nearby, plan to live there for next fifty years and want to raise kids.

It's normal for corporations to destroy arable land in Czech Republic too, they can always move elsewhere...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm all for harsh punitive measures for (convicted) business-crooks, but are these SWAT raids on peoples' businesses (and homes) ever a good idea? What good can come from a bunch of stormtroopers bum-rushing an office?

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure where you got the idea that these raids were conducted by SWAT teams. The article only vaguely alludes to "federal agents".

<comment><USER9> In bulletproof vests. Presumably heavily armed.

<comment><USER8> I don't think that just because they were wearing bulletproof vests you can reasonably infer "SWAT". Many law enforcement agencies have written or unwritten requirements to wear bulletproof vests when in the field.

[http://www.bja.gov/Publications/PERF_BodyArmor.pdf](http://www.bja.gov/Publications/PERF_BodyArmor.pdf)

"Our first main finding was that almost all law enforcement agencies (99.4 per- cent) from across the country report that their officers wear body armor when on duty." \- BJA/PERF Body Armor National Survey - page 36

<comment><USER10> Ignoring the word "SWAT" for the moment this was a raid on corporate offices for people smuggling honey.

I'm not sure why officers were armed. I guess I can understand why they wear protective clothing (but are shootings in that situation common?)

Are honey smugglers really going to shoot law enforcement?

You need lots of people in the raid to prevent employees shredding and deleting everything.

<comment><USER11> > I'm not sure why officers were armed.

My assumption is that any officer who is armed at the moment is always armed, and any officer who is always armed will be armed when he visits you. In other words, being armed in this instance may not be particularly interesting. Now, if they had their arms drawn at the ready, that might be more than interesting.

<comment><USER12> Police in NZ are not routinely armed, at least, not with anything more than some pepper spray and a batton.

I am aware that this is not the case in many other parts of the world, but I still pay attention to the difference between 'normal' and armed police.

<comment><USER13> It's the same in Norway, not sure about the other Scandinavian countries. Of course, our distinction between 'normal' and 'armed' police has no bearing in the US where the environment is completely different and armed civilians is almost an everyday occurrence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So only punishment for the fraud (of masking the country of origin, adulterating honey with banned antibiotics, rice molasses and such) was one year of jail for two executives, who were declared rogue by the company after their arrest. How will you deter future frauds then?

<comment><USER15> this part reminded me of breaking bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I always thought this was the largest food fraud, it almost brought down American Express. And they weren't forging the origin of the product but actually replacing it with water!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_Oil_Scandal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_Oil_Scandal)

</comment><comment><USER17> I get a broken link on my mobile device. This link seems to work, though:

[http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/how- germa...](http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/how-germany-s- alw-got-busted-for-the-largest-food-fraud-in-u-dot-s-dot-history)

</comment><comment><USER18> "After U.S. beekeepers accused Chinese companies of selling their honey at artificially low prices, the government imposed import duties in 2001 that as much as tripled the price of Chinese honey. Since then, little enters from China legally."

If Chinese companies were truly selling their honey at artificially low prices -- that is, dumping the honey below cost, in an attempt to destroy the competition -- then this entire scheme would not make sense. Why sell some small amount of honey at below-cost prices as part of an illicit scheme bypassing tariffs?

What this truly proves is that U.S. tariffs against Chinese honey producers are not actually based on "artificially" low prices. It's just pure protectionism for an industry group, at the expense of consumers.

<comment><USER19> You seem to have missed the bits about Chinese honey being commonly collected and processed in non-standard ways (machine dried, it said) that lead to inferior taste, which was then covered up with various additives. Also the bits about Chinese honey often containing residues of antibiotics that are banned in US food.

So I read "artificially low prices" not as "dumping below cost" but rather "cutting costs by ignoring legally required quality controls".

<comment><USER20> China has notoriously poor food standards and regulations, and only enforces them when they need to have some heads roll because the public is outraged. Business culture in mainland China is also strongly a "caveat emptor" market, so every buyer is left to their own devices to perform due diligence when purchasing something. In the US, regular inspections and regulations keep things mostly orthodox, and while irregularities happen in US food manufacturer, they are far and few between relative to China.

With that in mind, what would be reasonable if providing an exception to the tariff, if, and only if, the Chinese honey manufacturer can demonstrate provably that their honey and manufacturing meet high standards. This should apply everywhere. If these manufacturers were employing better manufacturing methods, their honey prices would probably be more inline with US prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Always buy local honey from real beekeepers. Otherwise you are probably buying sugar water made by non worker bees.

<comment><USER22> Doesn't that open a market for local "beekeepers" to buy honey from China and package it up with inkjet printed labels and hand screwed lids that say "local from <insert town>"? Placebo and power of suggestion is strong. I often wonder myself if produce I am buying at farmers markets a really authentic or just resold produce from grown on a large agro-business farm someplace across the country.

Also, I am a ware of a scheme that is importing Chinese garlic into Western Europe through Eastern Europe. You see Chinese garlic much like honey is banned there. Yet unbeknownst to them West Europeans (Germans, French) have been chowing down on Chinese garlic for a while now. The way it works it like this. A large shipment is brought into a city next to the EU border. Then small paid cargo van drivers make lots of trips across the border seemingly as local farmers going about their business. Then it is either sold at farmers market or "local" farmers buy it from them and sell it as "local" produce. Easy peasy.

<comment><USER23> Bees can be raised, with a few precautions, even in urban settings. What you really need is an experienced mentor who can help consider things like where to place the hive so it doesn't pose a problem for neighborhood kids (rooftop is good btw), and other precautions, such as not wearing gloves when handling the bees if in an urban environment.

<comment><USER24> I am an amateur beekeeper but I do not understand how wearing gloves is related to raising bees in an urban environment.

You are right, that urban bees are fine. Providing a water source will prevent most nuisance issues.

<comment><USER23> The argument is that if you wear gloves you miss out on the early signs of alarm from the bees, and therefore they are more likely to swarm and get aggressive towards bystandards. Without gloves you get a better sense of the alarm state and can avoid problems. It's generally easier to manage alarm state without gloves.

I got my first hive a few years ago, and I am noticing that there are fewer recommendations of working without gloves in urban environments today. I don't know why this is the case. Also I am used to a large yard/small town environment (lots of pedestrians, folks doing yard work, etc), and there are plenty of other environments where I would expect this to be less of an issue (for example a rooftop hive on the third storey is going to provide a lot less exposure in this regard). So demographics and hive placement may have something to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like the idea that foreigners got a harsher sentence than the Texans in a case involving exceptionnally big tariffs against a chineese product, it reinforces my prejudice that Americans are xenophobes.

<comment><USER26> Do you have any evidence to suggest that the crimes that both the citizens and the non-citizens were charged with were different and yet one group got a lesser sentence?

<comment><USER25> These are not non-citizens, these are citizens from another country. I'm a bit tired of US people using this vocable too.

<comment><USER27> While I agree with the sentiment, as an American, it becomes a bit difficult to not let the verbiage of the media and power seep into your vernacular.

<comment><USER25> Orwell agrees. "foreigner" or "alien" convey the exact meaning you are looking for without implying the person comes from a barbaric non-democratic country (ironically on the day they elect their deputies, and transitively, their leader).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Last year I visited Germany for the first time and was astounded at how good their English was, despite it being so far from French/Spanish/Italian (which I'm a little familiar with)...everywhere I went, people were happy to speak to me in English, almost in a slightly condescending way, like "poor American, let me speak your language for you" (and the condescension is well-deserved, IMO).

But wow, the German executives at hand must think Americans are _really_ anti- multi-lingualism if "WRITE IT IN GERMAN" is one of their protocols for obfuscating their fraud.

<comment><USER29> You're aware English is primarily a Germanic language, right?

<comment><USER30> Not particularly relevant, partly because English has been corrupted by all sorts of influences. There's some common vocabulary, but the syntax and sound are very very different.

Look at it from the other perspective: German is commonly (and IMO properly) considered a bit harder for anglophones to learn as compared to Spanish or Italian. The linguistic family is only a small piece of information, and doesn't tell the whole story.

<comment><USER31> As far as I know the fact that "the sound is different" from most European languages is not really due to any "corruption" (like the Norman Conquest) but due to this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift)

Quoting from the Wikipedia article linked above:

> Vowels of Middle English had "continental" values much like those remaining > in Spanish and liturgical Latin. However, during the Great Vowel Shift, the > two highest long vowels became diphthongs, and the other five underwent an > increase in tongue height.

As for syntax I've always heard and read that it sounds very natural to speakers of Germanic languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder whether they were arrested in a _sting_ operation.

<comment><USER33> Would you say the feds set up a _honeypot_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm not too much of a conspiracy theorist but I wonder if the Chinese are behind Colony Collapse Disorder that is devastating our bee populations... They destroy our bees and we are therefore beholden to them in yet another critical piece of infrastructure. I guess the best way to determine that is to figure out if CCD is destroying bee populations in China at the same rate as in the U.S. and Europe.

Far-fetched? Cut back on the weed? Stop reading Hacker News and get back to work?

<comment><USER35> No, the bees just went back to their home planet. I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Paint some bees on the containers, replace ALW with Madrigal GmbH, Hamburg with Hannover, and you get another eposide of...

</comment><comment><USER20> I was shocked at the fines involved. $180 million in tariffs avoided, but from what I read, only $3 million in fines were meted out.

</comment><comment><USER15> the take away in this history is that if they sold honey at regular prices at the honey holdings "over the table" while still giving the deal to the buyer and eating the fiscal difference for the fake vs received price, they would still be operating.</comment>


Ask HN: Best JavaScript Single Page Apps - <AUTHOR>

What are the best SPAs (Single Page Apps) you've encountered so far?
I'm looking for good examples to demonstrate business the potentially better experience with an SPA over classic server side produced html pages.
Complex examples would be preferred over simple ones. <comment><USER2> Trello [https://trello.com](https://trello.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Facebook, Twitter, Asana. Interestingly, each developed their own JavaScript libraries/frameworks - React, Flight, and Luna (Luna is not open-source).

Others: Google Maps.

I don't find Gmail to be a particularly good example, unfortunately.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the examples with frameworks. Still looking for more good corporate sites with Angular or the likes...

<comment><USER3> Two salient examples of Angular include: Amazon's AWS dev console (not the best example of Angular, but the only public use by a large corp I know of), and Lift's web app (lift.do).

I also know that Apple uses Angular for a few internal (non-public) developer tools/consoles.

Angular is a framework, heavier than the other frameworks too. Twitter and Facebook are particularly good examples because they use both server and client-side rendering, so they get the best of both worlds (fast initial page render and fast subsequent client renders). I love Angular, but Angular can't do this currently.

<comment><AUTHOR> AWS dev console? I can only find the mgmt. console and it looks not like angular - do you have an url?

[http://www.nasa.gov/](http://www.nasa.gov/) uses angular as well bit it's a bit media heavy why i consider it only a mediocre example.

With angular you can include server side produced html as well? Or how are React and Flight better regarding that aspect?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another self-plug: WebODF and ViewerJS. Editor and viewer of OpenDocument Format files respectively. 100% client side. [http://webodf.org](http://webodf.org) [http://viewerjs.org](http://viewerjs.org)

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://getflow.com](http://getflow.com)

backbone + rails

</comment><comment><USER6> GMail is a single-page app that popularized rendering on the browser/AJAX in many ways.

</comment><comment><USER7> shameless self-promo: [https://app.codeable.io](https://app.codeable.io) (our startup). We have rewritten the whole app in AngularJS (with Rails API).

<comment><USER8> Dont send us to a sign-in page without knowing what you do.

[https://codeable.io/](https://codeable.io/)

<comment><USER7> That was deliberate, because you can't see the app unless logged in, but can see the source</comment></comment></comment>


The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/young-coder/the-rise-and-fall-of-visual-basic-f422252349a6 <comment><USER4> I'll copy one of my recent comments with some minor changes:

I still sometimes program in Classic VB, (aka VB6). Each year it is more difficult to install the IDE, but the runtime is still installed by default.

It is incredible easy to build a nice one screen application with not very a very complicated background logic. Normal people like a nice graphical interface with a few buttons, and with Classic VB you can create them very easily and iterate and customize the form.

My last big problem was that it doesn't have a build in sort function, so you can use a n^2 sort or write a good sorting function by hand :( . When the logic start to be not so easy, there begin to apear problems.

\--

About the article: I agree with most of it.

> _Also on the big side: There was no more edit-and-continue feature._

I still miss that when I program in other languages. It kills so many (all!) optimizations possibilities, but it's extremely handy.

> _VB.Fred and the .NET Solution_

I call it VB# or VB#.Net instead of VB.Fred.

<comment><USER5> The first money I made using a computer was writing simple business automation apps in VB, first 5 and for a short while 6. I also dabbled in Access Basic and then VBA when all the office apps standardized on it instead of each having their own flavor.

VB was great like you said until you needed to do something difficult. I remember Bruce McKinny's Hardcore Visual Basic book being my best friend for a little while. It thought me I could do the hard stuff in C, make a DLL and drop that into my VB project.

Bruce had a saying, VB makes 95% of the job easy and the other 5% impossible.

<comment><USER6> I was going to make a reference to "Hardcore Visual Basic" but you beat me to it. Fantastic book, it's hard to find a tech book that is that useful and fun at the same time.

My first job started out with mostly Visual Basic 6. One of the modules written in VC++ by a bunch of guys who were looking to get that on their resume (they had since departed). It probably should have just been in VB as well and was always a nightmare to debug and enhance.

Once .net was prominent we mostly moved to C#. There didn't seem to be much of a reason to go with VB.Net, C# seemed more "legitimate" and without the hassles of Visual C++/MFC.

Decades later and I still find myself writing an Excel macro in VBA now and then but I've largely moved on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> And though historians love to talk about the visual part of Visual Basic, its signature ability had nothing to do with graphical widgets. Instead, VB became famous for a legendary feature called edit-and-continue, which allowed developers to run their programs, find problems, fix them, and then keep going with the new code._

I agree that Edit-&-Continue was a nice debugging feature but I disagree that it was the main draw to VB. The main attraction to VB really was the easy-to- use _graphical widgets_ which was exposed to the programmer via an abstraction called "windows forms".

If one takes a look at a 1990s era Win32 "hello world" app[0] written in raw C Language, it has tons of complicated boilerplate. Lots of complexity with CreateWindow(param1, param2, etc, param11), GetMessage() loop, WndProc() callback. The Win32 HelloWorld example doesn't even handle a click event. One would have to add a switch case statement for the "WM_LBUTTONDOWN" message.

The VB "winforms" IDE eliminated all that and let a programmer "drag & drop" UI elements onto a "form" and put code on a "click" event. It was a clever simplification of raw Win32 API calls for business-oriented user interfaces. In the ~1991 era, the winforms abstraction empowered a bunch of 1980s 4GL programmers (e.g. dBase, Clipper, Foxpro) and business language programmers (e.g. COBOL) to immediately be productive writing apps for Windows -- without the steep learning curve of C/C++ and the raw Win32 API.

A lot of VB programmers I knew were not even aware of Edit&Continue but they nevertheless were able to drag a command button from the UI toolbox and add code to the button_click() event.

Another VB feature that I believe was more utilized than Edit&Continue was the _VBX components ecosystem_. Lots of programmers would buy add-on VBX widgets from various companies to enhance the UI such as calendar date picker, datagrids, charts & graphs, etc.

[0] [http://www.prowaretech.com/Computer/Windows/WinApiHello](http://www.prowaretech.com/Computer/Windows/WinApiHello)

<comment><USER8> _[...]VBX components ecosystem. Lots of programmers would buy add-on VBX widgets from various companies to enhance the UI such as calendar date picker, datagrids, charts & graphs, etc_

There was a lot of optimism at the time about how much of the more mundane software development would become the assembly pre-defined components and there'd be marketplaces of components. That's mostly not how things worked out but they did, for a while, for VBX. Seems like a bigger, more startling achievement than 'Edit & Continue' to me as well.

<comment><USER9> How did that vision not work out? Seems pretty on the money to me - <USER2> difference between then and now is that we ship components as JARs or node_modules etc, and the components are mostly free and open source vs proprietary products.

The basic vision that mundane programming would become the assembly of pre- built components has worked out astonishingly well though, to the extent that now many developers actually _get upset_ if they're asked to write a program in an interview that _isn 't_ an assembly of pre-built components. They go on HN or reddit and post diatribes about how they should be asked to do "real" work, instead of coding up things they can just grab a component off github to do.

<comment><USER8> Arbitrary chunks of source or object code are not 'components' in a usefully meaningful way. You're not firing up Reactant IDE and making things out of Enterprise Java Beans and ACME WebWidgets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yet another interesting benefit of/interesting feature of VB is that it was the Python of its day in terms of the "there's a library to do that" factor. Not only was it easy to pick up, but (while not built-in like Python) it had access to thousands and thousands of easy to install and easy to use ActiveX libraries. There was almost always an ActiveX Library to suit your needs, ready to literally drop into the WYSIWYG editor and use.

That _combined_ with the easy to use WYSIWYG editor and the edit and continue functionality were, to me, what made it such an amazingly useful language for creating quick utilities or small programs. It was truly a "Rapid Application Development" language.

I also saw some nightmares in my days, though I don't blame VB as much as the people who created the app. The most notable one was a document management system that I'd been asked to port from VB3 to VB6 (so that it could run on win32 among other reasons) and to turn the system from a batch system for document processing facilities into a desktop DMS for home use. I will never forget when I opened up the project and there were 60 some-odd "forms" in it, and when I opened any one of them up not a single one defined a variable. They all - every last one - was defined as a global variable in a single globals.bas file. There were _thousands_ of global variables. Every single one in the entire application declared there, and edited at will in any of the myriad forms wherever they fancied. My first task became "untangle the global variable mess."

</comment><comment><USER11> I have done a couple of projects during the last years at a few life sciences companies part of Fortune 500.

Their researchers aren't using R, Python or even eyeing on Julia.

They use Excel with VB macros and those skillful enough, get IT to install them Visual Studio Professional and carry on using VB.NET.

Also remember that VB.NET, contrary to F#, enjoys equal footing with C# across all .NET deployment scenarios and Visual Studio graphical tooling.

<comment><USER12> As I recall, Kernighan and Ritchie in _The C Programming Language_ admitted that C had "idiosyncratic syntax" (with lots of results on Google and I'll save time by not searching the book itself). Then C++ used that, and C# borrowed some of it.

The .NET version of Visual Basic, VB.NET, seems to be about as good as C# for getting at the .NET Framework and taking advantage of the "common language runtime" (CLR) but with more traditional syntax (Kemeny, Kurtz Basic, Algol, Fortran, Pascal, PL/I, etc.) easier to teach, learn, read, write, and debug. So, shock, I wrote the code for my startup in VB.NET! But, IIRC, there's a translator to convert at least one way between C# and VB.NET!

<comment><USER13> I've used this a number of times, it has its limitations and faults, but it's usually pretty good for sharing C# code example to a vb. Net dev [http://converter.telerik.com/](http://converter.telerik.com/)

<comment><USER12> Many thanks! Gee, it claims to work both ways,

C# <\--> VB

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Instead, VB became famous for a legendary feature called edit-and-continue, > which allowed developers to run their programs, find problems, fix them, and > then keep going with the new code. This was a sharp difference from almost > every other programming environment known to humanity, which force > developers to recompile their work and start over after every change.

Umm, _cough_ Lisp environments from the 1960s, Lispms, Smalltalk etc...

<comment><USER15> I wouldn't expect a VB programmer to really know anything about the higher forms of computing. Maybe I'm being a little harsh though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> At great risk to my HN karma I'm gonna share from the heart.

VB was the pinnacle of software development.

Nothing about it was perfect, except it was easy for anyone to build anything. I saw everything from kids making shareware to phd's building multi-hundred- million dollar ERP systems.

A lot of nice-enough and useful software was built in VB that remained useful and editable over long lifetimes.

I pine for something like that in the mobile or web worlds. Everything else I've tried is an absolute mess in comparison.

<comment><USER17> > _I pine for something like that in the mobile or web worlds_

A recentish episode of a python podcast ([https://www.pythonpodcast.com/anvil- web-application-developm...](https://www.pythonpodcast.com/anvil-web- application-development-episode-215/)) had an interview with one of the founders of Anvil ([https://anvil.works/](https://anvil.works/)). He claimed VB & Delphi as significant inspirations for their web app platform (using python for front & back ends, with a drag/drop GUI builder).

Might be worth a look, if only for curiosity's sake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone wanting to relive the glory of VB but on a modern system can use Gambas:

[http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html](http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html)

<comment><USER19> Vb6 is still out there being developed with, on Windows 10. Active community at vbforums

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Open sourcing the original VB6 would be an incredible move by Microsoft.

Something tells me that this could be a quite successful community project. Possibly for building cross platform apps for phones.

I like how we are at least talking again about Visual Basic recently - <USER3> it inspires the industry to build a super easy to learn language/environment for UI and data apps again.

VB had an extremely low barrier of entry, it was truly empowering for many non techies.

<comment><USER21> They should open-source Q(uick)Basic and with it GORILLAS.BAS, MONEY.BAS, NIBBLES.BAS, and DONKEY.BAS. State-of-the-art programming power for your XT, 286, or higher PC compatible, free and open source.

<comment><USER22> Check QB64. It runs even that Stephen King novel based text adventure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I programmed VB from the first version up to vb.net

to me it had these big draws 1) REALLY good documentation, this was the peak of MSDN.

2) object orientation for ui component reuse just made so much more sense than message queues in c/c++

3) out of the box ui that looked like a windows app. easy to make something that looked like users expectation of a windows app

4) speed of design and iteration. you could build new ui really quickly, and iterate with the edit/continue feature

5) it was cheap compared to other products, and continued to evolve with new versions on a regular basis. it had momentum

</comment><comment><USER24> This seems relevant;

RAD Basic, a new IDE for Visual Basic 6.

[http://radbasic.dev](http://radbasic.dev)

Personally, I've always thought there was a niche for a VB6 runtime implemented on .NET that could intercept method calls an enable a system to be slowly rewritten in C#; issues with COM interop esp. visual components might be a challenge.

<comment><USER25> A great idea that I hope they can make happen. Sounds like quite an undertaking though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The people still developing in vb6 are a pretty relaxed lot these days, no one worries any more that the apps won't run in windows, they will, forever. It's still possible to get new activex components for skinning or whatever and if all else fails there's always interops with .net. Meanwhile the vb6 ide is lightning quick, designed as it was back in win 95 days, and with a couple of add ons can be very up to date.

</comment><comment><USER26> The first version of the software that made our company launch back in the 90's was made with Delphi with a browser like component that we discovered, after making successful demos to French historic telco leading to more visible demos, was a 30 days demo and that we couldn't compile anymore without a message box stating that.

So due to emergency we rewrote all in a week in VB6 (or maybe it was 4 or 5 I don't really remember) with the Internet Explorer browser object.

And thanks to the simplicity of Visual Basic it was possible to do so !

And then the demos lead to sales and we are still here 22 years later

<comment><USER9> That's kind of weird. I recall Delphi could embed IE directly, maybe not in the version you used?

Why was it easier to rewrite all your code than just buy a license to the component though?

<comment><USER26> I think it was Borland Delphi 3 or 4, and there where a browser object, perhaps based on IE, but demo.

It was in 1997 and it was not possible to order via Internet so the times the letter with the licence number arrive from US to France and we would have missed the important demo.

Plus, to be completely honest, we were totally broke !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I got started with graphical programming with RapidQ, a sort-of cross between VB and Delphi (and the predecessor to RealBasic). I had a 486/Pentium I machine around that time, with not enough hard disk space to install VB (and too young to afford upgrades or VB itself).

It was not as powerful as VB, but being able to display graphical widgets in as few lines of code as VB got me hooked. Funnily enough RapidQ also supported writing CGI apps, which was my gateway into server-side programming.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm just going to put my two cents into this outpouring of love for VB. Of all the languages that were available, this one was one of the worst. For some reason they paired it with a highly useful RAD environment. (Probably because of billg's historical love for Basic).

Error handling was dismal. It was painfully obvious very few VB developers understood it and most applications would crash on failed IO. I'm talking production applications sold to third parties with 10+ years in the field. Syntax was incredibly clumsy. String manipulation was painful. It had classes but no inheritance. Small programs required complicated installers because OLE was the basis of all libraries. Most components came from for profit ISVs, and community sharing was actually rare. Many components had confusing license terms enforced by software that was as buggy as VB code often was.

<comment><USER29> You are describing the 90s, not VB specifically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I still have two products in production that I am supporting, both written in Office Basic on Access - It's been over 10 years now.

And my search through FOSS has been for a similar environment, preferably supporting Python 3, now that I reflect upon it. Kind of a hold-over from working in Borland's ObjectVision back in the day, or FoxPro before that (the jump to Visual FoxPro caused me to stumble), or Paradox before that (as well as Ashton-Tate's DB2-3 and variants).

And yes, I am a hack who still manages to comment my code, at least at first. One of those "bad examples" I imagine c-corp professional programmers cite in TedX talks. But I do get paid :)

</comment><comment><USER31> I am very thankful for MS to abandon VB Classic and suddenly destroy years of my work on the merit of an egoistical businesses decision. After that I valued the freedom of software as no 1 priority, rebooted and never looked back.

<comment><USER32> The tool to port to .Net wasn't as bad as the article claims. I ported a pretty big messy WinForms application which was somebody else's years of work and today it's even more successful than ever. It took maybe a week or two to work through the many 100s of errors, but none were that difficult. I had already learned not to rely on proprietary binary libraries that were popular back then because you knew they wouldn't be supported in the future when you'd need them.

I'm very grateful for VB.Net. It's much cleaner and safer than VB6. My biggest wish now is for a way to port to C# piecemeal instead of doing the whole project in one shot.

<comment><USER31> I never tried to porting tool. Because porting to another proprietary platform did not make any sense to me after I experienced first hand what non-freedom means. I learned my lesson the hard way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> VB was the greatest thing I'd seen (before I saw SmallTalk or NeXTSTEP). I preferred the 1.0 'edit on your desktop' over the later nested window UX.

I had recently taken OS/2 Presentation Manager courses at Microsoft and started to tinker with making an OS/2 version. The toy turned into a client/server product for the company that produced code generator and analysis tools for enterprise. It eventually because a cross-platform tool running on OS/2 or Win NT and targeting OS/2 and Win32/Win16. A separate X11 editor targeted several Unixes using the same document format and generator templates.

Good times.

<comment><USER34> > I preferred the 1.0 'edit on your desktop' over the later nested window UX.

Later versions including 6 could be switched back to SDI mode. I never liked it though, too confusing if you had stuff open in the background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I will go ahead and say that it still is a better tool in various contexts than what a lot of programmers use now.

I'm saying that as someone who did quite a lot of VB6 programming many, many years ago but now generally creates UIs with some HTML or Vue or whatever inside of vim.

I think a lot more of what we do is related to fashion as much as any technical reason.

It's definitely not cool to program in VB6. People will assume you are not a programmer or just write awful code.

But that happens with any tool that really significantly makes programming easier, if it touches on the core paradigm of colorful cryptic text.

</comment><comment><USER36> IMHO VB was not respected because you could not write your own components/widgets in VB, you had to resort to C++. Delphi components were all written in Delphi. It was clear VB was a second-class citizen.

Due to this factor, and others, VB had the typical Microsoft learning curve: extremely easy to do simple things, and then exponentially difficult to do big things. It was the same in MS-Access that many people thought it was the future of client/server apps, ERP apps, etc.

This limitation was lifted in VB6 or so (dumped VB for Delphi when left win16 for win32 so I am not sure).

<comment><USER37> You couldn't compile it into an app. So you had to distribute the source code. This meant it was a dead-end for anything serious.

<comment><USER38> VB6? You could definitely compile VB6 code into an application and distribute it without the source code!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's worth mentioning that VB6 became a very potent tool for script kiddies to wreak havoc all over the place. This was ~14 years ago and there was no good decompiler back then. VB6 compiled to machine code (.exe) so trying to trace exploits against software was within the ASM itself. Aside from that it was a solid workhorse language that was breezy compared to VS2005 and MFC programs. I still have nightmares to this day that start out with me writing an include to stdafx.h because something went wrong...

</comment><comment><USER40> I learned BASIC in the late eighties. When VB appeared it was close, but not really BASIC. When VB.NET and Visual Basic for Applications (Excel/Access/etc version of VB) forked in all directions I had to write some VBA, but I ran away as soon as possible: from one language it forked to too many dialects that were too incompatible to matter. Divide and conquer transformed in divide and destroy. Now I use C# whenever VB would be a choice, I am not Microsoft's puppet to put up with the VB mess.

<comment><USER41> VBA is exactly the same language as VB 6. VBScript, which was used for ASP, was quite different though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I learned to "seriously" program in VB. First in 6, then every version up through 2018. It was easy to get into because the hard parts (gui programming) were not done with code—or at least, not done with code you ever needed to look at. The error messages helped young me worry about logic and control flow instead of memory management. I got to learn how to build software that was good to _use_, practice algorithms with the insanely good debugger, and build actual executables that I could share.

This led me to JS and PHP (asp.net drove me away from .NET for web) which ultimately led to my current career.

Granted, there was a lot to learn after I left VB, but for a self-directed ten year old, it was the perfect tool. Whenever I see someone trying to teach a youngster C or C++ instead of VB, JS, or Python (or Ruby) I cringe because there's so much there that they don't seriously need to learn, especially if they're just interested in dipping their toes in software.

</comment><comment><USER43> It is alive and kicking: deep learning with TensorFlow on VB.NET: [https://github.com/losttech/Gradient- Samples/blob/master/VB/...](https://github.com/losttech/Gradient- Samples/blob/master/VB/FashionMnistVB/FashionMnist.vb)

</comment><comment><USER44> VB6 got me started on programming, in a really tangible way I could really understand - when I was only about ten years old.

I was lucky enough to be playing Sonic 3 and Knuckles on my Sega Genesis enough that I eventually asked my youth pastor, whom I knew was in IT, 'how do I make a game like this?'

He responded 'I dunno' and handed me a copy of Visual Studio 6 on a CD, and I grabbed a bunch of books from the library, and foolishly (but also correctly) tried to start with C/C++. The frustration of simply getting graphics to appear on the screen was enough to drive me away from it. While I understood the logic, what I really needed was a basic-level 2D graphics API like Cocos2D, likely.

Visual Basic was a very nice balance between code and it's visual link - I get the same feeling in a great way with Xcode and Interface Builder today. I owe it my career. :)

<comment><USER45> Wasn't VB pretty much a clone of Xcode's granddaddy, the IDE that came with NeXT step? Even the idea behind ActiveX was copied from there AFAIK. No wonder Xcode reminds you of VB then.

<comment><USER44> That's a really cool note! I actually own a NextCube...I hadn't made that link, especially when I was younger and actually had just gotten started.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> VB and Delphi as well as other 'RAD' software from the 90's still has its fans, and some of these systems power very large installations even today. You wouldn't know about it because all you see is the outside but behind the scenes you'd be surprised what is running.

<comment><USER47> I think VB dead just because RAD is dead just like the article states: Careless newbies, bored company workers, and summer students trampled in, solving challenges that would have been much more difficult on any other platform, and spraying spaghetti code everywhere. In other words, because VB was easy enough to use even if you weren't a trained coder, it was used by plenty of people who weren't trained coders. And VB did nothing to encourage them to correct their bad habits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The article present the fact that VB is accessible to non professional programers as "a problem". I could not disagree more. The future isn't to coding being a specialized field, but to everyone having basic coding knowledges. VB in that respect was extremely powerful, and its integration with Office a genious idea.

The problem rather is that VB6 is a 1990s language and that not only Microsoft has never made a more modern scripting language available in Office (and I mean pre-installed on everyone's machine, with an integrated IDE, etc. I know there are all sorts of hacks and addins) but if anything they seem to consider scripting nothing more than a security risk and are doing anything they can to lock office down and make it hard for people to script it.

</comment><comment><USER48> I loved VB a lot and am trying to build a modern day version of it which can build Webapp and Microservice based apps at yazz.com

(Full disclosure: I work at Red Hat but my views do not necessarily reflect my employers views)

<comment><USER49> Why? Is the language really what you want or is it the tools surrounding it?

<comment><USER48> I want the all in one development system for quick prototypes that can be made by non technical people , that's why

<comment><USER49> Right, but why use visual basic as the actual language?

<comment><USER48> I don't. I use Javascript instead of basic. I just use the concept of components and events and forms from Visual basic

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Am I dating myself if i say i started with GW-BASIC... I remember how it was a big deal to code a menu by highlighting text based on the arrow keys... and then based on mouse movement

<comment><USER51> If it makes you feel any younger I started with TRS-80 Level 2 BASIC years before GW-BASIC existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> We have probably 100,000 lines of VB code at work. Manufacturing environment of course. Some of the worst design patterns you will see. None of it is "modern" Visual Basic. It's stuff people learned around 1995/96 and stopped there.

Objects were never embraced. Libraries are shunned. The project started to encompass every part of the company. It's truly a picture of "persistence over skill".

The worst part is that a couple years ago, the VB programmers started writing PHP code that is just as bad.

<comment><USER53> Also in manufacturing similar story.

Most of the VB I've seen is front end code to MS Access '97 running underneath. We have been slowly chipping away at it and replacing various components but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of it still around in another 10 years.

All sorts of legacy stuff here Visual Fox Pro - which I think is VB precursor as well. Lots of old 90's Commercial Unix stuff (RS/6000 era - Old C++ code - pre STL etc). Older than that we have a heap of Fortran and mainframe era stuff written in PL/1 language. Code and software here has very long lifespan and not always easy to replace it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> As a kid I dabbled with BASIC on an MSX, but the first real desktop app I made was with VB on Windows 98 if memory doesn't fail me. It was a catalog of Starcraft units.

</comment><comment><USER55> My first "real" job was fixing a VB6 app used in a manufacturing setting that consisted of one 3,000 line function, and one 2,000 line function.

And this was a critical system. It certified the units we made were configured correctly-- which were then installed in semiconductor fabs.

Also, VB6 is responsible for my favorite bug ever-- an if statement: no more than "if count=0 then" that opened a dialog box, somehow. It was reproducible as well.

</comment><comment><USER56> Anybody think there's an opportunity to bring a VB-like experience to web programming? Could widespread availability of WebAssembly help in that regard?

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm still using VB .NET for hobby projects today: My home automation system runs on it. Sometimes I have to convert sample code or examples when I'm having issues to and from C#, but I can write VB a lot faster than other languages, because as the first one I learned, it still comes second nature to me.

</comment><comment><USER58> I was shocked how fast it actually was. In the VB6 days, it was only slightly slower than the lovingly crafted ATL C++ code for some of the COM component development. It was crazy - rough out a VB component in a few hours, then spend a better bit of the week making it 'real'.

</comment><comment><USER59> VB was a money maker, flat out. You could deliver great solutions to problems while standing on your head. And the fact that it extended into Office S VBA made it even better.

We wrote plenty of code in VC++, but I have to admit that VB had massively better ROI.

</comment><comment><USER60> Started programming with BASIC on a graphing calculator and it was easy to move on to C and Java from there. The use of english words over symbols and a lack of boiler plate and "concept clutter" is beginner friendly.

</comment><comment><USER50> Btw, VB6 still kinda lives on in form of VBA macros on Microsoft Office products

</comment><comment><USER61> I started off doing VB6, both at a personal level, then a few years later, commercially.

It wasn't bad. If you wanted a quick app with a few forms and a backend DB, then this was a decent choice.

I quite like it.

</comment><comment><USER62> I keep my favorite VBA jokes in github library called NVBC, the "NecroVisualBasiCon".

With the Regex and Scripting runtim COM objects, tools like a string interpolator are within reach.

</comment><comment><USER63> I wrote my first program in QBasic. I played Gorillas (like, a lot). If they decide to kill VB, I'm gonna cry.

</comment><comment><USER64> DoEvents

<comment><USER29> Still in vb.net! Async/await before its time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I'm so glad people are finally talking about VB! For a certain subset of programming, VB is very effective.

I've been working on "VB, but hosted in the cloud, and built specifically for developers": [https://tryretool.com](https://tryretool.com). We're still early, so I'd appreciate any feedback :). To use Retool, you're ideally an engineer who knows both SQL and JS. We connect to most databases, as well as any arbitrary REST / GraphQL APIs.

(Our docs are at [https://docs.tryretool.com.](https://docs.tryretool.com.))

Edit: removed a part I didn't fully agree with, but paraphrased.

<comment><USER66> "As the essay notes though, I think VB possibly made programming _too_ easy, which led to poorly built and poorly maintained apps."

This feels a little elitist to me. VB (and Access) allowed a lot of people to develop mission critical things rapidly they would never have been able to afford before.

When I look at the complex monstrosities we develop these days I don't know if they are in any way more maintainable or well-built. Yes the people who created them know them in and out but give them a few years to become legacy and outdated and they will become a maintenance nightmare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> The story is behind the paywall but I think from my experience that the VB had been an inferior version of smalltalk.

<comment><USER68> uBlock with Firefox gives me no paywalls on medium.

<comment><USER69> Or block javascript in any browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> stopped reading after the third time the author dissed javascript

</comment><comment><USER71> A practical and popular corporate-driven language. Just like Go and Rust.

Then the company decides to bend it out of shape or slow down the development. People cannot do anything about it because it's corporate-driven.

And yet, people have not learnt the lesson.

<comment><USER72> Well, yeah, kinda, sort of... difference being that if Visual Basic was open source, it'd probably still be around, just not under Microsoft.</comment></comment>


Evening project: hsline, a grep/sed-like text processor with haskell goodness - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/inportb/playground/blob/master/Pinako/hsline/hsline.hs

<comment><AUTHOR> I felt like learning Haskell last night, so I decided to rip this idea off PyLine < <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2808400> ></comment>


3 Months After Explosion, SpaceX Plans to Launch Rocket Bearing Satellites - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/science/spacex-rocket-iridium-satellite.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_dk_20161202&nl=dealbook&nl_art=11&nlid=65508833&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Originally read this as "plans to launch (rocket-bearing) satellites" (as in satellites which carry rockets), which would have been interesting indeed.

I suppose all satellites have thrusters, but that isn't what came to mind.

<comment><USER3> I agree, it's a terribly ambiguous headline. Headlines have a way of dropping everything that gives context to a sentence. Makes sense when you're limited to a relatively small piece of paper, but on the Internet you can write as much as you want. So put those extra words back in there! "SpaceX plans on launching a rocket bearing a satellite"... or better yet, "SpaceX plans on launching a rocket _containing_ a satellite".

<comment><USER4> How about "SpaceX plans to return with a commercial launch"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The most fascinating aspect of this to me is that Iridium still exists.

Who uses it, and what for? I can imagine a few uses for emergency comms in particularly out-of-the-way locations, but it's hard to imagine how that makes enough money to maintain an entire constellation of satellites.

<comment><USER6> They have the only global, instant availability, low latency, SBD (short burst data) capability.

Transmitter is very small as well. [https://www.iridium.com/products/details/iridium-9603](https://www.iridium.com/products/details/iridium-9603)

<comment><USER7> You can get a ready to use Arduino shield for 250$. The service is 12$ a month. Not bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For anyone interested in the story of the Iridium system, including its many near-death business episodes, I can recommend "Eccentric Orbits", by John Bloom.</comment>


Facebook Messenger protocol in Pidgin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jgeboski/purple-facebook <comment><USER2> It's a shame that Facebook removed support for XMPP in the first place. I guess it's part of their strategy to make the world more "open" and connected.

<comment><USER3> Not just FB. Everyone is moving (have moved) to proprietary protocols.

<comment><USER4> XMPP wasn't a great protocol though... I'm not aware of a better option though. I know that something over WebRTC may not be much better, but may be the best chance of seeing something more open in the next decade again.

Every company wants their walled garden though... though there's moats stocked with alligators and piranha around them..

<comment><USER5> Do you think it's strictly that they want walled gardens? I have a feeling more large companies would support open protocols if they provided the features they needed with the efficiency to provide those services cost (and battery) effectively. It seems all the many open protocols (XMPP, Web and CalDav, etc.) are simply not efficient or feature rich enough for companies that are in a constant features escalation war with competitors.

<comment><USER6> I imagine it's that, but amplified by NIH syndrome. Something like "oh yeah we _could_ do it with XMPP, but it's all complicated and stuff and if we just built our own protocol we'd be able to do everything we'd ever want exactly how we want it! It'll be the future!"

I've fallen victim to something similar myself many times. "Oh yeah, I could do <this> with <tool x>, but it's ugly and not how <tool x> is meant to be used! I'll just design and implement <tool y> myself to do exactly <this> and it'll be the future!" It's the temptation to make something customized for yourself and it's hard to resist. Particularly when the existing solution has some flaws, which makes the relative cost/effort of rolling your own solution seem lower (even when it inevitably turns out to still be quite high).

<comment><USER7> [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/building...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook- engineering/building-facebook-messenger/10150259350998920/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I'm worried about: The protocol is proprietary, not a public API and all official clients can be updated by Facebook almost instantly. This means they can make arbitrary changes to the protocol at any time without bothering the users of official clients very much.

This library would have to keep up with all the changes or clients would quickly stop working. So is the manpower there to do this?

<comment><USER9> Well there used to be this thing called AOL instant messenger. Then people cloned the protocol. So AOL would just start causing purposeful buffer overflows that would take them to specific parts in their code but mess up the people trying to imitate it. But they figured it out, and now they teach students in class how to overcome it. The other illegal thing they taught us was decrypting a DVD.

<comment><USER3> This in NO way addresses "proprietary protocol".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any part of this plugin that is specific to Pidgin? If it's just a libpurple plugin, it should work with Adium too, right?

<comment><USER11> Yeah, as well as minbif and others.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Appreciation to this project. When facebook updated their protocol, my workflow and screen `real estate` were impacted in very distracting ways.

[edited to address comment]

<comment><USER12> > I wanted to appreciate this project.

You wanted to, but you don't, because...?

<comment><USER13> I think it's 'he wanted to' so he posted it to HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me or there is no actual source code there?

<comment><USER15> Wiki-Entry:

"The purple-facebook project simply back-ports the purple3 plugin to purple2 [..]"

So i guess you won't see the actual protocol implementation in this repo but only the necessary patches.

<comment><USER14> Ah this makes sense, so it has only some glue code (in the .h files I guess)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome. Now we will be able to have a XMPP/Jabber transport that works with Facebook. Great for sort of keeping in touch with the relatives without the horror of actual Facebook.

<comment><USER17> messenger.com is a great alternative to use Messenger without the distraction of Facebook in the background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is the protocol documented somewhere?

<comment><USER7> [http://mqtt.org/](http://mqtt.org/)

<comment><USER19> If I get it right, MQTT is just a PubSub protocol, i.e. it essentially carries the messages, but doesn't care about their contents.

Is there a standard on how chat layer (the content of published messages) is implemented? (I haven't looked into source code, but guess it's not just a plain text, but it has some structure to it.)

<comment><USER7> C implementation of Facebook MQTT for bitlbee: [https://github.com/jgeboski/bitlbee- facebook](https://github.com/jgeboski/bitlbee-facebook)

<comment><USER18> So that's a no, as it appears there's no documentation in the repository beyond the comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wait a minute. I thought "Facebook Messenger" protocol was just MQTT?</comment>