Perl Did That First - <AUTHOR> http://variousandsundry.com/cs/blog/2014/09/12/perl-did-that-first/

<comment><USER2> I am not sure how constructive posts like these are. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

That said, the longer I code, the more borrowing from the crufty old langiage/system/community/technology I see in the "shiny new thing", even if many folks slam the old entity.

<comment><USER3> The constructiveness of this is that people trying to find a solution for an already solved problem can easily take from them the solutions already implemented; instead of struggling through making their own solution. "Stealing" is highly recommended and looked upon favourably by Perl people.

And as you say, it also serves to show newer programmers that there is no need to badmouth older languages, there is only to learn.

<comment><USER4> > trying to find a solution for an already solved problem can easily take from > them the solutions already implemented

The 'solution already implemented' in this case seems to be 'Email the PAUSE admins who will deal with each case individually'. It seems kinda condescending to imply that 'have more volunteers' is something that the ruby community just hasn't thought of; as if projects short of manpower just need to learn from the wisdom of the perl community in just, y'know, having more.

One of the main motivations for Benjamin to write his post seems to have been the reply in the initial thread from the Rubygems admin saying "I want these decisions to not be on my (or anyone's) shoulders. It's stressful and nerve- wracking if I get it wrong"[0]. Given that, a reply saying, essentially, 'What's the problem, just get the RubyGems admin to make the decisions' seems.... unconstructive at best.

[0] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubygems- org/niS5ZO9DNgk/9gF...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubygems- org/niS5ZO9DNgk/9gFq2S67npoJ)

<comment><USER3> He didn't post the step-for-step instructions on how to proceed, but only the first bit of that:

[http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan- faq.html#How_adopt_module](http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan- faq.html#How_adopt_module)

In short: Make an account, email admins and cc author, then shotgun every place the author's likely to see your intent, then wait a few weeks, and if your efforts have been clear, and the author unresponsive, admins will transfer rights to you.

Typically following this procedure results in the original author reacting, and if they don't, then there's nothing wrong or nerve-wracking about a transfer. CPAN has a big body of history pointing to this working just fine.

Besides, if i interpret this right that the number of rubygem admins is low enough that simply handling such a simple matter would be a problem, then you have bigger fish to fry.

\----

Edit: Then again, Benjamin admits that his post doesn't solve:

        > deal with gems whose owners are AWOL

Which is the _real_ problem, and the solution to which solves pretty much all other cases too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Condescending tone aside, what I read as being proposed for Ruby isn't the same as what is being shown for Perl.

In Perl, a dev says "Huh, I don't think this is being maintained properly", and then proceeds to contact the original author, and failing that, a set of admins.

The Ruby proposal, on top of that, allows a dev who is abandoning a project to mark it as such, and that then is individually findable or noticeable. This is actually a rather more interesting approach, as it means those downstream know when a library they're using is being abandoned, and can decide -immediately- what to do about it, from switching to another library, up to and including taking ownership of the existing one. The community can have a proactive notification of abandonment, if you will.

<comment><USER6> how about this?

[http://neilb.org/2013/08/07/adoptme.html](http://neilb.org/2013/08/07/adoptme.html)

[http://neilb.org/adoption/](http://neilb.org/adoption/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I agree with a majority of the posts, I have some reservations - uploading to CPAN and PrePan is not as simple as a git push. Registering through PAUSE and then properly uploading to CPAN with a zip file through their UI or through FTP.

I think CPAN and co could use an infrastructure update.

</comment><comment><USER8> Simpsons Did It: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Already_Did_It](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Already_Did_It)</comment>


William Gibson says today's internet is nothing like what he envisioned - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/03/19/810570879/william-gibson-says-todays-internet-is-nothing-like-what-he-envisioned <comment><USER2> > _" the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that > we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here."_

Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of _Shadowrun_ , a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here).

In the earlier editions, from 1989 through the 1990s and early 2000s, the Matrix (their 'internet') was all virtual reality, and the 'Decker' using it would disappear into that world and barely interact with the rest of the team.

In more recent editions, written after smartphones and wireless internet became common, _everything_ was connected. Everything is connected to the Matrix. In combat, a Decker can hack the opponents' guns to disable them, for example. It's not a world to disappear into; that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.

<comment><USER3> There were also gameplay reasons behind that for flow. One of the criticisms of the newer model is that the needless connectivity without so much as a logistical benefit doesn't make the decker/hacker feel smart so much as make it feel like the world is set up by colossal idiots who would think giving the army hand grenades which are always remote detonatable without a manual safety fuse would be an excellent idea and be utterly shocked that their entire army got blown up by one hacker.

<comment><USER4> Whoever paid for that grenade doesn't trust the soldier / mercenary they gave it to very far, that's why the network connection exists in the first place, hackers can exploit that.

At least that's the reason I just made up.

<comment><USER5> More likely it needs a continuous connection back to the license server for GaaS (grenades as a service).

(This kind of cyberpunk dystopia is very plausible from the intersection of military contracting grift and lowest-bidder IoT design!)

<comment><USER6> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M7_Spider](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M7_Spider)

<comment><USER5> This shows how hard it is to write sci-fi when I was joking about "grenades as a service" \- someone's gone one better and made a wifi mesh network of landmines!

And then converted the landmines to remote-operated as part of a legal fiction about victim-operated devices. Which is the military version of the concern about robots taking jobs: to what extent is it acceptable to have munitions making their own decisions about taking lives?

Anyway, in the Shadowrun universe you'd _definitely_ be able to hack the mesh network of landmines.

<comment><USER6> I figured you were joking, sadly I just figured something like that had already been thought up and deployed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, > and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in > 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was > so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I > thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'"

Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it gets harder and harder to write near-future SF as the present is in flux. Especially to write post-apocalyptic SF.

SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards. This remains true even in apocalyptic scenarios, which are always tied to the worries of the present at the time of writing.

But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events. Things like the "5G causes coronavirus" nonsense remind me of what Carl Sagan called the "demon-haunted world".

<comment><USER7> > SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological > development and social progress moving forwards.

This is what I think was so original about The Handmaid's Tale--a possible iteration of our own culture and technology that moved backwards-sideways instead of forward. (Disclaimer: we read this years ago in school, and I haven't had a chance to see the recent adaptation.)

<comment><USER8> Not really Frankenstein, War of the worlds where not a Whig view of history.

Only early plup SF Gernsback etc had that view

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his emotions around it and its hypothetical impact on a future climate change- induced apocalypse.

<comment><USER10> >[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election.

This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...

<comment><USER11> > But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a > future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the > population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where > characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the > election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the > world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of > the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very > much be present."

I don't see this as a pathetic premise.

<comment><USER10> >I don't see this as a pathetic premise.

You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle:

Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up....

Would you think that was somehow a profound idea? Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? Wouldn't that come across as hysterical and insulting to the future?

The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.

<comment><USER12> > Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into > my work?

We're talking about William Fucking Gibson here. Next you'll tell me you hate it when Ursula Leguin 'shoehorned politics' into her work.

<comment><USER13> It's true that Gibson's work is compelling because like all great cyberpunk writers, it grafts real world social, cultural, and political considerations in with his futuristic technology. That said, good world-building doesn't mean the author himself might not have naive or problematic politics. J.K. Rowling's expressed views on Twitter have been an ongoing source of controversy. Or perhaps more relevant, Ray Bradbury in his old age became a staunch supporter of George Bush and the wars waged by his administration:

[https://www.salon.com/control/2001/08/29/bradbury_2/](https://www.salon.com/control/2001/08/29/bradbury_2/)

[https://books.google.com/books?id=rRmlA33pEcsC&pg=PT192&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=rRmlA33pEcsC&pg=PT192&lpg=PT192)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080521050300/http://anthony.gn...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080521050300/http://anthony.gnn.tv/blogs/24458/The_Great_Bradbury_Bummer)

<comment><USER12> Sure. Shitty politics in fiction still flies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >"Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff."

Ultimately, there are a lot of boring and average intelligence people in the world who spend a lot of time doing banal boring practical stuff and have always liked low brow entertainment. The Internet reflects that.

<comment><USER15> I think one of the things it was easy to miss in 1984 when Neuromancer was published was how accessible the internet and computers is. I've watched two year olds interact with the modern internet.

If you have a system with a high barrier to entry -- like computers where in 1984 and as they are described in Neuromancer -- it's safe to assume that a lot of "boring" and "average" people wouldn't use it. At the time Microsoft's unofficial mission was "a computer on every [office] desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software". It sounded overly ambitious, even into the 90s.

<comment><USER16> Interestingly, a decade later, both Tad William's _Otherland_ (1996), and Neal Stephenson's _Snowcrash_ (1992) described networked virtual realities which everyday normal people had access to, but they were referred to as "Ken and Barbies" or similar. Their use of off-the-shelf avatars and no custom software gave them away. And the Techno-elites still had their own spaces within these worlds that were either off-limits or hard to find.

<comment><USER15> Something happened between 1984 and 1992 where imagining a virtual world had to include large numbers of everyday people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we > would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here."

This is a common mistake utopians of all stripes; the short comings of the world as we know it isn't a consequence of external forces imposing badness on us, it's a consequence of the fallibility of humanity. Unless if you have a concrete plan on how you're going to organize society differently, any attempt to start something fresh will end up recreating all of the ills that drove you from "society" in the first place.

<comment><USER18> Pretty sure Neuromancer isn't a utopian novel, and that Gibson isn't a utopian.

<comment><USER17> Arguable; I'm not enough of a literary person to argue it out. But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude, and I'd argue that my original point still holds; escapists often fail to recognize the source of the problems they're escaping from, and recreate them wherever they escape to.

<comment><USER19> It's not really arguable. Gibson wrote _punk_ literature, at least back then; he identified himself as a punk subculture writer, and punk isn't utopian. He was not describing a desirable future, but a depressing one where soulless corporations rule the world.

> _But the sentence above is a very escapist attitude_

Escapism can be pessimistic, as in Gibson. It's not him who "escapes", it's the denizens of the soulless world he described, and the "world" they escape to can be just as alienating. It's no triumph to "escape" to Gibson's matrix, and his world continues to be a crapsack [1][2].

\----

[1] [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld)

[2] [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literat...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/Literature)

<comment><USER13> The setting as a whole is dystopian, but the possibilities of the net as a free space for people to flee into and become empowered there- isn't that a utopian enclave, a refuge?

Regardless of post hoc genre classifications like cyberpunk vs. postcyberpunk, you can still have pockets of hope within a generally dystopian setting, and perhaps Gibson's cyberspace was the place in Neuromancer.

<comment><USER20> > but the possibilities of the net as a free space for people to flee into and > become empowered there- isn't that a utopian enclave, a refuge?

That theme isn't really present in the _Neuromancer_ series. From the perspective of our viewpoint characters, the matrix is primarily a place that one goes to do a job, not a place to hang out; it's seen primarily as the domain of megacorps and mysterious AIs, not a human space.

<comment><USER21> It is present in the follow up Count Zero though. Also while Gibson focuses on characters at the fringe of society, the world itself is not significantly more distopian than our world (or the '80s), which is probably one of the author's points.

I still wouldn't call it escapism though.

<comment><USER20> > the world itself is not significantly more distopian than our world (or the > '80s)

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment! The backstory to the Sprawl universe is crushingly dystopian -- Soviet Russia has won a nuclear war, destroying a number of European cities (particularly in Germany) and irradiating much of the European continent. In the wake of that war, it appears that the US government has largely collapsed, leaving megacorporations (like Sense/Net), wealthy families (like the Tessier-Ashpools), and street gangs (like the Yakuza and Panther Moderns) as the primary sources of power.

2020 sure isn't great, but I'd still prefer it to the crapsack world that Gibson built.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I disagree, the cyber fighting is almost exactly how he described it. Tons of misinformation, requiring personal compute agents to sort through it for you. Attacking high-profile targets by buying zero-days, creating distractions, then pivoting to more obscure vulnerabilities in the corporate firewalls. Attack & parry, then riposte.

I find his descriptions more apt now than when his books were first published.

</comment><comment><USER23> We're definitely in more of a Bruce Sterling cyberpunk future than a William Gibson cyberpunk future. Distraction has been feeling eerily prescient recently.

<comment><USER24> We are actually in the Mike Judge Idiocracy cyberpunk future and it terrifies me. Our president is a reality TV freak, the citizens are so science-retarded that they think Covid is a hoax, the population all sit in our homes watching testicle-kicking videos on huge TVs while drinking Mountain Dew and eating Cheetos while the world melts down outside.

<comment><USER25> That's all true. The difference is in Idiocracy there's no fracture- everybody's an idiot and perfectly content to be one.

In our time, there's still push-back to any descent into idiocracy.

<comment><USER26> I think we are going to have to push harder. The anti-intellectual cohort has got their preferred elected leaders in more than one country these past few years. Just because smart people exist, doesn't mean they are holding the reigns currently.

<comment><USER27> > The anti-intellectual cohort has got their preferred elected leaders.

I think the anti-intellectual cohort have been helped in that by the super rich who had their preferred elected leaders as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point. The current generation of VR seems like the first halting steps into that world. Progress towards realtime raytracing and massively online social worlds look like the next steps. The lofty goals of brain machine interface companies whisper faint possibilities of "jacking in" at some distant date.

<comment><USER15> The human brain processes ~40gigabits/second of information. Current direct brain interfaces are probably closer to 400bits/second Computer to Brain. I think it's very possible that we will hit wetware limitations for direct brain interfaces an order of magnitude or two less than ~40gigabits/seconds. With less information to process the digital worlds created by brain machine interfaces will be significantly less stimulating than the real world.

In conclusion I believe the real world will always feel more real, and be generally preferred because the digital world will provide less total information to our brains than digital worlds, even with brain machine interfaces.

Neal Stephenson's 2019 book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" describes a path forward to the mysterious and sexy place through upload. Upload removes the wetware limitations and provides the most likely candidate for a mysterious and sexy place.

<comment><USER28> I would argue that that number is a bit high for sense input. Figures I've seen are about 20x lower on the high end. The only time I've seen estimates as high as the one you gave are when they are considering the full field of vision for each eye and translating that directly to pixels assuming there is 100% fidelity. Human vision doesn't work that way, we dedicate far fewer neurons to our peripheral vision outside the fovea. You also have to remember that neurons transmit data at a much slower rate than electrical connections (100m/s vs 300,000km/s) so the path to building a better brain machine interfce is to have a large number of electrodes which seems to me a fairly straightforward problem to solve e.g. make them smaller and adding more of them. The other side of the coin is that we aren't aware of all of our sensory input all of the time so you can get away with only transmitting the important stuff which greatly reduces the bandwidth needed. Further out, there's likely some form of abstraction going on inside our brains and if we can communicate data on that level we'll likely need even less input to create a realistic experience.

As an aside, I don't think I'd opt for the type of uploading outlined in that novel considering it involves a posthumous destructive scan of the connectome. There wouldn't be any continuity so you'd probably just end up with a copy. The only type of uploading I could see working would be a Ship of Theseus approach where you gradually replace your biological neurons with artificial neurons and even that causes some hesitation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why does one assume the Internet is in its final form? I'm about 99% certain the phase we are in is a transitional phase. Upon the arrival of ubiquitous immersive computing, it will go through what may be its final phase shift, but right now it'll be looked back upon similar to the previous eras.

<comment><USER30> Yes! What's interesting about Gibson's vision is that he assumed connectivity would be hard, but VR would be easy. It's a world of payphones, fax machines, and "simstim" where you can receive someone else's sensory input and ride along inside their head as they move through the world.

That's not where we are now, but we'll be a lot closer to it if and when we nail VR.

<comment><USER31> Simstim is - at least in part - being worked on by a company called Openwater[0]. Mary Lou Jepsen did a talk at the Long Now Foundation a while back that speaks to the ambition of thought/memory recording via an MRI-like device and the "insertion"/playback of the same in other people [1].

[0]www.openwater.cc [1]www.longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical- telepathy/

<comment><USER30> Yeah, I was at that talk. A little out there, but pretty awesome.

<comment><USER32> Have you seen Brainstorm from 1983?

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/)

<comment><USER30> No, just the clip that Lou showed at the talk.

<comment><USER32> I asked because the world of Brainstorm consisted of payphones too, and they did that 'telepathy' with headsets which could replay recorded experiences over that modem line.

Hard to classify that movie, at its time it was pure science-fiction, now it is a technothriller from the past. But very watchable, i think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I dunno, I think the future described in i.e. Neuromancer can still happen, it's just farther down the road.

<comment><USER34> that is exactly what those of us simply waiting for a Neuromancer _movie_ have been saying to ourselves for years :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The current season of Westworld is very Gibsonian. The main new character (Caleb) is introduced as a vet with PTSD, but as the season unfolds we see he's been augmented, and it's strongly implied that he's living with implanted memories to cover up the horrible stuff he did in the military.

In the most recent episode he got to use a drug called "Genre" that moves you through different states of mental alteration. Whoever wrote this read lots of Gibson.

But the idea that everyone is jacked in to the same network, the hand of corporate control is always present, and shady things are happening all the time, no one thinks of that as unique or novel any more.

</comment><comment><USER36> > I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world > either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — > would still be very much be present."

TV show The Good Fight Season 4, Episode 1 "The Gang Deals with Alternate Reality has brilliant dark humor take on alternate reality where Hillary Clinton won the election.

spoiler alert \---

(spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH)

<comment><USER37> > (spoiler: Liberal lawyer Diane wakes up in alternate reality where Trump > lost, but #MeeToo did not happen. She is representing Harvey Weinstein who > is big donor for liberal causes and connections to the WH)

that's eerily close to current reality. (#MeToo only when politically expedient; Weinstein's damage control advisor is now a senior campaign adviser to a 'liberal' contender for the WH)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > "Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all like the > Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly > stuff."

That is the story of all technology. The horse was the super weapon used by kings and warriors. It ended up being something that farmers used to plow their fields. Same with ships, cars, telephones, radios, televisions, computers.

</comment><comment><USER39> _" Gibson says his favorite type of science fiction requires time and effort to understand."_

Yes, that's Gibson's new book, "Agency". It's complicated because it's contrived, not because the subject matter is complicated. Probably his worst book to date.

</comment><comment><USER40> I strongly believe we need more separation from the real world and the internet. Every year it seems like more of our physical lives are being placed into social forms on the internet which should be more of an escape than bringing it all over.

</comment><comment><USER41> _" And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'"_

Honestly, if you were deeply, dramatically surprised by Trump's election, you weren't paying enough attention. The causes of working-class angst against globalism and coastal centers of power goes back to at least the late 70s, with the offshoring of jobs and the subsequent death of thousands of towns in the now-called Rust Belt.

It lead me to wonder if there is a term for such a phenomenon: the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new, surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you were ignorant of.

<comment><USER5> > The causes of working-class angst against globalism and coastal centers of > power goes back to at least the late 70s, with the offshoring of jobs and > the subsequent death of thousands of towns in the now-called Rust Belt.

So .. how's that working out?

> the realization that your model of history was so flawed that a new, > surprising event wasn't actually unpredictable, but merely based on data you > were ignorant of.

Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in _Excession_.

<comment><USER26> > Iain M Banks calls this an "outside context problem" in Excession.

Fantastic book, really interesting perspectives on society to be gained by the absolutely enormous lens the Ship Minds are able to view it from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The reasons why society decided to re-root itself on top of internet are to be investigated. Capitalism logic caught in a loop looking for virginial spaces to re-grow with even less constraints ?

</comment><comment><USER43> The hacker spirit of the early Internet has been replaced by corporate shenanigans and capitalist greed.

Just like "hacker" in "hacker news".

<comment><USER44> +1. I just watched Eric Weinstein on Lex Fridman's podcast. He is angry about how students have been emasculated by the establishment. That the death of Aaron Schwartz was a tragedy and the students should 'rise up and take back' MIT. Yet he himself has a net worth over 100mill and is doing nothing about it.He promises betterment through revolution like Batista and Castro, yet he himself is busy amassing wealth. Why does he think youth will waste itself on anything else except the pursuit of the dream that made him successful? Internet has just become another tool for control because that's just what humans do - make tools out of anything including their fellow humans.

<comment><USER5> This guy? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein)

I can't understand why anyone would even begin to take calls for revolution from someone like that seriously, when he's so obviously a grifter.

<comment><USER31> Why so obviously a grifter?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brendan Eich - A Brief History of JS - <AUTHOR> http://blip.tv/file/3837048

<comment><USER2> Can't go wrong with Evil Dead and Morrissey.

</comment><comment><USER3> A legend and a hero.</comment>


Log in to StackOverflow with your smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://blog.clef.io/post/42364199828/log-in-to-stack-exchange-with-clef

<comment><USER2> This is a game changer, or at least a huge step in the right direction. I shouldn't have to wait for individual websites to make systems like this, third parties like Clef should handle it for everyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> We totally agree. Having every site try to re-implement and keep up with security best practices is a waste of time, money, and makes it hard to trust anyone online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations guys! I added the clef plugin to my wordpress blog as soon as I found out about it - it's working great.

Stackoverflow was one of the sites I wanted to see this working on!

</comment><comment><USER4> This is very awesome, congrats Jesse and team!

</comment><comment><USER5> i don't know. why should i trust clef?

the google two-factor authentication can be run on your own server. can clef be run w/o clef? i don't think so.</comment>


Show HN: New iOS app to delete similar photos - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/9d2367398340

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, maker of the app here. Would love feedback and your thoughts on this app. There's always tons of things to improve on a first version. Thanks.</comment>


Turtle meat – the ultimate survival diet? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46671224 <comment><USER2> Ship wrecked by orcas, really? Wiki doesn't mention any [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale#%22Killer%22_stereot...](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale#%22Killer%22_stereotype) Couldn't find any other reports of this happening. Youtube has some videos of other whales but not orcas.

Low fat is a problem, because we need it or "rabbit starvation" \- rabbit meat is only 8.3% fat [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning).

Nutritionalist picks one food, mushrooms... which have very low calories. Great for weight loss, not great for survival.

Potatoes are surprisingly good; high calories, they even have vitamin C. Easy to grow (not in a dingy of course). The favoured survival food of the stranded Martian.

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia does mention the incident: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale_attack#1970s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale_attack#1970s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess if I was stuck on a raft at sea and starving I would eat a sea turtle, but nearly all species of sea turtle are now endangered because of humans. [https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/sea- turtle](https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/sea-turtle)

<comment><USER5> Darwin ate all of them.

<comment><USER5> I guess I have to explain the joke: [https://io9.gizmodo.com/what-did-charles- darwin-put-in-his-m...](https://io9.gizmodo.com/what-did-charles-darwin-put- in-his-mouth-pretty-much-e-1687788345)

He famously had 30+ galapagos tortoises on the HMS beagle but he and the crew ate all of them before they got back because they were so delicious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it me or is there no left padding on this article and the page is entirely responsive when you expand... maybe a new BBC update that went wrong?

</comment><comment><USER7> I watched _Cannibal Holocaust_ not long ago. Actually a pretty good movie, not dumb. The very first 'found footage' movie apparently. Features anthropologists behaving badly and later being torn apart and eaten by the natives. The director was charged with the actors' murders, but it turned out they'd just signed a deal to disappear for a year after filming. Brilliant marketing I guess.

I mention that because it features an extremely graphic and lengthy sequence of a turtle being killed, shell removed, cut open etc. Very colourful insides, you can almost smell it. I felt sick from that point on.. [I watched the director's cut]

<comment><USER8> The turtle scene was also, obviously, controversial for killing an actual turtle rather than faking it. Lots of people didn't like that at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Turtle isn't that rare a thing to eat. They taste pretty good. You can even eat the shell if you boil it long enough.

</comment><comment><USER10> As if survival weren't enough of a hurdle

You have to get by on the blood of a turtle</comment>


Silicon Valley's "megacommute" even worse than L.A - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/02/job-boom-intensifies-traffic-and-housing-woes/ <comment><USER2> Better public transport would solve a lot of those problems. For such a dense area the current offering is a joke.

I live in San Mateo and work in the south bay. By car it takes me 35-40min (with no traffic) but with public transport it would be over 2h. After six there isn't even any option available to go back home. No surprise that so many people choose a car to commute.

<comment><USER3> Public transit works best for young healthy people. If you have kids or move a little slowly due to health or old age, public transit is a straight up no-go. And certain jobs necessitate a car. You won't convince a salesman to carry a projector, screen, and a box of pamphlets on the bus and train.

And this says nothing of "comfort", which along with Time, is a rare commodity for working people. I'm not sitting on a rough seat crammed next to 5 other people for 2 hours. I'll take my car, with its 8-way adjustable seat, climate control and cup holders, thank-you-very-much. I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.

And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month. A car lease, insurance, and gas per month would be about $600. I will happily pay $200 more per month for the massively increased mobility and comfort that a car provides. The value proposition for public transit really sucks.

<comment><USER4> This is always so weird to me. These problems have already been pretty much solved in other countries, but the US always thinks it's a special snowflake. Public transport works pretty well for non-young healthy people in other countries.

<comment><USER3> The US and Canada are geographically huge. Take the problems the other countries solved and multiply it by 10. The climate here is also different. When was the last time a hurricane or tornado hit Europe? Or an ice storm? Or major snow storm? What about a heat wave over 100F?

Public transit is not resilient to these things. Our streetcars shut down in Toronto during heavy snowfall because they'll derail if the tracks aren't clear. Ice gets into the concrete supporting the tracks and they need to constantly be repaired because of that.

Asphalt roads are cheap and easy to maintain. Hell, you don't even need asphalt, cars are perfectly capable of driving on dirt or gravel. You can drive a car on shitty, broken asphalt, but you can't drive a train on broken tracks. There is a resiliency to road and cars that public transit just doesn't have.

<comment><USER5> But we're talking about Silicon Valley - which is smaller than most European cities. And cities there handle snowstorms and heat waves just fine (or just as well as American cities). For that matter - when was the last time a hurricane or a snowstorm hit the Bay area?

<comment><USER6> The SF Bay Area is 7000 square miles. London is 600, Paris is 40.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Literally everyone I know in the bay area who doesn't already own a house is considering leaving.

As extreme as the shortage of housing is the shortage of childcare. 150 person waitlists for 50 kid day-cares are common.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I visited the Seattle area, locals were complaining about all the Bay Area people moving up there and driving the rent up. I wonder how big a problem that might become for places that are appealing to Bay Area residents like Seattle, Austin, Denver, etc.

<comment><USER8> It'll be a large problem. The issue is that the concept of ownership is changing in the "millennial" generation. There isn't a drive to own a car, a house or other large purchases so the concept of paying $200-500/more a month for leasing an apartment isn't as cumbersome as it was for the past generation.

So as the technology folks from other cities move into these newly labeled "tech hubs" they'll drive the rent up because the costs seem so much lower than they actually are. It's a hard concept for some reason to grasp that they can pay $1500/month for a 1 bedroom in other tech cities that's $2800/month in SV/SF. However, what they don't realize is that it used to be $1100/month but landlords take advantage of the fact that $400/more/month is not an issue for someone coming from SF/SV

<comment><USER9> >There isn't a drive to own a car, a house or other large purchases

It's not that millennials don't want to own these things, it's that they see them as out of reach. It's an uncomfortable economic reality that gets abstracted into "kids these days just want different things" like they're hoarding stockpiles of money and refusing to spend it unless the thing-makers read their minds.

<comment><USER10> I believe that the truth is somewhere in between. I'm 27 and own my own home. Where I live it's actually more economical to own if you can accept living outside of the city. Many people my age refuse to make that compromise and instead pay a few hundred extra a month to rent 15 minutes closer to the city.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, the truth is not somewhere in between.

"The drop in homeownership is largely due to a delay in homebuying by the millennials, who have the lowest ownership rate of their age group in history. Millennials are not only burdened by student loan debt, but they have also delayed life choices like marriage and parenthood, which are the primary drivers of homeownership. "

[http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/28/millennials-cause- homeownersh...](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/28/millennials-cause- homeownership-rate-to-drop-to-lowest-level-since-1965.html)

Can Millennials Afford The American Dream?

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerrizane/2016/01/24/will- millen...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerrizane/2016/01/24/will-millennials- afford-the-american-dream/#6f09feeb7379)

<comment><USER10> As I said it actually costs less money to own where I live. With FHA loans very little capital is required up front. You just don't get to live within the city proper and instead have about a 15 - 20 minute commute. I've spoken to dozens of young professionals (most of whom make much more than I) about this, they'd like to own in center city but that isn't happening so they rent.

I'm a highschool dropout who has no familial support. If I can do it so can someone with a college degree and better access to opportunities as long as they are willing to make the same sacrifices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fortunately, the election's just around the corner, and if you'd like to help solve these problems, you can do so with your ballot.

[http://www.sfyimby.org/endorsements- nov-2016](http://www.sfyimby.org/endorsements-nov-2016) Is a good pro-housing voter guide for San Franciscans.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that there is a claim of ~5% mega commuters in bay area. The 2012 census bureau study (using 2006-2010 data) had that number at about 2% [1].

On that note, you'll see that traffic/commute is worse than L.A. in many cities. I think L.A. just gets the publicity but there are a lot of people around the country suffering in silence.

[1] [https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/2012/Paper- Poste...](https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/2012/Paper- Poster_Megacommuting%20in%20the%20US.pdf)

<comment><USER13> percent "megacommutes" is a pretty odd metric. LA is "leading" in total time wasted in traffic[1].

[1] [http://inrix.com/scorecard/](http://inrix.com/scorecard/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh, from the european perspective, the SV housing / transport seems little... weird.

If you look at urban design & public transport it's amazing how well it works despite all obstacles.

Public transport doesn't make sense in low population density areas and wide road make the distances even bigger. I mean, some US cities managed to realize a car-utopia Houston with 11 lane highway or Phoenix. The question is, does it make sense?

I'm surprised that no one tried to buy a shit lot of land and create a more- cityish city. In this context SFO is city with a city life, especially some older districts.

<comment><USER15> Because a lot of people don't _want_ to live in a more-cityish city. Some of us prefer the suburbs.

A place like Houston or Phoenix is perfect for me. Actually, I live in suburban Dallas (and I work farther out in the suburbs), and I have no desire to move. Though it's possible I might have to move out of state next year, in which case I'm seriously looking at St. Paul, MN.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, but a "suburb" like San Jose is just annoying. It has the population of a city, but the life of a suburb (=nothing going on). So basically the worst of both.

I mean, I am like you, that I would rather live in a smallish community where it's calm and everything over a city, but if you combine that feature with "there are people everywhere" then it is not that great.

<comment><USER14> Try visit Zurich. It's very much like village-city by an America' standards. Slow life, quiet, know your neighbours etc. with all good inventions from XXI century ;-)

<comment><USER16> That is where I am planning to move to in May or so. Currently still in the US, but I am missing home :P So back to Europe it goes.

<comment><USER14> Congratz, I loved this city. Missing it a lot. However still living in Europe.

<comment><USER16> Where do you live?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I live in Livermore, and my commute to the South Bay averages about 2 hours each way. It sucks, but I've gotten used to it and you just have to accept it because there's really nothing you can do about it. There are only a few major road arteries, and the public transit options are a total joke--it takes LONGER because you need to drive to the train station, then bike or take a bus from the other train station to your work.

Honestly I have no idea what the solution is. Build more lanes on the highway and more people will choose to commute, quickly using those new lanes up.

<comment><USER18> >2 hours each way

Jesus, man. That's time you don't get back. I'd factor that into your salary, take the difference off, and move somewhere sane.

<comment><USER17> I've lived in sane places. Problem there is you've got a handful of tech employers in most of these places. If you lose your tech job in the Bay Area, you can interview at dozens of local companies a week pretty much forever until you find something. If you lose your job in SaneTown, USA, you can exhaust the entire local hiring market in a week and if you come up empty you're moving (probably to a different State).

<comment><USER19> In NYC you can find tons of employers but rent a room for 800-1000 (living with roommates) with a 20-40 minute subway commute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let's all work from home 1 or 2 days a week. But I suspect things still aren't bad enough to consider any changes.

<comment><USER10> I heard a executive scream "but face time!" somewhere in the distance. Results only workplaces would make this possible but I don't see that happening.

<comment> norea-armozel I never understood the need for face time in positions that aren't sales and the like. When I write code it's mostly at my workstation without the need for chit-chat. And meetings I do have can be done over a Skype conference call or some shared whiteboard app. If anything, there needs to be a tax on employers who force tech workers to be in an office.

<comment><USER20> Long commutes = workers arriving at work exhausted. Not a great way to start the day.

The other day, I worked from home... Made coffee, and was coding away at 8am. By noon, I had a ton of work done. That never happens on a commute day.

<comment> norea-armozel When I was stuck using the buses in Minneapolis to get to my job in Shoreview that was the hardest commute I've ever done. I just couldn't get much done. I was so tired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As someone in Boston but from California, the lack of commutes comparable to the Bay Area or Silicon Valley always makes me grateful, even if there are other downsides. For example, I split a 2 bedroom apartment in a nice, active neighborhood a few minutes walk from downtown and about a 20 minute walk from work for about $1,200.

<comment><USER22> You have a 2 bedroom in downtown Boston for $1200? Or do you mean $1200 each?

<comment><USER21> $1200 each. But it still seems a lot better than my friends in and near the Bay Area (and please correct me if I'm wrong).

<comment><USER23> It would be in the low end in SF but I know several people paying that there.

Granted it's for a 4-600 sq ft place...

<comment><USER21> As far as I can tell, the middle here tends to correspond more to the high end there. The only friends I know paying substantially more are living in luxury highrises, whereas on the low end I have friends paying more like $600 a month to do something like a 4 way split of a 4 bedroom apartment a couple of stops out on the T.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned e-bikes. As far as I can tell, that is _the_ answer to the bay area traffic. Since I bought one roughly 5 months ago, I've commuted almost 3000 miles. My commute is the same every day, and it is a lot faster than a bad day of traffic. The bonus is that I don't have to change into bike clothes or shower.

Details:

12 mile commute

40 minutes by ebike, every day

25 minutes by car, best day

50 minutes by car, average day

1 hour 40 minutes by car, average day

<comment><USER25> What's the draw of an ebike vs. a low-end motorcycle?

Also, one very simple answer is that the Bay Bridge isn't passable on anything short of a 250cc motorcycle and won't be until 2018.

<comment><USER24> > What's the draw of an ebike vs. a low-end motorcycle

Main draw is that e-bikes are usable on bike paths and through parks. You feel like a kid again by taking "shortcuts".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's hard not to see this as a life-and-death struggle between people who think public transportation is the way of the future and people who think cars are the future.

I know which way the HN crowd leans, but I feel compelled to point out that while pro-transit folks may feel comfortable being ideologically "correct", in practice this has just not worked out in the US and any argument about why sounds like someone hammering a bell upon which is inscribed "no true scotsman".

Either there's been a multi-decade cabal holding the entire country in its grip and preventing us from leaping into our beautiful public transportation future... Or Americans just do not want it, kicking and screaming about sustainability to the contrary.

<comment><USER27> > Either there's been a multi-decade cabal holding the entire country in its > grip and preventing us from leaping into our beautiful public transportation > future... Or Americans just do not want it, kicking and screaming about > sustainability to the contrary.

Zoning, basically. It makes density illegal in enough places that transit isn't terribly practical. It also makes even walking to a corner store something that is no longer an option in many new developments. If you'd like to read all about it, this book is very thorough:

[http://amzn.to/2fz1hPI](http://amzn.to/2fz1hPI)

If you'd like something a bit more tl;dr, these are good: [http://amzn.to/2erOJXL](http://amzn.to/2erOJXL) [http://amzn.to/2fyXrpG](http://amzn.to/2fyXrpG)

<comment><USER28> But "Zoning" (to the degree that's the central reason) was also not created by a "multi-decade cabal". It's largely the summation of the preferences of residents in different areas.

<comment><USER27> > It's largely the summation of the preferences of residents in different > areas.

Yes. With the complicity of states/feds/courts etc... who have allowed neighbors to run rampant over others' property rights to a degree that I think has lead to a number of terrible consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It would be interesting to understand _where_ they work. Back in the dot com days there were people living in Livermore and driving into San Jose (aka "the South Bay") but now it seems more people with "long" commutes are driving into San Francisco. And one of the people who worked for me (at an office on the peninsula) was thinking about moving to San Francisco, even though they currently lived much closer because they enjoyed the more urban lifestyle offered there.

As a result of all these different forces I realized how challenging it is to _not_ have some bad commutes. And in Sunnyvale we're in the midst of a debate started about choices the city council has made to allow more local housing to be developed. There are a lot of apartments and condos being built and some residents are complaining about traffic and change. It will be interesting to see if folks approve additional transit dollars.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd be curious to know if distance is a factor they accounted for. Traffic in LA is straight-up gridlock (or at least it was when I lived there). You could spend an hour going 10 miles, and that's not even during commute hours.

If you spend 90 minutes driving from SF to Mountain View, traffic definitely makes it slower/worse than it would otherwise be, but it'd still be a 45 minute drive without traffic.

People may spend more time driving in SF/SV, but that's largely a factor of how far apart desirable housing and jobs are for many people. I wouldn't be surprised if traffic on the Peninsula made commutes 2-3x longer than they'd be without it, but in LA the factor's more like 6x.

<comment><USER31> LAX is a perfect example.

It can take you over an hour to get from the off ramp to your terminal. Less than 1 mile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Tempting though it is to cry, "Let it burn!", we should be beyond such things, and earnestly desist from anything that might be construed as wishing harm (even indirectly) upon our honoured colleagues in the greater San Francisco Bay area.

</comment><comment><USER33> > _" even worse than LA"_

people in the bay area loves chiding LA like this.

but you are quickly starting to understand first hand how exactly LA came to be the way it is. it was/is a mixture of extremely powerful political, economic, and social forces exerted over generations.

unfortunately SF/the bay is doing nothing to fix it -- at long last LA is building new housing, mixed-used real estate, and new light rail and other public transit very aggressively.

it will probably take the bay area another 2-3 decades to overcome the resistance, just like LA.

</comment><comment><USER34> Every time I read these articles, I feel like I made the right decision staying in the Northeast and not chasing the startup culture of the West. Sure I make less money on paper, but my office is five minutes away, my large house is only $1200(including the $6000 in escrow taxes!), only 36.5 hours a week, no on call, totally flexible working hours, I get to travel all over the world, and I live like a king. All that free time saved from virtually zero commute, and no overtime required, adds up to A LOT of time for my personal projects, and vacations. As I get older, I'm definitely valuing that over "being in the industry".

<comment><USER35> _I 'm definitely valuing that over "being in the industry"._

You ARE in the industry.

For every programmer in Silicon Valley, there are x of us not in Silicon Valley. And there's probably little correlation between whether or not you're in Silicon Valley and the coolness and value of whatever you're building.

I love visiting but I can't imagine living there.

<comment><USER34> There's no denying the connections in that part of the country. I guess that's what I was eluding to. I'm just finding it's not worth it for most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm wondering specifically about the Warm Springs District in Fremont. This is where:

\- A new BART station is set to open shortly, and,

\- Across the street, a new single family housing development with 4,000 (yes, four thousand) new housing units is under construction [0],

\- And, next door, Tesla will be building 500,000 Model 3s annually with 3,000 additional workers.

The AM commutes via I-680 / Pleasanton and I-880 / Oakland are already Hell on Earth. It's going to get much worse before it gets better.

[0] [https://www.fremont.gov/1515/Warm-SpringsSouth- Fremont](https://www.fremont.gov/1515/Warm-SpringsSouth-Fremont)

<comment><USER17> Still ultra-expensive. That area is highly desirable due to the factors you listed. Cheapest homes you're going to find in that area start at $1M. Check out this charming little starter home: [1]

1: [https://www.redfin.com/CA/Fremont/47040-Havasu- St-94539/home...](https://www.redfin.com/CA/Fremont/47040-Havasu- St-94539/home/1789960)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The article makes disingenuous claims about measure B. The county plans to spend nearly all of that money on freeways, which history has shown will not relieve traffic. Their plan calls for almost nothing for public transit.

<comment><USER38> > The county plans to spend nearly all of that money on freeways, which > history has shown will not relieve traffic.

Additional freeway lanes improve throughput, but don't remove congestion at peak: it will reduce the duration of congestion. If you want to handle peak traffic without congestion, you would have to build a lot more capacity than is reasonable (or significantly reduce demand).

Since demand for transit is increasing continuously (as more people move to the area), and supply of transit increases slowly and only in steps, it's no surprise that the new supply is quickly matched with demand. Lots of people would like to go places during rush hour, but the freeways are full for several hours, and Caltrain is too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I had to sell my house in Berkeley because my commute to San Francisco was eating up 3 hours every day - the time I allocated to side projects.

Our politicians have given up, no one even talks about making our transit system better. Total losers.

(12 miles)

<comment><USER20> We should assign the problem to engineers, instead of politicians. Are there any such efforts? Or have they given up just because of the costs?

<comment><USER39> Exactly. This is exactly the problem. In the 50's congress was made up of Engineers today its made up of attorneys.

<comment><USER40> Source for "In the 50's congress was made up of Engineers"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Remember Scott Collins (of Netscape) commute in 'Code Rush'? He lived in _Michigan_ and commuted via airplane every 2 weeks to Silicon Valley

<comment><USER32> The LA area has people who fly in every week from someplace further east, maybe Nevada. They spend the week in shared apartments that probably contain nothing but bunk-beds and a microwave. Then they fly home for the weekend, and still come out ahead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Just out of curiosity: How's the public transport situation in the same area? (I mean, Public Transport + car pooling would help reduce this issue no?)

</comment><comment><USER20> Will self driving cars be the panacea? Or merely a tool to make painful commutes more tolerable, for those who can afford them?

<comment><USER43> Assuming every person replaces their car with a self-driving car, how much would roadway throughput improve as a result of smarter communal driving? The assumption is that the self-driving cars are a 1:1 replacement of human-driven cars and ride sharing does not increase or decrease.

<comment><USER15> The idea is that you'd use your commute time to do something other than drive. You could read a book, watch a TV show, play video games, etc. You could even take a nap if you wanted to.

<comment><USER44> So buying a house behind even a 2-3 hours commute will become doable. So people will start doing it. Perhaps briefly wake up after 5 hours of sleep, hop on and get the rest 2 hours of sleep in the car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Anyone know what the % drag on SF's economy caused by the lack of housing is up to?

SF has had a shortage of housing for decades, and it just gets worse and worse. Is there any point at which the NIMBYs will be defeated and zoning policy adjusted to allow real densification? Or is power stacked so much in their favor that it will never happen?

</comment><comment><USER36> And even the coffee shops are more crowded as folks hang out waiting for traffic to ease before heading home in the evening.

</comment><comment><USER46> the commute is very relaxing if you're on a corporate bus

<comment><USER14> As far as being forced to sit in corporate bus for over hour is relaxing ;-)

<comment><USER15> Bring a book (or an e-reader) or a handheld gaming console.

Don't think of it as a commute; thinking of it as blocking out two hours every day to play video games!

<comment><USER47> I have an hour commute daily, and I use that time to read technical books, papers, watch videos (like Lynda.com training videos), or even code (if I can get place to sit during off peak hours).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> When I was in the Bay Area during the '90s dot-boom, it took me 90-100 minutes to get from Fremont to Palo Alto. During the dot-bust, it was more like 40 minutes. I cannot imagine what it's like now.

I regret that I didn't use that time to learn Japanese or something.

</comment><comment><USER49> After visiting the Palo Alto region for work I don't understand why anyone would drive anywhere. It was so extremely friendly to biking, I could get from Menlo Park to Redwood city and even across the bay to Freemont with no trouble whatsoever.

<comment><USER16> Because you can't get anywhere without a car here. At least in San Jose. And to be honest, I would not ride a bike here after seeing how people drive around here.

How do you get your stuff home from Costco? I mean there is delivery, but still.

<comment><USER49> I was able to get everywhere I needed to go, granted I was staying at an AirBnB so I didn't need to go shopping, but I rode past a safeway during my adventures and I can put plenty of stuff in saddle baskets.

About the people driving, I also found that there are tons of roads right off the main through fairs that are very very bike friendly, very little traffic and lots of bike lanes. I think you underestimate just how far you can get on a bike in a reasonable time. Like I said I commuted from Menlo park to Redwood city and to Freemont ( across the bay ) with no trouble whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We need to encourage clustering/density/jobs in more remote areas where housing is cheaper, instead of downtown SF/SJ/Oakland. Wouldn't that help? Or just result in broader sprawl -- I'm picturing LA.

</comment><comment><USER50> By 2010, the commute in SF was worse than LA. While caltrain & bart do help in SF, when it breaks, you got problems. Bart is pretty reliable but Caltrain seems to break or hit something/someone a few times a month.

</comment><comment><USER36> Public transportation is not going to come to the rescue. The communities involved won't tolerate the additional taxes, nor will they cooperate in making an efficient system.

Can we pin any hopes on fully autonomous vehicles?

<comment><USER4> > ...nor will they cooperate in making an efficient system.

You mean like the rest of the world has already proven to be doable? What makes this area unique?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Just choose where you live carefully (and pay the big bucks and sacrifice space) and work close. I've never had a bad commute in SV but then I don't live in a palace.

</comment><comment><USER52> If you sit in traffic for hours to get to and from work where you sit in front of a computer all day then you are living in the past.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone living here could have told you this years ago.</comment>


Books with titles so good, you don't have to read them - <AUTHOR> https://writingcooperative.com/10-top-turnkey-titles-books-with-titles-so-good-you-dont-have-to-read-them-2002e25977a5 <comment><USER2> Unrelated to tech or entrepreneurship, but the great Russian filmmaker Tarkovsky published a book with that kind of title before his untimely death.

Tarkovsky may or may not be your cup of tea, but he is remembered for his unique and intricate cinematography. The book's title? _Sculpting In Time_. When I came across it, I thought "well, that explains a few things".</comment>


Ask HN: How many of you are philosophers? - <AUTHOR>

what are your works?both published/non published or currently working on. <comment><USER2> I went to grad school in philosophy, but quit ABD. I regret neither going nor quitting. Someday I'd like to write a book or two in the "popularizing philosophy" genre.

</comment><comment><USER3> I kind of think it is unseemly to call oneself a philosopher. Better is that someone else calls you one.

I did an undergrad in philosophy & mathematics. Have since broadened into digital cultural studies and digital humanities.

What I am working on (read: playing around with in my head for the last few years) is a philosophy of the digital that is integrated with Luhmann's theory of society.

<comment><USER4> Why would it be any worse to self-identify as a philosopher than as an engineer? Both are vocations; why would someone else be better able to assess whether "philosopher" is yours?

<comment><USER3> 1) Because humility dictates.

2) I have no problem someone calling themselves an 'academic philosopher' if what they teach and publish is philosophy. That still doesn't make them a philosopher though, at least not to my mind. Also, if you have studied philosophy but don't devote a good proportion of your life to philosophising you are not a philosopher.

3) Maybe I do need to distinguish between philosophers of the first rank and workaday philosophers... I'll concede that :)

4) The boundaries of what a philosopher is are far more nebulous than those of other 'professions' or 'callings' due to the very nature of philosophical pursuit and practise.

4) Would you designate Eckart Tolle a philosopher? How about Kahlil Gibran? Or Paulo Coehlo? Or Alain de Botton?

5) Allow me to demonstrate to contested fluidity of the subject: Derrida, a pillar of continental philosophy is not even recognised by some[1] as a philosopher. `Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy."'

6) I would prefer to say that I 'do' or 'study' philosophy... :)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#Criticism_from_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#Criticism_from_analytic_philosophers)

<comment><USER4> > 1) Because humility dictates.

Even assuming the validity of the maxim, that would still only be valid if "philosopher" were a value judgement and not a value-neutral description of a vocation. "Philosopher" isn't an honor being claimed.

> 2) I have no problem someone calling themselves an 'academic philosopher' if > what they teach and publish is philosophy. That still doesn't make them a > philosopher though, at least not to my mind.

I think its fairly obvious that the set of "academic philsophers" is a subset of the set of "philosophers".

> Also, if you have studied philosophy but don't devote a good proportion of > your life to philosophising you are not a philosopher.

Sure, that's a defensible standard for describing any vocation, but not a reason _someone else_ would be better situated to judge it. I know what I spend my time doing better than anyone else does.

> 3) Maybe I do need to distinguish between philosophers of the first rank and > workaday philosophers... I'll concede that :)

That's not something particularly unique to philosophers. Every field can be viewed to have a (usually highly subjectively defined, and this is certainly true of philosophy) "first rank".

> 4) The boundaries of what a philosopher is are far more nebulous than those > of other 'professions' or 'callings' due to the very nature of philosophical > pursuit and practise.

I don't think that's at all true.

> 4) Would you designate Eckart Tolle a philosopher? How about Kahlil Gibran? > Or Paulo Coehlo? Or Alain de Botton?

I wouldn't reject the designation for any of them.

> 5) Allow me to demonstrate to contested fluidity of the subject: Derrida, a > pillar of continental philosophy is not even recognised by some[1] as a > philosopher. `Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at > least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy."'

There are quite a lot of fields where members of some particular subschool deride those of other subschools as not being in the field, that is neither special to philosophy nor something that makes someone else more qualified to judge your vocation than you are; in fact, it illustrates a pretty big weakness in such external assessments.

> 6) I would prefer to say that I 'do' or 'study' philosophy... :)

And that's great, but we have a nice noun for people who do or study philosophy...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Comprehensive evaluation of entity extraction APIs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.viewchange.org/2010/05/entity-extraction-content-api-evaluation/ LinkTV did a comprehensive test to determine how OpenCalais,  Zemanta, Evri, Alchemy, Yahoo APIs and others perform tasks of 'content understanding' such as named entity extraction, related content search, image search, etc. <comment><USER2> This is a tremendously useful resource, with all the major players compared/contrasted. This could save a lot of people a lot of hard work.

</comment><comment><USER3> great analysis</comment>


Unblock blocked calls -- see the number even if caller id is blocked. - <AUTHOR> http://www.trapcall.com

<comment><USER2> Makes sense - calls to toll-free numbers always have ANI (number ID) even if blocked, so just redirect calls to a toll-free number.</comment>


Where Have All the Sexy Movies Gone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.playboy.com/articles/film-crit-hulk-sex-in-cinema <comment><AUTHOR> "Sexuality, nudity and arousal have become valueless in so many ways to people. Meanwhile the bigger goals of sex: intimacy, fulfillment, and sexual happiness remain as elusive as ever."</comment>


Ukrainian Billionaires Allegedly Laundered Money in the US - <AUTHOR> https://gijn.org/2019/06/14/document-of-the-day-how-ukrainian-billionaires-allegedly-laundered-money-in-the-us/ <comment><USER2> Now here's the crazy part. Cleveland has a rich history of money laundering. The FBI recently broke up a mob related group in 2012 being ran through The KD Group.

Funny enough, KD Group is a primary beneficiary of this "new" money laundering: [https://m.clevescene.com/scene-and- heard/archives/2019/06/11...](https://m.clevescene.com/scene-and- heard/archives/2019/06/11/how-ukrainian-oligarchs-secretly-became-the-largest- real-estate-owners-in-downtown-cleveland)

</comment><comment><USER3> In Ukraine many people strongly believe that Kolomoyskiy has sponsored presidential campaign for Zelenskiy - comedian, who played president on TV (on the TV channel "1+1" that belongs to Kolomoyskiy) and won elections. Supposedly he now has a direct influence on Mr. Zelenskiy and the new government.

<comment><USER4> Zelensky is sponsored by an oligarch, meanwhile Poroshenko and Tymoshenko were oligarchs themselves...

It really doesn't matter though, Zelensky was a protest vote against the status quo and everything that entails.

<comment><USER5> So Kolomoyskiy observed the wave that swept US, UK, IT and almost FR, and decided to orchestrate a similar situation with his own chosen puppet? Dude's pretty smart...

<comment><USER6> Ukrainian politics was always a TV show with a ton of populism and anti- establishment vibe was always there, so it's the other way around — toxic electoral culture spilled over to the West.

When politics turns into a show it's obvious that professional showman beauts amateurs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Admittedly, I didn't read every link in the article, but this quote is almost unbelievable to me: \---- From 2006 through December 2016, the total movement of funds (credits) into the [ultimate beneficiary owners'] laundering at PrivatBank Cyprus was $470 billion, which amounts to approximately double the Gross Domestic Product of Cyprus during the same period. \---- Nearly half a _trillion_ dollars??? That would make them the richest men in the world, many times over. How can that be possible?

<comment><USER8> A few possibilities:

First, the amount appears to be the total through a bank, where this number would be aggregated over a several (possibly many) individuals.

Second, the amounts reported do not reflect the total funds laundered (illicit funds made to appear legitimate) but the total revenue stream, which would be offset by liabilities. For example, one laundering technique I've read about involves buying real estate and selling it at an inflated price to someone who has the illicit funds. For example, A has illicit cash and wants to transfer it to (apparently) legitimate profits by B. B buys a property for $1m. B sells the property to A1 for $2m. B keeps the $1m difference as profit. A1 later sells the property at a loss, and the cycle is complete. Repeat this a few thousand times, but probably with a smaller % margin. But assuming a 100% margin (and the whole laundering effort being exactly this scheme) that'd be $450B total revenue but $225B actually laundered.

Interesting side effect: This pushes up the cost of housing in an area until the launderers abandon it, at which point demand and purchase volume dries up significantly and valuations sink. Additional profit could be made off this market manipulation.

<comment><USER9> That's how Vancouver got its house prices - money laundering by Chinese nationals.

<comment><USER10> Source?

<comment><USER11> [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-20/vancouver...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-20/vancouver- is-drowning-in-chinese-money)

[https://globalnews.ca/news/5259196/home-prices-in-metro- vanc...](https://globalnews.ca/news/5259196/home-prices-in-metro-vancouver- increased-by-5-due-to-money-laundering-report/)

[https://business.financialpost.com/news/fp-street/dirty- cash...](https://business.financialpost.com/news/fp-street/dirty-cash-probe- finds-booming-vancouver-china-luxury-car-trade)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this even real? First of all, the dollar amount is unbelievable. Second, it's not being reported on most of the Ukrainian news sites I frequent (or it's well hidden). Third, it's far, far bigger than the missing funds as reported by most media (5.5B).

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

<comment><USER6> 5.5B is the bank itself. Think about how much money Firtash, Ahmetov, Timoshenko and Kolomoyski together siphoned through gas prices, coal and electricity trickery in like 20 years.

Could be half a trillion easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I mean, was he just attracted by the presence of lots of Ukrainians?

</comment><comment><USER13> Why Cleveland I wonder?

<comment><USER2> There was already a large mafia infrastructure for laundering money is my guess. It was big through the 90's, got busted, then got busted again in 2012 by the FBI for money laundering through real estate.

Some of the properties mentioned in the full complaint were owned by KD Group, the company at the center of the early-2010's mob money laundering scheme

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why would private parties file suit under any of these statutes? The Ohio RICO act lollll, these are matters for the state

Could it be just to bring attention to them in the civil suit and then hope the department of justice comes in with the criminal sanctions and asset freezes? Maybe PrivatBank makes a little money in the process?

</comment><comment><USER15> Why aren't the DoJ and FBI involved in this yet? International money laundering should be prosecuted severely.

<comment><USER16> I think FBI gives more priority to terrorism cases now instead of white collar crime.

<comment><USER17> White Collar Crime is Official Policy now. Interfering with White Collar Crime is now a crime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like opportunities have risen since this guy[1] got a state-funded home for himself

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlo_Lazarenko](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlo_Lazarenko)

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks like they can let you launder whatever amount you want, till you behave.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is this not what Manafort was essentially charged in aiding?

<comment><USER2> Nope, but it should be. But it does up an entirely unexplored avenue into foreign election interference

<comment><USER20> It might also be worth looking into whether FinCEN is still putting pressure[1] on these two zip codes.

[1] [https://therealdeal.com/miami/2016/01/13/secret-buyers-in- mi...](https://therealdeal.com/miami/2016/01/13/secret-buyers-in-miami-could- be-exposed/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here is the original article - boingboing is just a copy-paste post [https://gijn.org/2019/06/14/document-of-the-day-how- ukrainia...](https://gijn.org/2019/06/14/document-of-the-day-how-ukrainian- billionaires-allegedly-laundered-money-in-the-us/)

It links to this commentary which is much more interesting to read [https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/how- kolom...](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/how-kolomoisky- does-business-in-the-united-states)

Looks like the claim is that they misappropriated clients funds and invested it in USA under companies whose control can be linked back to them.

I am somewhat puzzled how this could fly under the radar of US banks... this is much bigger deal than the recent Danske Bank scandal in Estonia.

<comment><USER22> Seems likely there was a failure of the FinCen Know Your Customer (KYC) rules. I like the plot twist in the filing:

 _" Kolomoisky is now reported to have made a return to Ukraine for the first time in several years, a decision which is believed to be linked to the recent victory in the Ukrainian presidential election of the television star and comedian Mr. Volodymyr Zelenskiy, behind whom Kolomoisky is widely reported as being the principal power and financial backer. Press reports speculate that there is a deal between Mr. Kolomoisky and Mr. Zelenskiy: in exchange for Kolomoisky's support, Mr. Zelenskiy will ensure the return of PrivatBank to the ownership of Mr. Kolomoisky in order to circumvent any pending or threatened litigation against Kolomoisky."_ \-- [https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/royaltyfree/kolomoisk...](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/royaltyfree/kolomoisky_case.pdf)

That is some serious corruption allegations right there.

From a financial controls perspective it seems like the US government was pursuing these folks (according to the complaint) so somebody was making complaints.

<comment><USER22> Seems like an interesting strategy to use ill gotten gains to elect a pliable television personality to the role of chief executive, Then once that is accomplished pressure them so that they will use the power of the office to obstruct any attempt to bring the criminals to justice.

Pretty far fetched though, you would have have someone on the inside running your faux campaign, etc. Perhaps I'm reading too much Stieg Larsson.

<comment><USER6> It's not far-fetched it's just a regular day out here.

Previously it was the other way around — to be in office yourself and book profits for your son in law (Kuchma—Pinchuk) or other related person. Conflict of interest? Never heard about that.

This was commercialized and outsourced at some point, but only at MP level, so you could enjoy Presidential impunity yourself.

Zelensky happened as a controlled exit strategy because all other contenders had highly toxic reputations to assume office for themselves after being in some office or another for nearly 30 years, so it was a chance that somebody really from the outside would get ir

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> water is wet

</comment><comment><USER24> Jokes on them, though: They bought _Cleveland_</comment>


Ask HN: What top quality do you wish your peers/employees had more of? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Being considerate. It's rarer than it should be to find someone who thinks before acting, and that their thinking is around what impact their actions will have on others. There are benefits to spontaneity, but spontaneity is too often just a result of laziness around being considerate.</comment>


Get rewarded with tokens for recommending friends - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bff-best-friends-forever/id1317793365?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> BFF is a community to ask and recommend contacts anonymously and earn a trust score which will be converted to a reward as BFF tokens.</comment>


Show HN: Pager Team, a Simple Alternative to Pager Duty, OpsGenie, and VictorOps - <AUTHOR> https://pagerteam.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! I'm the person behind Pager Team, and would love to hear any feedback you might have for me. If Pager Team is a perfect product, yeah go ahead and sign up and pay for it, but that's going to be relatively few of you. So, I'm all ears!</comment>


How to write a book in Emacs - <AUTHOR> https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/how-to-write-a-book-in-emacs <comment><USER2> I wrote my first book in what was then Star Office, but everything since has been in Emacs and some sort of markup. I agree with the annoying variations Markdown. reStructuredText is, at least, predictable. I do still outline in org mode though.

It seems like anytime I interact with a traditional publisher, just like the editor in the article, they want MS Word. They then want to give me edits as Word change tracking.

My compromise is to go back and change my source and regenerate. It works, but at night, when the world is quiet and dreams are less threatened by reason, I imagine a world where editors send me patches or pull requests.

I'll have to try the method described in the article. That might be much better, but I'll have less chance of negotiating it than with a freelance editor.

I don't think there's a technical solution to this problem and certainly not a profitable one, because it's a matter of getting people who couldn't care less about diffs and source control to use unfamiliar tools for the benefit of someone they are paying.

I can't even get some developers to use source control.

Maybe GitBook will change minds.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you so much for writing this. It is useful not just for Emacs users but to anyone who prefers writing their book in a text-based markup rather than Microsoft Word. It also explains how to collaborate with someone who uses Word exclusively.

Unfortunately, every tool has a quirk and we eventually need to settle on a workflow that somehow works, even though everything might be open source as you have described in the case of Pandoc. But I believe Emacs is the best authoring tool for books due to its versatility.

<comment><USER4> Pandoc's great. It has many great advantages and I would not hesitate to recommend it, but when you commit to a workflow early (rst in my case) rewriting or converting it mid-way through is a major hassle, one I'd rather like to avoid.

Still, rst/Markdown/Docbook is better than MS Word for techies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also wrote a book in Emacs org mode. My plan was to do all the editing in emacs, and then design the layout in Adobe Indesign. I struggled a lot with several delirious XML-based solutions for this (e.g. Docbook), but finally I found out that a fine method is to use pandoc to directly convert org mode files to IDML (a markup format native to Indesign).

</comment><comment><USER6> > Pandoc's great — it really is. But I still had no end of trouble with it.

Now I haven't done anything really advanced with it - but from what I've done so far it's worked great. Being able to export to PDF and epub with the right formatting from the same document is huge leaps for me.

> First of all, there is no documentation.

Now I can't take the author seriously.

* [https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki](https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki)

* [http://pandoc.org/README.html](http://pandoc.org/README.html)

I'm not saying it's the most obvious tool to use - but with some digging I was able to figure it out.

> Ultimately I had to delve into the source to figure out why some things > worked and other things did not.

Well...yeah. Pandoc isn't this magical thing that supports converting every possible format and niche feature back and forth without some sort of loss of style or formatting. Even tools like OpenOffice and LibreOffice have some formatting and style issues with the real Office tools.

</comment><comment><USER7> For those interested in how the publishing industry operates (and it really is quite interesting) Charlie Stross has penned a number of articles over at his website, collected under the title "Common Misconceptions about Publishing".

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2010/04/common-m...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html)

Including _Why I [still have to] use Microsoft Word (even though I hate it)_ [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/11/cmap- why...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/11/cmap-why-do-you- use-microsoft-.html)

I've got a funny feeling there might have been a few that didn't get added to this list.

<comment><USER8> His closing lines at the last link could be applied to corporate IT (or machining in general) across the board.

This, basically, because IT etc is a sunk cost. As such, beancounters insist on running that "cost" until it has been ground into component quarks...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a bit longer piece on a related topic here: [http://www.therandymon.com/papers/emacs-for- writers.pdf](http://www.therandymon.com/papers/emacs-for-writers.pdf)

Looked nice when I found it, but I'm not a writer and I can't judge how useful it can be.

</comment><comment><USER10> " _In Emacs, there are several modifier keys you can use, each with its own character:_ "

        </comment><comment>==   </comment><comment>===
        Modifier   Full Name
        </comment><comment>==   </comment><comment>===
        ``C-``     Control
        ``M-``     Meta ("Alt" on most keyboards)
        ``S-``     Shift
        </comment><comment>==   </comment><comment>===

That list is sorted incorrectly. It should be Esacape, Meta, Alt, Control, and Shift.

<comment><USER4> I already made that joke later on in the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The author seems to be disappointed with aspell. I wonder if LanguageTool would have been a more adequate choice. I use it regularly before publishing documents.

</comment><comment><USER12> AsciiDoc is an often overlooked markup format, which implements all features of DocBook. It is a perfect fit for writing a book. Markdown and reStructuredText were not designed with books in mind.

It's a pity that the popularity of Markdown made it hard for the author to even consider AsciiDoc. It wasn't even in the list of contenders.

</comment><comment><USER10> " _Enabling old-style numerals (lowercase numbers) [in LaTeX] is easy enough, right up until you want to only enable them in some parts your book._ "

I've seen people say that before, but I've never been able to get lowercase numbers myself. And in the past I've futzed with LaTeX a lot.

I give: how do you do it?

<comment><USER4> You set Numbers to OldStyle in \setmainfont, for instance. This assumes your font supports numerals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm writing Learning Akka for Packt Publishing using org mode w/ pandoc to convert it for the editors to work with. Org mode supports most anything - code, images etc.

Once the editors put it into packt format, then I'll continue editing myself. It's working well for me.

</comment><comment><USER14> His point about Markdown is why Commonmark now exists. The guy who created Pandoc is one of the people who are working on it.

<comment><USER10> ...something, something,...the nice thing about having _n_ standards is now having _n+1_ standards...something.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I've seen that comic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps using git would help too.

<comment><USER9> It's explicitly stated in the article that the author uses git for version control with a Magit Emacs plugin...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Preparing a manuscript in Emacs is like preparing a graphic design in GIMP.

Suck it up and use the tool that everyone else is using -- Word.

<comment><USER17> > Suck it up and use the tool that everyone else is using -- Word.

A great recipe for making sure nothing ever improves!</comment></comment>