Best practices for programming in C - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-hook_duttaC.html <comment><USER2> "Errors cannot be avoided by recipe. If they could, we could eliminate automobile accidents by plastering the countryside with _Drive Carefully_ signs!" -- Andrew Koenig, _C Traps and Pitfalls_

Some of the article's examples come straight from that book, BTW.

<comment><USER3> is that quote meant seriously? certainly it's obvious that the analogy doesn't work. we do have signs plastered around the countryside that are recipes for driving, they just actually include the ingredients. i would think the same applies to code, but rather than recipes, to hold the analogy, you are providing templates for recipes, or maybe style guides for writing recipes. (bad analogy, imho.)

<comment><USER2> More like listing mistakes to watch for. I was mostly posting to note that the book was a much more in-depth collection of same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is like a never ending issue. One way to start the path to a better practice of C is to read [http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van- Linden/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van- Linden/dp/0131774298) after you finished [http://www.amazon.com/Programming- Language-Prentice-Hall-Sof...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language- Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/0131103628)

</comment><comment><USER5> "Since function calls usually take a long time, getchar is often implemented as a macro." And then I stopped reading. Does anyone know of a meaning for this sentence that's more sophisticated than "function call overhead is punishing, don't call functions if you can help it", advice that was out of date when C was /invented/, for God's sake? Something special about getchar(), maybe?

<comment><USER6> Um...function calls _do_ have an overhead. Yes it is negligible in most cases but it certainly made a difference when C was invented.

In fact, C++ still carries the "inline" declaration around to avoid function call overhead. The compiler can ignore when knows better but the fact that inlining exits implies that function call overhead is not imaginary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like how gets() and scanf() are both considered unsuitable for use. There's something wrong with a language when you can't trust the standard library's input functions, and I say this as someone who rather likes C in the right context.

Where's the mention of the three-argument main() variation? (int argc, char __argv, char __env)? Is this not standard?

</comment><comment><USER8> just for the record: i always found rob pike's advice on c programming very thoughtful and readable (and, common: he should know ;)

<http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html>

</comment><comment><USER9>
      C; I <3* u;</comment>


Interest Rates: Naturally Negative? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pimco.com/en/2019/08/interest-rates <comment><USER2> When I see people defend negative interest rates, I am reminded of this saying by Orwell: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

>>One likely factor behind the savings glut and negative interest rates is negative "time preference." Once upon a time, economic theory maintained that people always value today's consumption more than tomorrow's consumption – and thus display positive time preference.

An alternative theory: people's time preference is still very much positive, but becomes negative when presented with a set of equally bad options - negative interest rates plus high risk speculative investments plus a history of governments around the world unexpectedly seizing or devaluing wealth building assets. To me, these bad options seem to be the making of the governments and not naturally occurring scenarios.

<comment><USER3> Especially for rich people and for _consumption_ (not investment) it looks _obvious_ to me that they have negative time preference for consumption. Why? They could choose to consume all their money today to whatever they want (business jets, charity, space travel etc) and live rest of their lives in poverty if they face negative interest rates on their assets. That's what a positive time preference looks like. Of course, even when rates are negative, the rich people choose to live comfortably also in the future, even if their total consumption is slightly smaller. And as the wealth has been concentrating during the last decades more and more to the wealthy ones, the interest rate needs to reflect more and more the time preference of the wealthy ones. You want to get higher interest rates, you need to reverse the wealth concentration.

(All of the above is completely without source or further arguments or detailed analysis available, just my thoughts.)

<comment><USER4> To me this comes back to the "r > g" controversy: [https://www.ft.com/content/e1b9254e-f476-11e3-a143-00144feab...](https://www.ft.com/content/e1b9254e-f476-11e3-a143-00144feabdc0)

In order to earn a positive rate of return without simply taking wealth off others, the overall world economy has to grow. This growth appears to be slowing, and also significant concentrations of wealth are being stashed away (e.g. Chinese investers in Vancouver and other cities).

Not to mention the huge "negative growth" risks presented by climate change. There's going to be significant investment needed to reduce CO2 and/or mitigate the impacts of these, just to maintain the same level of economic output! An exogenous source of negative growth.

Basically the wealthy have to choose between negative interest rates, voluntary charity, wealth taxes, sudden confiscation, or invalidation of worth due to collapse. You can't take it with you, as the saying goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reason that there's a naturally negative interest rate isn't because "people are getting better at saving". The reason there's a naturally negative interest rate is because over half of the American population owns less than nothing; they have more debts than assets. Investors simply own too much wealth, and the general public owns too little. The economy is so lopsided that investment is yielding a negative rate of return, because the wealthy invest the majority of their money while the poor have to spend it just to survive, and a lesser and lesser proportion of wealth belongs to the poor.

<comment><USER6> Money doesn't have high velocity in the upper echelons of society compared to in the bottom half. One dollar will pass through many hands if paid to a person in the lower half of our economy, while in the top 10% this same dollar barely makes it into one other person's hands, let alone multiple.

The economically disadvantaged chunk of society has grown as middle wage jobs have disappeared, while their wages have effectively dropped. This is terrible for economic growth IMO.

<comment><USER7> Do you have a source for your money velocity claim? Intuition implies it would be the opposite

<comment><USER8> How so? It checks with my intuition quite fine. Do you mean as a total volume of dollars earned?

<comment><USER9> Wealthy people are likely to invest any cash received immediately which would be invested or loaned out to businesses that purchase things and pay salaries.

They don't take their extra $100K and stick it under a mattress.

<comment><USER10> Investment is a problematic word because it has so many subtly different meanings.

Let's say you "invest" in the stock market. Does that actually _cause_ any business to "invest" more? The answer is likely no. It'll drive up the stock prices of the company whose shares you buy, yes, but companies don't tend to make investment decisions based on their share price.

Conversely, companies _do_ make investment decisions based on the demand for their products, so giving money to poor people who immediately spend it is likely to cause more (real world) investment than giving it to rich people who merely "invest" it.

<comment><USER11> Even if you transferred the money directly into the bank account of those corporations they would just merely pay it out as a dividend or give the CEO a bonus. What then? "Invest" again?

A corporation doesn't need a third factory if no one is buying their products. Because of deflation it may even want to get rid of it's second factory.

<comment><USER5> It's like that comic with the dog holding the ball going "no take, only throw!"

"No purchase, only invest!"

At the end of the day the economy only works because it's extracting profit from consumers, if the profit you're extracting is money you lent them in the first place...where is the profit coming from? Hence the negative interest rates: you NEED them to take on more debt so they can even buy things from you to begin with. It's the market itself saying "you need to give them more money".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I understand why you would want to set interest rates negative if your central bank is going to buy up all that debt, but as an individual or institutional investor why would you ever want to hold something with negative interest instead of cash?

Why is there even a market for a bond with negative interest rates at all, since compared to a $X bond with negative interest, $X in currency seemingly carries less risk, more liquidity, _and_ a higher rate of return?

<comment><AUTHOR> > but as an individual or institutional investor why would you ever want to > hold something with negative interest instead of cash?

There are no effective ways besides these bonds to hold tens or hundreds of millions of dollars as cash, even if you hire a warehouse, security, and store pallets of fiat (which has been attempted). You are paying a premium for principal safety.

You either make this choice voluntarily as an asset manager, or because you are required by regulation or other means to hold a percentage of your portfolio in this asset class.

<comment><USER13> Also cash can be made illegal.

<comment><USER14> Technically but likely not functionally.

<comment><USER15> True, but they can always impose greater restrictions such as how much you can spend with cash. Cash transaction limits have been decreasing for some time.

[https://wolfstreet.com/2017/01/28/europe-limits-on-cash- tran...](https://wolfstreet.com/2017/01/28/europe-limits-on-cash-transactions- war-on-cash/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love the discussion on this topic. Classic HN. A bunch of pretty smart people throwing out claims and arguing assertions with no evidence or even an inkling of how they could justify their claims.

Perhaps this topic is especially suited to these types of arguments as economics and financial instruments _seem_ to follow some sort of intuition. The problem is that you can have lots of ideas about what causes something but unless you can build a model that seems to reflect the world properly and then introduce your change and see if it results in the outcome you expected, you have no idea if it is even close to possibly true.

Arguing off intuition is fun and could even give you some ideas but it is ultimately pointless if you don't test your intuition and correct it if you are off.

<comment><USER2> Unlike, say, the design of an actual rocket ship (where it is perfectly OK to leave everything to the experts), the economy is the truest form of democracy - of the people, for the people, by the people and all that. You cannot really opt out of it. And ignoring it is generally a bad idea. And to make it worse, someone you don't know and cannot influence (and is generally unaccountable to the elected political class also) controls policies which directly affect your livelihood.

We probably need more discussions, not less. But I agree with you that folks should also spend more time learning about economics. If you think there are good sources for learning the subject, please let us know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Obviously this article shows up when the negative rates are already here, with the benefit of hindsight. What I am more interested in at this point is what is a good, safe alternative for a small time investor who's already overweight on equities and housing. Bonds used to be the sensible pillar that worked at times when stock market crashed and now it doesn't really make sense to use them for a small guy.

<comment><USER18> It's only government bonds that go negative. Corporate bonds will always provide a positive yield.

<comment><USER19> Apple issued negative bonds in some European country recently, if I understand this[0] correctly. Anyway, I don't think there's anything preventing a company from issuing negative bonds. Whether or not anyone would buy them is another question.

[0] [https://markets.businessinsider.com/bonds/apple_incsf- notes_...](https://markets.businessinsider.com/bonds/apple_incsf- notes_201530-bond-2030-ch0271171693)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article presented and dismissed a valid alternative in the same breath:

"average net monthly payroll gains have now slowed [and] aggregate hours worked for production and non-supervisory workers are now contracting..., something that usually doesn't happen outside of a recession."

We could instead be entering a recession. They tend to happen about every 10 years, and we're a tad overdue for one now.

<comment><USER21> > They tend to happen about every 10 years, and we're a tad overdue for one > now.

Though it is oft-repeated, it is not just wrong but meaningless to claim that recessions "tend to happen about every 10 years".

If we look about the NBER data on recessions[1] there is not a single way of measuring that has a 120 month cycle. Not if you measure trough to peak. Not if you measure trough to trough. Not if you measure all recessions, 1854-present. Not if you just limit yourself to post-World War 2, 1945-present.

The average length of a post-WW2 expansion is 58.4 months, or under 5 years.

But, as should be clear from the data in the link, averages are pretty meaningless. Even if we _pretend_ recessions are normally distributed (and there's no reason to believe that), the standard deviation is 33 months, nearly 3 years. Meaning there is a tremendous amount of variance, such that we can't say things like "we're a tad overdue".

But, especially on HN where any scientific study has immediate replies about small sample size, we should all know that something that only has 11 observations (post-WW2) or 33 observations (1854-present) is far too few to draw any actual conclusions from.

What's more, any claims about "the average time between recessions" can't just look at the US, unless we are claiming there is something so unique about US economic activity that we don't need to account for out-of-sample data around the world.

Australia, famously, has gone 27 years without a recession. So much for "they happen every 10 years". Japan had no recession from 1961-1993 (32 years). The Netherlands had no recession from 1981-2008 (27 years).

And on the other side, there's Greece, which has had 3 recessions just since 2010. Or Argentina which has had 5 or 6 recessions in the past 20 years.

If you look at this chart of economies around the world and their incidence of recessions[2], it should be pretty clear there is no such thing as a 10-year cycle.

It is just a made up story. The same old made up story of humans seeing patterns in data that aren't actually there.

[1]: [https://www.nber.org/cycles.html](https://www.nber.org/cycles.html) [2]: [https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/59de54466d80ad23008b5...](https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/59de54466d80ad23008b5d08-640-788.jpg)

<comment><USER20> Are you saying my high school economics professor taught me something without verifying it's authenticity and just relying on social proof?

mild_shock.jpg

<seriously>that was a good reminder though to revisit my cached belief, thanks :)</seriously>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My understanding is that interest rates were cut originally in order to provide a "safe landing" instead of a "sharp drop" after the last economic crisis (and that they were left low since then). If interest rates are imposed externally by Central Banks instead of by a free market, how do we know what the natural rate would be? Do Central Banks attempt to adjust interest rates towards the natural rate or is it in some sense completely arbitrary/detached?

<comment><USER23> The article is talking mostly about long term interest rates (on 10, 20, 30 yr government bonds). Those are set by the market, by a simple demand/supply mechanism on individual bond issues. Things like QE have some impact, but the impact is hard to gauge. The central banks normally determine only the short term interest rates (up to 3-6 months).

Note that even as QE is being slowly reversed in the United States and the short term interest rates have been raised - the 10yr, 20yr, 30yr treasury yields are still tanking like crazy. So it is _not_ the fault of the central banks, which is the point of the article.

In short - people are buying bonds which eventually drives the yield below zero. There's no rule that says "a bond can only be sold at below the levels that the 0% yield implies", therefore brace yourself for the possibility of breaching this level. For any currency, including USD.

<comment><USER22> > The central banks normally determine only the short term interest rates (up > to 3-6 months).

But if the short-term rates are manually set by central banks to be artificially low, wouldn't that be the primary driver behind negative long- term interest rates even if the exact number is determined by supply and demand? The article is talking about natural drivers like "negative time preference" which just sounds wrong.

<comment><USER23> Well 10yr or 20yr should still be above zero even if short term rates are kept around zero for an extended period of time. This is due to the cost of locking money in for a long period of time. What the article is trying to say by "negative time preference" is that this sound logic: "I'm giving you money for 20 years instead of lending money 80 times for 3 months each time; pay me more for that privilege" is disappearing in the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand why people are just shrugging off the adjective 'naturally'. Interest rates in the present system aren't natural, they are set by the central banks.

A system where a small number of central bankers choose a number might be a good system, but to call it natural is an abuse of language. If the 'natural' rate for lending money was 10%, we'd never be able to find it because the US, European and whichever other central banks would intervene.

<comment><USER25> which part of savings glut do you not understand?

<comment><USER24> I understand what a savings glut is.

The point is, we wouldn't know if we had one because that the interest rates are a number being chosen by a small committee. We might not have a savings glut, we might have a natural rate of interest at 10% that is being suppressed by central banks.

There is a minor pension crisis in the United States and their infrastructure is not in great shape. That doesn't make it look like there is a savings glut. There is a lot that needs to be done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This Danish bank has a -0.5 percent interest rate. Source (in Danish language): [https://www.jyskebank.dk/bolig/nyheder/realkredit-med- negati...](https://www.jyskebank.dk/bolig/nyheder/realkredit-med-negativ- rente) It still looks like it'll actually be over 0 percent with fees and costs.

<comment><USER27> Excuse me what? If something is already negative interest rate, how would fees and costs (which are also negative) push that to 0?

<comment><USER9> Cash you get (loan amount) minus cash you give (payments + fees) will give you a net interest rate.

With negative mortgage interest rates you might borrow $200K and only pay back $190K, but if there are $10K in fees, then you're net interest rate is 0%.

<comment><USER28> Hm. This is going to be a dumb question but why wouldn't you borrow a billion dollars, spend your 5 million immediately, then pay the rest back in instalments?

<comment><USER26> Because the bank would never let you borrow a billion dollars unless you could prove to them that you also have the income AND the discipline to service such a loan. For that you'll have to show them quite a bit about your personal economy, which may even include showing them your tax bill. They'll also want papers that prove that they have a stake (mortgage) in what you're loaning money for. On the other hand, if you know your way around law and certain organizational structures, then there are more ways than one to get quite exorbitant loans depending how you go about it. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The market must simply be anticipating interest rates going even deeper negative, especially in the EU, where there's a huge amount of sovereign debt, collateralized across different countries.

The "natural" demand is there in the form of reserve requirements by European banks. This is limited by the amount of cash that banks can store at cost, but that practice can restricted or eliminated:

[https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WP/2018/wp181...](https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WP/2018/wp18191.ashx)

</comment><comment><USER30> Risk free interest has been called "welfare for rich people", money for nothing. You shouldn't expect a return unless you put your money to work.

<comment><USER31> That makes no sense. Rich people are precisely those people who are most able to take risks ("put [their] money to work.") Nobody has millions sitting around in bank accounts earning the risk free rate when they can afford to take risk and earn more on average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Negative interest on wealth is the historic norm for people who have a lot of it. Think storage costs for gold, guards (and maintenance) for your palace, or your yacht - not to mention the crazy depreciation.

For the ultra rich, 50 basis points of holding costs would arguably be a bargain. Even normally wealthy people don't hesitate to pay 200 basis points for their wealth to be managed in, for instance, mutual funds.

[https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1155840864146661378](https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1155840864146661378)

<comment><USER29> Except when you're giving out a loan you're not asking the debtor to "store the wealth", you're asking them to pay you back the principal plus interest when the loan matures.

The debtor is free to do as they wish with your money in the meantime. The debtor is also "free" to default and not give you back anything. The interest rate is supposed to reflect that risk.

In the case of a government bond, you either have the risk of sovereign default, or the risk of currency devaluation to pay back otherwise unservicable debt.

The idea that already heavily indebted governments will be "storing your wealth" is completely naive. They'll be playing this game until suddenly they can't hide the massive inflation anymore, then they'll have to hike interest rates to double digits to get it back under control. This literally just happened in Turkey last year, but it also happened in the US in the seventies.

<comment><USER32> I agree. The difference is that at large levels of wealth, levels beyond what most of us can realistically imagine happening, then storage becomes an issue.

No regular person is going to buy a bond with a negative interest rate. Just hold cash. But once you start to have large amounts of cash, different considerations enter the picture. How do you store it? Security guards. Guards to watch the security guards. Too much cash is hard to spend, so you want it in electronic form.

The market is now saying that for certain types of cash in electronic form, the risk adjusted fee for creating the electronic record and holding it for you is greater than the interest they will pay you for the money.

In that way, the net interest rate including all factors such as the risk of default, ends up negative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if periodic jubilee style debt forgiveness as in ancient societies could help clear the stagnation of money flow implied by this article

</comment><comment><USER34> Negative interest rates should result in storing giant shrink-wrapped bales of currency in vaults. Is that happening yet?

</comment><comment><USER35> Just wait when the people accumulating these savings get a bit older, and decide that now it the time to use them.

<comment><USER11> What if they give the money to their children?

<comment><USER35> Their children will start to spend them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Are stocks still the best asset during negative rates and contracting growth?

</comment><comment><USER37> I argue that centrals banks are a monopoly that artificially manipulate interest rates in the favor of banks.

Low interest rates drive up home prices as people can borrow more with the same monthly payment. High house prices hurts first time home buyers younger generations the most. Older generation do not need to loan to buy a home as much as the have enjoyed price gain on their homes.

This is a form of generation inequality. Parents who have children will have to think how the will afford home purchases with negative interest rates.

<comment><USER11> Easy, just reduce the interest rates until even the children can afford their 70 year mortgage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like what this perspective adds, where Central Banks are only reactionary. Yes, Central Banks _want_ to distort the market so that savers are forced to invest if they want to keep their wealth growing.

But adding another dimension to why savers do what they do is fascinating. Time value and life expectancy. Very fascinating. I don't think it explains the last 10 years as an accelerant to suddenly consider this, but it is interesting how it happens to coincide with other monetary policy adjustments.

Its like people stopped trusting the markets and money supply, so central banks reacted to add liquidity to markets. This coincided with people realizing en masse that they can also delay gratisfaction for a rosier economic reality, and Central Banks react to that further by trying to push saved liquidity in the markets.

So far, private persons have barely budged and will rather pay for the privilege of keeping their money.

</comment><comment><USER39> 5 months ago on HN...

10 points by djyaz1200 5 months ago | parent [-] | on: U.S. personal income posts first drop in over thre...

"We can't sit there and leave interests rates low forever" ...says who? What force dictates that the equilibrium for rates must be higher? Yes that's historically been the case but that doesn't mean that's the right path for us now and in the future. I would argue that low interest rates will be and need to be the new normal.

Interest is the ultimate rent seeking activity. The fed funds rate is a form of price fixing for banks whereby they collectively decide how much interest they can extract from the economy without killing it. Why must this be the case, the economy should be allowed to run much hotter for much longer.

Inflation is less of a risk now because of technology + globalization, right now we are experiencing significant deflationary pressure as products and labor converge towards global pricing/wages.

Our economy and government will be in very serious trouble if we have to pay higher interest on our significant national debt, so the government has a big interest (pun intended) in keeping rates low to protect its own financial solvency.

Finally, high interest rates imply money is scarce and that's far from the case now. Having large sums of money is not what it used to be, you're competing against a lot of other people and organizations seeking to deploy that money productively for a return. This generates downward pressure on market interest rates as evidenced by European Central banks going below zero to negative rates.

<comment><USER8> >Inflation is less of a risk now because of technology + globalization, right now we are experiencing significant deflationary pressure as products and labor converge towards global pricing/wages.

I've seen this point frequently cited on blogs, but I've yet to see any academic data that supports it. Intuitively it makes sense to me. I just haven't seen any raw data that backs it up yet. Indeed, isn't this what Trump and Brexit are trying to _reverse_?

<comment><USER39> I agree, I have yet to see hard data on this but academic research tends to shed light on things long after the fact... while a big part of making money is about what is happening right now. Anecdotally I've seen (and you probably have too) that I can buy many of the items I need for daily life for dirt cheap online, and when I need labor for my company I can hire nationally/globally on sites like upwork for a fraction of what local talent would cost. Both have low transaction costs and because of ratings I waste much less time and money buying the wrong thing or hiring the wrong person... which is an aspect of inflation.

That final point is probably worth study. My thesis would be that when the economy is hot everyone is in a hurry and more likely to hire people/vendors and buy things that aren't ideal. Online rating systems tend to direct demand to the vendors who can successfully satisfy that demand. The web also makes discovery of new vendors and products very quick lowering the switching costs.</comment></comment></comment>


We're Eating This Planet to Death - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/ipcc-land-report-food/ <comment><USER2> The general HN narrative is that, "yes, there are issues. we should fix them". So, I would love to hear some concrete examples of what is being done to reverse this.

For example, the deforestation efforts in Amazon are putting tribes at risk every single day. Not to mention the loss of animals, plants and other wildlife. Is there anyone here on HN that has given actual thought to how this could be resolved?

And I am not talking about hoola hooping the government either. Clearly that is not an approach that is ever going to work.

</comment><comment><USER3> We aren't eating the planet to death. The planet has survived asteroids and all sorts of things, including the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and most of the life on earth.

The only thing we might be doing is ruining humanity's own long-term chances of survival. There's a distinct possibility that humans will undergo a mass extinction. That doesn't mean the planet is dead, though.

There is bacteria that can survive in extreme temperatures (for example, in extremely hot underwater volcanic plumes).

Worst case scenario, humans go extinct and some other life-form ends up evolving. You could be looking at some kind of sentient jellyfish taking over the planet in a billion years or whatever.

<comment><USER4> Whenever these articles write 'planet', it's obvious that the connotation is _Biosphere_ , aka living creatures.

Sometimes it also means _civilization_ , which encompasses a broad spectrum of things, but mostly a standard of living above subsistence farming/hunting/gathering, and being able to organize in groups larger than small tribes.

> Worst case scenario, humans go extinct

Sure, might take a while. I think the bigger immediate problem is that to survive in a global warming environment, traits will be selected for that aren't necessarily conducive to preservation of civilization (which is our main achievement as a species)</comment></comment>


Anonymous Login - <AUTHOR> https://developers.facebook.com/products/anonymous-login/ <comment><USER3> This is absolutely _horrible_ for the open web.

What this means is that users who sign in to your website with this are Facebook's users, not your users. Facebook controls them and decides if and when your access to them shall be revoked. At least with an email address, you can bootstrap an independent relationship. Not here.

Mozilla Persona got this right - authentication should be decentralized and establish an independent relationship between website and user. Too bad they gave up on it.

<comment> rkuykendall-com > At least with an email address, you can bootstrap an independent > relationship. Not here.

Wait, what if I want that? I'd say 95%+ of sites I sign up for I am just trying out. I _don 't want_ an independent relationship to be bootstrapped, I just want to play with the site. Chances are, after a week I will never see it again. But instead, I get a newsletter, and have to unsubscribe. Then I get a friend notification or something, and unsubscribe from those, or try to find out how to deactivate or delete my account.

> Facebook's users, not your users

Yes, that's true. I am a Facebook user. I have an account there, which I use. Why should I spread my email around to sites I don't really consider myself a user of, just because I want to save my game or explore the app or something?

<comment><USER3> Congratulations, you've just handed ownership of your electronic life over to Facebook. Now _your_ access to the internet is gated by Facebook. What? You've used a nickname or an inaccurate photo or you're a sex offender or a drug offender or you've had a DUI or enough people have flagged you? Say goodbye to your entire internet identity, time to start from scratch - assuming FB doesn't recognize your IP address and ban you.

The risks of submitting an email address are overblown. Websites are _terrified_ that you will click the 'spam' button. They don't put those little 'unsubscribe' links at the bottom because they want you to click on them.

I was one of the early adopters of the Facebook platform and 'social login'. Now I think it's a menace. They aren't doing anyone, except themselves, any favors with this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh Mozilla. How I wish that you had finished your BrowserID project! Now we have to trust Facebook with this idea instead of you.

<comment><USER5> I still use Persona on over 300 sites for 50k+ users.

It remains one of the best auth components I've ever used, and I have zero issues from users relating to it.

What sucks is that at some point I'll have to remove this great component because they stopped working on it, and will inevitably sunset the hosted service.

<comment><USER6> The server service is open source, isn't it? Just run your own.

Still a shame they are no longer pushing it, however.

<comment><USER5> That will suffer bitrot.

It will also lead to many people having to maintain something that they were choosing not to maintain. i.e. a complex piece of software responsible for security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesnt make much sense.

If someone is worried enough about privacy - then why are they even logging in via their Facebook profile in the first place? Realistically you would just use a throw-away email account and then no one knows.

Secondly - as a developer - why would I want to accept anonymous logins? If I did - then I can just let them create a username + password with no email account instead?

<comment><USER8> As a developer I want to use this to persist and sync data between devices. It provides a unique identifier I can use for the user before they trust my app enough to want to login.

We have found that a significant number of users will just quit the app if presented with a "sign up or login" with Facebook screen at the beginning of the flow.

With this, they don't have to give us any personal data and can start using our app right away. If they want to activate social features later it is really easy to upgrade their token without having to worry about merging accounts.

Edit: regarding the user side, the problem for a lot of users isn't that they don't trust Facebook. It's that they don't trust the random app/website that is asking for their Facebook data.

<comment><USER9> >We have found that a significant number of users will just quit the app if presented with a "sign up or login" with Facebook screen at the beginning of the flow.

thats me 90% of the time.

<comment><USER10> Ditto – it's similar to the push notification / run in the background prompts on first run, where I have nothing invested in the app and don't even know if I'll use it.

I like this because it allows the developer to solve things like unique sync accounts and only ask me for more info after I've liked the app enough to want to do something like share it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't forget, that this is not so much anonymous towards FB. They have enough tracking power (mobile and web) to link the dots.

<comment><USER12> Technically speaking, of course they do. Google can also read all your emails.

But I'm not sure Facebook would bother doing so. Hopefully the privacy policy regarding anonymous login specifies what they will or won't track.

<comment><USER13> It is in their direct interest to do so. They could use that information to better target ads, and to keep an eye on the popularity of potential acquisitions.

<comment><USER14> It's not in their interest to get sued for violating their privacy policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a small feature change with a big marketing angle. Facebook has been cutting the minimum amount of information shared when you "Connect with Facebook" with each iteration of their API. At launch, Facebook literally shared all of your information and most of your friend's information by default with no way to limit it. Then they pared it back to selective requests with a minimum of name, gender, and email. Then name, gender, and anoynimized email. Then it was name and anoynimized email. And now it is just an token specific to that site and nothing else.

They started by building what site owners and developers want - <USER2> about a user without having to build a complex form and have the user agree to fill it out. And they ended up with what the user wants - to share nothing at all with the site owner and fill out no forms.

My guess is this will be stupidly successful, and good for absolutely no one, but Facebook.

<comment><USER16> > _My guess is this will be stupidly successful, and good for absolutely no > one, but Facebook._

Why? I see it being very good for Facebook users. I'm very happy about not giving any data about myself to random websites I want to check out just once. I especially look forward for the amount of spam (er, value-added marketing e-mails) it cuts out of the circulation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is in no way an anonymous login ... Facebook knows exactly who you are and what application(s) you're logging into. In fact, it's more data to mine so they can serve you targeted advertising.

The proper term for this is "Federated Login". Most enterprises have some form that's used for SSO.

<comment><USER18> @smoyer You have no need to question citizen, Facebook coined a double plus good term and you accuse them of pettifogging,redefining words, Newspeak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This looks great to me, if it works as I imagine it does: use Facebook to authenticate myself to services, but don't give them any information about me - just an anonymous token.

I want to be able to use the convenience of Facebook login, but usually I don't because I'm worried about how much data the app I'm authenticating with has access to.

<comment><USER20> They tell you exactly how much you're authorizing when you opt in to login via Facebook, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For a Facebook user like me, this is awesome. It's really irrelevant how much I trust Facebook (if at all) - I trust someone's random startup less. Giving me an option to use something while not giving the other side enough information to spam me with crap or milk me for marketing money is a win.

</comment><comment><USER21> OK, so I take it this is "anonymous" only for the application owner, Facebook still knows exactly where you log in, when and whatnot.

So, and please correct me if I'm wrong, this is just logging in using Facebook without (probably) sharing "any" data with the software provider, right?

</comment><comment><USER22> This is for services that don't need to email users but want to remember them across devices. You're lowering the barrier to entry somewhat but you still have a barrier just to provide the cross-device feature. Why not remove the barrier completely by just using cookies, and then later after the user has created enough state, and is presumably hooked to your service, give them the option to add the cross-device feature. You might even have enough goodwill at that point to be able to ask them for their email without having to use Facebook as a crutch.

<comment><USER23> I think <guelo>'s advice above is sound. I learned this lesson myself after testing early versions of [http://recent.io](http://recent.io) \-- there's a high barrier to convincing users to type in an email address and password, even if it's for personalized news recommendations across multiple devices. It's not necessarily a trust issue -- it's simply a hurdle. Fortunately there are other ways to do it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL)

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if Facebook will release an according `Anonymous Mail` feature. A way for site owners to reach their `Anonymous Login` users by sending notifications, newsletters, etc right into their FB inbox.

This would surely attract site-owners by providing them with some kind of communication-channel to their users which is important for acquisition, retention, marketing and all that other stuff programmers usually don't like to do :)

The user can unsubscribe/delete account with a click and never gets spam in his inbox for sharing his contact details. Did Persona give away the email- address to site-owners or were there attempts at something like described above (even if persona were just to act as a proxy to your email via api)?

<comment><USER16> > _This would surely attract site-owners by providing them with some kind of > communication-channel to their users which is important for acquisition, > retention, marketing and all that other stuff programmers usually don 't > like to do :)_

Yes, please. Give me a throw-away app-specific inbox but make sure that I can completely ignore it. It's not only programmers that don't like "acquisition, retention, marketing" \- as a user I don't like being subjected to it either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I get how this works when I'm using a single device. But how do you identify that you're the same anonymous account when you switch from one device to another, without giving any personally identifying information?

<comment><USER7> I'm guessing this is linked to your Facebook account. So Facebook knows who you are - just the "3rd party" website doesnt

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think that for the people that do use facebook this actually does have a decent value. Useless for people that are actually worried about their privacy though.

</comment><comment><USER28> This has been in beta since Facebook's F8 conference nearly a year ago. Has anyone here tried it out in their app yet, or encountered it in the wild?

</comment><comment><USER29> I tried to apply for the beta but it requires a FB account, which I obviously don't have since I want to stay anonymous ...

</comment><comment><USER30> How is this supposed to work? Does this create a temporary FB profile, and you can then log in via FB's OAuth?

<comment><USER8> Basically. Facebook already switched to using "app scoped ids" last year. So each app gets a different unique identifier for a Facebook user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm curious to see if we would see a lower bounce rate w/ anon login compared to regular FB login.

</comment><comment><USER31> I was so hoping for anonymous logins on Facebook, like they announced a little while ago on mobile if I recall correctly (Rooms or something?). But it's only for SSO.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is solely made, because people are afraid to use facbook to login anywhere, becuase they don't want their friends to know.

<comment><USER33> No, I don't want some random website knowing my name, email, and friends list. This solves that problem.

<comment><USER34> Facebook created that problem.

<comment><USER35> Websites were still requiring email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, etc. before universal login.

If anything FB is closing the loop.

<comment><USER34> I was there before Facebook changed the expectation. Obviously companies retrieved this information in other ways before federated identity but the idea that you can't get an app or a service without handing over your real name and friends list is entirely on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Note that the App don't know about you but Facebook know about you using that app because they can see all the API calls.

</comment><comment><USER37> Should be "Anonymous" Login.

</comment><comment><USER38> Why would I use Facebook to build an anonymous login function?

</comment><comment><USER39> >facebook

>anonymous

Very funny.

"Sure it's anonymous, just trust us..."

</comment><comment><USER40> I spit my coffee.

Why isn't an entity with a more trustworthy past in handling privacy doing something like this? What entity would even qualify?</comment>


Master Emacs in one year - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/redguardtoo/mastering-emacs-in-one-year-guide/blob/master/guide-en.org <comment><USER2> _Once you have mastered Emacs, you are good at all other editors_

I haven't found that to be true at all. I find that due to archaic idiosyncrasies and the customization possible with emacs, the more time I spend with it the more difficult it becomes to use different editors.

<comment><USER3> I spent 5 years learning and using vi (n perhaps a dozen different Unix-like OSes, so they were all different, meaning I could only use a core set of features.

I then spent a few years working on Windows where I had Vim, but other editors I used were, well, 'standard'.

Then ViEmu came along and I now move between Vi-like editing in VS and Vim, and 'normal' editing in other apps.

It's not too bad, to be honest. I'm editing in a non-vi-like-manner in this comment box. I could probably install something to make Chrome do vi-like editing here, but my brain is happy to switch modes, if you'll forgive the pun.

<comment><USER2> True I rarely have a problem editing in web text boxes, I never really committed to using emacs as a word processor. But I'd be lying if I said I've never accidentally closed a browser tab when absent-mindedly trying to do a backward-kill-word ('ctrl-w').

I was thinking more about programming and system administration. After years of using emacs, I find it harder to adapt to the popular mainstream tools like Visual Studio, TextMate, etc.

<comment><USER4> Ctrl-w as "backward-kill-word" is a _Unixism_ from the classic Unix TTY, you can't blame Emacs for that one.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Ctrl-w in Emacs is actually "kill-region".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After seeing TextMate struggle around the jump from version 1 to 2 and yesterday reading Sublime Text to struggle going from version 2 to 3 (to 4) I became more afraid of the sustainability of newer editors. Maybe it's time to hold stronger to your emacs, (or vi).

<comment><USER7> I've been using Emacs as my day-to-day editor for coming up on 15 years now. There is a lot to be said for picking up a tool with that kind of longevity.

<comment><USER8> > I've been using Emacs as my day-to-day editor for coming up on 15 years now. > There is a lot to be said for picking up a tool with that kind of longevity.

To amplify your comment: I'm going on 33 years, and one of the great things about emacs is how it has changed with the times.

<comment><USER9> >I'm going on 33 years

Your comment made me realize I'm about the same (ouch.)

I started on TECO EMACS on a DEC-20, then Gosling Emacs on Unix, then GNU Emacs on Unix, then various mini-emacs on PCs, finally back to GNU Emacs.

>how it has changed with the times

Heh, even a glacier will surprise you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reading guides like these makes me think about how I sound like when I implore novices to try out the command-line.

 _Why should I?_

I'll peg myself as a half-competent developer, the kind who codes everyday and can lose a weekend to a spontaneous side project. I am completely in agreeance that tool mastery is vital for enjoying and being productive in programming, I just have no concept, not from this guide, and not from many others, why Emacs is better for me than Sublime Text, nevermind why I should consider taking a year (an eternity in technological time) to master it.

And I realize that's a question that requires an unfair amount of trivial knowledge (e.g. the way I work and design)...but that's kind of the core concept for me...I feel pretty productive in ST3, I can sense the shortcuts and power tools I haven't taken the time to master and where they would help me, and for the most part, I design my projects in a way that fit the ST3 navigational flow...which I imagine is a side-effect of ST3's overall excellent design. In general, though, the bottleneck for me in programming isn't the typing of code or navigating through files, it's the sitting and thinking...rarely do I ever feel that ST's navigational functions cause me to lose context or concentration.

So all things considered, what value does Emacs bring me? Is it better in _general_ programming situations? Or for ones in which a highly customized environment is needed? In that case, then fashion the argument properly...I would never argue that Ruby is the best language for all purposes, but I could certainly argue that it's a great contender for specific domains, and as a "glue" code.

Maybe the OP lists some compelling use cases further down in this document, but I pretty much stopped reading at this line, which gives me low confidence that me and the OP share the same worldview of how things work:

> _No job ad will list Emacs as a required skill. That's actually a good > thing. It ensures that only honest technical guys exist in Emacs community._

<comment><USER11> > nevermind why I should consider taking a year (an eternity in technological > time) to master it.

I don't want to proselytise, but maybe that hints at one of the core appeals of emacs. A year is nothing in terms of the span of time emacs has been around, and so time invested in making emacs _your_ editor is effort that won't be discarded in the next technological cycle.

The other aspect is what I mean by "making emacs _your_ editor"; emacs has had a lasting appeal because it is so general, and so malleable. Emacs becomes a construction material for your personal editor, and everyone who uses it seriously ends up with something idiosyncratic and ad hoc, in the best senses of those words.

<comment><USER12> Visual Studio, or Eclipse have been around for a fair while as well now. Its not like they will disappear with the next text cycle. And you can get productive with them in far less than a year.

<comment><USER11> Every five years or so I decide to give whatever editors/IDEs are in vogue a decent shot, to make sure I'm not missing out on anything (better still is to work along side of someone who is really productive in a radically different environment, like acme). Usually I come away from it with a few tweaks to my emacs configuration, but I have yet to be compelled away from emacs.

For example, I gave Visual Studio another shot recently (VS2013); and I mean, I read books on using it productively, I read the various tip blogs, advice for customization online, et cetera; I used it extensively. Unfortunately, I just don't see what people see in it. From my point of view, it's still slow, cumbersome, expensive (for any version with features that are actually useful), much less featureful than (customized) emacs, and doesn't run on most of the platforms I use to develop software. In theory, I could dedicate a few years writing extensions for one of these IDEs to duplicate all the emacs modes I use, but I'd probably never be able to fix, for example, buffer switching, or all the places where the mouse is the preferred form of interaction, or where modal dialogs steal focus (let alone all the dialogs that inexplicably aren't resizable). Meanwhile, the nice features like Intellisense and so on are the kind of customizations I've had in emacs for most of my prefered languages for years anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At last, a reason to check G+! I also need to learn about smex.

Interesting to see he uses evil-mode. I've just started using it, and so far the jury is out. I have yet to find an equivalent to move by sexp (move by sentence [()] doesn't do the same thing for me) for instance. I'm less interested in an exact replica of Vim than a more efficient editing experience. Perhaps this will ease with more experience.

</comment><comment><USER14> _A developer who is curious enough to try Lisp is possibly more intelligent than average_

This is the kind of exaggeration that makes a lot of people to avoid even trying Lisp. Any programming language that uses a different programming paradigm than the one you are familiar with will make you a better programmer.

<comment><USER15> I don't really have any desire to try lisp, and every time I see that kind of lisp advocacy I have even less.

<comment><USER16> If you do decide to try a lisp, don't start with Emacs Lisp. It's a mess. Go with Clojure, out of all lisps it's one of the least self-congratulatory about how awesome they all are for using lisp.

<comment><USER17> Well, Clojure also was a mess when I tried it (2 years ago maybe?). Leiningen (a/the build system) was pretty slow, and I couldn't find a way to use the language in a more lisp-like way easily, like editing a few files and (re)loading them into a running REPL (other than iterating through all buffers in Emacs and loading/evaluating them manually; there may have been other problems as well, I don't remember). You know, like you can edit a few Java files in Eclipse, press shift-ctrl-s, and have the new code hot-deployed into your debugging session.

Maybe the people who wrote the Clojure tutorials considered that question to be SO natural they didn't even mention it, but I found it very unintuitive. And running a very slow tool on every code change and waiting for the build and then starting the program is very unnatural and un-lisp-like.

Common Lisp is a bit old by now, but it's always been very stable and fast. Maybe Racket is a more modern+mature Lisp family member that's nice to try.

<comment><USER18> I also tried getting into Clojure around that time. I was coming from CL where we have nice things like conditions and restarts, dynamic variables, and CLOS -- being able to hit an error in the debugger, inspect the slot of the instance of some object that caused the error and recompile the class definition to fix the error without restarting the program is really nice (all of the running instances are updated). I was not used to Clojure's unhelpful tracebacks.

I don't understand what age has to do with anything... CL is still a good language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Currently I use Sublime Text 3 with the Vintageous plugin, I'm proficient with Vim but I find myself preferring Sublime Text due to the multitude of packages available to it as well as the UI being in my opinion better and more customizable. I'm most interested in moving to Atom once it matures a bit more and the Vim style plugin also matures. That being said, I've tried using Emacs tons of times now and it just doesn't click with me. More power to you if it's your preferred editors but I'll take Vi(m) over Emacs if I have to use a legacy editor or Sublime Text with Vintageous for everything else. Hopefully soon Atom can replace Sublime Text for me and I can stay on Open Source software.

</comment><comment><USER20> I started with purcell's config as well. I did two separate attempts at getting started from scratch, and it was just too much. Using purcell's config made me somewhat productive in a week.

Now I'm starting to do my own changes to his config, but there's still a lot of stuff I'm afraid to touch. I'm thinking of declaring ".emacs bankruptcy" soon, or maybe start from something more minimal like the Starter Kit linked in the article (I wish I knew about it before starting with purcell's)

Biggest thing I miss when I moved from Vim was tmux. Window management in Emacs is a nightmare, and the shells suck as well.

<comment><USER21> I started with nothing. I believe that just like every Jedi must build their own light sabre, every Emacs user should build their own dot-emacs. Conversely, thus spake the great French philosopher: "hell is other people's .emacs"

Emacs is a stern taskmaster, but she repays the investment in multitudes.

Glory be to the thermonuclear text editor.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=thermonuclear%20text%20editor](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=thermonuclear%20text%20editor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone share what they feel are their top 3 greatest workflow improvements in productivity going from a point and click IDE to a shortcut based IDE like emacs?

<comment><USER23> Emacs is not an IDE- its a text editor. It would be nuts to use Emacs to edit Java compared to Intellij or even Eclipse. Having said that, it is no more productive than any other text editor at editing text (as compared to Vim or Sublime Text 3). Even if that weren't true, would you really invest years into learning a new editor to make editing text a few percent faster? Programming is limited by thought, not typing (common pain here is solved by plugins anyway). The benefits of using emacs are as follows:

1\. terminal based 2\. key chords 3\. (e)lisp 4\. open source 5\. stable 6\. extensible

<comment><USER24> Last I looked Emacs comes with a million lines of Lisp code extending Emacs way beyond normal editing.

Emacs easily is a text-based IDE. I for example use the SLIME extension with GNU Emacs to make it into a Common Lisp IDE.

Now we can ask if the depth of GNU Emacs makes sense and if the UI usable. But there is little doubt that Emacs is WAY beyond being a simple text editor. See ORG mode, GNUS, ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps a naive question here, but I'm interested in emacs now, and I need to ask: does your left pinky finger get used to all the CTRL and ALT key combos, or do you change the key bindings, or are there special keyboards meant for emacs use, or what? Two minutes into the tutorial I was already thinking about whether there should be some sort of hack to use CAPSLOCK instead of CTRL...

<comment><USER26> You should absolutely rebind Caps Lock to Ctrl.

I guess it's time once again to mention the Kinesis Advantage keyboard on HN. You can rebind every key. You can rebind control and meta to keys that are under your thumbs, and put one copy under each thumb so you don't have to use the same thumb all the time. And everyone who walks by your desk will have an excuse to start a conversation about your incredibly strange keyboard.

<comment><USER25> Looks interesting, but at $269 I don't think I'll be able to try one out. Maybe after I make that first million. Glad to hear my instinct about capslock isn't crazy.

<comment><USER26> If you think that's bad, don't get me started on chairs and desks:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105026)

(Incidentally, since writing that _N_ years ago a physical therapist talked me out of the Aeron, which has poor upper back support. I've got a Steelcase Leap now.)

If you ever find yourself getting a job as a programmer, convince them to buy you a fancy keyboard _and_ a proper chair _and_ some Ergotron products. These things all last at least half a decade, so it's not as if you're spending that money every month.

Or buy them yourself... But if your company can't be convinced to budget $750 per year to keep you healthy and happy as you sit at your desk all day pounding out code for them at ludicrous speed, I've got bad news about your company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm a competent Lisp developer (and fanatic), yet I use Vim. I've also met Vim-bashing Emacs fanatics who didn't know the second thing about Lisp (the first thing, of course, being all those parentheses).

</comment><comment><USER28> A great reference with some pragmatic advice.

I've heard that one of the main benefits to emacs is that it can be used to tool itself to one's needs; curious to know if that's what others have found?

<comment><USER29> Yes, emacs is wonderfully customizable, but there's a deeper idea underneath. By investing time and effort into learning it and buying into its conceptual view of the world as text buffers that can be manipulated, you gain a level of mastery over your environment that's simply not possible with an IDE or specialist tool. And we are all deeply motivated by mastery. Some authors like Dan Pink say that mastering something is the biggest motivation of all, even above recognition and money.

Many IDEs are pretty veneers on sequences of complex commands that must be learned by rote. Emacs gives you text buffer interfaces to whatever you want to do, a mostly consistent model for dealing with them and the programmability to change whatever you like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A friend of mine asked me this recently: are there many young programmers investing in emacs? I only know a few... it's kind of depressing.

<comment><USER31> I'll be using emacs as the sole text editor with my students in September, so there'll be a few more young programmers learning how to use it.

<comment><USER32> I hope you will be teaching Intro to Emacs. Why else would you impose a text editor on students?

<comment><USER31> I'm confused as to why I wouldn't teach students how to use a text editor. What else would you suggest they write their code using?

<comment><USER32> You aren't teaching them to use a text editor. You are teaching them to use emacs. A choice based on your personal preference that wastes lots of their time learning what is a very complicated environment. You need to write lisp just to make emacs auto indent on return.

Nano or gedit in comparison would be sensible choices if you were interested in teaching students about the language rather than indoctrination in the editor wars.

Unless of course it's a lisp class in which case Emacs is a sensible choice, but i think you would have mentioned that if it were the case.

<comment><USER33> > You need to write lisp just to make emacs auto indent on return.

I wanted to say that it's not true, but fortunately I went and checked and found this (in my programming-mode hook):

        (local-set-key (kbd "<return>") 'newline-and-indent)

in my Emacs config. I thought that it's configurable via `customize-*` interface, which is as nice as any other editor "settings" dialog, but apparently it's not...

OTOH I'd rather write Lisp than JSON or Python for editor configuration, but you're right in that it's personal preference.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend making Emacs the required editor for any programming course (if not using Lisp). Just disallow using IDEs and let the students choose their editors. Make a list of mandatory features, like syntax highlighting, and let them use whatever they feel comfortable with. That way you can focus on teaching programming instead of teaching how to use an editor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> -> "I believed Microsoft Windows was only platform worth to develop software."

This sounds like the first line of a Kafka-esque horror story.

</comment><comment><USER35> Out of curiosity, and this is a real question not a troll :

What can emacs and vi do that a regular IDE can't ?

<comment><USER23> Emacs and Vi are not IDEs. They operate on strings, not ASTs. Intellij Idea is an IDE for Java- it allows you to eg change the name of a method and have all call sites be updated. A text editor forces you to do this yourself with a string based find/replace. Having said that, text editors are easier to extend.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like you haven't used emacs in a few years (or longer). There are tools like CEDET that allow building language modes with AST-level understanding of the source code. I don't know about the vim world in general, but I use omnisharp in emacs to provide C# refactoring tools like you describe, and that was originally built for vim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Any one know how Sublime Text's Command Palette alternative in emacs?

<comment><USER37> maybe smex? [http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Smex](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Smex)

<comment><USER33> I use Smex + ido-vertical-mode which looks like this: [http://klibert.pl/ido- vertical.png](http://klibert.pl/ido-vertical.png). It's closer to how the "command palette" looks like than the normal ido. It doesn't display keybindings next to commands like Sublime does, but if you have `suggest-key- bindings` set, Emacs will show you command binding when you execute it: [http://klibert.pl/suggest-key-binding.png](http://klibert.pl/suggest-key- binding.png)

Helm ([https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm](https://github.com/emacs- helm/helm)) is another way of doing this, although I don't use it (yet - I'm going to check it out sooner or later).

The "command palette" (M-x or <esc>: in Emacs/Vim respectively) is a very useful tool for both exploring and working with the editor. It's kind of sad that people forgot about it for a few decades and only rediscovered it recently thanks to Sublime and similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are there any decent books out there on emacs?

<comment><USER38> The official GNU Emacs Manual is good. I've slowly been working my way through it. It's a free download:

[http://shop.fsf.org/product/Emacs_Manual_24/](http://shop.fsf.org/product/Emacs_Manual_24/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I may be raging, but if you need one year to master an IDE/Text editor there is something wrong.

<comment><USER40> It takes a year because you learn it over time. Learning a tool progressively is the best way to go.

There is a wonderful presentation called '7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0' [1] explaining this philosophy. The idea is to get the basics down upfront and then get more proficient gradually over time. When you use the tool you stay aware of what you are doing. When you find an inefficiency in the way you use the tool, find a quicker way and make it an habit. This is the most efficient.

If you only care about the code you have to type right now and never read the editor's documentation nor learn new commands you'll keep using only basics commands and never will gain proficiency. Not efficient.

If on the other hand you try to learn every feature immediately you'll waste time learning things you won't use and forget most of them anyway. Not efficient.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6K4iIMlouI#t=2085](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6K4iIMlouI#t=2085)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> FTFY Get Emacs pinky in one year

<comment><USER42> I did mention evil-mode.

Whatever problem you got, Emacs has a soluton.</comment></comment>


Apple Pay and the rise of the five-party network - <AUTHOR> https://fin.plaid.com/articles/apple-pay-and-the-rise-of-the-five-party-network <comment><USER2> A centralized payment system will never be able to provide the best service for users. With a single entity in control -- as opposed to an open system where newcomers can enter and compete with incumbents -- there are no competitors, and competitors are responsible for pushing down fees and adding innovation, thus forcing incumbents to follow along or fade away. That's why the web is so successful: competition is built in through an open protocol, so competitors can replace incumbents by providing a better service/price.

With the iPod and iTunes, and the iPhone and the App Store, Apple created something that didn't exist before, and captured most of the newly created market. Replicating VISA's business model doesn't do the same, but simply adds a couple of features to an otherwise closed system where users will not benefit from competition.

An actual alternative to VISA needs to be open, allowing for competitors to easily enter and compete with existing actors. Such a system is the Stroem protocol on top of Bitcoin, which is a thin clearing protocol designed for competition, constantly forcing issuers to follow along on price or be left behind. This is what merchants want, and what's needed to revolutionize payments.

<comment><USER3> This is probably not a popular opinion. Visa and Mastercards were all owned by the banks that back your credit card. These are highly regulated organizations. I rather not have startups that have sometimes have pretty dubious reputations for skirting the law trying to get into this space. What if someone steals your bitcoin what do you do? Or if you purchase something and you don't get it.

<comment><USER4> It's cheaper to lose 100% of your purchase 2% of the time than 3% of your purchase 100% of the time.

Insurance is for health and houses not my $8 lunch or $500 wallet contents.

<comment><USER3> You don't think some startup will not take fees? Who is paying for infrastructure and salaries?

<comment><USER4> The fees can be a lot lower when you don't have to maintain rewards programs, liability for fraud, or dispute mechanisms.

Bitcoin is ridiculously inefficient compared to what a centralized entity could be and it's already cheaper than wire transfers or even credit card transactions over a certain size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anybody know how Apple Pay peer-to-peer actually works? I find all the information I can on the web disappointingly light. The same thing was true for the original Apple Pay which lead to myths like Apple Pay using a new PAN every time out pay.

> Bank transfers will be handled separately.

When are bank transfers used and for what? For unloading? If so do you have to unload via bank transfer or can you use a CFT transaction? I can't imagine a case where you want to unload using an ACH or SWIFT transaction. I would image you always want to use a domestic settlement system or T2 if you can.

> Apple Pay Cash's back-end is powered by a Green Dot-backed Visa prepaid card

Only in the US or globally? I imagine there is a lot of fine print associated with that like the amount of funds you can store. I will get a tax statement even if I live outside the US, right?

<comment><USER6> It's a debit push payment. Everyone is issued a green dog virtual card and then the entire network works over debit (with a layer of abstraction that Apple builds on top).

<comment><USER5> > It's a debit push payment

What does that mean?

> Everyone is issued a green dog virtual card

I assume that's just a VISA Debit or VPAY with a special BIN range. Is that correct? Does everybody in the world participating in Apple Pay get a US issued VISA Debit card?

> then the entire network works over debit

There is no difference at all between VISA credit and VISA debit apart from interchange and when how the issuer bills the card holder. The whole infrastructure is the same. I assume with "works over debit" you mean is VISA cleared, is that correct? Does that also mean that unloading happens with a CFT transactions? If so what does the following sentence in the article mean "Bank transfers will be handled separately."?

<comment><USER7> They're good questions, but I think they're answered by the point that Apple Pay Cash is US-only. The service is just Apple's abstraction of Green Dot [1] branded prepaid reloadable VISA cards. If it's US only, Apple doesn't need to worry about the international corner cases yet.

There's some more info at Recode [2]:

[1] [https://www.greendot.com/](https://www.greendot.com/)

[2] [https://www.recode.net/2017/6/5/15741636/apple- pay-p2p-venmo...](https://www.recode.net/2017/6/5/15741636/apple- pay-p2p-venmo-competitor-apple-pay-cash-money-transfer)

<comment><USER5> > Apple Pay Cash is US-only

Thank you, I missed that point. I guess it's understandable given the environment but still I wish Apple would have gone for something more ambitious like the original Apple Pay.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Newspapers don't need a special law to help compete with Google and Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/10/newspapers-embarrassing-lobbying-campaign-227100 <comment><USER3> I still don't get this. There have only been a handful of newspapers that seem to have tried anything different than the same model that they used in the 80's and they have done ok, but most of the newspapers I feel like I take a peek at are barely worth more than the paper they are printed on even if they have a solid Sunday edition, and their websites end up being trashy from ads, bad design, slow page loads, or any of the other reasons. Most of the articles in web or print end up being roughly equal quality to an equivalent mediocre to random web article as they rushing to be first.

In my opinion most newspapers haven't showed me something I want to buy/spend money on/visit to collect a few token ad dollars. Did Google really steal your money because I chose New York Times over some random newspaper with lackluster articles/reporting? I feel like even radio and local/regional TV still does a good job of giving me a reason to choose them over someone else.

<comment><USER4> Or their websites actively scare you off, like the San Francisco Chronicle, which hits me with 3 modal pop-ups in a row every time I try to read one of their articles. If I was ever inclined to pay them I most certainly am not now.

<comment><USER5> GA says our visitors are clicking an average of 3 times after we added more modals. That's _engagement_ , bro!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem is that the newspapers were already a cartel, and Google and Facebook broke them up.

There were several large networks:

Associated Press

United Press International

Reuters

Agence France-Presse

etc.

Newspapers generated little unique content. They tended to both act as a distributor for AP/Reuters content, and share their content back into the network.

Another example... The sports, stock and weather pages? Yeah, not always generated by the paper - I worked for the NZ Metservice who had a great business gathering together the feeds and generating the layout, shipping print-ready pages direct.

Along come Google and Facebook who are perfectly capable of de-duping the articles from AP, allowing a winner take all competition among the papers. Add to that the ability to render the data pages themselves from feeds that they can buy and there's a lot less of a reason for the end customer to pay the local news organisation.

<comment><USER7> Ok, say you strip away all of the syndicated content. How much unique content is fair to expect from a local newsroom. They aren't anything like content mills. Some stories take 9+ months to develop. They sometimes inform law enforcement and often change the state of the world in very significant ways. I've spent the last year as a technologist in a newsroom and I am in awe of how remarkable an impact a big story can have on the real world. It's hard work, and I've turned down job opportunities for literally double what I'm making because I believe in the cause of journalism so deeply. I see what vile hated that they have to endure every day, and try like hell to keep them safe from a myriad of digital adversaries.

The advertising business model demands attention; it's the only way to assure value for advertisers. Its been the enemy of media integrity for over a hundred years. In our market-worship society we collectively place little value on honestly, and the numbers back that up. Since 2000, over 270,000 newsroom employees have lost their jobs. Despite all the hubbub, only about 25K coal jobs have disappeared in the same timeframe. It's as if we have ceded verification of truth to a UI provided by a private corporation that is managed by AI systems, instead of other people. Oops.

Unless society supports people being able to dedicate their lives to uncovering truths and righting abuse, 'speaking truth to power' there won't be people that can devote the energy and resources to do that well enough to have a meaningful impact.

Strip away the wire services and the ads and the articles that pay the bills in traffic for a moment. How do we compensate people to do good work on a story that might change the world for the better, or invest all of their valuable skill towards something that doesn't lead anywhere of immediate value. There are membership models, tipping, merchandise, but what is the right way to pay for this type of work? For most people it isn't a gig, and not something they can do on demand in a real time marketplace. For most people they just decide to dedicate themselves to that kind of work and go all in, and the best way to pay talented people according to the market is to pay them decent salaries and give them benefits. Only when a journalist can meet their basic needs for living can they devote their attention to fighting the impossible battles they face in the public sphere.

So how does the organization that provides that security for journalists get compensated outside of advertising or state sponsorship?

If we could craft something more beautiful to give to our grandkids, what would it look and feel like?

Asking for a friend.

<comment><USER8> The beauty of programmatic advertising is that it enabled the rare publisher to profit. When the pool of advertisers is massive and where they advertise is mostly decoupled from their ad campaign being set up, you don't get individual companies "pulling their ads" from places. You do, but the publisher still makes money because there are so many advertisers and the cost to be on the market for them is near zero.

The masses panicked and now good news is hidden behind the paywall. That's okay for me. I'm on the inside and I will use my differential knowledge. While those who can't afford news will be outcompeted by virtue of their having shittier knowledge.

They will be fat. Their unvaccinated kids will die. Their money will go to fund my roads. They will go on Robinhood and Coinbase and give their wealth to me. Their taxes will go to fund art galleries they will find no time to visit.

And in their ignorance, they'll do all this while taking stances that will only make them give me more. Beautiful.

About the only price I have to pay for this is that they'll get angry when they face these facts: that they collectively chose a poorer life than available and that they collectively chose to give to those with more than them.

<comment><USER9> > The masses panicked and now good news is hidden behind the paywall. That's > okay for me. I'm on the inside and I will use my differential knowledge. > While those who can't afford news will be outcompeted by virtue of their > having shittier knowledge.

Except we live in a democracy and thus the masses can vote in a leader who can take away all those benefits you get "on the inside".

<comment><USER8> They won't. It's because it's a democracy and they read shitty news that it's guaranteed they won't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems to me that journalism suffers a "tragedy of the commons"-like situation: since many news stories are available free of cost, there is little incentive for individual citizens to pay for subscriptions that fund the information-gathering necessary for robust free press.

Is there any way that the government can subsidize newspapers without exerting influence? Perhaps the government could offer tax credits (not itemized tax deductions, but credits against the final amount due) at a given rate for newspaper subscriptions, up to an annual limit per taxpayer? E.g., each dollar spent on newspaper subscription yields a tax credit of $0.75, up to a limit of $150. A newspaper could be defined content-neutrally as printed matter delivered daily to subscribers. To prevent abuse (such as kickbacks to subscribers), the government could require that participating newspaper companies limit the benefits of subsidized subscriptions to (1) delivery of a physical newspaper and (2) online access to the content of the physical newspaper.

<comment><USER11> Or maybe the government shouldn't pick winners in the market. I am a subscriber to the Wall Street Jpirnal because they produce high-quality content which is significantly less biased than other major mewspapers. I figure if it gets bad enough, much of the media goes out of business. This leads to a higher demamd leads to more and better news.

Indeed, I'd argue there are you tube broadcasters with high-quality reporting, often better than traditional media.

Also, have you considered the environmental impact of subsidizing use of paper? Why can't it be digital? I subscribe only to the digital version of the WSJ. This has the added benefit of being cheaper for consumer and publisher, increasing demand.

<comment><USER12> The Wall St Journal is biased right of center.

For example they have an anti-regulation bias that they wear on their sleeve editorially and which informs their news reporting.

You might consider the possibility that you like it better because it is consistent with your world view rather than because it is less biased.

<comment><USER13> Who is pro-regulation, in the abstract setting?

Like: "Here's a thing."

Anti-regulation response: "Thanks. I will evaluate it on its merits with the responsibility being mine."

Pro-regulation response: "Oh, was it regulated? No? No thanks. I only accept regulated things otherwise I have to accept responsibility for my own evaluation."

<comment><USER14> What always strikes me as odd is how the US discourse around regulations stays always on a hypothetical level, while literally 50 other states have regulations for _decades_ and know where it works and where not.

This feels a little like discussing whether airplanes are a realistic means of transportation while the rest of the world uses them for years and isn't really a rational approach towards reality, but rationalizing ones believes. Airplanes are made by the devil, therefore they _can't_ be good.

The way this discourse unfolds in the US says more about the state of the nation than it says about the practicability of any regulation.

Can you fuck up things with overregulating? Sure thing! Can you fuck things up by not regulating? Sure thing! And while hitting the right balance can be tricky at times, this is not a theoretical matter you can observe it empirical and ask yourself if it works.

I know the tribal partisan divide in the US leads some to leave their head at the door, but come on, this is just silly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No, they don't need one. The article shows how some groups are pushing for legislation to allow news orgs to form a cartel, in order to compete with the likes of Google and friends, who themselves enjoy a high concentration of market share.

So, instead of promoting a competitive economy with fewer cartels, there's a push to promote cartels within the economy, ostensibly to... compete?

Nice. These are, indeed, interesting times. Cartel economy it is!

</comment><comment><USER16> I think all business has to know what they are selling. Google and Facebook know it very well. They sell ads. All their business endeavours hence are to sell more ads.

On the other hand, newspapers seems to not know that they are selling.

If it's content or information, then they don't create enough unique and valuable content that enough people are willing to pay enough amount.

If it's content distribution or platform for opinions or civil discourses, they are almost anachronistic.

If it's ads, they simply don't have enough eyeballs.

<comment><USER17> Maybe readers aren't the customers and newspapers are actually selling narrative control.

<comment><USER18> That's more or less how Russian printed press worked in the 1990s and early 2000s. All major newspapers and magazines not telling you how to have sex after properly tying your girlfriend to the bed were losing money, and each was owned by a major businessperson who wanted to control the narrative or at least to look like they were able to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They should change their business plan. It's clearly not working anymore. Most newspapers in my country are basically dead and kept alive by government's money, ie, tax money. It would be ridiculous to expect a law to help them. They should build a competitive business.

<comment><USER20> I see comments like this a lot, but I rarely see proposed alternative business models. The only one I can think of off-hand is ProPublica. Anyone else got anymore? I'm sometimes afraid that the reason newspapers don't pivot to any other structure is because there really aren't any viable models outside of subscriptions (which very few people pay for) or advertisements (which just makes for a sucky experience).

<comment><USER19> Then it's not a viable business. I subscribe to the papers I want. Tax payers shouldn't absorb their faulty business.

<comment><USER21> Taxpayers, and all other citizens and residents, benefit by a well-informed (and accurately informed) population.

<comment><USER22> How do you propose to force people to inform themselves?

<comment><USER23> Are you in the same thread as me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Newspapers aren't competing with google or facebook. No more than newspapers were competing against news stands. Newspapers are competing against each other and those that have the power to force google and facebook to give it preferential treatment will do well. Those without the power to strong-arm google and facebook will do poorly.

Newspapers biggest enemy are "authoritative sources" and the preferential treatment these "authoritative sources" get. Small and local newspapers are going to suffer as their top enemies ( NYTimes, WSJ, CNN, Foxnews, MSBNC, WashingtonPost, etc ) get the "authoritative source" special treatment on social media and the internet overall. This applies to other smaller outfits like huffpo, vice news, vox properties, etc. As they get squeezed more and more, they'll fold if they are independent or if they are owned by a larger parent companies, the parent company will either absorb them out of existence or slowly shut them down.

When the CEOs of Facebook, google, apple, etc all bend to pressure by "authoritative sources" and pledge to give them special treatment on their platforms, it spells doom for smaller competitors.

Look at how many nytimes articles we have here. As time goes on, it'll get worse and worse. The diversity of news, thought and speech online is slowly being destroyed by a handful of state backed news companies.

Apple, Google, Facebook, etc are each worth hundreds of billions of dollars. NYTimes is worth a fraction of that. Yet the nytimes is able to bully these massive tech companies. Strange huh?

How much would "special treatment" on facebook, google, apple, etc be worth? Tens of billions? Hundreds of billions?

Imagine you had a business and you could force google, apple, facebook, etc to show your product to customers first . How about you could get them to only show your product. How much would that privilege be worth?

</comment><comment><USER25> Say they get their cartel, and negotiate a link tax of a penny per link or whatever. How does that play out?

Will Google and Facebook drop news altogether? How much would that harm them? Do they just do a deal with Reuters and AP?

Say they drop news altogether. Does that just boost the popularity of aggregators like reddit with less than a billion monthly active users? Does it really change anything for the newspapers?

<comment><USER26> > Say they get their cartel, and negotiate a link tax of a penny per link or > whatever. How does that play out?

We don't have to speculate! It happened in Spain.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9f7fmj/this_is_how_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9f7fmj/this_is_how_google_news_looks_like_from_spain/)

Google shut down their news product in Spain. Full stop.

<comment><USER25> Did Facebook do the same? Did they have to actively prohibit users posting links? It seems odious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> No but they need one to do so _while refusing to evolve_. Let them die. Let them be replaced. Humanity will produce something better.

</comment><comment><USER28> You would think that an article on Politico about the effect (or not) of Google/Facebook on ad revenue for newspapers would at least have a disclosure that Politico makes money from ad revenue.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sorry, a little off topic, but I wonder how partnered publishers are doing financially with Apple's new News+ service. I am somewhat surprised to find myself cheerfully paying $10/month for spending perhaps 90 minutes a month reading material there. I assume that Apple is giving about 70% of the prorated proceeds to publishers and keeping about 30% for themself.

I sometimes contribute to The Guardian but the. Aridity in News+ is fun.

</comment><comment><USER30> Meh, if Major League Baseball gets a special anti-trust exemption, I think the newspapers are at least as deserving. A vigorous free press is a rare and valuable thing, and we'd be fools to give that up in favour of Googbook-bait listicles.

<comment><USER31> Why do you think newspaper cartels will give you a vigorous free press? Historical evidence suggests that is not the case.

<comment><USER32> A very valid point. And yet, newspapers' primary competition today is not other newspapers.

<comment><USER9> Then what is it?

<comment><USER32> Other sources of news - radio, TV, and the internet. And other sources of commentary - radio, TV, and the internet. And other sources of advertising - radio, TV, and the internet.

Newspapers aren't in the _paper_ business. They're in the _news_ business, and commentary business, and they're really in the business of finding ways to get you to see advertising.

[Edit: Newspapers mostly don't compete with other newspapers because almost all cities are down to only one newspaper. Their only "paper" competition is USA Today.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does local TV news experience any of the same troubles as written media? Video news doesn't seem to be struggling.

<comment><USER34> Local news TV has been infamously consolidated to conglomerates and often clearly makes a mission to do as little journalism as possible - <USER2> overreporting one story in development with speculation and forgetting about the actual resolution.

You do see some good work in complaints forwarding "name and shame" occassionally where they pressure for resolution about bueracratic failures and dodgy businesses fixing the situation as it is the easiest way to make the problem go away.

<comment><USER35> It's worse than that. A significant portion of of American "local" news is actually just parroting Sinclair Broadcast Group which is a national group trying to push right wing opinion.

See this for a chilling example [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't see newspapers as being competitors to google and facebook. newspapers create content and google and facebook distributes it. this law doesn't seem to be aimed at balancing this relationship. EDIT: I think Facebook and google should pay for each click through to a newspaper

<comment><USER34> If they aren't making money through clickthroughs somehow (subscriptions, ads, or donations) they are frankly doing it wrong and deserve to be out of business because they don't know what the hell they are doing.

Is there any field where you need to pay to advertise someone else? That is abject insanity even if it "worked" it would be a death spiral as short term gaind peter out as nobody wants to mention you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Google takes about 75% of all ad revenue flowing through their platform? And I thought Apple had a sweet deal taking 30% of app store revenue.

<comment><USER38> Where are you getting that number from?

<comment><USER37> Just a misunderstanding, I suppose, of the meaning of "Google and Facebook take 76% of all advertising revenue."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Given that Google and Facebook are natural monopolies, what newspapers are demanding seem fair to me. The law just levels the play field. The alternative --breaking up these Internet giants--isn't in the public's interest and probably won't work.

<comment><USER17> Why wouldn't breaking up Google and Facebook be in the interest of the public?

<comment><USER39> Because people value the convenience of Google's integrated services. Market fragmentation is unnatural in the software world. Generally, the winner takes all in a given category. If we break up Google, one part of it will end up vanquishing the other parts.

<comment><USER17> > People value the convenience of Google's integrated services

So, short-term convenience should prevent us from breaking up a monopoly? The long term benefits of having a competitive market far outweigh the inconvenience of having to use tools from separate companies, or buy ad space from separate markets.

> Market fragmentation is unnatural in the software world

Oh yeah, that's why we have one text editor, one operating system, one browser, one CMS, one type of forum software, one chat app, one web framework, etc. Right? Having a fragmented market with tens, if not hundreds of competing solutions would be weird.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever - <AUTHOR> https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-09-01-the-most-obsolete-infrastructure-money-could-buy/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original HN thread from 2 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153132)</comment>