Turkish GSM networks currently play a message of the President on any phone call - <AUTHOR> Turkey reached another milestone of propaganda thanks to the total control of the communications.
Right know when you make a phone call using your mobile phone, before ringing starts citizens are forced to listen to 10 seconds voice recording of the president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Here is a demonstration: https://twitter.com/sendika_org/status/886343590208835584
Here is a Twitter search that will provide you with many more videos showcasing the issue: https://twitter.com/search?f=videos&vertical=default&q=erdoğan%20telefon&src=tyah
Here is a report by BBC(Turkish edition): https://twitter.com/bbcturkce/status/886351634888085505
The message is about the anniversary of the unsuccessful coup attempt believed to be orchestrated by Gulenists(previous allies of the president, currently branded as Terrorists  ) that took place on 15.06.2016, claiming the lives of more than 200 civilians and led to uncontested power grab by the President.
Right now Turkey is one of the most hostile countries for the journalists. Wikipedia is banned since a while. <comment><USER3> "As president, I send congratulations on the July 15 National Day of Democracy and Unity and wish the martyrs mercy and the heroes (of the defeat of the coup) health and wellbeing,"

Source: [https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/36394050/mr-president- erdo...](https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/36394050/mr-president-erdogan- voice-message-surprises-turkey-mobile-users/#page1)

<comment><USER4> Actually I m glad I don't make too many phone calls, (who's using their smartphones for making calls) but this type of "call injection" may annoy similar to Ads-gone-insane recently on the web. That happens because after the Gulen Islamists' coup d'Etat faction killed around 250 civilians and wounded 2500 civilians( _mostly_ ) last year during the coup attempt - the voters for the main party feel too emotional during the anniversary of the event. Ironically AKP voters had sympathy for US based cleric Gulen who calls himself the Imam of the Universe and embedded thousands of his sect members in police, army etc in past 40 years especially accelerating in the past 15 years.

I guess and hope in a couple of years - things will be normalized.

<comment><USER5> Are you in fact Turkish?

(HN: If he is, maybe he shouldn't be downvoted so hard… aren't you at least curious to hear from laypersons there without punishing them for not seeing things the way we do? Hear, converse, leave with greater understanding)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is something equally insane happening on the Turkish internets right now.

At least two major mobile operators / ISPs are injecting JS into web traffic to display pop-up ads / Youtube videos on the lower right corner of every web page. The videos "commemorate" last year's events on July 15 in a language that is, to put it mildly, thorougly in line with Erdogan's ideology, and make a point of offering free data and phone credits throughout the 3-day commemorations being held.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I've noticed the injected video my ISP, Turkcell Superonline. Only works with sites with no HTTPS/HTTP->HTTPS redirection since they can't proxy sites with SSL.

Interestingly, I don't get the Erdogan's message on my cell. My friends tried calling me last night to hear the message, they don't hear it when they call me either. Could be related to me using my networks -paid- call ring tone customising app.

<comment><USER8> Back in 2013 the Turkish CA (TURKTRUST) enabled phishers to spoof Google. Given the current situation, finding someone who tries to mess up the certificates should not be a surprise.

> [https://security.googleblog.com/2013/01/enhancing-digital- > ce...](https://security.googleblog.com/2013/01/enhancing-digital- > certificate-security.html)

> [https://www.wired.com/2013/01/google-fraudulent- > certificate/](https://www.wired.com/2013/01/google-fraudulent-certificate/)

<comment><USER9> Some time ago Wikipedia has been banned in Turkey because the government didn't like a couple of pages about its involvement in the Syria civil war. (I don't have references handy but you can find easily with Google)

In the past couple of weeks I noticed the a number of ISPs (for sure Turkcell for mobile and Türk Telekom for land lines) started injecting a wrong certificate, I guess to MITM the communication.

The certificate is of course wrong (it is both untrusted and the domain name is wrong) so the browser will notice this and block the access, but I'm surprised that I haven't seen any discussion about this online

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a additional level of scary allow people to opt out but record who they are and compile a list. Use the list to deny them services or imprison when the next overthrow is attempted."You've been protesting and we noticed you blocked messages from our glorious leader... clearly a candidate for the labor camp"

<comment><USER11> Ouch. It's terrible when guys like this find guys like you to work for them :)

<comment><USER12> But someone else would have done it anyway.

<comment><USER13> Ah, but you see, you were the one who actually did do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Even if you stop watching TV, reading newspapers and following the political people on social media and avoid discussing political news with people, you can't escape from him and his followers.

They will force you to believe what they believe and if you don't, they will flag you and also make you listen their leader no matter what you do to avoid their propaganda.

Even though I believe that the leaders of Gulenist group did the coup attempt and are terrorist, Erdogan gave this power to them and yet acts like he's not responsible from all these shit.

<comment><USER15> > Gulenist group did the coup attempt

Has the government provided convincing evidence of this? I know Gülen was immediately accused despite not being in the country, but I don't know of any evidence of his audience being involved beyond Erdoğan not getting along with the guy, which automatically makes any opposition sympathetic to him.

<comment><AUTHOR> AFAIK the evidence is that well known civilian Gulen affiliates were caught in military bases and armoured vehicles on the coup night but a concrete evidence of Gulen himself giving the orders do not exist. A bit like the story of the Russian military personnel in Ukraine(like everything points to Russia but Kremlin denies any involvement and claims that the caught soldiers were on a vacation in war zone).

If you want to read more about the subject, here is a nice write up by pro- Erdogan, liberal, non-islamist(yep, they still exist) Turkish jurnos: [https://medium.com/@15thJulyCoup/who-was-behind-the-15th- jul...](https://medium.com/@15thJulyCoup/who-was-behind-the-15th-july-coup-in- turkey-19f75a5771c5)

<comment><USER16> As someone outside of Turkish politics: how is it even possible to be liberal and pro-erdogan?

I can see why someone might like the guy or think he's somehow good for the country, but it seems, to an outsider, that he's 100% incompatible with liberal values.

<comment><AUTHOR> Erdogan came to power thanks to the support of the liberals. He had their support because before Erdogan Turkey wasn't a liberal democracy and Erdogan actually had very progressive agenda compared to the hard core secularist establishment. That's how he had the support of the EU and USA liberals too.

Turkey before Erdogan wasn't much different than today but with much less islamic sauce in the politics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Have anybody thought why you hear the sound(beeeep-beeeeep-....) when you make a call and from where it comes? Yes, telco can put anything there. Even more, I wounder why we do not hear some commercial Ad's every time we call. This would be in a spirit of current times...

<comment><USER18> Indeed! Verizon, a carrier in the US, actually made a product out of this by allowing people to buy what they branded "Ringback Tones" which would play some song or tune when someone called your number and you hadn't picked up yet. Not sure if it's still a thing.

<comment><USER19> They are. All those Emergency numbers you call to see if school is canceled are really ringback tones. It's how many people can call at once to receive the message w/o hearing a busy tone.

<comment><USER5> > how many people can call at once to receive the message w/o hearing a busy > tone.

And yet, by calling the same (typically toll-free) number, a call center's worth of support calls can be handled simultaneously.

Implementing this as ringbacks would not seem to be the only way.

<comment><USER19> Well, of course if you are willing to pay the phone company for multiple lines and install an expensive phone system you can waste a tone of money doing it other ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So so sad when a country devolves into quasi-dictatorship

<comment><USER21> Quasi?

<comment><USER22> At least it could be said that it could get worse.

<comment><USER23> But that's always true, even in North Korea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The number in the video is 112, which is Turkish-equivalent of 911 in the U.S.

<comment><USER25> even for 112? what if some real emergency happens (fire/robber/terrorism)? The caller has to listen to the recording?

That's lame.

<comment><USER26> That's some IT Crowd TV show level bizareness.

<comment><USER27> This.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's a lie like so much other stuff in the press. I'm currently in Turkey/Antalya, I've a cell-phone with a turkish Vodafone SIM card - I had several phone calls today - no president in my phone.

<comment><USER4> I haven't heard anything neither, although I tried hard to call everyone. Maybe some portion of prepaid tariff sim cards could be having it as they had some other types of ads in the past. Maybe you're right, could equally be "fake news".

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely not "Fake News". TRT(Turkish equivalent of BBC) reported that the stunt was organised by the BTK(Information Technologies Committee, govt. body): [http://www.trthaber.com/haber/gundem/gsm-operatorlerinin- abo...](http://www.trthaber.com/haber/gundem/gsm-operatorlerinin-aboneleri- erdoganin-surprizi-ile-karsilasti-324605.html)

<comment><USER4> The reason I was suspicious is that your post read more like a basket case for dramatization propaganda including "total control of the communications", "wikipedia", "journalists". Between 2005-201x, When Gulenists were embedded in every institution, and our fake "liberals" were cheering - people used to be afraid to make phone calls as they were recording and posting mobile conversations by everyone on their "liberal" media. Many businessmen used to apply to them, for tweaking the judicial system.

But I guess, the BTK guy, went too far to put the 10sec celebration message of the president to celebrate the official national public holiday. Just FYI - <USER2> prepaid tariffs there's already some kind of ads by mobile operators.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't want to bring the classical Turkish political debates to HN. I will briefly say that Turkey actually had really good progressive years under AKP right until they teamed with the Gulenist and begin arresting people for the Ergenekon&Balyoz. Turkey before Erdogan was also not short of imprisoned journalists and intellectuals, that's why liberals were eager to give Erdogan a chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why are they a NATO country again

<comment><USER30> Here is why: Half of the population wants to be part of the Western world. They believe in secularity and many other Western ideals. That's how Turkey became a close ally to US, part of NATO and almost became part of EU. Because this half had the control and the other half previously mostly lived in villages and wasn't interested in power. Then, as they moved to cities and as they became influential, the other half of the population took over the country and started applying middle eastern and Islamic ideals instead. And, they have so much ambition and hatred in them. They are ready to replace the democratic republic with a new Ottoman Empire that will probably be similar to Iran.

Expect West to kick out Turkey from NATO or Turkey to leave NATO soon since the islamists see west as evil.

<comment><USER31> > Expect West to kick out Turkey from NATO or Turkey to leave NATO soon since > the islamists see west as evil.

I don't think so. Unfortunately, ethics often play a less than significant role in international affairs like this. Just look at the dealings the Western world and the US in particular have with a backwards, medieval state like Saudi-Arabia that more or less openly supports Islamic extremism.

Turkey is a strategically important region, not least because with Bosphorus it guards access to the Black Sea. From a geopolitical point of view the "West" couldn't possibly want Turkey to align with another bloc or another powerful country.

<comment><USER32> You do realize that without Western support current Saudi government will fall victim to internal opposition, which is much more fundamentalist and is not significantly different from ISIS, right?

<comment><USER31> I'd say that'd remain to be seen. ISIS essentially is a doomsday cult. A fundamentalist state like that isn't sustainable in the long run.

Make no mistake though, the Western world doesn't prop up the Saudi government out of moral reasons. They do this because of Saudi-Arabia's significance to the oil economy. The House of Saud in exchange complies with the economic - and to some extent - political demands of the Western world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What exactly is he saying? Can someone translate?

<comment><USER34> Would like to know as well. Not a single comment on Twitter or here has the translation.

<comment><USER35> I am Persian/Azeri. I know a little bit of Turkish too. I provide you with a little bit of translation until official translation will be available:

"... congratulation for our Democracy and our national day, we want compassion for our mythers from God. I want health and prosperity for our ...[I couldn't understand this part]"

This basically kind of congratulation/propaganda message.

p.s. My Turkish is not reliable.

<comment><USER36> > p.s. My Turkish is not reliable.

But worth mentioning that Azeri is a Turkic language, and probably the closest major relative to Turkish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wonder how would things have been if Turket had been accepted to EU 10 years ago. Would it have helped?

<comment><USER38> Yes, almost certainly. They wouldn't have had to become a member back then. All that was needed was a realistic path to membership.

Instead, some influential EU leaders basically said "It's never going to happen", sometimes under pressure from their countries' right wing. Not because Turkey was economically too far behind, or because of concerns with the rule of law, but simply because a sizeable portion of EU populations objected to non-christians becoming part of the EU.

Nobody knows what could have been, and the current situation shows that turkish democracy was rather weak all along. But it's important to remember that Erdogan started out as a moderate, who sought nothing more than approval from the EU, and only turned to the dark side after repeatedly being humiliated. It's possibly one of largest mistakes made in recent history.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi The biggest mistake of the EU has been accepting too many countries in, not too few.

For an Europeanist it's desperating to see how the UK (now to be gone) and Eastern European countries have always blocked policies of further integration.

If Turkey were in and with veto power, the EU would be able to do practically nothing, as the cultural and political differences are huge. The EU would probably be on the verge of breaking up now, or would have already broken up at the Greek crisis.

And the story of the "moderate" Erdogan turning an authoritarian dictator after being "humiliated" sounds extremely naive to me. The things he is doing are not the work of a humiliated moderate. They are the work of an authoritarian for whom the alleged humiliation was a very convenient excuse to stop pretending to be a moderate.

<comment><USER39> Depends on where you put your counterfactuals. It is true that once countries are in the EU, the EU has almost no leverage. That happened with Bulgaria and Rumania.

If you imagine a world where Turkey was in the EU, you might as well through in some mechanisms for more leverage on existing members?

<comment><USER40> > Rumania

It's spelled Romania.

<comment><USER39> Sorry, been playing too much Diplomacy. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_\(game\))). They use the old spelling for historical flair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Dexter Palmer's 2016 novel _Version Control_ had imagined something rather like this in a near-future United States, where phone calls and video screens would occasionally be interrupted by a message from the president.

I had thought it was inventive and evocative, but sort of unrealistic.

I was wrong. Yikes.

<comment><USER5> So easy to imagine Trump doing this, too. He's already made much ado of needing Twitter to be heard properly instead of going through the "fake" (mainstream) news media. Imagine Twitter no longer feels like enough of a megaphone to the egomaniac. Is there any law against pressuring telcos to do this? Would he care if there were? Would he even be challenged if it came in response to a national emergency?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's funny to see that Erdogan wants to battle every European country and at the same time he asks us to visit Turkey.

His power comes from the wealth and investments of Western companies, so the people had it good in the past. But this is currently changing. Its 'just' a waiting game.

<comment><USER4> > His power comes from the wealth and investments of Western companies,

That's not true - though wished for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> When people voted, they were tricked into thinking somehow they were voting against the West instead of installing a dictator for themself

</comment><comment><USER44> Use a VPN to stop this happened again. Such as Yoga VPN, Bestline VPN, Super VPN...

</comment><comment><USER45> What does this say in English?

</comment><comment><USER46> This is 100% normal for these types of situations.

<comment><USER5> Regardless of whether you are being sarcastic or not, you aren't really saying anything informative or provocative; this is probably why you are being downvoted</comment></comment>


FunAdvice/MyYearBook acquisition emails (TechCrunch BCC'ed) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/30/i-wish-more-people-bccd-us-on-their-confidential-acquisition-emails/

<comment><USER2> So Michael Arrington was cc'ed on a sensitive acquisition e-mail where, presumably, only one of the parties has agreed that the information should be public. And not even explicitly so. And he chooses to publish it directly on Techcrunch....

That's despicable, and not exactly good for his reputation.

<comment><USER3> I know it's fashionable to bash Arrington on HN, but I'm willing to take the karma beating and say this: couldn't the MYB CEO have requested the FunAdvice CEO submit to a confidentiality agreement for this specific reason?

Here's another, potentially more-provoking one: Isn't this what "good business" is all about? Manipulation of your opponent? Using what you can to generate PR buzz? "I'm not being a jerk, I'm just doing good business."

Please do not treat this post as a testimony of my own values.

<comment><USER4> Good business is treating your colleagues with respect (even if you secretly want to crush them). You can be sure that Geoff Cook will never, ever, ever do business with Jeremy Goodrich after this display of unprofessionalism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the move to B'CC Techrunch and the move to send a blind acquisition offer off of "inferences" are equally stupid and one action might deserve the other.

</comment><comment><USER6> If he really wished all startup founders would do this, he wouldn't publicize it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just goes to show you, any time you talk to someone in the media, do so knowing that it might just end up published

</comment><comment><USER8> Also, the offer was super-cheap: Acquire a site with 1M uniques per month for $125K in cash (plus the same amount in highly volatile stock).

That's barely a 6 months of salary for the founder. Frankly, it's insulting. Even YC offers you a better valuation, and that's before you have any traffic :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Jeremy Goodrich will create lot's of traffic with this one.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ok so - morality aside - is $4200 a month in revenue worth $125k?

<comment><USER11> 2.5x revenue isn't bad, if that's how the math actually works out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone want to take a guess at how much free traffic and users were obtained by all 3 sites from this PR move?

<comment><USER13> Honestly, not much.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: UX Books / Wait for revised/updated or buy now? - <AUTHOR>

As a developer/designer, I'm trying to get a better understanding of UX design. To get started I wanted to dive into some books like "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug and "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman.
When I checked on Amazon, I noticed that both of these books have a revised/updated versions coming out within the next two months. Does it make sense to wait and look towards other authorities on the subject? or are the the "current" editions worth jumping on right away?
Thanks for any help on the matter. I know there are a ton of books on the subject, but my searches keep leading me back to these two authors. If anyone has other authors/books/blogs that they can recommend that would be amazingly helpful too. <comment><USER2> In the forward of my copy of Design of Everyday Things, the author points out that he could have used computers and mobile devices as but the examples he provides gave me a much deeper understanding of design. That being said, i still plan on buying the new edition because of the new chapters, brand new examples and ideas on implementation that may be more helpful to a dev-signer like yourself.

Other useful resources

[http://robertlenne.com/requiredreading/](http://robertlenne.com/requiredreading/)

Universal Design Princples [http://www.amazon.ca/Universal-Principles-Design- William-Lid...](http://www.amazon.ca/Universal-Principles-Design-William- Lidwell/dp/1592530079)

Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love (great for teams) [http://www.amazon.ca/Inspired-Create-Products-Customers- Love...](http://www.amazon.ca/Inspired-Create-Products-Customers- Love/dp/0981690408)</comment>


Spinach Leaf Transformed into Beating Human Heart Tissue - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/human-heart-spinach-leaf-medicine-science/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fb20170325news-spinachheart&utm_campaign=Content&sf65838089=1 <comment><USER2> This is brilliant.</comment>


This is why you don't piss off programmers - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=5389687&page=1

<comment><USER2> I sure hope he returns to Leichtenstein and convinces them to lock him in the securest jail they have, because by now I'd imagine the Mafia (and worse, the Russian Mafia) have a price on his head.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if that's an accurate story title.

If the server room were duct-taped up, it might be funny. But burning a CD to give tax avoiders a bad day because you are pissed at your employer, just not the same.

</comment><comment><USER4> So _that's_ why we pay so much... Once the govt collects the billions in back taxes from these rich people, surely they'll have enough $$ to drop taxes for the rest of us (USAians, at least) and still pay the bills.

Wait, isn't that how it works?

</comment><comment><USER5> Hooray

This SERIOUSLY made my day.

Wish I could buy him a beer, dinner, a "massage" ;) at one of the local places (it's legal here) if he is so inclined, a big bag of chips AND a big bottle of Mountain Dew . . .

I salute the man.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For years, the LGT Bank in the tiny European principality of Liechtenstein, tucked between Austria and Switzerland, has been regarded as a safe haven for wealthy Americans trying to hide their money from the IRS. It helps that the reigning prince there, Hans-Adams II, and his family own the bank and strictly enforce the country's bank secrecy laws.

"Liechtenstein is regarded as one of the most secretive places in the world," said John Christensen of the London-based Tax Justice Network.

But all that changed when a disgruntled computer technician at LGT, Heinrich Kieber, downloaded all the names and secret accounts on to two CDs and turned them over to tax authorities in the US and Europe.</comment>


HN: Like playing Go? Review my new site. It was a "weekend hack." - <AUTHOR> http://go.davepeck.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to check it out. This was a "weekend hack" for me -- really, two weekends since I implemented Ko enforcement and a few other requested features the weekend after the original code was written.

I wrote more about "weekend hacks" here: <http://davepeck.org/2009/01/26/weekend-hack-1-go/>

The project is an open-source AppEngine application. The source code is up on GitHub; it is released under the AGPLv3. This was a hack, so don't expect the world's finest code base! <http://github.com/davepeck/appengine- go/tree/master>

Please send your suggestions (or, better, patches) my way. Happy Go!

<comment><USER2> Can you explain the part about entering email addresses?

<comment><AUTHOR> This version of Go is played by correspondence. Email or twitter is required. There are no "accounts" on go.davepeck.org -- just people playing the game via their preferred contact mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice work! It's great to see a fellow go-playing hacker on HN. I'm the author of EidoGo (<http://eidogo.com/>, <http://github.com/jkk/eidogo/tree/master>), which is JavaScript-based, open source, and has features like branching and labels. Feel free to steal any of my JavaScript; I'll certainly be taking a peek at yours :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I played with your site and it's really nicely done. Following your project on GitHub now. Good to know about this; I've discovered a few other Go+GitHub types in the past few months. Cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> can you include a match making service?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great idea!

To explain the history a bit: I originally wrote this site so that I could play with my friends, whose email addresses (and twitter accounts) I know. That's why there are no accounts on the site itself right now. (And as I've mentioned elsewhere, accounts starts to look more like other services I know, so I'm less excited about going that direction.)

The site has enough traffic these days that I could imagine a match-making service that didn't require an account; you just get in line and give a rough sense of how good you are, and when a match is found both players get an email (or twitter) and away they go.

Does this sound like a good feature? I think it would be easy to add!

<comment><USER5> I'd recommend giving a quick overview of the Kyu/Dan ranking system and then asking people in line to estimate their rank if they don't know it.

<comment><USER6> It would be slick if it figured out their approximate Kyu/Dan from watching them play. Not sure how you'd do that.

<comment><USER7> perhaps by having them play against gnugo a few times at varying levels?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like a fun site. Anyone want to try playing me? My email is firstname.lastname@example.com. I'm a 5dan (aga) but I haven't played for years.

<comment><USER9> Oh God, I'm at best a 17 kyu and haven't played in a while either. Well, let's change that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In addition to the Ko rule, you might want to consider handling the other repeated postion situations like at:

<http://www.britgo.org/rules/molasses.html>

Rules vary for these, though. See:

<http://www.britgo.org/rules/compare.html#rept>

The British Go Association has a great site in general, with good info on computer and online Go playing resources.

</comment><comment><USER11> Could you put cursor:pointer on the clickable parts of the board?

<comment><AUTHOR> I went back and forth on this.

In the end I decided that cursor:pointer was most desirable for links, and that on the board I just wanted the standard cursor.

Let me know if you feel strongly...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> First off, I love it that you made a game without flash. way to stick it to the man. I also have some javascript games on my site <http://kidbuilder.net>

To improve it: Why not add instructions? I'm not sure how to play. Also, The main page is just a little taller than the screen on my hp laptop. I had to scroll down to find the play link.

<comment><AUTHOR> Drat! I tried to be careful about the size of the main page so that you'd never have to scroll. What browser, and what screen resolution do you have? I will correct for it.

I definitely intend to add instructions to the site soon. I also want to add full-on interactive tutorials so that new players can learn the game. But... time! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a reason I should prefer this over <http://www.dragongoserver.net/> ?

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on your needs.

If you need any advanced features, or you want to play for rank, DGS is the place to be.

If, on the other hand, you want to casually play games with friends, my site is probably better suited to that. My site has (in my opinion) much nicer visuals & interface, but most importantly it is easy to play with anyone you like -- they don't need to have an account.

I am contemplating adding accounts and rankings in the future. But then I would stray into DGS territory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, this is drop-for-drop exactly what i wanted to make for chess, because i wanted to play with friends over email. I went as far as to write the valid chess move logic, I just never set up the web app. Cool stuff, thanks, i've been playing Go for 4 hours!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Chess like this would be a lot of fun, too. By all means, use whatever of my code is useful to build a similar chess service. (Note, though, that my Go service is under AGPLv3 which is a very restrictive/viral license.) Cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The site is gorgeous but the hidden navigation sucks it really needs some hints.

I thought the underlining for email was decorative until I read the comments here and fiddled about looking for Twitter options.

Some kind of tool tip might help perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER15> This is great! If it were possible to play against people I didn't know I would use it all the time. I've annoyed friends for years trying to get them to play.

I like toggable settings by the way.

<comment><USER16> The toggle settings are extremely annoying. The drop-down combo box is over 20 years old at this point. Still here because it still works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, good to hear this, and I was hoping to have discussion about the toggle controls.

There are only two toggleable options on the entire site that would be better served by a combobox. The rest are binary. The two in question both appear on the sign-up page and both are rarely used (based on the site statistics.) Therefore I opted for the less "correct" (and less usable) but more visually consistent option.

If all you're doing is spinning those two options around to test the site, then yes it certainly could be annoying. But my hunch is that for the average use case, it's just not a big deal...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This tool feels great. And the simple interface to start a game is a breakthrough in my eyes. I like and will use it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm a sucker for cool typography.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha!

As it happens, I watched Helvetica a few days before I built this site. I had in mind the typographer who was viscerally angry about Helvetica's popularity; he described Helvetica as "textual dung." I decided I disagree!

<comment><USER19> Too bad Safari doesn't ever kern: those Yo pairs end up garish, whatever the font.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this a Safari thing or a Webkit thing? I notice it in Chrome too.

<comment><USER19> Apparently it's a webkit thing, done for performance reasons. On IRC, it was claimed that when they last tried it, kerning slowed text rendering down 25% (because it makes it impossible to cache some glyph metrics or something), but that was apparently quite a while ago, and they said it "might be a good idea to test again".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Definitely impressive, but I think I prefer www.dragongoserver.net for the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> See my other comment about how I think my site relates to DGS -- I think they are complementary.

And can you give me specific reasons that you like DGS better, or is it a case of liking what you're used to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If anyone plays on KGS, I'm Blackthorn.</comment>


Yelp Creates Gofundme's for Local Businesses Without Permission - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/1243234941153898498 <comment><USER2> This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Yelp's entire business model is high-jacking small business' reputation and holding it hostage to extract money from the business. This is just more of the same. Steal a piece of the relationship between the customer and the business, then sell it back.

Yelp is a hardship on all small businesses they interact with. They can't go away fast enough.

I mostly ignore them, but they've somehow inserted themselves into Apple Maps. It's the only reason I refuse to use them over Google Maps and I hate it. Fuck Yelp.

/rant</comment>


Ask HN: Learning phone development - iPhone or Windows 7 Phone? - <AUTHOR>

I've put it off for far too long and I've decided I want to learn how to make phone apps. Now, the question is: should I learn for windows phone or iphone?<p>I'm interested in your thoughts on (a) what's easier/quicker to learn, (b) which will be more useful in the future, (c) which will offer a greater chance for earning income, and (d) whatever you thin is good advice... <comment><USER2> Windows 7 is non-existent in the market.

Learn Android, that's where the future is. The iPhone reigns supreme, at least for 2010, but after that it's an Android world.

iPhone is alright, but it's getting marginalized by Android pretty quickly. The prickly antics of its owner are not helping either. Steve Jobs is a visionary whose vision is just a tad bit too imposing.

You can develop for Android without having a phone handset, from any desktop OS, using any tools you damn like. Best of all, you can sell your software, any kind of software (that's isn't harmful) to users. On top of that, it's Free, and actually beautiful, both in appearance and API; the people working on it are reachable, and very much approachable. Not some corporate head- honchos locked in a lab. It's worked on by hundreds of companies, employing thousands of developers.

Android is the best thing to happen to computing in the last 10+ years; it will have the same impact for mobile computing as "LAMP" for server side, and "GCC" for systems programming.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agree on Android being the future, but oddly enough the very fact that you can develop using any tools you like creates a barrier to new developers. Too many options sometimes mean you spend too much time faffing about finding the perfect development environment and then jumping from one to the other. The great thing about iOS is that there really is only one way to develop for it so you immediately just jump in and start writing software.

<comment><USER4> I agree to an extent, but I'm fairly new to the Android platform and I'm still using the Eclipse+ADT setup described in the official Getting started guide.

I've never been a fan of Eclipse, I used it a while back before moving to NetBeans for Java work, but for the work I've done so far in Android it works just fine and for the most part gets the hell out of the way - and when I want it to get in the way it usually has a wizard to help me out while I'm still green.

I think this is definitely good for new Droid devs, especially those that are new to programming in general - the books I've read, the online material I've read, and the official guides all have used the same development environment. So my opinion is that althrough you CAN use anything you want, you're guided towards the Elipse way unless you know what you're doing enough to work how you want to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Over the last few years Microsoft has had a history of late, me too products that ultimately go nowhere. I see no reason to believe that the Windows Phone will be an exception. Ignore it.

However you do have a real choice. Do you want to learn the iPhone or Android? Right now the iPhone has a much better organized marketplace. However Android is selling faster and is rapidly gaining market share. It is unclear which will win in the long run. (I personally prefer Android's chances, but it is close.)

One benefit to Android is that you'll be on a much more standard computing platform. So if you decide that you want to move out of phones, you'll likely find C++ and Java to be more employable than Objective C.

My belief is that both will be players for some time. So pick either one and learn it. If it turns out to be the wrong choice in the long run, you will be able to switch later. Sure, you'll face a learning curve. But your previous experience will help.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're used to writing Microsoft compatible software, WP7 will be easier, iPhone's the same for OSX, Android's probably a bit easier if you're happier in Linux land but I wouldn't know.

WP7 right now has a small market but isn't flooded with products. You have an opportunity with Windows Phone 7 to gain first mover advantage with your product that you won't necessarily have with Android or iPhone.

With iPhone, charging for your product, unless it meets a particular niche is unlikely to be viable in the long term. If you can make money from in-product purchases and can promote your product in a crowded market, iPhone is probably the way to go right now.

Android is gaining popularity and the question with Android isn't just phones but what else would you run the app on? (e.g. TVs)

Incidentally you have the same question with iPhone (iPad, iPod Touch and a possible future AppleTV store).

I would recommend that you look at the app you want to make. If you pick something fairly simple that exists in a niche without too much competition you can test the water for each. You might need to rewrite code, but you would be able to reuse algorithms and patterns in a large amount of cases.

</comment><comment><USER7> Disclaimer: I'm a current iphone developer so I'm obviously slightly biased.

(a) quicker/easier: I've programmed in .NET, and I would say Microsoft's development tools make programming very easy. If you have previous experience in Java or C#, Windows Phone 7 programming should be easier to pick up.

(b) more useful in the future: debatable but I don't see iOS going away anytime soon. No harm in learning both.

(c) greater chance for earning income: iPhone, no question. Windows Phone is definitely an unknown quantity at this point. If you want to make money right now, iPhone offers by far the largest market.

Regarding Android, while it's true that it is growing in marketshare compared to iPhone the app store is a bit of a mess. Rampant piracy, poor payment options, and lack of discoverability means that the App Store is still a much more attractive market than Android Market, at least for now.

Of course this could all change in the coming years, it's tough to predict the future. But if I were going to learn mobile programming, I would learn iPhone first, Android second, Windows third.

</comment><comment><USER8> Android or iPhone. Don't touch Windows 7. The media has completely fallen out of love with Microsoft, so by writing for Windows 7, you have a big strike against you if your app is the kind that would be eligible for media attention.

</comment><comment><USER9> Depending on what you need to do something like Appcelerator <http://www.appcelerator.com> might be of some use. Dunno if they are planning on Windows Phone 7 compatibility.</comment>


Jacob E. Goldman, Founder of Xerox Lab, Dies at 90 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/business/jacob-e-goldman-founder-of-xerox-lab-dies-at-90.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> It's really interesting to read this. I had no idea it was John Bardeen who was instrumental in setting this up. Who knows how the world would have changed with Zerox pulled the trigger on commercializing PCs.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is bigger news than anyone else's death in quite a while, at least in my mind.</comment>


Linode VPS Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.feross.org/linode-vps-hosting-review/

<comment><USER2> Referral links all the way through the post every time Linode is mentioned, not really cool.

It makes what might be an interesting post read as an advertisement, which lets face it, it basically is.

<comment><USER3> So you're proposing that affiliate links should be reserved to shaddy, useless articles wereas actually well written, useful articles should avoid it ? I understand the conflict of interest of course...

<comment><USER4> Opinion: This shadiness is not in having a referral link at the beginning of the article which seems to be the "accepted" way. The problem arises when almost every noticeable use of the word is a link and a referral code. Note probably not an automated replace but a conscious selection.</comment></comment></comment>


Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://cdn.loc.gov/service/mss/mss85590/099/099.pdf <comment><USER2> Setting aside the ideas for the plot, could games like Eve, No Man's Sky, or Elite: Dangerous accomplish the same thing if they used actual astronomical data?

<comment><USER3> They can't. In order:

Eve is a murder/capitalism simulator and has almost no physics in the first place. (There's 3-dimensional positioning, but you can fly through planets and shoot through other ships as much as you like; also the entire world is static.)

No Man's Sky is 90% an art piece with some added murder simulation.

Elite: Dangerous, also a murder/capitalism simulator, only unlike Eve it's more about the immediate visceral.

Notably all three of those pretend space ships are, like WW2 planes, subject to air drag, have a terminal velocity and have no automation on-board whatsoever, and astronomic physics aren't even considered in the first place. These games are literally WW2 fan fics in "space". (Or really, ether, as old- timey people thought of what's between planets.)

If you're looking to teach physics and astronomics, Kerbal Space Project does that quite well, even though it also ignores relativity and speed of light considerations.

More importantly, none of these games are even remotely able to tackle the topic of civiliations and saving them, which won't be done with a gun, but with the word. The closest thing i can think of to that are the Mercenary games: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary_\(video_game\))

Edit: Not saying that the three mentioned are bad games, just that they can't be taken seriously as space games.

<comment><USER2> You're assuming the goal is to teach astrophysics, rather than astronomy. If we're just trying to teach the space equivalent of geography, the physics and plot don't matter so much as the physical locations and nomenclature.

<comment><USER3> Astronomy is the study of the laws of stars, not of their names, regardless of how close "nomy" sounds to "name".

[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy)

Additionally Sagan was most certainly conflating it with astrophysics, as is commonly done, and evidenced by his mention of "stellar evolutionary events".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive... This has to be different Seth MacFarlane than the one I am thinking of right?

<comment><USER5> Nope! He actually had a major role in producing Cosmos <[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395695/>](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395695/>) with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and also has a major interest in space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Carl Sagan was a very interesting man. I'm sure he would have loved this simple space game I made - [http://brainplex.net/space](http://brainplex.net/space)

It uses random points for stars, but tracking "the nearest few thousand stars" from Earth would be pretty simple.

I actually want to make a scientifically educational game. I want to make a game that demonstrates the concepts of relativity with accurate space travel at near light speed.

<comment><USER7> I recently spent some time working on exactly this, in 2D:

[https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids](https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids)

To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s)

I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting). Unfortunately, I never really figured out how to turn these into actual game mechanics.

<comment><USER3> Read the Star Carrier series: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Keith,_Jr.#Bibliogr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Keith,_Jr.#Bibliography)

It has a number of situations and warfare considerations regarding that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The question is how to design a home video game which would teach a great deal of astronomy in a context as exciting as most violent video games."

I'm curious as to what "most violent video games" he might be referring to? Asteroids?

<comment><USER9> I got lectured a bit by dad when I showed him a cool "violent" video game in 1987 or so. I think it was a C64 game, maybe Commando. He told me it was neat but he'd much rather see my brother and me creating things and learning. We would later leverage that little fact into our its-an-education-system arguments when we asked for an upgrade to a Commodore Amiga.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> More like a rough idea than full-blown design, but such a game could implicitly teach astronomy the way Balance of Power implicitly taught geography.

</comment><comment><USER11> FWIW, just recently read Sagan's Contact book, and found it really disappointing in terms of fiction-writing technique. The game idea sounds more like a screen-saver ... alas. In his home nonfiction niche, like Cosmos, he was great.

<comment><USER12> Really? I love it, because it's science fiction written by an actual scientist, one who knows how scientists talk to each other and who knows what the Fourier integral theorem is. The Soviet-American politics of the time in fiction form are also pretty interesting. My only complaint was that God in the digits of pi was a stoner cop-out, but other than that, I love it. I think his depiction of what would happen to humanity if we made contact was very believable.

Why are you so disappointed?

<comment><USER13> Really? I thought the ending was pretty great in that regard. It was a novel twist of grand revelation which I don't think I've seen used anywhere else.

<comment><USER12> Well, pi is almost certainly normal. That means that it stores all possible information (for example, the entire contents of the internet). We haven't proved normality of pi, but if we do, then seeing the face of God in the digits of pi is just the infinite monkey theorem. But this is mundane. You can also see them in the square root of two or in e.

I get that Sagan was trying to get the "numinous", but the tiniest bit of mathematical knowledge makes pi mundane, not mystical. If you want to make _me_ mystical with mathematics, oh boy, talk to me about the Gauss Bonnet theorem, the classification of finite simple groups, or the moonshine conjecture. But pi is pedestrian.

<comment><USER13> Conversely he did try to cover this with the statistics - the message was found much sooner in the sequence then the statistics would dictate were it random.

<comment><USER12> But we _know_ this is false. We have computed way more pi than he knew about when he wrote that.

Conversely, we also know that even with the amount of pi we have, we can already come up with any kind of pattern you could want to, by changing the base, by arranging the numbers in a different order, or by picking particular colours or whatever. In a sense, this is an application of Ramsey's theorem. We can find patterns in pi for the same reason that we can see patterns in clouds, or the Bible, or in constellations.

I still think it's cheap potheaded thinking that dilutes the whole "mystery" and "numinous" edge he was going for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting that even the author of the original work seems to put aside the point of the original work for a game adaptation. Contact is about the search for god(s) and higher powers and the human religious experience, and contacting extra terrestrials was the mechanism to talk about that.

<comment><USER3> That is open to interpretation. I adore Contact and i got nothing even close to religious out of it.

<comment><USER14> The movie focuses pretty heavily on a Christian or at least monotheistic God, and the book has some different depictions of gods and how humanity relates to them. Hadden is the most obvious: a maybe immortal man, living in the sky, who saves the plot with a deus ex machina.

I remember Hadden having built a theme park/commune in a jungle somewhere which had polytheistic and maybe sacrificial elements.

The protagonist discovers that existence is neatly ordered, down to the digits of pi.

It's not proselytizing, but it looks at how humans react to higher powers, whether they're called aliens or faith or gods. It's a skeptic's inspection of the humanness of belief and faith.

<comment><USER3> I didn't read the book, only watched the movie.

And i am saying quite seriously: Until i read the post above i did not see _anything_ religious in the movie. Whatsoever.

I do realize that this is highly likely to be due to being not an american and coming instead from a culture where religion is looked upon as at most a hobby, something a vanishingly small percentage of people spend time on and even less take seriously.

Thus: Interpreter matters. Whether Contact manages to touch on religion at all is highly dependant on the subjectivitiy of whoever watches the movie.

<comment><USER15> The religious aspect of the movie wasn't some deeply masked symbolism. It was right on the surface. The two main characters of the film were a scientists and a reverend who had multiple debates about faith and the existence of god. Then the climax of the movie is when their roles are reversed and the scientist is the one asking for people's faith to believe her without any physical evidence.

<comment><USER16> There's the evidence of her having recorded many hours of static after the pod fell for a few seconds.

<comment><USER17> Yes, the movie on the surface seemed to end on a note of ambiguity, but it in fact resolved in favor of science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I will always use the themes of first-contact, intergalactic civilizations, and video games to plug the excellent scifi novel _Constellation Games_ , by Leonard Richardson:

[http://boingboing.net/2013/02/20/constellation-games- debut-s...](http://boingboing.net/2013/02/20/constellation-games-debut- sf.html)

You may also know Richardson's other writing, such as the O'Reilly books _RESTful Web APIs_ and _RESTful Web Services_ , or the Python HTML-processing library _Beautiful Soup_.

Comparatively, _Constellation Games_ has more action and satire.

</comment><comment><USER19> Was I the only disappointed that the game play description didn't include having to use an "Ok to go!!!" audio command to start each mission?

</comment><comment><USER20> He basically describes Star Raiders (Atari, 1979). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders)

<comment><USER3> Star Raiders is one game in a long series of games that pretend space travel works like airplanes of the WW2 era. It's a very impressive game for the technology it was on, but doesn't convey any of the concepts Sagan was talking about or is known for.

<comment><USER10> I get the feeling that the original poster never actually played Star Raiders, a game in which all one does is blow up the enemy, occasionally pausing to chase the robot that delivers recharges from the starbases...

That said, 36 years later, it's still playable...

<comment><USER20> I did play it. That's why Sagan's description reminded me of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> would the Carl Sagan's estate allow his name to be used in a video game made with that idea?

"Carl Sagan's Contact" sounds cool

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me sorta of The Three-Body Problem.

</comment><comment><USER23> tangential, but spaceengine is awesome.</comment>


The Characteristics of a Bad Software Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-characteristics-of-a-bad-software-engineer/answer/Michael-O-Church?share=1

<comment><AUTHOR> _Hot arrogance is that of the "rock star" who can't work well with others, leaves scathing code reviews, and who changes APIs by the hour and doesn't bother to tell anyone because everyone else should consider themselves privileged to work with his hot-shit code. The hot arrogance pattern tends to have a manic-depressive rhythm to it: 16-hour code binges (producing buggy, undocumented code, generating a lot of technical debt but impressing middle managers by just-barely completing a lot of features)_

I feel like Michael and I have worked with the same people.</comment>


Hints on Programming Language Design (1973) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/73/403/CS-TR-73-403.pdf <comment><USER2> > [References'] introduction into high level languages has been a step > backward from which we may never recover.

I'm young and never lived through such turbulent times, but this thought struck me as the most disjoint from my reality. Programming without pointer indirection seems like cycling without legs; indeed high level languages often move the other way, abandoning value types altogether.

I'm not sure this has much to teach me about language design in the modern day, but I do appreciate the insight into the early history of these things.

<comment><USER3> Isn't what he's talking about C pointers, which let you mutate the memory location that's visible in the caller? Most modern languages don't let you do that, though object oriented languages let you work in much the same way by mutating the fields of an object.

As for functional programming, the use of pointers seems like an implementation issue. As far as the programmer is concerned, you're just passing around values. Now, part of what he was complaining about was implementation issues, but I don't think that was his only concern in the passage about references.

I think you're right that there's a disconnect between what he's saying and modern languages, but it's not because we've adopted the position he's attacking, instead we've gone a third way.

<comment><USER2> > As for functional programming, the use of pointers seems like an > implementation issue. As far as the programmer is concerned, you're just > passing around values.

This is fair if you're OK with time and space complexity being an implementation detail, but I'd wager that this is rarely true. The difference between an O(1) and O(n) destructuring, or an O(n) vs O(∞) size cyclic data structure, is not something I'd want to leave undefined.

<comment><USER4> Are there (non-contrived) algorithms where adding extra pointer indirection increases the complexity? I would say you could transform O(2n) into O(4n), and in practice this matters, but not O(2n) into O(2n^2).

<comment><USER2> It's the other way around - removing pointer indirection would ruin their complexities.

If a tree is an unshared value type (eg. there are no references), then a functional tree update is O(n). Using shared references, this is O(n²).

Cyclic data structures without pointers are of unbounded size.

De-structuring a type (X, Y) is O(sizeof(X) + sizeof(Y)) without pointers, but O(1) with.

Tons of examples.

<comment><USER2> > If a tree is an unshared value type (eg. there are no references), then a > functional tree update is O(n). Using shared references, this is O(n²).

I meant O(n) vs O(log n) of course. Not sure what happened there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As I was reading this I found intimations of

1\. Go - compilation should not be too slow and and runtime not to slow.

2\. Ocaml - special notations for certain operations e.g. A.+B</comment>


Antimatter experiment produces first beam of antihydrogen - <AUTHOR> http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/01/antimatter-experiment-produces-first-beam-antihydrogen <comment><USER2> High energy physics is one of the leading fields that drives scientific progress forward. Studying antimatter is particularly cool, because at the face value it is one of the most efficient ways to store energy (Basically 100% of matter gets converted to energy). Now if only we could figure out a way to cheaply produce it without relying on fossil fuels.

<comment><USER3> > _Studying antimatter is particularly cool, because at the face value it is > one of the most efficient ways to store energy (Basically 100% of matter > gets converted to energy)._

In theory, a black hole is also a 100%-efficient converter of matter into energy, via the Hawking radiation. A microscopic BH might radiate very large amounts of Hawking radiation. The bonus is that, unlike antimatter, you can make (or at least fatten up) a BH directly from ordinary matter, without spending energy as a prior step (anti-matter is energy storage, a black hole is an energy source - if you're willing to spend some dirt as "fuel").

Of course, the problem of storage is just as bad, if not worse.

<comment><USER4> I hadn't thought about black holes as an energy source. Cool idea. But where does the energy actually "come from"? With M/AM interactions, the M/AM is annihilated, which creates harvestable photons. Does the energy given off by a black hole come from the change in entropy from structured matter to unstructured Hawking radiation or something? It seems almost too easy if we can just feed any old matter into a black hole and get energy out...

<comment><USER5> The energy comes from virtual particles. You should think of it this way : anything has a certain chance of happening, but must follow conservation laws. Conservation of energy, conservation of mass, conservation of ... (the "real" conservation laws are more complex, but ... E.g. only mass+energy+entropy is constant, not mass, nor energy, nor entropy). But small, "short term" violations are possible.

Now imagine there are particle pairs that, when added together have zero mass, zero energy, zero ... These would pop into existence in pairs everywhere and be anihilated soon after. Same is true for triples, quadruplets, ... with different probabilities. Surprise : these particles "exist" (normally for very short times).

So particle a and particle b come into existence, both particles on a path that separates them from eachother. However, because opposite charges attract (and other effects related to other forces) they will fall back into eachother after a while, anihilating eachother and leaving nothing. These are generally referred to as "virtual" particles.

Except of course if something comes between them while flying on their path. This results in multiple effects, like the Casimir pressure, and hawking radiation.

The Casimir pressure is simpler. Suppose you have 2 straight plates, and you bring them close together. So close that these virtual particles have a good chance of impacting one but not the other. If the plates are metal, the particles will generally "merge" with it (like electrons). So a tiny percentage of the virtual particles between the plates become real.

This does not affect virtual particles that are not between the plates. So there is a clear differential between vacuum interactions outside of the plates and inside. This results in a massive pressure pushing the plates together, like removing gas particles in a container results in a pressure on the outside of the container (and, in an athmosphere of large molecules, if you move plates closer together than the size of the gas molecules, there will be a pressure that pushes the plates completely together).

Likewise, in black holes what comes between the particles is an event horizon. Event horizons "erase" quantum information, only the black hole as a whole has quantum information (the reason for is that black holes are physical, localized, manifestations of the end of time : they don't have an inside as far as anything outside the black hole can detect), no individual parts of a black hole have quantum state. So if an electron crosses the event horizon the charge of the entire black hole changes instantaneously, and the point charge of the electron disappears. That means the charge pulling the particles back together (assuming an e+ and e- virtual particle pair) becomes much more distant to the particle, and if it has enough speed and a convenient direction it will fly away from the black hole. Due to conservation laws the net result is that the black hole has eaten a somehow negative-mass charged particle, and the mass has decreased. A particle has been created outside of the black hole and is flying away to infinity.

The vast majority of these particles are photons of a specific frequency, and, surprisingly, the smaller the black hole, the larger the effect (and the higher the frequencies). So spaceships would have to carry "heavy" black holes to get a decent output and would have to "feed" the black holes to avoid exploding (millions of tonnes as least, and you have to shovel in matter at a rate of 10+ kg per second to keep it stable. Or you could reflect hawking radiation back in). And of course, large black holes have large inertia (plus : how do you hold on to one ? Electrical fields can do it, but it would have to be a field so huge it baffles the imagination ...).

A 1kg black hole would be converted into energy in less than a planck second by this effect and there is nothing, even theoretically, that can hold back that energy. Such an explosion might even do what people were "afraid" would happen with CERN's Higgs experiments and disrupt the Higgs field, causing a cascading conversion of the energy "powering" inertia into photons (the higgs field is something like a magnetic field that opposes all velocity changes in mass). If this were to happen, it would look one hell of a lot like a big bang.

<comment><USER6> Is there a similarly simplified explanation for why the black hole tends to 'eat' the negative-mass halves of the virtual particle pairs but not the (or at least more often than the) positive-mass ones? Just going by your explanation above, it seems just as likely that the positive-mass particle would be captured by the black hole, emitting the negative mass one, but since the black hole loses mass through this radiation, that must not be the case.

<comment><USER7> They're not 'negative mass' particles, they are anti-particles, which have the same (positive) mass as the normal particle, but opposite charge.

<comment><USER8> well by his definition they HAVE to be negative mass. Because when these particles unite, they end up having ZERO mass, energy, entropy etc. So all of their properties must be inverses of each other, including mass

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The lack of antimatter is an enduring mystery. And creating it is always cool. And I find it particularly fun to imagine anti-matter fusion plants producing anti-helium (more bang for your buck antimatter :-).

<comment><USER10> It thrills me that the Antiproton Decelerator is a legitimate thing that is at least as cool as it sounds. The need to slow particles down is obvious only in retrospect for me,which I'm a little ashamed to admit.

Add, too, that the acronyms are excellent.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" \-- H. Schopper

The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.

In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.

Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff. [...] Potential missing staff in some areas is a separate issue, and educational programmes are not designed to make up for it. On-the-job learning and training are not separated but dynamically linked together, benefiting to both parties. In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.

[http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse- stud...](http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-students-and- fellows-missing-staff)

An unsatisfactory contract policy

This will be difficult for LD staff to cope with. Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career

[http://staff- association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...](http://staff- association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-contract-policy)

Pensions which will be applicable to new recruits as of 1 January 2012; the Management and CERN Council adopted without any concertation and decided in June 2011 to adopt very unfavourable mesures for new recruits.

[http://www.gac- epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin...](http://www.gac- epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin42-en.html)

And a warning to non-western members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's two cool thing about this experiment: Normal Hydrogen atoms do respond to magnetic field feebly. They feel repulsion while travelling in a field gradient. Anti hydrogen has same property and that's how you keep it away from normal matter.

Second, they were able to produce 25 anti-Hydrogen atoms per hour. They measured total 80 of those. A long way from anti-matter weapons :).

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain where the antihydrogen winds up after being created? Is it annihilating with something?

<comment><USER14> Even extremely strong vacuums contain large amounts of atoms, and there are the walls of the vacuum chamber, of course. When an anti-hydrogen atom collides with any normal atom an electron will annihilate with the anti- hydrogen's positron leaving behind a negatively charged anti-proton which will fairly rapidly collide with a positively charged proton in a nucleus.

<comment><USER13> Wouldn't colliding with the walls of the chamber be extremely undesirable? That seems like it would create stress/damage in the chamber, and given how sensitive and expensive ALPHA is I'd imagine that they don't want to do that, right?

<comment><USER15> We must remember we're talking about a few _dozens_ of antiatoms here. The few gamma photons they turn into when annihilating are so utterly insignificant compared to natural background radiation it isn't even funny.

<comment><USER14> Not to "actually" here, but actually... while positron/electron annihilation results in just photons most of the time the situation with anti-proton/proton annihilation is much more complex. Initially you end up with a bunch of high energy pi-mesons (you can think about this as the quarks and anti-quarks pairing off, which isn't really correct since typically more than just 3 pi- mesons result from an annihilation, the typical number is about twice that). These then decay into showers of other particles. Photons, certainly, but also leptons/anti-leptons (muons and electrons) and neutrinos.

In terms of intensity you are absolutely correct though.

<comment><USER15> Thanks, yeah, for some reason I just considered the electron/positron case :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Study shows student attitudes toward free speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-chilling-study-shows-how-hostile-college-students-are-toward-free-speech/2017/09/18/cbb1a234-9ca8-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html?utm_term=.bbfde876a8f6 <comment><USER2> > A fifth of undergrads now say it's acceptable to use physical force to > silence a speaker who makes "offensive and hurtful statements."

> Results based on online survey of 1,500 undergraduate students at U.S. four- > year colleges and universities, all U.S. citizens, conducted Aug. 17-31.

That's pretty scary and surprising. But for reference/context it would be great to know how different this is over time or how different it is from the general US population. Is it just the case that university attendance is rising and the student attitude is shifting to match the general population's attitude?</comment>


Show HN: Forge - an easy way to take payments powered by balancedpayments.com - <AUTHOR> https://www.forgesimple.com

<comment><USER2> Congrats on launching! Really like the design and prominent example. One question: what's the advantage of this over Gumroad/Ribbon.co? Lower fees?

Also, you mentioned that this is targeted at a non-technical market. I'd definitely think about revisiting the homepage copy/selling points. To me it still feels targeted toward a developer audience. Perhaps a couple of use cases would be helpful to show off the types of businesses that would find Forge useful? (<http://goodsie.com> and <http://shopify.com> come to mind as decent examples of this).

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! As for the competitors in the space, we have some things in the pipeline that will differentiate us quite a bit. We needed to at least catch up, and we wanted to launch as soon as possible.

Now that you point out the homepage, I agree completely. That will be the first thing we fix up first. Thanks for pointing these out. Adding examples is a great idea. I think we'll end up showcasing businesses built on top of Forge.

Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this just another wacky advertisement? Why would people use this over the more useful/well-known ones like stripe or braintree payments?

Even if it's free, it's not really any better. Running the payment process of checking/validating cards and all that for your company individually that is primarily web-based may be more work and end up costing more.

<comment><USER4> Designer of Forge here.

We're aiming to solve the problems of the non-techie market. People who just want to sell something online shouldn't be worrying about payment gateways, payment processors or designing a checkout process. Forge handles that.

With Stripe, it's fairly easy for a programmer to write their own payment processing backend and build a checkout process for it. We're not trying to serve the people that have the development skills to use Stripe. We're going after the people who use PayPal Buy Now buttons.

<comment><USER3> This sounds like a good enough idea, but the front page kind of just doesn't tell any of how it's done, instead it just sort of has an example. Not sure how that is going to convey the "easyness" of it. That is my main concern really.

<comment><USER4> That's a great point. Perhaps a demo video explaining how it works would show the "easyness" of it.

<comment><USER3> That could be a better idea for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not convinced that a standalone payments system is useful for anyone: the type of person who couldn't get stripe or balanced payments to work most likely will leverage a turnkey storefront solution.

Forge needs to have connectors to storefronts (or build their own system and market the package). A payment system in absentia makes no sense.

<comment><USER4> I agree. It would be better if we had storefronts for these people, and product pages they can link to.

That's on our todo list.</comment></comment>


Acquisitions Done Right - <AUTHOR> http://venturefizz.com/blog/acquisitions-done-right

<comment><USER2> I think Google gets it right most of the time (GrandCentral, Applied Semantics, DoubleClick, Urchin), but there are some cases where they disappoint (e.g. Dodgeball, Picasa). Thankfully the successes outweigh the failures.</comment>


Show HN: Music for Squirrels – new iOS app - <AUTHOR> http://news.fiddlewax.com/post/84813502619/music-for-squirrels-heres-another-video-of

<comment><USER2> I found this section on the Fiddlewax about page very interesting:

>A Small Caveat: For now, the word "we" is used lightly since Fiddlewax is currently just a team of one. This is meant to disambiguate personal opinions/experiences from the company's perspective. We appologize if that causes any confusion.

<comment><USER3> I tend to use the royal We as well, but I'm not a good enough man to actually call that out anywhere.

<comment><USER4> We can confirm this tends to be a fairly standard practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Charge for this. Charge $0.99-1.99 and capitalize on the exposure you're getting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pricing is a tricky dance with apps.

For this one it's "free for the first week" as an experiment to see how things go.

So far there's been a lot of great feedback and interest in just a few days (yours included -- thanks!). I don't think it would have been quite the same with even a tiny $0.99 price tag. Hopefully the decision to start as free makes sense in the long run. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh man this is so much fun. I know nothing about music but I had a blast making a couple of terrible things.

[https://soundcloud.com/egypturnash/burning- bright](https://soundcloud.com/egypturnash/burning-bright)

[https://soundcloud.com/egypturnash/ants](https://soundcloud.com/egypturnash/ants)

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool, I like this. I need to tell all my squirrels.

</comment><comment><USER8> Man, I love it! I really miss RJDJ apps we used to make some funny music experiments time ago. This is the nearest thing I've found and better!

I would love if you add like plugins or something for more effects or harmonics, as in-app purchases of course!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is really cool! It looks amazing (and I'm only looking at the video). Sell it!

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool, I like it. I've messed around with Keezy app a bit and had a lot of fun, but always wanted the ability to loop. This seems to fill that gap. Nice work.</comment>


Facebook Flavored Ice Cream Is A Real Thing - <AUTHOR> http://www.psfk.com/2013/09/facebook-flavored-ice-cream.html <comment> vezzy-fnord Isn't brand loyalty wonderful?

Good on these two for exploiting one of the oldest cognitive biases out there. How's about a Reddit Sundae next time?</comment>


What is your current stack? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for what to pick up next, and would like to see what you are currently using for your web framework/language. <comment><USER2> I worked at 2 start-ups so here are the technology stacks:

The first company was started 3 years ago and our technology included: (1) Python-Flask (2) Postgresql (3) SQL Alchemy (4) JQuery for web (5) Objective C for IOS (6) Bootstrap

In my second company we wanted to take advantage of the growing ecosystem around Node. We also did not want to have to manage a DB, migrations, and server scripts. Our rationale is that we should focus more on the customer and turning the customer requirements into the product than on the technology working. We are an enterprise software company and so the less complicated the technology the better since we are not doing anything ground breaking from a technology standpoint. Our stack includes: (1) NodeJS/Express (2) Heroku (3) Angular JS (I don't get all the negative comments about Angular lately because it works fine for us) (4) Lodash (Javascript utilities) (5) S3 - static file storage (images and files) (6) Jquery (7) Bootstrap (8) Firebase (9) Angular Fire (to connect firebase with angular)

Using our current backend, we were able to build the SAAS product in about 1 month with only myself as a developer instead of 2-4 months that might be required if we had used the previous technology stack. Firebase, Angular, and the Node ecosystem really helped make the coding much faster than before.

<comment><USER2> In my opinion, web technology has become so advanced that the technology for the most part should not matter as much. Unless you are doing something on the scale of Facebook or Google, your technology usually does not matter. Just choose the stack that you are most productive with. And some are more productive than others.

When choosing a technology stack I look to Southwest Airlines for inspiration. I might sound strange but more people should embrace the Southwest model. As an airline, they only have 1 type of plane and tries to keep things as simple as possible. So instead of building some of your products in Ruby, other parts in Python, and another part in Erlang; it is better to just stick with one or two core technology. The rationale behind this is to reduce context switching, reduce errors and bugs that occurs at the crack of technology systems, make it easy to train and onboard other people to your project, and make it easier for yourself to maintain it over the long run. My rule of thumb is that software is maintained and read more often than it is written so now I tend to take much longer to write software because I have to think about how people would read it. For every 2 days of coding, I spend about 1 day of refractoring and I do this religiously to keep the technical debt low.

<comment><USER3> I have recently been going the other direction from the "Southwest model".

It's on a case by case basis, but if it takes less time to learn and use a technology that is purpose built then I'll invest the time to learn / use something new. I find for some situations it's less time and effort to use the right tool for the job vs. trying to make one tool do everything.

<comment><USER2> So I by no means am talking about following the Southwest model religiously. There is always a tradeoff between over using a tool and having too many different tools in place. Ultimately you have to choose the right tool for the job. But more often than not, people tend to choose the trendy tools because they sound cool. Leave the experimentation to side projects where there is less risk involved and the codebase does not need to be maintained for years.

My general philosophy about software development is to keep things as clean and simple as possible -- and no simpler because then you wouldn't be solving the problem in the first place. So I am not suggestion that you over use (for example Jquery) to do everything in the web. What I am suggesting is to think about building software the same way that we build houses. You want to choose carefully the tools that will stand the test of time and not just the fad language or tools. For this I usually check out the community behind the software.

When I architect a software solution one of the parameters that I think about is how long will it take to get someone totally new to my technology stack up and running (and hopefully productive). Most people don't think about this deliberately and so a project might have legacy code that takes months for a new person to come to grip with. Imagine trying to recruit for this type of role. My general rule of thumb is to have the choice of tools/modules as standard as possible and aim for a 2 week preparation period for anyone to get acquainted with the code. For this reason when I use ExpressJS I stick with EJS rather than Jade. I still use CSS rather than Less or Sass (these are my personal opinion).

I also take this philosophy a step further by creating certain software patterns and try as many of the well tested patterns as possible. Thing brings consistency to the codebase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am using openresty,couchdb and jquery.

Openresty because it so much fun :) It uses lua which is a very pleasant language to work with (I love the idea of multiple return values from functions) and it built on top of nginx which is a big win for me since I always use nginx in front of my app server.

With openresty I can use nginx both as an app server and as a proxy. I think that if anyone is already using nginx they should look into openresty because it opens up so many possibilities.

couchdb because of it's ease of use. It has a simple http api that works well with openresty's `location.capture/capture_multi` capabilities. It has a server side javascript environment which can be used to validate data/render templates etc,the common js module system is very capable. It also gives me an excuse to have erlang in my stack, ready just in case.

jquery because it is reliable. The other javascript framework that I like is knockout js but I use it only when I need to have a complex client side logic and knockout js works well with jquery.

</comment><comment><USER5> If I do my own REST back-end: node/express or good old php. If I go no- backend: parse.com or firebase.com (different use cases). Front-end: BackboneJS and the usual mix (CSS, HTML5, Bootstrap, Jquery, etc) and I am looking into adding ReactJS to the stack.

Increasingly I am using more free/paid SAAS for services like file uploads, emails, storage, monitoring, etc. Not sure if we can call this approach a "stack" but surely it is becoming very relevant and it solves most requests I get. I guess it is also interesting to rapidly hack an MVP with such tools and if the thing picks up (traffic/user base) you can scale the services (pay more) or start programming them yourself, if the think flunks time/money was not wasted. It is also a big plus that these services play super nice with mobile native and mobile web, SDKs are always available. Maybe I am a wishful thinking hipster but somehow I feel this is the trend to follow.

<comment><USER6> > Increasingly I am using more free/paid SAAS for services like file uploads, > emails, storage, monitoring, etc.

Yes! I forgot to mention this in my answer.

For prototyping, Parse is great. I recently built something in an hour that would've taken me a day in the past.

When I get past the prototype, RDS, S3, and Dploy.io are also huge time- savers.

<comment><USER5> I surely will check out dploy.io, I was uploading static sites to AWS S3 through the AWS Console :(

<comment><USER6> There are actually a lot of solutions (cloud-based, as well as local/terminal- based) for this. I can't say that Dploy.io is the best, because I haven't used many others. I will say that it's "good enough" for me -- provides web hooks and allows rollback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Languages: Ruby / Clojure / JS

Frameworks: Rails / AngularJS / Cordova

DB: Postgres / Redis / Elasticsearch / Memcached / DynamoDB

Messaging: SQS

Plan on learning in the next few months:

More Clojure

Machine Learning

ReactJS (Hopefully a replacement for AngularJS / Cordova from above)

I've been picking things to learn based on reading programming books and observing trends. 7 concurrency models in 7 weeks, 7 languages in 7 weeks, and 7 databases in 7 weeks are all good places to start for finding something new to learn. As you can tell, I'm a big fan of the series as an introduction to a topic that can then be explored in more depth after reading.

</comment><comment><USER6> Depending on the frontend, I use either PHP or Node. Python is a better language and more enjoyable to code in, but I often pass my projects on to junior devs to maintain. It's a lot harder to find someone to take over a Python project than a PHP or JavaScript one. All the good Python devs seem to be gobbled up by larger companies.

I'm getting into Go now, but I'm hopeful Rust will become the language of the future. I'm desperate for a great type system in a web framework. Elixir is cool, but I don't think I could find anyone to work on it for me.

<comment><USER8> > _Elixir is cool, but I don 't think I could find anyone to work on it for > me._

You would be surprised! The Elixir community is growing quite fast. Come hang out on IRC in #elixir-lang on freenode sometime. Elixir also has the added bonus of the entire community more or less accepting Phoenix as the "go to" Web framework so Elixir doesn't have nearly the amount of web framework fragmentation of Go or Node.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Languages: C# / JS Frameworks: .NET / AngularJS / jQuery Database: SQL Server or SQLite if needed for a tiny system Tools: TeamCity / Octopus

Nothing too fancy on my end. I build standard CMS based websites at my day job using ASP.NET MVC. At home, I occasionally work with Django, but with all the news about .NET support across Linux I've put Python down and have been toying with writing C# on my Ubuntu box.

</comment><comment><USER10> My current stack:

\- Server: Node & express

\- DB: Mongo (using mongoose)

\- Frontend: Knockout.js using components (introduced in 3.2), Cordova when developing mobile.

\- Hosting (db, services): Azure

Pretty standard with the exception of Knockout.js, which I think is criminally underrated following the introduction of components in 3.2, especially given all the recent hype around component/module based separation of concerns. Also Azure, mostly because I get $150 free monthly from MSDN.

<comment><USER11> knockoutjs is something i loved to code. Althgh its long time now when I had a look. Does that still fire all bindings together?

<comment><USER10> If it's been a long time, you should definitely take a look again at components, which really feel like the thing knockout has always been missing.

All bindings are still fired upon applyBindings, but I haven't encountered issues here - it's still once on page load, and I can't imagine that it's much different than building the DOM initially using handlebars or react.

<comment><USER11> I would surely make time for KnockoutJS. But currently I have been following flux which is quite easy to implement althgh I am still not sure how it works with routing, 3rd party libs like some charts etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At work it is Scala with Spray, that is becoming now Akka Http. In Spray you have to write your our implementation / helpers for many things as Spray is quite minimal. Scala gives your type-safety, but sometimes it feels like too much typing (say, for prototype app). So for hobby projects I started to look at Clojure / Luminous and Elixir / Phoenix.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have joined a few startups and architected a few as well. I currently love one of the following two stacks, depending on the need:

GoLang -> Postgres -> React Meteor -> MongoDB -> Blaze

Of course, most of those are interchangeable. We use Redis for caching, Docker/Ansible for deploy, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Golang + Gorilla, running the built in Golang net/http web server on a Linode VPS. Frontend is just HTML/JS/CSS with assorted JS libraries like jQuery and Bootstrap. I use this for several side projects.

</comment><comment><USER15> My current development stack:

( During my day job ) Front-End: AngularJS BackEnd: ROR Database: Postgress

( For my side projects ) Android Development ROR Redis/Postgress/freebase and lots of reading about Material Design

</comment><comment><USER16> Plain ol' LAMP stack here (with some extra goodies thrown in - memcache, varnish, redis). You should use what you're most productive with, not the new, shiny thing of the day.

</comment><comment><USER17> Meteor. It's a fun, fast and modern web framework that uses javascript on both the server and client so it's easy to pick up if you already have web skills.

<comment><USER18> I've tried Meteor with a side project. I did manage to develop fast and the initial performance is ok. However I found the Meteor server runs slower n slower. I'm not sure why. I just assume it might have some traps or catches that I don't thoroughly understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Java - server side / GWT - client side.

<comment><USER20> Interesting. We used to use GWT for several projects, but ditched for new ones to simple Java backend and AngularJS. Now when I had to fix some bugs, etc it feels so unpleasant to work and kinda slow (for dev). Project still uses old GWT 2.5 since transition to new version & 3th party component replacement would cost too much.

Do you use modern super dev mode and latest GWT version? How this turned out? Are there 3th party plugins repository?

<comment><USER19> > Interesting. We used to use GWT for several projects, but ditched for new > ones to simple Java backend and AngularJS.

We would love to use lighter-weight technology but project currently is about 300kloc and we share code on the client and the server. It's just not the size of application which JS is good for.

> Do you use modern super dev mode and latest GWT version? How this turned > out? Are there 3th party plugins repository?

These are great. In 2.7 you can just refresh page and incremental compilation will do the job. It's almost like writing code in JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Angular, C#, Oracle, SQLServer is the legacy system. Angular, Clojure, CouchDB is the new one.

</comment><comment><USER22> Python / Django / Postgres / jQuery

Currently trying to learn iOS development with Swift.

</comment><comment><USER23> The most recent web work I've done was Haskell/Yesod.

<comment><USER19> Is it commercial project or hobby project?

<comment><USER23> Non-profit. snowdrift.coop

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Python, Django, Postgres, Jquery

</comment><comment><USER25> spring boot + mybatis in backend, ZK in frontend, it's for an company ERP extension app</comment>