Django for a Rails Developer - <AUTHOR> http://uswaretech.com/blog/2009/11/django-for-a-rails-developer/ <comment><USER2> For me the hardest thing about Django was comprehending that the 'View' is doing most of the work.

* urls point to views

* views do stuff. Perhaps hard, manly stuff. Perhaps involving models. Django views have hard, beefy beceps. They're awfully controlling.

* the view passes a dict of results to the template, which is sent as a response to the browser.

Once you get that, it's not so hard.

<comment><USER3> Actually, if you apply the MVC paradigm, the Django View is a mix of View and Controller. Admittedly a little confusing

<comment><AUTHOR> Hence, it is defined as MTV.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes I wonder if they renamed the pattern just to keep up the music theme...

<comment><USER2> Same here - MTC would have been simpler to understand for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> " _Why not create a 'templates' directoy and a 'base.html' either in project's directory or in the apps's directory, because creating the same templates directory and same base.html for every project is not DRY?_ "

There's nothing wrong with that. Even the djangoproject.com website does it: [http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/djangoproject.com/djan...](http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/djangoproject.com/django_website)

" _Why serving static files in development has to be a additional setup, as no developer wants to setup a server for serving static files, I am aware of 'django.static.serve' but still that is an additional setup, why not create a sample media directory and a url for the same in urls.py ?_ "

Read this: <http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jun/23/media/>

<comment><USER6> The question is, why not the framework create it automatically ? why one has to create it manually every time a project/app is created ? Atleast a default template directory and a standard base.html on a project level will reduce the repetitive work.

<comment><USER7> The question is, why use the framework to create the layout of project which happens to depend upon that framework at all? Instead, use a generic project templating tool to create the layout, then it's easy to choose alternate starting points depending upon what you need in your project. In Python, 'paster' is commonly used for this. It lets you create projects that depend upon TurboGears or Zope or Plone or Grok or even plain old Python projects which don't depend upon a full framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I work with Django for a living but the lack of init/buildout in a new project has always driven me a bit nuts, I guess it's one of my development pet- peeves.

I've _never_ had project that didn't need:

\- a project-wide templates/ directory \- media/[css|img|js] directories \- some kind of database setup by default \- contrib.admin (well, I created a form mailer once that had no admin)

Django seems to take a "we don't want to force you to use any particular setup" stance, but the result seems to be to force you to make a bunch of relatively meaningless decisions before you can start writing code. (they could have other reasons, I haven't looked into it lately)

These days I have a script that does all this, and I know others have written similar scripts as well. It just strikes me as being a gaping hole on the Django development model... IMO anyway.

<comment><USER9> And your script probably sets things up differently from everyone else's :)

But if you think it's a problem, why not publish whatever you use and encourage others to use it as well?

(also, FWIW I _don't_ have such a script -- a new site at work always simply inherits default settings from other stuff, and those defaults are set up to match how our production servers work)

<comment><USER8> > _And your script probably sets things up differently from everyone else's > :)_

I don't doubt it. Much like how there is the occasional "this is how I handle managing multiple settings for different systems" blog post, people have come up with their own systems because Django provides none.

> _But if you think it's a problem, why not publish whatever you use and > encourage others to use it as well?_

<http://github.com/tvon/django-gig>

Written for personal use, so...

There is also "create project" or "project template", I forget the exact name, but it's on bitbucket or github... and "paster" from zopeskel seems to have potential to do something like this but it may be too zope specific, I don't know.

There are ways to do it, but IMO it's something the framework should be handling. As it stands, "basic setup and configuration" is a much higher hurdle in Django than it is in Rails.

> (also, FWIW I don't have such a script -- a new site at work always simply > inherits default settings from other stuff, and those defaults are set up to > match how our production servers work)

Well, you don't have a script that builds things out in a certain way, but you have a system in place that handles project defaults.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also note that the default Django template is showing it's age. I don't think it's ever been updated and it contains a few faux-pas to look out for. In particular, it starts you off inside a python package (__init__.py file), which is highly confusing. If you later want to treat your Django project as a normal Python project, you need to create a setup.py file. But this file would be one directory up from the project directory ... which is outside of your Django project. Django puts the directory one level up on your PYTHONPATH to compensate for this, with the assumption that part of your project lives outside of version-control, etc. The solution is to remember to put the directory above the directory that the project lives in version-control and treat it as part of the project. Although then you have to put a library location on your PATH to run the manage.py commands, since this file won't work if placed in your projects /bin directory.

(Speaking of /bin directories, it's always bugged me that Rails renamed this directory to /scripts ... if it's executable, it goes in /bin, it makes no sense to split executables based on arbitrary implementation details)

<comment><USER9> Well, to be perfectly honest I almost never use the 'startproject' or 'startapp' commands. When I'm working on a new app I just create the directory and an __init__.py, and then start filling in specific files inside it as I need them.

For stuff at work apps all go into one of a couple particular namespaces, so packaging concerns don't come up there; for my personal stuff the package name is almost never the same as the app anyway (e.g., django-registration provides an app in a module named 'registration').

Also, I'd really really like the concept of the project to die soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most annoying part about doing Django as a dev coming from Rails is the RequestContext that isn't used by default, if you want to access specific contexts like settings. Then it means having to hack it using direct_to_template or writing a decorator.

It's a different philosophy, but it's hard getting use to having to explicitly spell out everything when I just want to get going with defaults that make sense.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone knows if this exists vice-versa?

<comment><USER11> No one goes from Django to Rails...

<comment><USER12> Hmmm.... I do Django stuff but I'm working on my first Rails project right now. A Django -> Rails guide would be useful to me.

<comment><USER13> I would also like to see this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Why serving static files in development has to be a additional setup, as no developer wants to setup a server for serving static files, I am aware of 'django.static.serve' but still that is an additional setup, why not create a sample media directory and a url for the same in urls.py" - Because typical deployments don't use django for serving static files?

<comment><USER15> however typical developments do, and this question is about typical development setup

<comment><USER14> Agree. What we probably need is a nice way to switch between deployment/development setups, possibly by splitting settings.py like rails

<comment><USER16> the usual trick is to use a local_settings.py.

put all of your environment-specific variables in there, and put 'from local_settings.py import *' at the end of your settings.py

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems like Django is more comparable to Sinatra? And is 4 spaces the python way? I like my font big and my lines short.

<comment><USER18> > And is 4 spaces the python way?

It is, see PEP 8: <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/></comment></comment>


Intellectual Ventures Paid Consultant To Get Unions To Fight Patent Reform - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110316/23442113522/contract-dispute-reveals-that-intellectual-ventures-paid-consultant-to-get-unions-to-fight-patent-reform.shtml <comment><USER3> A good way to frame this behavior that makes clear why it is revolting: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking>

The economic concept of rent is where a firm in an advantageous position uses that position to extract wealth without doing anything productive. Much of the divisiveness between the two dominant U.S. political parties can be explained in these terms:

The Left thinks that corporate privilege enables rent-seeking behavior (e.g. finance), while the Right thinks that government privilege enables rent- seeking behavior (e.g. regulatory capture, public sector unions).

It may seem like all economic activity is rent-seeking, and this is true to an extent -- everyone wants to sit back and let prior work bring in income today. Competition is what checks rent-seeking -- such behavior often goes hand-in- hand with a monopoly position, which is why you see it where there is heavy government involvement (e.g. patents, public sector services).

What I would like to see is the calling-out of rent-seeking behavior from both sides. This is the way forward to a more united, wholesome, just economic / political system.

<comment><USER4> _...everyone wants to sit back and let prior work bring in income today_

This isn't rent seeking. This is simply enjoying rents from value creation. Rent seeking is when actively seek out rents by engaging in unproductive/harmful activities in order to continue receiving rents.

For example, getting a patent to prevent others from building similar works is rent seeking [1]. Or forming a union to prevent others from undercutting you is rent seeking. Similarly, creating regulatory requirements that crush small players (e.g., Walmart's attempts to raise the minimum wage, Phillip Morris attempts to increase tobacco regulation) is also rent seeking.

[1] Of course, patents might still be beneficial if the rents extracted are smaller than the value created which would not otherwise be created in the absence of patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just once I'd like to find out that reality doesn't turn out as rotten as I can possible imagine it. To hear somewhere, someone, on some board said, "ya know, we've made enough this quarter, lets _not_ make giant asses of ourselves by usurping and corrupting the system that allowed us to do so."

<comment><USER6> Move to my native Sweden, it is a not-so-capitalistic economy which is clean, with very little corruption and backroom dealings. Just ask the politicians.

But before you go, I wonder if you might be interested in buying a bridge to a really good price...?

(At least you get to find out _some_ of this stuff in the US. In many other countries the 'ol boy's clubs are just too tight. I think I'll send money to WikiLeaks, even though they seem a bit weird.)

Edit: Thanks, dexen. Sigh, I aimed for humorous and informative, not sarcastic. (I can't upvote you, since my "avg" is too low after questioning news sources which people claimed were good without having references. I probably came off as sarcastic then, too.)

<comment><USER7> Be aware the sarcasm of your post is easy to miss with cursory read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's amazing is how little money was involved. $30K / month, about $360K / year. In return, millions in extortion fees and a huge drag on the economy.

<comment><USER4> It's also rather likely that unions and patent holders have some shared interests, so I doubt this is solely about the money.

Both patent holders and unions are rent seekers. Strict patent laws make monopolies/oligopolies easier to form, and unions find it easier to extract rents from monopolies/oligopolies than from competitive markets.

In a monopolistic/oligopolistic situation, the monopoly can extract rents from customers, and the union can demand their cut. In a competitive market with many players, profit margins will be thinner, and it's likely that the non- union shops will undercut the union shops. So this move might be as much about shared interests, or at least shared ideology, as it is about money.

<comment><USER9> Is it actually true that unions find it easier to extract rents from monopolies or oligopolies than from competitive markets?

Imagine that all software without exception is made by Microsoft. Then (near enough) all software developers have to work for Microsoft. That gives Microsoft a lot of bargaining power against its employees, unionized or ionized. The only way in which the Universal Programmers' Union is better off in this world than in the real one is that Microsoft (having a monopoly) may be under less pressure from the market to sell its software cheaper, and therefore may be better able to pay rent to the unionized programmers. Fair enough, but is there any actual reason to think that that outweighs MS's gain in bargaining power over its employees? (Which exactly parallels the gain in bargaining power over its customers that makes it better able to afford to pay what its employees demand, if that seems worth doing.)

<comment><USER4> A monopoly and a union have equivalent bargaining power. The union members have only vastly inferior substitutes for employment (e.g. Dairy Queen), and the company has only inferior substitutes for labor (temps). It's in both of their best interests to eventually agree to split the rents.

In a competitive market, there is less rent to split (e.g., 5% profit margin instead of 15%) and there is always a third possibility: the unionized employer goes bankrupt and only non-unionized employers remain. So producers (as a class, not any individual one) get to survive, while the union (as a class) is destroyed.

But don't take my word for it. Go take a look at the world. The primary bastions of unionization seem to be monopolies or oligopolies: the government, Big 3 automakers (in their heyday, at least), cable companies and the like. Unionization also declined (outside the government) as the country became more competitive.

Think about what nearly happened to the auto industry. Consumers suffered with crappy overpriced cars, and the Big 3 + unions enjoyed their rents. Then the market became more competitive, and absent government intervention, the unionized part of the sector would have died. The unions seem desperately afraid of this effect in education which is why they fight tooth and nail against charters/vouchers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This made me angry at first, and then I thought that IV were being smart and doing what everybody else does in a political fight: attempt to exert influence by paying for it.

I am more inclined to blame the representatives who make legislative decisions based on who is funding them .

<comment><USER11> The Reps need the money. More money means more ad campaigns and better chance to stay in power. The system is to blame I think. Not enough oversight or regulation?

<comment><USER12> > Not enough oversight or regulation?

More of the same is bound to work...

When there are benefits to buying legislation, legislators will be bought.

If you don't want govt to be corrupt, you can't ask it to run things.

As they said in "WarGames" - the only way to win is to not play the game.

<comment><USER13> Hrm -- this seems a little too... nihilistic? I mean, I agree, the system is highly flawed and quite possibly broken, but it's the system we live in. If we don't like the system, we can either withdraw from it completely, as you're advocating, or at least try to change it for the better. If you withdraw, it's only going to get worse.

<comment><USER14> It seems Gandhi didn't think so.

<comment><USER12> What was Gandi's big success?

He had four big campaigns. One was Hindu-Muslim unity. Another was to block the import (into India) of British textiles. The third was ending "untouchability". The fourth was to get the UK out of India.

The latter succeeded, but since the UK couldn't afford to be in India and its PM at the time was an anti-Imperialist, it's unclear how much effect Gandi had. As to the others ....

However, he does get good press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let me try this again, more verbosely, since I appear to have overestimated the audience when I tried to ask this more concisely:

So? How is this different from what pretty much every other company large enough to afford lobbying (Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Amazon, Wal Mart, Comcast, and a gazillion others) does?

There's only one interesting (in the sense that it is at all out of the ordinary) thing in that article, and no one has mentioned it.

<comment><USER16> Put it in an different context,

Lets say you were married, lets say you had an affair, lets say that the news of this came to light and your spouse yelled and screamed at you.

How do you think they would answer the question: "So? How is this any different from what every other person who has had an affair?"

The answer is that the question itself is flawed, whether or not other companies attempt to game the system is irrelevant if the gaming itself is an insult.

We know people will attempt to manipulate society and governments to their ends, we can all be offended when they do so in an attempt to enrich themselves at the expense of the greater good.

<comment><USER15> What gaming of the system?

There's a company. They have an opinion on a piece of proposed legislation. They present their arguments to another organization and ask the other organization to support their position.

That is not gaming the system. That's ordinary participation in the political process.

<comment><USER16> "What gaming of the system?"

If an organization objects to legislation and presents those objections themselves, its fairly transparent what they want and why.

When an organization attempts to inject objections to legislation through an obfuscated channel (in the above case unions) to both take advantage of the political capital of unions (on which many politicians rely for campaign contributions) and to avoid the obvious conflict of interest that would come out of a company that makes its living as a patent troll objecting to patent reform. That is 'gaming' the system.

Note that gaming isn't illegal, its just politics, but as someone once said, "Maneuvering the system for the public good is leadership, maneuvering the system for the public good and your personal benefit is public - <USER2> cooperation, but maneuvering the system for your benefit and harming the public good in the process, well that's just dirty politics."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "They also asked him to try to keep Intellectual Venture's involvement in derailing patent reform quiet, since top investors in IV, such as Bill Gates, supported patent reform."

Stay classy, IV.

</comment><comment><USER14> one racket talks to another.

</comment><comment><USER15> So?

<comment><USER7> Are you American? I'm not, but it seems to me unions are important force in american politics.

From time to time, news surface how unions surprisingly stand up and take strong stance on something unrelated to protecting the empoyees. <weasel words>Which makes some suspect corruption</weasel words>. This story seems to validate that.

<comment><USER15> Depending on who you believe, patents are either a vital component of keeping companies innovating and profitable (which is good for employees), or they are dragging companies down and making them waste money working around bad patents and dealing with patent troll lawsuits (which is bad for employees).

Either way, they seem within scope for unions interested in protecting employee interests.

<comment><USER7> You seem to believe there are only two sides to the discussion. There are three, actually: two very vocal partizan sides, and a third side doing actual research. Scientists have spoken on patents and other forms of Intellectual Property protection. I believe [1] in science, do you?

\----

[1] in the _figurative_ sense ONLY. Science is not matter of belief; nor the beliefs I hold personally have anything to do with science.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Python graphing and reporting libraries for web app - <AUTHOR> I'm building a web site that will include multiple graphs and printable reports. The graphs are pretty simple line graphs (perhaps with multiple data sources). Ideally, the graphic library would be able to do some smoothing of the data.
The reports are also fairly simple (lists of data with said graphs).
What do you think the best graphing and reporting libraries (for the planned usage) out there are? <comment><USER2> For creating graphs you might want to look into SciPy's Matplotlib. It's a graphing library based on Matlab's stuff. Pretty good if you want those sort of graphs.

See: <http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/users/screenshots.html>

Here are instructions on hooking it into Django: <http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/Django>

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a fan of the Open Flash Chart 2 project: <http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open- flash-chart-2/>

As the name implies, they are flash charts, what except JSON data. There is a wonderful Python lib that makes it very easy to use OFC in a Pythonic way: <http://btbytes.github.com/pyofc2/>

<comment><USER4> Agreed. PyOFC2's graphs have better interactivity than the other options - being able to see values at a specific point where the mouse cursor is is quite liked by my users. There are two distribution sites: one has far more sample code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Flot is great for generating graphs directly in the browser, saving the roundtrip for the image and allowing some interactivity: <http://code.google.com/p/flot/>

You can also generate simple Sparklines client-side too: <http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Pycha (PYthon CHArts) is pretty good. It use the Cairo vector graphics library.

<http://www.lorenzogil.com/projects/pycha/>

<comment><USER7> I second this. Graphing libs fall into 2 camps:

\- Flash and JS charts. Those are interactive and most of the processing takes place on the client side, but they cannot be embedded into email reports or PDF documents or anything else, and are very difficult for the average end- user to archive.

\- Server-side generated images. Those are not interactive, but obviously can be embeded into anything and easily archived, so tend to be more flexible and require no extra dependencies, such as a fast JS engine or a plugin.

I've been working with both types for way too long, and I eventually settled on PyCha. I wrote a presets package for my apps that allow me to very quickly change every aspect of charts in bulk, and I was floored when I ran my charting benchmarks. It's also one of the few libraries that scale to a very high number of datapoints (provided you remove the line shadow).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google Chart is a good choice : various graph types & facility of use. You may want to use a wrapper like pygooglechart

</comment><comment><USER9> The Cairo-powered <http://www.aeracode.org/projects/graphication/> is well worth a look - unfortunately the only documentation is examples at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER10> Although not specific for Python (it is xml based), I find FusionCharts (<http://www.fusioncharts.com/>) the best of the breed</comment>


Show HN: Simple Analytics for websites - <AUTHOR> https://centi.in/ <comment><USER2> I like the idea, especially if it provides details on specific users. Two major issues with analytics:

1\. Load time. You can't slow down the page event a little. How will you handle this? Currently according to pingdom's speed test your DNS lookup alone takes 317ms, compared to GA's 14.

2\. Handling large quantities of data. Even with the streamlined information being collected it will still grow to a large amount. What is your plan for scaling?

Thanks for sharing!</comment>


A tool to find 3,000+ .com startup domains in 100ms - <AUTHOR> http://StartupDomainSearch.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I have recently put together this little app to brainstorm/generate business names, startup names, products etc.

It's sort of a hybrid between the Shopify business name generator and InstantDomainSearch.com. It has plenty of suggestion as the first one but with the speed of the second one.

As far as I am aware there isn't another tool that can generate 3,000+ available domain names based on the user's keywords in ~100ms. Or at least I couldn't find it when I needed it.

I could actually generate 1,000s more in nearly the same time but updating the browser's content turned out to be one of the major bottlenecks to keep the app snappy and responsive.

I wanted to learn a little bit about sockets and domain names so I came up with this. The web app is implemented in nodejs/express while the back end database I had to implement it in C++ and Qt5. I sort of built my own version of Redis but with minimal memory footprint and maximum speed. This way I can also easily implement multi-threading which Redis does not support. That was the fun part of the project. :)

All the communication between the browser, the server and the DB is done via socket.io to minimize latency. Switching from REST API to socket.io reduced the latency by 2/3s.

Anyway, let me know what you think about it. I'm eager to have your feedback and advice on how to improve speed, usability and quality of suggestions.

Thank you!</comment>


Why does IT suck with computers? (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.honestrepair.net/index.php/2019/01/20/why-does-it-suck-with-computers/ <comment><USER2> This article missed the two _most_ important characteristics in the good vs. bad bullet list:

* Ability to understand how a piece of technology actually works. Not just push buttons or google answers. Not just follow a recipe to fix a problem, or know a piece of knowledge. Often problems are new and unique. Real understanding of how something works, or is supposed to, is critical for synthesis of new unique solutions. If you see someone that gives up after all information sources, google, documentation, etc. have given out - this is the problem. You have to solve problems even if they have never been seen before - somebody has to figure it out the first time.

* Sound and logical problem solving aptitude, skills, and techniques. Too often, even someone who is knowledgeable in a technology, can fail hard and waste lots of time if they have poor troubleshooting skills and no aptitude for troubleshooting itself. For example, don't keep making hypothesis and changing stuff, but forget to put it back when the guess doesn't work. Getting lost, making illogical guesses that don't fit the problem, tunnel-vision.</comment>


Tell HN:  Bitcoin is about to break 10M market cap mark. - <AUTHOR>

bitcoinwatch.com is probably the best place to watch.. probably will happen before midnight.<p>Been a crazy rally. <comment><USER2> 20% appreciation in a day. That's definitely a bubble.

<comment><USER3> Everybody is worried about bitcoin being a bubble, constantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I suspect if anyone tried to convert a significant amount of bitcoins into ordinary currency, the value would plummet. Also, comparing the value of one "bitcoin" to one USD or EUR is meaningless.

<comment><AUTHOR> How is it meaningless? There is an active trading market where people are trading BTC and USD back and forth.

It doesn't seem different than comparing one "dollar" to one "euro."

<comment><USER5> Dollars and Euros are currencies. Bitcoins are collectables.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even though that is patently false, even if they _were_ only "collectables" then you could still tie them to a dollar/euro amount.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anything over $1.67 USD brings the "market cap" for the 5.991M BTC (money stock at present) over the $10M mark.

Currenty intraday high of $1.70 so 10M has been breached.

</comment><comment><USER7> This morning Bitcoin reached parity with EUR ($1.45/BTC).

This afternoon it reached parity with GBP ($1.65/BTC).

Insane. <http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> Can the title still be edited? Over $11.5M at the present moment.

There's so little supply that to buy even just a few thousand bitcoins at this point runs the price up 10% or more.

<comment><AUTHOR> someone is buying everything they can at 1.95 right now</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you feels/thinks when seeing a demo? - <AUTHOR>

Take a look at this 5 years old demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZT2JzJImm0
It's a realtime application coded by programmer (with the help of artists and musician).
If you are developer who never saw a demo I wonder what do you think/feel after seeing that? <comment><USER2> Well, I saw demos earlier. Nevertheless, it looks quite interesting, but if you address your question to developers - you should provide more technical details about the implementation - that is even more interesting.</comment>


Proposal to add optional social media account fields to US Customs arrival forms - <AUTHOR> https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2016/06/23/2016-14848/agency-information-collection-activities-arrival-and-departure-record-forms-i-94-and-i-94w-and <comment><USER2> It's gotten to the point where the authoritarian feel of US immigrations is actively deterring me from wanting to visit.

I wonder if anyone has done any research on whether/how much this is measurably affecting the US economy.

<comment><USER3> It has zero measurable impact because anyone who counts will make sure their social media profile is either sterile or doesn't exist. Only an idiot would be a member of ISIS or Al Queda on Facebook.

<comment><USER2> It likely has zero measurable impact on _stopping terrorism_.

It will have measurable impact on the millions of people who have to give up privacy to enter the US, some proportion of which is likely to be further negatively affected by having something "suspicious" in their profile. Like being idiots who once liked something offensive as a joke, or being friends with some idiot who is connected to ISIS on some social network.

<comment><USER4> Having to be careful what kind of jokes you like or articles you link reminds me exactly on how people behaved back in pre-1990 socialist era where liking or retelling a wrong joke got you in trouble with your boss, police or a landlord :/

<comment><USER2> At least in this instance we can avoid this specific persecution by opting to not visit the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a very expensive change for not a lot of value. Truly nefarious folks will put in a fake handle to instill confidence during background checks. The only folks who'll pay are law abiding people via their loss of privacy....and well:

> Form: Estimated Annual Cost to Public: $26,325,300.

> Website: Estimated Annual Cost to the Public: $265,020,000.

What a waste.

<comment><USER6> How are those costs so astronomically high? $265MM for a website!

<comment><USER7> $265MM in aggregate "burden" in additional time asked of the public, not $$ from the budget. See here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12375763](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12375763)

<comment><USER5> To all the people that think this number is absurdly high, it isn't. Let's do some paper napkin thinking here:

Form:

\- The forms will have to be redesigned and reprinted. Not cheap. Don't forget, the 94W is in a variety of languages.

\- Flight crew will have to be trained to answer this question. For 94W form.

\- Agent console will have to be updated.

\- Which means agents will have to be trained to handle this data.

\- Embassies will have to be trained as well.

Website:

\- Updates to the website. Don't forget different languages.

\- Help documentation will have to be created for the web.

Other:

\- Data will have to be aggregated from social site. Development costs.

\- New console will have to be created to look at a user's streams.

\- Staff will have to pull and review the data.

\- New infrastructure (servers, software, upkeep) will have to be put in place to handle this.

Just thinking for a few minutes, it seems expensive. It is not just a field on a form or website, it is a whole staff, backend, ball of wax.

<comment><USER2> But as the people responding to you have pointed out, the above is not what these cost estimates are referring to.

They are referring to the estimated burden in terms of the time spent by the people _filling in_ the forms.

<comment><USER5> Then the costs are even higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The usual way to handle these scary "features" is to keep them optional only until the next terrorist attack.

This reduces public backlash while you can still start implementing it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Most people probably don't have the skills to answer that question. Heck. Without going online I can't even remember my Facebook ID.

<comment><USER10> That's okay. Probably you will just be able to provide your fb login credentials, it's easy-peazy. (turn on your sarcasm detection mechanism if you are reading this)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So is it ok if I provide my pornhub account?

</comment><comment><USER12> It'll be great precedent for when Iran, China, Russia, etc. want to do the same thing.

<comment><USER13> When you get a Chinese visa you will be reviewed for, e.g., Falun Gong activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Something to keep in mind: social networking sites have been already checked, even without explicitly listing the ids/links. From 2012: [http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists- tweets-...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-get- them-denied-entry-to-the-u-s/)

Devil's advocate - are they already checking everyone and this just actually saves them the time?

</comment><comment><USER15> >It will be an optional data field to request social media identifiers to be used for vetting purposes, as well as applicant contact information. Collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide DHS greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case.

>optional

My question is: How is this at the #1 spot with 8 votes?

<comment><USER2> "Why did you not fill in this field Mr. Smith?" "Well, it's optional, I didn't think..." "So what do you have to hide, Mr. Smith? Did you perhaps think we will find something illegal?"

When something is "optional" but it's there so that if provided the DHS can get visibility to "possible nefarious activity and connections", how likely is it that they will start seeing failure to provide it as a sign that you need to be investigated more closely?

> My question is: How is this at the #1 spot with 8 votes?

Because Asia is going to bed and it's early Sunday morning in Europe, and it was submitted a short while ago, and hence it has little competition that hasn't started "aging out".

<comment><USER16> > how likely is it that they will start seeing failure to provide it as a sign > that you need to be investigated more closely?

The rationale that I've gathered from this is that they're going to investigate you anyways by trying to find your social media profiles, etc. This is a long process, so to make the process quicker you can opt-in your social media handles.

In other words, it's already happening, but has a lot of inconveniences.

Not saying this is right or wrong, but it's just from what I've gathered.

<comment><USER17> That rationale is suspiciously close to "FB should just turned over all and any data of everyone to the US government".

In certain cases with regard to the government, inconvenience is a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER18> I disagree with that sentiment. As a citizen, I'd like the government to work _on my behalf_ as efficiently as possible and to not work at all otherwise.

So I think the real issue is that there is almost no control or transparency regarding what agencies like FBI or DHS do with the data. This should change. Once there is actual oversight (and no rubber-stamp court) I'll give them the permitted data as efficiently as possible.

Going the other way - allowing them full and uncontrolled access provided they just jump through a few arbitrary hoops to get the data - seems to me would only muddy the waters and increase costs without providing any actual advantage to the citizens.

<comment><USER17> Control, transparency and check-and-balance are all inconveniences though. Having to ask a judge for warrant is definitely inconvenient, same as proving beyond reasonable doubt (instead of just, let's say probable doubt).

I didn't say that inefficiency should be the goal for the government. However, for certain scenarios, that's the trade off we have to make.

> Going the other way - allowing them full and uncontrolled access provided > they just jump through a few arbitrary hoops to get the data

Fortunately, most of the time those "hoops" involves a human in it, hopefully being able to stop bad things from happening. Again, there is no silver bullet, and shitty paper stamping process won't be helping either.

<comment><USER18> Yes, most effective checks are inconvenient but not all inconveniences are effective checks. My worry is that but focusing on "it must be inconvenient" your setting the priorities wrong. This might just result in a heap of useless labour and frustrated employees - but wouldn't shed any light on which "attack scenarios" you actually defended against, if any.

In some cases, it might make misuse actually _easier_ if the inconveniences affect both agencies and their control instances.

A nice example of a process that's apparently deliberately kept inefficient by lobby power is the US weapons "registry": [http://www.gq.com/story/inside- federal-bureau-of-way-too-man...](http://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal- bureau-of-way-too-many-guns)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The proposed change is optional, not required.

The title is misleading.

<comment><USER19> So, are you saying they aren't using the information for anything? Why are they asking for it then? Or are you saying that it's optional, but supplying the information might have benefits, so, it's optional only in the sense that entering the US is optional?

<comment><USER16> You could just read it. I'm only repeating what it states.

<comment><USER19> You are familiar with the concept of a lie?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's left? Government demands complete access to every aspect of your life in every way.

No, wait, that's what they already have.

<comment><USER21> It is getting to the point that I am seriously contemplating of deleting all my social media presence. I got nothing to hide, but I also don't want any stranger snooping in my privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wouldn't it be just as effective and faster for everyone to add a simple yes/no question to the form like: "The primary purpose of this trip is terrorism? Yes [] No []" Then the DHS can do their work and there is no further loss of privacy for visitors.

<comment><USER23> You're joking, but the Visa application does ask this already: "Do you seek to engage in terrorist activities while in the United States or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities?"

<comment><USER24> "Why yes, as a matter of fact the wife and I were planning to do a spot of mass shooting on our way through, we're really after the full experience you know... say, is there a problem?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Facebook and Twitter are obviously social media platforms. But what else is to counted there? Gmail? Path? Github? Hacker News? Wikipedia? What about my professional society ids? And what about medical social platforms? Does anyone understand where the line is?

</comment><comment><USER26> Sure, they can have the accounts i don't use.

<comment><USER27> "Looking at this account I can see that there's no content. Do you have other accounts that you use? Are you purposely misleading me Mr. Smith?"

<comment><USER28> Step 2: In order to assist immigration procedures, social networks will now be required to verify the identity tied to the account you're registering.

But telling the immigration official still is optional, since we already know who you are, what you buy and what por- uhm, websites, you like. (discretely fist-bumps Goomazbook) Welcome to this great nation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "It will be an optional data field to request social media identifiers"

</comment><comment><USER17> > "Current Actions: This submission is being made to extend the expiration > date with a change to the information collected as a result of adding a > question about social media to ESTA and to Form I-94W, as described in the > Abstract section of this document. There are no changes to the burden hours > or to the information collected on Form I-94, or the I-94 Web site."

I can't quite understand what it mean to "extend the expiration date ...". Shouldn't it be "extend the collection process" or something similar ?

</comment><comment><USER30> So not having Facebook is now officially suspicious?

<comment><USER31> Fecebook kicked me off for being too old. I could probably find my MySpace profile riddled with mis-information and my only _true_ friend, Tom, floating around somewhere(on a dark market site[0]). I hope this would help default my identity from 'guilty until proven otherwise' to 'not-a-terrorist' status.

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2016/05/hack-brief-old-myspace- account...](https://www.wired.com/2016/05/hack-brief-old-myspace-account-just- came-back-haunt/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a link to "Proposed Collection; Comment Request; Arrival and Departure Record: (Forms I-94 and I-94W)"

[https://www.regulations.gov/docketBrowser?rpp=25&so=DESC&sb=...](https://www.regulations.gov/docketBrowser?rpp=25&so=DESC&sb=commentDueDate&po=0&D=USCBP-2007-0102)

Which was originally submitted by quickben

</comment><comment><USER32> I still need to file back taxes & so don't feel like reading yet another document from the government.

Can someone summarize what this says?

Will people who don't use social media have to go to the back room for a full cavity search?

<comment><USER33> The relevant section:

DHS proposes to add the following question to ESTA and to Form I-94W: "Please enter information associated with your online presence—Provider/Platform—Social media identifier." It will be an optional data field to request social media identifiers to be used for vetting purposes, as well as applicant contact information. Collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide DHS greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case.

<comment><USER32> That's pretty crazy.

The only way they could deal with that much data would be some sort of agreement between the US & Facebook for information sharing.

Time to create another social media network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Such a waste of USCIS time. This should have come from AILA (Immigration Lawyers); who has vested interest keeping USCIS busy on all wrong priorities.

</comment><comment><USER35> At which point will they order you to fill that social media platform with actual events so they know it's really you ?

</comment><comment><USER10> Will any of you provide your HN account information?

</comment><comment><USER21> Big brother for aliens

</comment><comment><USER36> I think this is a good thing. Most people are very stupid about their online behavior. Or rather, they try to pretend they are someone else "IRL", because in real life they know people are looking but online they think they are anonymous. This has been demonstrated several times that this is where social media harassment comes from. Anyone who is an asshole online is an asshole in person, they just know better to hide it when people can see their face.

We should be working to make it clear to people that--just because you have a cat photo for an avatar--doesn't mean you are off the hook for acting like a decent human being.

We print out home address on official forums, why not online addresses? Make that presence "real".</comment>


Y Combinator Partner Harj Taggar: "San Francisco is Becoming Silicon Valley" - <AUTHOR> http://www.7x7.com/tech-gadgets/y-combinator-partner-harj-taggar-san-francisco-becoming-silicon-valley

<comment><USER2> "Now, they are starting with both iPhone and android apps, saying they need to nail mobile distribution, and saying that maybe will never build a website at all, because it's unnecessary."

So I've heard that in Vermont the local tradition is to build the barn first, and then live in the barn until you can afford to build the house. This seems like the digital equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER3> I dunno.

The incentives of living in SF versus, say, Mountain View or Palo Alto seem to be nightlife. And most founders I know aren't really going out very much. They're too busy with their startups. It would seem Mountain View is more ideal for that.

Maybe MV is better for super-early stage startups with just two or three cofounders, and as soon as hiring occurs then SF becomes more appropriate.

It seems to me that SF has more distractions. I of course could be totally wrong, and I'm curious why, if so, the trend continues.

<comment><USER4> No, the main incentive for living in SF for me is _not driving_. I work at Dolores Labs and live 5' away. Not worrying about driving makes a huge difference in lifestyle. It leaves more time for fun / productivity. It also makes it much easier to go to meetups.

<comment><USER3> Good point.

Is that enough to make the city more attractive? Isn't office space cheaper in MV or PA?

<comment><USER5> SF actually has an abundance of reasonably priced office space. I don't know the medians, but a quick glance at <http://www.rofo.com/CA/Mountain-View> and <http://www.rofo.com/CA/San-Francisco> shows similar price to square foot ratios.

<comment><USER6> The rates are comparable per sqft if you're willing to be in a seedy part of town (mission, west soma). If you want to be in the nicer parts of SF, if you can even find a good listing, it will cost way more.

That said I'm super happy with workout out of the mission near the 24th street bart. And it's very affordable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As crazy as it is to hire in San Francisco, hiring in the Valley is several times harder. Being in downtown SF, I really don't have to compete with Facebook and Google for engineers, especially anyone coming from the North or East Bay.

Add in a huge amount of local design talent, a city that people outside of California want to live in and would be willing to move to and engineers that are generally happier/more well-rounded.

I honestly can't come up with a good reason to be down in the Valley.

<comment><USER8> No comparison for me.

PA / MV are lovely small friendly towns with streets you can find a good array of shops, restaurants etc, lots of sunshine.

SF is a cloudy windy big city with lots of homeless people begging, run down streets, etc

Just providing a counterpoint. If I had to work in SF, I'd be miserable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _One factor in YC's boom is the added incentive that every startup accepted by YC automatically now receives a $150,000 investment when they graduate, courtesy of Yuri Milner and YC founder Ron Conway's SV Angel fund._

YC founder Ron Conway?

<comment><USER10> Ron Conway is also an investor in YCombinator. Source: <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It feels like that, but some data say SF as of a few months ago had less tech jobs than in 2000, see [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/26/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/26/BUG41IHABH.DTL)

Here are the comments I left on that article, with one line of context added between them. I got no response on sfgate (no surprise!)

...

I'm surprised that the number of tech jobs in SF still hasn't surpassed the 2000 level. SF still felt like a tech backwater then; now it doesn't so much. However, I believe the research. Likely the SF tech workers were just really poorly deployed in 2000.

I imagine fairly small in number of employees, but the nonprofit tech sector in SF has also become really important over the past half-decade, in particular Wikimedia Foundation and Public Library of Science. The Internet Archive is an old stalwart that has recently expanded. (I work for a smaller related nonprofit, Creative Commons, that moved from Stanford to SF in 2004, and (sadly) is moving from SF to Mountain View (where Mozilla is another significant tech nonprofit) next month.) I think there's an interesting cluster here.

Clearly Oakland/Berkeley/Emeryville is the future. Because I say.

Re number and % of tech jobs in SF in 2000 vs 2011:

(34116/.144)-(32180/.174)=51974

Has SF lost >50k "nongovernment office" jobs in ~10 years or am I missing something?

...

Related to my first comment, Mozilla is opening an SF office this summer [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_i...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=87452)

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been living in Orinda/Moraga for 4 years now and make the daily commute to the city. It's 25 minutes by BART, and another 15 or so combined on both ends to make the connection. Having the city and office so close, yet basically living in the boonies (with the cows and turkeys) rocks.

<comment><USER13> I have done the math on this.

For a SOMA commute during peak hours, living near the BART station in Orinda is more convenient than most of San Francisco.

<http://brevity.org/pic/misc/downtown-transit-eastbay.png>

(Explanation of method here: <http://brevity.org/code/google/transitheatmap.html>)

<comment><USER14> Really cool calculation. This is to get to Embarcadero Bart I assume?

One thing about SF public transit I've learned: Aside from BART, it is slow. If you live within 4 miles of your destination, biking most likely is faster. (Case in point: I live in a 35-50 min grid. By bike I'd get to the Embarcadero BART in under 25 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "At YC," says Taggar, "Every round we have more applications. But we only accept between 2.5 and 3.5 percent of those who apply. The first round this year we had 44 companies; this round we have 64 companies [almost a 50 percent increase]."

I haven't seen this number before (2.5-3.5%). If they accepted 2.5-3.5% when they accepted 44 companies, that's 1760-1257 applications. If they accepted 2.5-3.5% when they accepted 64 companies, that's 2560-1829 companies. So this comment gives us a range of between 1257-2560 applications.

Good luck everyone! :) I'm applying this winter.

</comment><comment><USER16>
       Now, they are starting with both iPhone and android apps,
       saying they need to nail mobile distribution, and saying
       that maybe will never build a website at all, because it's
       unnecessary.

       This is especially true with location-based services like
       photo-sharing, since the website is secondary, just in the
       background.

I'm surprised this would apply to photo-sharing. If I'm taking photos and sharing them, I want some control over the organization and layout, the ability to add annotations, and stuff like that. I don't want to do that from my phone--it is fine for quickly uploading them into some kind of default setup, but I want to manage my information on my nice big monitor.</comment>


Rust Qt Binding Generator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KDE/rust-qt-binding-generator <comment><USER2> I'm the author of the generator. There's a presentation on the project here: [https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/rust_qt_binding_gener...](https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/rust_qt_binding_generator/)

Happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER3> Hi Jos, and thanks for coming up with this.

I found the project quite useful as a way to move away from C++ to Rust [0]. Of course, there were still some unsupported features, but that didn't stop me.

I did some additional work [1], where properties can be writeable references to Rust objects, and where I hope to make QML objects (list items) possible to create from Rust as the next step.

I'm sure you thought about those problems before, and I'm curious if you know any non-obvious solutions. Apart from that, what's the preferred way to submit changes?

[0] [https://github.com/rhn/notquick/](https://github.com/rhn/notquick/)

[1] [https://github.com/rhn/rust-qt-binding- generator](https://github.com/rhn/rust-qt-binding-generator)

<comment><USER2> Your notquick [0], "a nice workflow for emails that works for me", is similar to a topic I've thought about a lot and which was one of the reasons to start RQBG. (I'd like to tie my mail more to my projects and tasks via content addressable storage and RDF). Coding in Rust is fantastic, but the GUI options are not there yet. Hence RQBG which is meant to stay small (<3k lines atm).

Your project uses it in the right way: just commit the generated files. It's a drag and error-prone to write so much binding code by hand.

> some additional work where properties can be writeable references to Rust > objects

You can nest objects. The demo code does this. Here's an example where both Parent and Child are a QObject:

        "objects": {
            "Child": {
                "type": "Object",
                "properties": [
                    "name": {
                        "type": "QString"
                    }
                ]
            },
            "Parent": {
                "type": "Object",
                "properties": [
                    "child": {
                        "type": "Child"
                    }
                ]
            }
        }

> some additional work [...] where I hope to make QML objects (list items) > possible to create from Rust

You'd like to use object types as itemProperties as well? That's not possible at the moment, but a logical extension.

Experimenting in your own branch is a good way to start. Wishes and designs for them can be discussed in the issue tracker: [https://bugs.kde.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=rust- qt-...](https://bugs.kde.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=rust-qt-binding- generator)

Currently, generated model code derives from QObject (Object) or QAbstractItemModel (List and Tree). Deriving from QWidget or QQuickItem would make it possible to write GUI components in Rust as well. Those classes are large though and I've not yet had the urge/need to try that.

<comment><USER3> By writeable references, I meant replacing one QML reference by another:

        RustFoo {id: "foo"}
        RustBar {
          foo_field: foo
        }

This is possible with my branch. Your above example needs to be amended the following way:

        "child": {
            "type": "Child",
        +     "write": "true"
        }

The API changes quite a bit unfortunately, and is no longer so nice to use.

Unfortunately, my ideas to use (read-only) objects in itemProperties all end up complicating the API even worse, with abundant Box<>es and wrappers over wrappers. I can't find an elegant way to work around the mismatch between some Rust and C++ concepts (mostly lifetimes), but I expect to come up with something worth discussing within a couple of weeks.

<comment><USER2> > The API changes quite a bit unfortunately, and is no longer so nice to use.

The object property could be changed to use QSharedPointer<X> when it is writable instead of a raw pointer (const X*). The setter could be done completely in C++ initially, since the main use case, as you show, is to assign that value in QML or Qt code.

> objects in itemProperties [..] I expect to come up with something worth > discussing within a couple of weeks

Looking forward to it!

For any Qt, QML or Rust experts reading this: I'd love your keen eyes on the generated code from Rust Qt Binding Generator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am no developer but like to toy around, build small tools and automate stuff. So i often can't wrap my head around programming stuff promoted on HN (also i simply can't wrap my head around rust since i never really learned programming from the ground up...).

But stuff like this, some Binding Generator really amazes me and i am also able to understand the code. Had the same feeling when i was working on some REST API Binding in Elixir, and was looking at other Repos and found a generated Slack Package. Out-of-the-box solutions like this are great (myself would start to write every function by hand and probably stop half through and try something else...). Thank you for making something like this open source so beginners like myself can take a look :)

<comment><USER5> > (also i simply can't wrap my head around rust since i never really learned > programming from the ground up...).

If you want to learn, alternate between studying and doing.

Read up on the basics, then go to doing mode, study something a bit more advanced, rinse and repeat.

Start the doing part by modifying existing code; perhaps some command line utility, they tend to be simple. Then add some features in it. You could also cut out all the functionality and implement something different in the skeleton.

It's a good idea to use version control even for your experiments, so you can go back when you inevitably break something so that it no longer compiles or works correctly. Sometimes breakage is obvious only much later. One thing is for sure -- you will break things, and version control will watch your back.

I'd recommend git (or hg), because they can be used locally without a server. Or a github account. (But really even zipping the directory is better than no history at all. But seriously, use proper version control tools.)

This method will work for Rust or anything else that can be similarly iterated.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for your tips.

Of course i am already using git. Working as a solo sysadmin i often automate stuff and need some scripts which i all version control. Since i like to work as a sysadmin i have of course also my own git server etc. :)

At the moment i try to focus on elixir, since i like the clean syntax and the REPL to try things (which is also a problem when i try to write something in rust. Since my programming workflow is pretty much based on try and error while i have the feeling a rust (or c) developer often knows beforehand what he puts into the function and what will come out). At work i often need to communicate with some kind of API (for example automatic sorting of pages in confluence) and all this GenServer Stuff helps me in Elixir.

But i think Rust would be a good choice if i need to write something more metal. Some small command line utility on one of the servers. Will try your "change an existing code"-approach!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This, together with the Rust autogenerated bindings for GStreamer ([https://github.com/sdroege/gstreamer- rs](https://github.com/sdroege/gstreamer-rs)) make up for my two favourite work-related C / C++ technologies. Kudos for this, it's great to see how the Rust ecosystem is growing more and more every day!

</comment><comment><USER7> I've seen a ton of bindings like this over the years, mostly implemented with SWIG ([http://www.swig.org/](http://www.swig.org/))... for binding desktop GUI libraries like Qt, wxWidgets, etc to languages more accessible than C++.

It's all awesome, and this example here is certainly better than most (fantastic work!). The problem has traditionally been that most of these things are hobby projects from a single developer, and they go moribund when the developer gets bored and moves onto something else. Hell, if you Google around a bit, you might still find a "wxJava" binding on Sourceforge that I started and abandoned ~15 years ago.

To actually be fit for production use, one of these things needs to be either: (a) sponsored by some entity that keeps leadership continuity going, or (b) driven by an unusually large and unusually non-toxic volunteer group that is able to effectively mimic "a", or (c) created by someone who sees it as their crowning achievement and effectively dedicates their life to it. If this project really does have committed backing from the full KDE organization itself, then that's very encouraging!

I'd be interested to know if it's really an organization level commitment, or if they're just providing hosting for an experiment spearheaded by a single contributor (the Go team at Google has an "experimental" GUI library like this, but it's just one guy's noodling and no one really sees it as gaining traction outside of that). I'd also be curious what the cross-platform story is at this point (i.e. does it build and run on Windows?).

The only other examples I've seen so far that even come close to fitting the bill are in the Python community. And even that is a bit of a mess. There's confusion between two competing Qt bindings... and the wxWidgets binding has been going through a re-write for years, such that it's confusing whether to stay on the old version or adapt the new one (kinda like Python itself!).

But I still keep my eyes open, and look into this space every year or so. It would just be so awesome if there were a viable cross-platform desktop GUI solution, for a modern statically typed language somewhere between the extremes of C++ and JavaScript. I accept that desktop development is less important than it was 15 years ago... but I reject this notion that, " _Desktop development is dead, just use Electron_ ". There are still millions of use cases for true desktop applications. The only thing that's "dead" is the notion of being able to get away with just writing a native Windows version, and ignoring Macs (or vice-versa). And all of the cross-platform solutions have major problems, or are tied to languages or toolchains that people don't want to use, so that lack kinda sucks the oxygen out of the room for the open-source and hobbyist crowd on web forums.

<comment><USER8> I completely agree with your thoughts. However, Rust is getting a lot of traction these days. Sooner or later more people will start to wonder "How do I write a portable app in it?" The Qt solution is a neat one, and might soon become the de facto standard - something similar happened with Python and Tk in the past.

<comment><USER9> I have dabbled a bit in Rust GUI programming for a small project and gtk-rs also works quite well. Is is also actively maintained and has regular releases.

[http://gtk-rs.org/](http://gtk-rs.org/)

Some people from the GNOME and Rust communities are working on macro magic that allows you to create GObject classes from Rust [1].

The downside is that the applications do not look native on macOS or Windows. But so doesn't Electron ;).

[1] [https://gitlab.gnome.org/federico/gnome- class/](https://gitlab.gnome.org/federico/gnome-class/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What are the safety guarantees of the resulting program?

<comment><USER11> The safety guarantees are precisely those of a program which calls reams of legacy C++ cruft.

<comment><USER10> Would appreciate pointers to pure rust GUI libraries from any rust experts in this thread.

<comment><USER12> The current state of UI in rust is very early.

Most of the mature UI libs are bindings to another language.

However there are some native UI libs

[https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/conrod/blob/master/READM...](https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/conrod/blob/master/README.md)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is anyone using Quipist.com - <AUTHOR> It's a social media platform out of silicon valley with a hidden club of users.  I'm noticing some VCs using it. <comment><USER2> Are you drumming up business or is this legit :P

</comment><comment><USER3> I am on Quipist it was invite only but I think they have opened it up to the public.</comment>


Show HN: coldornot.com - <AUTHOR> http://coldornot.com/

<comment><USER2> Sadly it doesn't recognize the ZIP codes of the last 3 places I've lived; none of them "small" towns or areas either.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi - I made this site - any feedback you have would be great. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice. but the definition of "cold" varies in different parts of the world or even USA. i like the app though.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! Yes, I've come up with a basic "formula" to define what is cold and what is not, but I'm trying to refine it based on different variables. Let me know if you have ideas.</comment></comment>


The Importance of Anxiety - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-anxiety-is-the-secret-of-feeling-good/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AeonMagazineEssays+%28Aeon+Magazine+Essays%29 <comment><USER2> All cool and great, but can you now give me something to shut that feeling off? I would be, like, million times happier (and financially stable) if I didn't feel constant anxiety towards things ranging from existential questions to work to relationships, anxiety that reduces me to someone who needs to read HN at work and watch sci-fi shows in huge batches just to stay sane. I'll side with Kant here, anxiety is a feeling that keeps you from 'having your capacities under your control'.

I've been struggling with that for over six years now. Big part of the problem is that anxiety is the very way for your mind to answer the question "is this right or wrong"? It's hard to think your way out of things if your brain fires up "it's still wrong!" alarm randomly.

<comment><USER3> CBT almost entirely resolved my baseline 'mental' anxiety of the nature you seem to explain. YMMV.

For the less controllable situational physical "fight or flight" anxiety, however, I've found low dosage beta blockers work very well. Apparently a lot of musicians and surgeons use them for similar purposes, but you'd need to have the mental anxiety sorted out first, I suspect.

<comment><USER2> > _CBT almost entirely resolved my baseline 'mental' anxiety of the nature you > seem to explain. YMMV._

That is CBT with a therapist, or self-applied CBT? I've been meaning to go through "Feeling Good" book, it seems to be widely regarded as an effective way to apply CBT to yourself.

<comment><USER3> First with a therapist but then self-applied. I think I needed an external "benchmark" to calibrate against and gain some structure from first.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I hope I'll find some non-stupidly-expensive CBT therapist at some point. Did you use any resources for self-applied CBT, or were just basing on the things you learned on therapy?

<comment><USER3> The latter. It was more having some mental artillery to use than a particularly formal process.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I feel bad for a while (a few weeks maybe) I often turn to meditation. When I do, I invariably notice that there's a weird background process in my head that ambushes me with things I feel ashamed about on an almost predictable schedule. I'll be sitting there counting to 10 over and over, starting over at 1 if I notice I've become interrupted, then "Hey remember that time you got so drunk at a party that you threw up on your friend's living room?"

I've started thinking of it as like my consciousness is a circular saw blade and there's this one bent-sideways tooth, like once a revolution it catches on something horrible in my past and drags it out and makes me look at it. It helps a little to recognize it, to be like, "oh yeah, this is the 10-minute self-shaming, right on schedule." But it doesn't help as much as, you know, that not happening.

</comment><comment><USER5> It recently occurred to me that humans probably have a baseline level of anxiety, and this causes us to find things to worry about (no matter how trivial).

Over the past several years I've had growing issues with anxiety, and I had found myself fretting about a passing conversation with someone that doesn't know me and likely will never see again. It wasn't even like the conversation went that badly, so why was I replaying it and worrying about it? Logically it made no sense, but it keeps happening over little things like this. The only way I can explain it is that life has been going well and I haven't had any significant things to worry about for a while. Now my brain seems to be working overtime to find hidden dangers.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, I have similar experiences.

If I'm not preoccupied with something creative, then my mind seems to want to focus on potential problems with my personal life. And I will ruminate until something potentially dangerous is found..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article describes how anxiety helped an individual navigate through a social situation... but who's to say allowing anxiety to control your behavior is better then having calm rational judgement dictate your actions?

In the past where people would declare formal duels in response to some verbal insult, anxiety was a relevant response to save your life. But in this day and age where people have much more to gain and very little to lose when being assertive and fearless in social situations, anxiety has become an excessive and prehistoric response that is largely irrelevant to the times and culture we live in.

Here's an example relevant to most men. Why aren't we talking to that hot super model at the bar? What do we have to lose? Nothing. What do we have to gain? Everything. The logic is inescapable but why are we still scared? Because in the past hitting on a super hot model meant dealing with her alpha male partner who could kill you in a duel. The emotions we feel are evolutionary relics from prehistoric times that were designed to keep us safe. These emotions are now largely irrelevant because murder and combat in our society is both frowned upon and considered a crime.

</comment><comment><USER8> Let's extol the virtues of fear and hate, while we're at it.

Yes, it's normal to get anxious sometime, just as it's normal to get angry sometimes. Someone who never, _ever_ gets angry could be suspected of bottling up their feelings (but we can't be sure). Our emotions aren't under direct voluntary control, so if we find ourselves getting angry, or anxious, or fearful, we must aim not to freak out, or criticize ourselves for it, or become anxious about our anger, angry about our anxiety, fearful of our fear, or any other such downward spiral. Emotions are normal; they are ok.

However, doing what a negative emotion says to do usually doesn't work out as well as doing something else, in my experience. While we can certainly find evolutionary justifications for the things we feel compelled to do under the influence of these emotions, that doesn't mean they are helpful. Fear tells us to flee, to avoid, to destroy, or to deny. I've read that highly successful people who seem fearless do feel fear but just aren't as bothered by it. I think this says the exact opposite of the OP's message, which in this analogy would be The Importance of Fear: It Tells Us When to Run Away. The hard part about fear is acknowledging it and not running away. That is called courage.

Similarly, anger. When you are fighting with your wife (or co-founder), they may say something that you take personally and it hurts your feelings. You are outraged. You strike back, and a fight breaks out. Ok, that's fine, that's normal. But one of you, at some point, has to ignore the anger voice that tells you to defend yourself at all costs, and to attack your enemy's weaknesses. Yes, your partner has become your enemy, thanks to anger.

Anxious drivers don't drive better than non-anxious drivers. I may have moments of anxiety when I drive, such as if I notice a car about to merge into me and I swerve. Perhaps the anxiety plays a physiological role in helping me respond. However, it takes many seconds for the feeling to subside, during which time the anxiety is not helping me, it is hurting me. It also seems naive to identify the _feeling_ of anxiety with the biochemistry of responding to an urgent situation. We could just as well say anxiety is a psychological state which is a harmful byproduct of the physiology.

<comment><USER8> Another analogy: Anxiety is like dirt, or the clutter in your house. You'll find bits of dirt on the subway platform. Some people's houses are awash in clutter. We often seek to get rid of it, but it's not evil. It's not important, either, in the sense of functional utility. Sure, you can construct arguments about how it's ultimately necessary -- an Earth without dirt, for example, sounds rather sterile; does it have no trees? Where does the oxygen come from? -- but if there is anything unhealthy about your attitude towards dirt, I don't think emphasizing the importance of dirt in your daily life is likely to help.

Mainly, we're stuck with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the others in the thread looking for a solution to their distracting background anxiety, I'll add my datum that regular exercise (in my case, swimming) has helped immensely. It's something I only picked up well into adulthood.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article talks most about moral anxiety because it is targeted toward philosophy students, but I've been looking for a while for insight into survival anxiety.

Growing up male, I was always morally anxious about the possibility that I would harm someone else accidentally or (when I was considering joining the military) through violence or (when I became sexually active) through misinterpreted signs of lucid enthusiastic consent. A thing that I've never fully been able to grapple with is anxiety around the possibility of being assaulted or having violence done to me and I feel like this makes me fail at properly empathizing with many of the women I'm friends with. Does anyone know of anything I could read or watch besides Gavin, Captain Awkward, or MVC? I feel like I just don't get it and, well, feel anxious about that.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd replace anxiety with introspection in this article and it sounds a lot better. I wouldn't necessarily consider anxiety to be a virtue; for many, it's a crippling affliction.

The examples in the article are really more about an introspective approach to life. About really considering our actions and the behaviour of the people around us. Anxiety as a disorder is more about being _too_ introspective, rather than being introspective in itself.

</comment><comment><USER12> Evolutionary psychology tells us anxiety is necessary for the survival of the species. This is obviously the case in social interactions as they can change our status/value in the social hierarchy which increases or decreases our chances of survival.

Like jobu said - humanity has a baseline of anxiety.

What about when our anxiety is severely deviant?

Meditation and Eckhart Tolle changed my life. Unfortunately, I still need to use medication sometimes when I get attacks.

There's so much I'd like to type out about not being the contents of our mind, Libet and free will, meditation, etc. It's only taken me 20 years to understand and I always feel like I want to tell everyone since I figured all of this out two years ago. But you can do it yourself. Buddhism, Tolle, meditation. Meditation got me to CBT. CBT brought me to Buddhism which brought me to Tolle.

vis a vis prostoalex's post - Tolle's right.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can somebody do me a favour and help me shake the anxiety I've been feeling since the Snowden leaks? Has anybody else found themselves stressed out by the implications of a technological surveillance state being constructed right in front of us?

<comment><USER14> I find myself stressed out about that, but I don't think it's an irrational anxiety or one that can be simply shaken off. Rather, it's something that we have to deal with directly and fix before we can feel safe.

<comment><USER2> This is the way I feel about energy issues and on-going automation (I love machines, I hate that people have to slave their lives off to survive, I want that post-scarcity utopia, but I'm afraid we don't make it through the transition period, that civilization will collapse).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Try taking Ashwagandha.

</comment><comment><USER16> Aka the importance of mentally being a headless chicken. You're not being "introspective" or otherwise "deep" when anxious. You're just applying a blanket negative bias to all of your observations, and then looking around mostly to confirm the bias. Anxiety is crippling, full stop.</comment>


Odeo Releases Twttr [2006] - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/#comments

<comment><USER2> Ha, very cool! I was reading through and found my comment from then.

"Looks interesting. Any word on how it might tie into Odeo? The privacy options are key. I'd never want any of my text messages public… especially the drunken ones. Nick over at valleywag, might have a new gossip and scoop source. Overall though, cool site, with lots of room to grow if it can fix a few things."

</comment><comment><USER3> _I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website._

Heh.

<comment><USER4> Slashdot's "Apple Releases iPod" news from 2001 is similarly funny looking back: <http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257>

_No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame._

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shades of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." But would anyone really have predicted the success of Twitter in July 2006?

<comment><USER6> To be fair: Twitter today is a rather different product as well. Gone is the emphasis on SMS, and instead it's a micro-whatever social thingie.

<comment><USER7> Also, the "success of twitter" still really has to yet be proven. They get data through their free backend message queue, but can that be converted to cash?

<comment><USER8> No, twitter is already successful; its growth and reach are spectacular and it could be sold for quite a tidy sum. Was google not a success before adwords, when all it had done was revolutionize the way we sort content on the internet?

<comment><USER7> Sure. In that measure of success, it's wildly successful. But it's not a sure thing they'll be able to monetize it well.

Surely the value should be measured based on how valuable it is to each user * number of users. I'm not convinced that's as high as people think. Their retention rates aren't great at all.

But if the measure of success is 'can we hype and sell', then definitely twitter are already wildly successful and I'm sure they'll all do fine out of it. (Then whoever buys will probably completely kill it and the cycle will repeat).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "and a few select insiders were playing with the service at the Valleyschwag party in San Francisco last night." I enjoyed that, because I was at that party. Though not one of the "select insiders." However I'm tempted to think "a few select insiders" is actually Mike Arrington weasel words for "me."

<comment><USER10> Are you really accusing Arrington of downplaying his importance in the tech world?

<comment><USER9> I thought I was accusing him of narcissism. Namely that "influential insiders" is synonymous with his friends, or to reduce it to it's basics, himself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I loved Twitter and signed up super early (summer 06) because it helped me keep in touch with my wife while she finished nursing school in San Diego and I was working my first SF job.

Reading the original review reminds me of how much I liked the original SMS- and-web-only focus. It leaves room for recent apps that focus on Twitter's original core mission of group texting, like Tatango:

<http://tatango.com/>

<comment><USER12> Agreed.

(there's also <http://www.ccsync.com/> )

<comment><USER13> (and 3jam, <http://www.3jam.com/group-phone-number.php> , although they've moved into the google voice space recently)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is classic. One thing I've learned from glimpses back at history like this is that the more off-the-cuff negative comments there are about a new idea, typically, the better. Simplicity is often met with disdain, mainly because people hold the belief that anything that becomes hugely successful must be insanely complicated. It pains us to see something so seemingly easy to come up with become such a hit.

I feel this way with a lot of successful startups today; a combination of jealousy and flippant denial. With Twitter, however, I remember being excited about it and joining really early on. I was mainly excited to hear what my friends were up to or thinking at any given moment since we've all spread out across the globe, but it wasn't until it became super popular that my less technical friends started joining and it became valuable. Now I love it.

</comment><comment><USER15> The comments on the TC article are really worth reading

<comment><USER16> Yeah, it was before TC comments jumped the shark. I don't know why they don't use a much more aggressive moderation policy; the toxic comments rub off on the rest of the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Attaboy Sumon, good comment

</comment><comment><USER18> Can you imagine a web service launching publicly today without making sure Mike Arrington had a working account?

Good find, thanks for submitting.

<comment><USER19> I launch web services publicly on a regular basis, and don't really care whether anyone at TechCrunch has an account.

<comment><USER20> Amen. I read TC but the idea that you need to get TC'ed is emotionally flawed.

<comment><USER18> Oh please. Obviously I mean companies that give 2 shits about PR and are trying to hit home runs, not weekend projects.

Techcrunch is the most popular tech blog. If you don't care about it, you don't care about PR. Replace TC with Mashable, Engadget, Gizmodo, or whatever you like better, the point remains.

<comment><USER20> Missed my point. While TC gets on my nerves at times I like the site and they break news pretty well. I subscribe to their RSS - I'm not anti-TC.

My comment was trying to state that people can get too caught up in their own world. For me, that's TC/Mashable/ect. Building a successful business (which I admittedly haven't done yet) does _not_ require being featured on TC (or other) blog. Does it help? Of course. But it's got a finite value which you have to make sure you don't overestimate.

<comment><USER18> Fair enough. I agree with you, I just thought the comments were a little nitpicky and came across as knee-jerk. Thanks for clearing it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Man, it sure was nice when TC was about reviewing startups.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm seriously confused about the name. Is it really pronounced "twitter"?? Is that not borderline trademark infringement?

<comment><USER17> Check the date.

<comment><USER22> Damn those post dates are barely noticeable sometimes.</comment></comment></comment>


Product Owners are a bad idea - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/09/product-owner-good-bad-complex/ <comment><AUTHOR> Waterfall was criticized for architects throwing dev work over the wall and failure was not detected early. Agile in its current form is to push devs to show they are busy with user stories even if the user stores are nonsensical and not wanted by the business.</comment>


OpenBGPD: The OpenBSD BGP internet routing daemon - <AUTHOR> http://www.openbgpd.org/ <comment><USER2> I ran OpenBGPD about 15 yrs back for peering access to a Metropolitan Area Network. My first/last/only experience with BGP (thankfully hehe).

OpenBGPD itself was solid and looked at lot easier to configure than the alternatives. Can't remember whether I looked at Zebra or Quagga or both though.

Haven't used OpenBSD itself since those days either, but OpenBSD originated software tends to have that straightforwardness I miss sometimes.

<comment><USER3> It is a delight to have an OpenBSD machine as my central router in my home. OpenBSD is so easy to work with and also comes with that cozy feeling of security. I can rest assured that the devs preferred to drop functionality rather than build insecure half-crappy stuff. That is a positive thing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone run their own Linux/BSD/Unix BGP? I heard bird is pretty good:

[https://bird.network.cz/](https://bird.network.cz/)

What about non-free?

<comment><USER5> I have been running 2 bird boxes (1.6 series, a version 2 upgrade is scheduled later this year) each with two peers of full feed for both ipv4 (~750k and ~755k routes respectively) and ipv6 (~67k and ~69k routes) and one of them is connected to a local ixp (~94k ipv4 and ~15k ipv6 routes).

No problems what soever in the almost two years, they have been running...

<comment><USER6> Do you run them personally and get full tables? If so do you pay for the peering and where?

<comment><USER5> forgot to write, that would be massive overkill for a private person...

<comment><USER7> maybe overkill, but i do that... got 7 servers in total around the world (2x London, 1x Frankfurt, 2 in Amsterdam, 1 in Ashburn and 1 in Dublin (Home)) and all (except home) have full routes with their upstream providers and a few IXes too. costs around 100 per month, including the ASN and V4/V6 space, and if you include the home internet connection, double that. all routes are brought back to the house for internal testing, so some servers have space using my own IPs. Yes, overkill, but defiantly fun to play with! [update] forgot to mention, all run Linux and Bird. Did look at OpenBGPD, but settled on bird. Also, if interested, [https://dn42.net](https://dn42.net) got me started, and i am [https://as204994.net](https://as204994.net).

<comment><USER8> you peer what to who with that?

<comment><USER9> Everything is on is asn site above. The peers are here [https://www.peeringdb.com/net/15369](https://www.peeringdb.com/net/15369)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're into free routing software, also for *BSD, Linux and Solaris:

[https://github.com/frrouting/frr](https://github.com/frrouting/frr)

<comment><USER11> Never heard of this one, thanks. I used quagga years ago, and migrated to bird and never really looked back. Next time bird makes me go crazy due to its somewhat bonkers config syntax I'll be checking this out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I run bird as part of an anycast service, but have used openbgp with great success via pfsense. Simple, clean configs. It just works, which is pretty much the best compliment you can pay for a product of the nature.

</comment><comment><USER12> A quality product from a quality team. Thanks, OpenBSD project.

It is reliable, secure, well-tested, and BSD licensed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there a TL;DR for why OpenBSD BGP vs BIRD? As someone who has only used Quagga and Zebra for BGP, I'm curious.

<comment><USER10> I posted this in a separate comment, but if you're still using Quagga it is mostly dead - its fork FRR[0] is miles ahead.

[0] [https://github.com/frrouting/frr](https://github.com/frrouting/frr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Has this been hugged to death? Because I can't access it, it times out. Pretty bad advertising if so.

<comment><USER15> Pretty bad advertising? It's a BGP daemon. It's not like there are all that many BGP implementations. And it's not a commercial product, so they certainly don't care about being advertised. OpenBGPD is pretty solid. The OpenBSD/BGPD team doesn't put much stock in websites. And the liveness of a website doesn't have much to do with the quality of a BGP daemon, so the advertising comment seems a bit off base.</comment></comment>


Announcing gist-deleter v0.0.1 - <AUTHOR> http://ithaca.arpinum.org/2012/03/07/gist-deleter.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I've just updated the bookmarklet, so if you tried it earlier in the week, update your version.</comment>


Screen Space Planar Reflections in Ghost Recon Wildlands - <AUTHOR> http://remi-genin.fr/blog/screen-space-plane-indexed-reflection-in-ghost-recon-wildlands/ <comment><USER2> It wasn't until I noticed the two guys in camouflage and looked closer that I realised the first image on that blog post wasn't a photo. The mountains in particular are very realistic. The state of the art in games graphics these days is really quite impressive.

</comment><comment><USER3> This blog post made me go back and play the game with my newly-arrived 1080 Ti.

In Full Ultra (every settings cranked up to 11) on my 3440x1440 monitor, this games runs smoothly at 70 FPS. And looks extremely realistic. I can't recommend it highly enough, even just for the sights.

The salt desert and the snowy mountains, the bog, the lush jungles, the sierras, the natural reserve… They all look amazingly realistic.</comment>


Philosophy has come up empty when it comes to proving god's existence - <AUTHOR> https://bostonreview.net/alex-byrne-philosophy-god <comment><USER2> Catholic man here.

I'd just like to comment here, and hopefully bring an unbiased view from the other side of this conversation.

Even though that I am Catholic, and that I believe God exists, I can't stand here and hold up evidence X that proves irrefutably that God exists. Why? It's based upon this knowledge that I've gained thus far:

1\. God decides when He reveals Himself to us. 2\. Our relationship with God is deeply personal, to others, this interaction looks like a "coincidence."

For most of my life, I knew of God and this and that, but didn't ever "feel" anything. I thought I should right? But I didn't. There's truth to this passage, Romans 1:19 (ESV); "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.". It's not us that come to see God's existence, but when God allows it to be.

So when I say that "I know that God is real because I happened to see a cross when I was driving to the store today" sounds like a coincidence to others, but what I don't tell you is that I've been deeply struggling with laziness and fear and needed some reassurance. It's this presence of the cross to me a reminder that God is listening to me as I pray.

\--

It's very common for me to hear people trying to disprove God. Oh what a crazy person, believing in this crazy floating man in the sky. What a wierdo!

Yes, I was in this crowd too at one point.

However, there is such peace in knowing God, having himself revealed to me. You have no idea, there is such a peace in my heart knowing God, and this is why myself, and likely other Christians choose to talk about God. With everything happening today, I know that God is still in control of everything and that we aren't assured destruction because nothing is impossible for God. This doesn't excuse us of doing the right thing, of course. We are still responsible for our actions but God has the final say.</comment>


The economic case for paternity leave - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/266841/economic-case-for-paternity-leave/

<comment><USER2> When I was a U.S. government employee I took 34 days of paid paternity leave when my daughter was born and 28 days when my son was born two years apart.

The notion that the U.S. doesn't have paternity leave is totally unfounded. In fact, the U.S. Government as an employer has pretty damn strong maternity/paternity leave policies.[1] I know of many private companies that also have great maternity/paternity leave policies.[2]

People seem to want the government to mandate the private sector implement these policies, however the U.S. Code is not structured in a way that encourages restrictions on private companies in this way.

[1][http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/leave- adm...](http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/leave- administration/fact-sheets/leave-and-work-scheduling-flexibilities-available- for-childbirth/)

[2][http://www.workingmother.com/best- companies/ibm-9](http://www.workingmother.com/best-companies/ibm-9)

<comment><USER3> >People seem to want the government to mandate the private sector implement these policies, however the U.S. Code is not structured in a way that encourages restrictions on private companies in this way.

This is basically false. There is nothing about the _structure_ of the U.S. Code that is hostile to mandates on private employers, and in fact the _content_ of the U.S. Code already includes wage/hour/leave mandates on private employers.

It doesn't include paid parental leave mandates for private employers, but there is nothing _structurally_ that supports the current mandates but would need to be changed for that specific mandate. Its just that federal decision- makers haven't adopted that specific policy.

<comment><USER2> I suppose I should have worded it differently.

The structural process _of changing_ the U.S. Code is not conducive to encourage restrictions on private industries.

<comment><USER3> > The structural process of changing the U.S. Code is not conducive to > encourage restrictions on private industries.

That's just the lawmaking process. Which produces new and altered restrictions on private employers all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a non-american, this kind of argument is really crazy for me. This isn't an economic discussion, but one about which kind of society we want to live. We always read all American politicians talking about the importance of the "Family", but the richest nation in the World can't afford their fathers to spend a dozen of days with their newborns?

<comment><USER5> Indeed; I've been thinking the same for a lot of time. The way the economy is treated in most media and political speech, even here in Europe, is almost machiavellian: everything is about the economy, nothing actually matters except it, whichever additional benefit is only collateral to the real thing; and of course, whichever damage caused is justified by the supposed greater good, so suck it up. Somehow we have forgotten that economy is the means and life (both as individuals and as a society) is the end, not the other way round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a lot more than just maternity (or paternity) leave holding back Japanese women: the cultural expectation remain that women are there to pour cups of tea, marry eligible salarymen, and drop out and rear their kids while said salarymen work insane hours.

My wife (MBA, ex-Microsoftie, etc; not your average "office lady") briefly worked for a super-old-school Japanese trading company in Australia. Her boss wanted her to go on a business trip to suppliers in Japan with a client; HQ held out as long as they could (because what would the _suppliers_ think if they sent a _woman_?), but eventually gave in because there was nobody else suitable. So they called up all the employees and proudly announced: We're sending a _woman_ to Japan, for the _first time ever_! Everybody, a round of applause at how _progressive_ we are!

So when was this? In the 1970s, perhaps? Nope: _2011_.

</comment><comment><USER7> The USA desperately needs federally mandated paid parental leave and paid pregnancy leave along with strong incentives to actually take the time off.

<comment><USER8> Why should the federal government legislate this, and not the states? What could possibly grant Congress the authority to force such a thing upon all private enterprises in the land, and wouldn't it open the door to federal laws for virtually everything argued to be for the general good?

<comment><USER9> Why should it be left to the states when there is an argument to be made that because of interstate commerce you need to implement a mandate at the federal level if you are to avoid a race to the bottom?

What is wrong with federal laws for the general good? The EPA and FDA fall under that very idea. Would you rather have food and drugs managed at the state level? We've already seen what happens if environmental concerns are managed at the state level [1].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain#History_of_acid_rain_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain#History_of_acid_rain_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Overprivileged first world honkies work 8-hour shifts at cushy desk jobs, and now they want paid leave because their waifu plops out babby? Ugh...</comment>