How I recorded an album on my own, in my room - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/what-i-learned-recording-an-alternative-album-on-my-own-in-my-room-c440b8201c9 <comment><USER2> A few of my own home recording tips:

\- Use a condenser microphone with a pop filter for vocals

\- Use 2 matched condenser mics for acoustic instruments, separated by twice the distance to the instrument, pan them left and right

\- Use a dozen cheap foam panels to reduce unwanted room sound (placed closer to the vocals/instrument depending on situation). I tacked mine to a sheet of plywood so that it could be moved around.

\- Eat a banana before singing to help improve vocal quality

\- It will never sound as good as you want, but the most important thing is the performance. People will put up with imperfect recordings if the performance is good.

<comment><USER3> > \- Use a condenser microphone with a pop filter for vocals

As an old engineer and record label owner I actually say NEVER use a condenser microphone unless you have great acoustics in your room and specific reason for using them. Use a dynamic mic instead. They are great sounding used on millions of songs and they are forgiving for bad acoustic areas. People just assume that condenser are better for all vocals. My 1" condensers that cost thousands sound amazing but a lot of times I just use a SM58 instead because it was a better sound for it. SM7B is my go to mic for vocals but that would be out of most people's budgets. Also no need for phantom power is also a plus.

SM7B from Shure $399 Sennheiser e945 $219 SM58 from Shure $99 (This is a tank of a mic that just rocks)

<comment><USER4> Sm57 all the way for me. $150 condenser mic I got at Guitar Center was terrible.

As a back in the day old time recording engineer, I had access to Neumanns and AKG mics worth thousands of dollars. But 60% of the time, a sure 57 ended up sounding better.

<comment><USER5> Hi, sorry for hijacking. I'm a bedroom producer noob and I'm currently using an NT1-A for vocal stuff although I've recently been working with a female vocalist who's got a very strong (and pretty bright-sounding) voice. Would you recommend giving the Sm57 a go for this sort of thing?

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. Condenser mics often don't work well with the kind of voice you're describing. They end up sounding shrill and a bit clippy even if they don't officially hit the clip level.

Mics like the 57, or the old re20 that you used to see in studios have a warmer, analog sound that's more forgiving and softens the harshness that you can hear in condenser mics.

<comment><USER5> Awesome, thanks! I'm going to give this a go :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1) Since record labels generally haven't given an advance to a new artist for a decade, almost all albums and Youtubes are now done "in your room."

2) The Yamaha AG03 is a mixing console more intended for live gigs. If you're mainly doing home studio recoding, then most people get a Focusrite 2i2 or Yamaha/Steinberg UR22 and do mixing in the DAW (computer program.) The UR22 has MIDI-in and out.

Synths often have a built-in audio interface for microphones or guitars, though sometimes without phantom power.

Otherwise, the how-to is pretty typical of how it's done. Note that the author was already quite a musician, having been in a band. YMMV!

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) Interesting note, I hadn't thought much about it - I don't know much about labels, the only one I follow is 4AD and what they post, I listen to. However, they're not that talked about.

2) I'll have to look into these - thanks for telling me!

3) Unfortunately I think playing simple chords in a band, when you and the two other musicians are 17, doesn't really qualify as being quite the musician ahaha thank you still!

<comment><USER7> I don't think you'll see any appreciable difference in conversion quality by switching audio interfaces at this level, particularly with the style of music you are making (which is great by the way, well done!). It all comes down to workflow, and it seems you're getting it done just fine with the Yamaha. I'd look to upgrade if you find yourself needing more inputs.

The more obvious upgrade would be a new microphone to replace the Kenwood you are currently using. An SM-58 will last you a lifetime or if you have a bit more to spend something like an SM7b will be a great investment particularly recording in untreated spaces.

Also, you could try recording the midi information of your electric drum kit and then loosely quantising/editing the takes to retain the feel. You can map these to Logics in-built drums which are pretty great.

Congrats on finishing a body of work, most don't get that far!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestions, and specifically on the microphone one. I wanted to get a new one but I was having some difficulty choosing a good one for me. I will look into this. And thank you for your nice words!

<comment><USER7> Yeah going down the microphone rabbit hole can be confronting. It's always best if you can try a particular model before purchasing it (particularly for your own vocals), as microphones are very source specific.

Not always an option depending on where you are, but often you can find an audio-rental company nearby. It's hard to go wrong with the mics I mentioned above though. Keep it up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On a similar note, here's a two-minute video by Calvin Harris on how he made "Slide": [https://twitter.com/CalvinHarris/status/843563157280903168](https://twitter.com/CalvinHarris/status/843563157280903168)

It's kind of crazy to see that while he has some slightly nicer instruments than me, he mostly does the same thing I do, only with a couple orders of magnitude more talent and a Dropbox with Frank Ocean and Migos vox in it.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a great writeup. I did something similar to this. 80 songs. Everything this author says about the process is pretty much the same that i experienced, but it took me a year to figure it out and another year and a half to write and record all the music. about one song a week. Oh except I did drums differently, I found somthinig called Fat Drums (or something), a midi-based drum machine, and basically i finger drummed on my usb keyboard into a track on my DAW. it was fantastic, absolutely indistinguishable from a human drummer. oh also i used ableton as a daw, it is really good, but really anything could work. and like this author discovered, you can spend way too much time redoing takes, so i took a lot of pride on doing one or two takes and moving on. kept the creative process flowing. in fact after 80 songs, maybe 12 i thought were actually pretty good, so we formed a band, learned those songs, and played live locally for a year or so. it was fun. great job romes!!!

<comment><USER10> I have Addictive Drums 2 and used it even live on my e-drums. It just sounds amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I tried to post a correction on Medium, but they wanted me to create an account. So I created an account to post the correction and they still wouldn't let me post, something about either my profile wasn't complete or I hadn't done enough to allow posting.

Great business model. Outsource the content creation to the peons but then implement draconian restrictions so you have to jump through hoops to make a positive contribution.

Anyway, the correction is, the book "Set Your Voice Free" is by Roger Love, not Robert Love as stated in the article. Helpful for anyone looking for it because Robert Love writes Linux books that contain very little information about improving your singing voice.

I don't understand why anyone would be suckered into creating value for a place like Medium when they are so obviously exploitative.

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, thank you for noting! i'll fix it right away. this is my first time using medium as well. I think i might abandon the account and repost the story on my blog.

thanks again :)

<comment><USER12> If you repost, please update here :)

Thanks for the detailed info--looking at doing this myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! I posted it on my blog - I want to redesign it, however, its working::

[https://alt-romes.github.io/#/march2020/-M2VLHK-TP_orVo9_FjI](https://alt- romes.github.io/#/march2020/-M2VLHK-TP_orVo9_FjI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do some mixing for live events on occasion, and I had a guy tell me once that no mix is ever done, but every mix is eventually abandoned.

Honestly, it's true. You can sink an incredible amount of time into mixing and still not be happy with it.

<comment><USER6> Pro mixers generally finish in a day or maybe two, which is why producers choose them.

<comment><USER13> Pro mixers also have lots of presets and tool chains already setup that they always go-to. It's not that they could just finish a mix in a day, it's that they have a lot of their tooling already roughly setup, and they just have to dial it in. It still takes time to create and setup those chains/presets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is exactly the reason why I switched careers from audio tech to development. Funny seeing this posted here.

I believe there was a post last night on mass amateurization - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_amateurization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_amateurization)

But yeah, you do not need a lot of professional equipment or specialized knowledge now to create great records. I am not at all bemoaning this fact, I love that creating music is more and more open for all, music is a very human quality we should all have access to.

<comment><USER15> One of the more famous "in your room" records is Sufjan Stevens' _Illinoise_. Highly critically acclaimed album involving many instruments that was mostly recorded on a Shure SM57 in a Manhattan apartment. And this isn't your bedroom EDM album, this is an album that well over 20 different classically trained musicians played on.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/pitchfork.com/thepitch/822-insi...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/pitchfork.com/thepitch/822-inside- the-recording-sessions-for-sufjan-stevens-illinois/amp/)

[https://www.sageaudio.com/blog/recording/two-critically- accl...](https://www.sageaudio.com/blog/recording/two-critically-acclaimed- albums-recorded-100-microphone.php)

<comment><USER16> Well, in couple of rooms, studios and a church. Thanks for introducing me to the album, some awesome music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's surprising how many albums are made in home studios these days. Most of David Byrne's stuff, Jagged Little Pill...

<comment> duncan-donuts Another thing I find pretty amazing is how much guitar work is 100% digital these days. The progress in DSP technology has allowed thousands of sounds available to the masses. $500 goes a long way these days which wasn't true a decade ago.

<comment><USER18> And those digital units are not only "legit" sounding, but also much more flexible and hassle-free. Lighter, with instant preset recall, different input/output routing.

I love this tech, really, and the fact that it brings people closer to making music.

<comment><USER19> Can both of you share what is now used for guitar sounds?

<comment><USER7> The Strymon Iridium is fantastic, if you have more to spend and want more flexibility Kemper profilers are hard to beat. AxeFX also gets a lot of love.

On the more budget end most audio interfaces these days will have a Hi-Z input for guitar, there are many great amp/stompbox emulation plugins these days.

<comment><USER20> I adorrrrre my Iridium. I have Guitar Rig & Bias FX and a bunch of other sims, but the Iridium is really special. The sound is _inspiring_ - in that it makes me want to just sit and play guitar for hours on end because it sounds so damn good. It's expensive and I try to not be a gear addict, but imo investing that much in my joy was money well spent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great write-up. People don't realise, this was instrumental to the success of Billie Eilish. She and her brother make their music in a tiny bedroom studio and you can't argue with the results. The trove of available VST plugins for mastering, mixing and instruments are vast and most of them are affordable for those who are serious about pursuing bedroom recording.

</comment><comment><USER22> Finishing an entire album is a great achievement. Even with the tremendous improvements and price reductions in modern home-recording equipment there is still numerous hours of effort required. It is a marathon like effort and anyone who completes it should feel proud.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is great, exactly what I've been trying to do but there's never enough time and now the second kid is on the way... I guess I'll have to just find that extra time somehow because you got me excited again.

One question: What did you use for the guitar amp? I personally use Guitar rig and I keep getting lost in all those infinite guitar sounds. I'm worried my songs won't sound cohesive if I experiment too much and have a different setup (or several) for each song. Do you just pick a few sets like a clean sounding one, dirty sounding one and stick with them through the whole record (maybe add some unique effects here and there) or does it not matter?

<comment><USER24> Rule of thumb for any sound situation, live or recorded: give yourself a limited palette so you can sound consistent.

If you want an album to sound like it's all one piece, you use the same instrument and processing for it all the way through -- except for that one time that you want to highlight it.

In visual terms, you want the grass on the left side of the painting to be the same as the grass on the right side of the painting, unless you deliberately want to say something about the grass. You should only be drawing people's attention to what _you_ _want_ them to be looking at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great article (and nice music). Wish I had read this pointers years ago, when I still had a lot of free time. Maybe a nice hobby for corona quarantine time :-)

<comment> duncan-donuts I'm definitely planning on writing a lot of music over the next month

<comment><AUTHOR> let's go! if you wanna share when you're finished send a text to email or social media (check last line of the post)

<comment> duncan-donuts You bet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's some fantastic artists on youtube who produce in similar circumstances. Here's one of my favorite examples (the video was also made in the artist's room) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYv6-5VmNEM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYv6-5VmNEM)

<comment><USER27> The artists name is Mree, and it's her cover of Walking on a Dream by Empire of the Sun. It's worth the click, and now you know to what you'll be clicking.

<comment><USER26> ha, yeah thanks!

If you aren't familiar with the original song she's covering [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eimgRedLkkU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eimgRedLkkU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I cannot help but mention Jacob Collier, who self-produced an album (called "In My Room") and won 2 Grammys with it. [https://youtu.be/4v3zyPEy- Po?list=PLHX_dBxnc8z-EeR431dUujzqe...](https://youtu.be/4v3zyPEy- Po?list=PLHX_dBxnc8z-EeR431dUujzqeFdMaeoGq)

</comment><comment><USER29> Really neat article. The part about promoting your music seems really hard. I have 0 knowledge about music industry but I've heard there are some sites like Submithub that promote your music to blogs for a small fee. Maybe you can try that. A few reviews from music blogger can help you get more fans.

</comment><comment><USER4> One thing I believe is not mentioned in the article is your monitoring and mixing set up. I didn't see any reference to headphones, speakers Etc

This makes a pretty big difference in the mixing and mastering phases.

</comment><comment><USER30> A four year old teaches a couple of lessons on how to use Garage Band

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK1PjOx9XoI&list=PLkx9TVrdk-...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK1PjOx9XoI&list=PLkx9TVrdk-e5AiYUz9K_Tcvmq4mrr1BmU&index=2)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhDbrdwjj7c&list=PLkx9TVrdk-...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhDbrdwjj7c&list=PLkx9TVrdk-e5AiYUz9K_Tcvmq4mrr1BmU)

</comment><comment><USER31> Reminders me than one of my favourite albums ever, Sheena Ringo's Kalk Samen Kuri no Hana was recorded entirely by her in her apartment with Mac and some cheap hardware.

</comment><comment><USER32> Good article and I like the music. BTW "Reverse Glimpse" gets stuck for me. Just a black screen and it will not play. It stops the playlist there too.

</comment><comment><USER33> Jacob Collier has an album called 'In My Room'

<comment><USER34> Of which 2 tracks won Grammys

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wonderful to see such a detailed run down!

I scrolled straight to the singing part to see if there were any nuggets of wisdom. I've been singing with a teacher for 6 months and it still seems impossible. Everything is so indirect and there is no obvious path to getting better.

Are there any people here who have improved their singing skills significantly? What did you do?

<comment><USER20> Yup! I went from "I don't even sing karaoke or sing in the shower" to really liking my voice, performing super comfortably in public & preparing to record my first studio EP. I guess it's been 3-4 years at this point.

I had a musical background which definitely helped, but the main thing is I desperately wanted to be able to sing.

The main thing you can do is take weekly vocal lessons with a good vocal teacher who you vibe with and practice every day. I didn't have lessons for that whole time, but the periods where I have had a teacher I got better quicker way better than when I just practiced by myself.

The cool thing is that singing unlocks songwriting, and songwriting is absolutely transformative as a self-care practice. It's also infinitely more fun to sing your own songs than covers. But also performing your own songs gives you a drive to get better at singing. Virtuous cycle.

edit: here's a recent song [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrd7Uvm2h00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrd7Uvm2h00)

<comment><USER36> Curious, why does singing unlock songwriting?

<comment><USER20> it's easier to write songs when you have control of your voice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Assuming I already have a guitar, bass and electric piano (with midi) how much would I have to spend on bits and pieces to do something similar. I have a couple of low spec windows laptops so might well need a new machine as well?

Guess the main costs would be the digital interface and software plus a new computer maybe (does it really gave to be a mac!!)

<comment><AUTHOR> I spent around 90€ on the audio interface (however, i think you can get a better one for less money now), 35€ on the mic stand, 15€ on the cable. I'm pretty sure you can get far with free software, and it wouldn't require a new machine - you just need the basics. I'm not sure how much the rest of the equipment cost because most I didn't buy myself.

<comment><USER38> Great job putting out an entire self produced album and documenting it. I wanted to bounce this opinion off you.

Its my opinion that most folks who are going to be using programmed drums would be better off with an inexpensive MIDI controller with some pads (like the one pictured in your article) vs playing them on an electronic kit unless they happen to be a very skilled drummer.

I play drums passably, but when I'm demoing up ideas I just thump them in with some pads on a MIDI controller.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Just on the first track, but this is quite good! Thanks for sharing your process.

</comment><comment><USER40> That's some atmospheric shoegaze. Very nice!

</comment><comment><USER4> One more question. Did you consider possibly releasing this material under a Creative Commons rather than a commercial license?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! No, it did not cross my mind - where do you release Creative Commons music? As a goal I wanted to have my friends listening and sharing the music where they usually listen to it. If you want to chat about it contact me (see last line of post for contacts)

<comment><USER4> Creative Commons doesn't mean you can't put it on Spotify iTunes Etc. It just means it can also be distributed on platforms that aren't part of the music industry copyright and licensing system.

One advantage of doing it this way is so your music is widely available even if the platform of the day goes away and you're not on top of it to migrate to whatever's current.

Check out more about this here [https://creativecommons.org/about/program- areas/arts-culture...](https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/arts- culture/arts-culture-resources/legalmusicforvideos/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> You should keep at it, that was not bad at all.

</comment><comment><USER42> What would someome need to change to this setup for hosting karaoke nights?

</comment><comment><USER43> Paz is a nice song.</comment>


Why High Fructose Corn Syrup Will Kill You - <AUTHOR> http://drhyman.com/blog/2011/05/13/5-reasons-high-fructose-corn-syrup-will-kill-you/

<comment><USER2> The problem with the American diet is not HFCS but sugar. HFCS and sugar is in _everything_ because Americans like sugary, sweet tasting food. HFCS is used as sugar substitute because it is cheap (thanks to govt subsidy). Replacing HFCS with sugar in junk food will not turn it into nutritious food. Demonizing HFCS is a bad strategy. I think people are smart enough to realize that massive consumption of sugar, in whatever form, cannot be a healthy lifestyle.</comment>


The Great Endumbening - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/iq-scores-going-down-research-flynn-effect.html <comment><USER2> As a Finn who served in the military, I wouldn't put much weight on the data gathered from the conscripts.

If you do well on the test, you might get assigned to officer training which means an extra 6 months of service. Many people intentionally answer wrong to get home earlier. I certainly did.

Apart from that, I do believe there is a grain of truth in the article.

<comment><USER3> That could readily explain the drop in IQ for younger siblings: Their older brother clued them in on this detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Outside of environmental factors, social factors should also be considered.

Oversimplified: Maybe everyone is being too safe and not exposing children to stimuli that promote better development.

I suspect several factors are contributing to this. 1) As more toys are discovered to be 'dangerous' or 'have small parts' children have less exposure to complex objects or it is deferred to later ages. 2) Adults have less, or are less inclined to, time to properly care for children and thus don't understand that judgement and supervision can allow 'supervised' use of toys that can be dangerous if not properly used, but would be fine if used while supervised. 3) I wonder how strongly this correlates to all parents within child rearing units being in the workforce (single parents, dual income parents, etc)? 4) Or how it relates to decreasing access to natural areas to explore as a child?

These are only some of the social influences that could also be part of the cause.

<comment><USER5> Why isn't this effect visible in America, then?

<comment><USER6> From TFA:

"As Flynn and Shayer note, Scandinavian IQ declines might well presage future trends in other countries. It may be that, once we've made our schools as good as theirs, we'll see our Flynn effect max out, and then whatever channels feed their anti-Flynn effect will show up in our data, too."

<comment><USER7> Amazing that the same pet hypothesis can explain both rising and falling IQ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Given how broad this effect, it seems like an amazingly good mechanism to attribute to a pet peeve of your choice: screen time, chemicals, lack of good old-fashioned memorization, boring playgrounds/toys, lousy education, lack of exercise, the decline and fall of practically everything, etc. Couple that to a golden opportunity for older people to self-praise ("In my day we weren't as dumb/sheltered/poisoned as you folks") and you have the perfect storm.

Making these fond arguments slightly more awkward is the fact that this effect doesn't seem to be happening in America, but I suppose all you youngsters lacked the attention span to read all the way to the end of the article. Now get the hell off my lawn.

<comment><USER9> One day, in the far future, it will be discovered that ubiquitious plastic has profound but subtle effects on intelligence, fertility and general health. Amending that will be like moving out of the slow zone.

The roman civilization used lead pipes for drinking water.

<comment><USER10> > Scarborough wrote that Nriagu's basic premise couldn't be trusted because of > sloppy work. He also concluded that the Romans were aware of the harm lead > could cause, that lead poisoning wasn't endemic in their society and that > Rome did not fall because of it.

> Yet French researcher Hugo Delile and his team, reporting in the Proceedings > of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, concluded that such > concentrations were "unlikely to have been truly harmful." The group also > claimed that enough criticism of Nriagu's theory had been amassed over three > decades to largely debunk it.

> "Lead is no longer seen as the prime culprit of Rome's demise," Delile > wrote.

<comment><USER11> It wasn't the pipes, it was the wine, which they sweetened with lead acetate. Delile's paper only touches on water supply, rather than lead as a deliberate addition to diet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My own personal hypothesis on this: it's clear that one skill that used to be important is now _much_ less important, and that's memory. When I was a kid I remembered dozens of phone numbers, now I know about 3. My fear, though, is that other higher order thinking skills are still very dependent on memory, and as we need to exercise our memory less frequently, other parts of our cognitive abilities suffer.

<comment><USER13> I imagine if you peeked over a teenager's shoulder as they went about their routine phone habits you'd have little idea what was going on through all the memes, inside jokes, cultural references, and slang. I have a hard time believing our ability to memorize is so rigid that it peaked in the period after operators routed calls and before phone books, rolodexes, and contact lists in flip phones. We just put memory to different uses throughout time.

<comment><USER14> > We just put memory to different uses throughout time.

I agree. Just look how many site names, youtube channels, game rules, game item stats, memes, pokemon names (is that still a thing?), anime slang, etc. young people can memorize.

No /s, I am serious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I attribute that to the lack of boredom in young people. When I was young I was bored at least from time to time. This led to doing mischief but also to use the brain and invent something entertaining to waste time.

Now distractions are all around us (play stations and TV on demand) or with us (smart phones). No more need for being imaginative.

There is also this interesting correlation of declining crime rate which can be attributed to kids wasting time with play stations rather than hanging out in the street.

have discussed this with close friends. In the past we perceived that and considered declining intelligence as an assumption, with recent articles like that it seems to be a fact.

<comment><USER7> So why is this happening in Scandinavia but not in the US? Doesn't the US have just as many play stations and smartphones?

<comment><USER16> It's hinted in the article,

Basically, as this is an average for societies, the average environmental factors are better in Scandinavia than in America. But those factors already peaked, and now are starting a downwards trend:

>The authors note several possible factors, among them worsening health and nutrition, a decline in the quality of education, detrimental changes to media exposure, and the indirect effects of immigration.

OTOH, America's average environmental factors are still improving, so, it's still on the rise:

> It may be that, once we've made our schools as good as theirs, we'll see our > Flynn effect max out, and then whatever channels feed their anti-Flynn > effect will show up in our data, too.

<comment><USER7> So again a pet hypothesis which can explain both rising _and_ falling IQ. So what observation could theoretically _disprove_ this hypothesis?

Note that you can state exactly the opposite hypothesis and still claim the numbers support it. The use of gaming consoles and smartphones _improve_ IQ, but this effect have maxed out in Scandinavia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it just me or was the knee-jerk 'racism!' on everything immigration-related in the article off-putting? I mean, is it racist to say that immigration might cause a decline of average intelligence, if it's clear that there are physical factors in play in the countries where the immigrants come from that could cause a decreased iq (lower nutrition etc, as noted in the article)? I'm not claiming that it's the case, but the prima facie dismissal of any theory like it because 'it's racist!' that anything might be influenced by immigration made the whole piece feel just very intellectually dishonest.

Again, just to be clear and lest I'll get dragged down into 'you're racist' myself, I'm not claiming one way or the other. My point is that apparently some conclusions are off-limits from the start; any evidence in that direction must be wrong because of the conclusion it leads to. It's this sort of thing that makes real racists go 'see how we're being censored'.

<comment><USER17> > Is it just me or was the knee-jerk 'racism!' on everything immigration- > related in the article off-putting?

Agreed. Impartial evaluation of facts seems to be dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't think we can rule out an evolutionary explanation so quickly. We are starting to get firm genetic evidence that something like dysgenics is occurring in Iceland, for example:[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114)

There is also a plausible mechanism of action, intelligent people tend to get an education proportionate to their intelligence. Educated people have ridiculously low birth rates. Intelligence is heritable.

Just like conservatives will have to overcome their global warming denial, those of the progressive tradition may well have to start accepting what cognitive genomics is making increasingly obvious: intelligence is hereditary and this has policy implications.

Should it prove to be a genetic decline, we have solutions, such as embryo selection, in the wings that can work now with little research. This will get us ~3-8 IQ points per generation:[https://www.gwern.net/Embryo- selection](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection)

Iterated embryo selection and genetic engineering will be able to offer much more, several standard deviations in multiple traits simultaneously.

But we cannot repair problems we refuse to look in the face.

<comment><USER19> > Intelligence is heritable

I believe parent is getting downvotes because of this, but this isn't a matter of opinion or social science. It's hard quantitative genetics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ)

This is the crux of any inter-generational change in average intelligence in a population. Human assortative mating patterns and the inverse relationship between intelligence and fertility account for some of the effect and some is due to shifts in the gene pool. While we can't and shouldn't discount environmental effects (goodbye lead paint!), the latest genetics research tells us that only 15-25% of variation in intelligence can be attributed to the environment.

<comment><USER20> But how does assortative mating account for it? One would then expect at least neutral relationship between fertility and intelligence.

<comment><USER19> Smart people tend to reproduce with other smart people, but they reproduce an awful lot less. Interestingly, smart people having low fertility is a rather recent phenomenon. Lots of famous scientists came from huge broods.

<comment><USER20> famous scientists are probably exceptional enough to not be accounted into statistics. The questions is why _they_ breed less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Or, the things the tests select for are gradually falling out of favor in our education system and society at large. Pollutants don't seem like an unreasonable hypothesis either, though.

<comment><USER22> Pollution might make sense if the decline was measured worldwide, but it's localized to Northern Europe, where pollution has generally declined over the last several decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Forgive my impudence, but why does this matter?

I have barely managed to come to terms that I will never accomplish anything of value in my life. I suspect this is true for most people. As a society, we inherently value diligence and hard work over intelligence because most labor implies more of the former than the latter.

The elites will still be elites. The general population gets a little dumber over time on average, but this matters very little.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Never memorize something that you can look up."

We've outsourced memorising facts to knowing how to google it. Factor in calculators, spelling and grammar checkers - yoy can outsource a lot of memorising.

Which doesn't help when you're sitting an IQ test.

<comment><USER25> I saw a Sherlock Holmes quote on here once, I liked it and I think it's relevant to your comment so I'll post it here.

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

<comment><USER26> Elsewhere Conan Doyle had Holmes explain that he did not know, or care, whether the Sun circled the Earth or vice-versa, because that fact was irrelevant for his activity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What if the sperm counts cause the IQ drop or vice versa?It's not clear how much of this research is male-only. I wonder if testosterone levels link the two.

</comment><comment><USER27> The great endumbening is that we're still trying to measure intelligence with this IQ thing.

<comment><USER28> Works well enough for all practical applications, and we don't have anything better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> We've been slowly transitioned from a life of creativism and questioning to a life of consumerism.

We're already cretins.

<comment><USER30> What else is there to do? Everyone is a creator now, and their creations never go away. Right up until the year 19nntp or so, your written creations were either adding to the world or they went out of print and were forgotten. Until the year 19youtube or so, your musical contributions either added to the world or they went out of production and were lost to the aether.

Now, everything is an endless library-cum-sewer filled with content, you can never run out of it, you can't clear out "worse" things, you can't meaningfully filter it - only on a superficial keyword match or vote score.

What point is there to be creative to add a drop to this ocean of content?

Why be creative when society says the purpose of it is to get followers and extract coins from them, and nothing more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy)

<comment><USER7> So why is IQ increasing in the US while declining in Northern Europe?

<comment><USER31> Because in the US the IQ scores are taken more seriously than in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Been around the world and found That only stupid people are breeding The cretins cloning and feeding And I don't even own a tv</comment>


'Fake News' and How WaPo Rewrote Its Story on Russian Hacking of Power Grid - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/#2558cbc6291e <comment><AUTHOR> It makes a lot of sense to use a blockchain for published news articles. One of the biggest issues with web based news is the ability of the content provider to change the content of an article with no indication of having done so.

The result of a 24 hr news cycle more concerned about being first than being correct, is the manifestation of a nonchalant attitude to post-hoc alter something which was supposed to be believed to be true at the time it was supposedly published. The number of edits to WaPos article let alone the actual falsehood of the claim made on Friday are deeply troubling. Of course there is the related issue of other news sources blindly regurgitating information and rolling with a narrative until the news cycle is over. When the story turns out to be untrue the attention given to the retraction is a fraction of the initial coverage.

>Despite the article ballooning from 8 to 18 paragraphs, the publication date of the article remained unchanged and no editorial note was appended, meaning that a reader being forwarded a link to the article would have no way of knowing the article they were seeing was in any way changed from the original version published 2 hours prior.

It is entirely irresponsible for a "news organization" to edit the news and not inform their readers</comment>


Ask HN: Why did Tim Cook say Safari just got ES5? - <AUTHOR> You can see him say it at today's WWDC at 40:31 https://youtu.be/hntVmN2aK8k?t=40m31s<p>Did he just misspeak or is this true? <comment><USER2> That's not Tim Cook, it's Craig Federighi. It seems like it was probably a mistake. In fact he hesitated and it sounds like he was about to say 6 then corrected (erroneously)</comment>


Distributing 2d Game sprites for iphone and android - <AUTHOR> http://design.taabi.com

<comment><USER2> I found no information about license. All it says is:

      By submitting the form you agree that the art you share is
      your personalcreation and you allow other users to use it
      for free.

Is the license attached to each image pack?</comment>


SwiftWebUI - <AUTHOR> http://www.alwaysrightinstitute.com/swiftwebui/ <comment><USER2> SwiftUI, and the underlying system for embedded DSLs that it's built upon, is pure genius.

It has excited me and invigorated my creativity in a way that I had not felt since Microsoft's WPF/XAML, but unlike WPF+XAML you don't have to work in 2 different languages for the logic versus the declarative UI, and unlike Microsoft I don't have to worry about it being museum'ed and forgotten after a couple short years.

See "What's New in Swift 5.1" [0] around 31:15 where they show an example of how you might use full-featured Swift to output HTML. You can immediately tell that it's a hint of something huge and possibly disruptive to come.

SwiftUI and its live previews and device-agnosticism are already insanely powerful. There's no reason why that tech shouldn't be applied to web dev as well, and hopefully even ported to Windows/Linux/Android to output their native GUIs.

[0] [https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/402/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/402/)

<comment><USER3> This all looks like Flutter to be honest.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I really liked Flutter so I was excited that some of it's best ideas were coming to Apple. But Flutter is so young it's hard to imagine they rewrote whatever they had in a few months and got it ready to ship in just a few months for all of their major platforms. So I don't think they've borrowed it from Flutter, but if they did it might be even more impressive.

<comment><USER3> The first commit to Flutter was made in Oct 23 2014 (Initial name was Sky), It is almost as old as the Swift language itself. So, IMO, Swift UI had quite a bit inspiration from Flutter. If you look at the samples, the similarity is uncanny.

<comment><USER5> Isn't Flutter just a reimagining of React Native anyway?

<comment><USER6> In theory, there are four fundamental approaches.

1\. Separate stacks, native widgets

2\. Shared stack, native widgets

3\. Separate stacks, custom widgets

4\. Shared stack, custom widgets

React Native uses methods 1 and 2. They have unified components that can be used across platforms, but they lack features, so most complex apps use the second approach. The big wins are a more known language (JS) and sharing a bunch of the "backend of the frontend".

The big downside happens when you add more systems (eg, web, OSX, Windows, Linux, etc). When you do this, the intersection shrinks and the potential for bugs in the shared widget increase dramatically.

Flutter uses methods 3 and 4. Rather than using the native widgets, they carry along Skia to do the rendering for them. This neatly skips most of the UI intersection issues because if the native widget for X lacks a certain feature, you can add it yourself in your custom widget. When dramatically different looks are desired, you can still use separate widgets for different systems. Adding additional systems is usually less difficult because rather than writing hooks into everything on the system, you only need more basic system hooks and the effort to get the renderer working.

The big downside here is development time and little inconsistencies. Instead of leveraging the work already done by the native developers (who probably know their system much better than the library's devs), everything must be built from scratch. Getting 90% there is easy, but getting every little detail working so it feels native is much harder. In addition, you must keep up with native widget changes which generally adds a lag time between their release and your catchup (but on the plus side, you may have already implemented some features they were missing). It should also be added that some UI features may not be available on some platforms (despite the shared widget) simply because the underlying OS does not support them, so multiple components may still be necessary for some things.

Both approaches have been tried in the past. Qt is probably the most successful at cross-platform design and they use the 3rd and 4th methods. I'm inclined to think its a better solution in the end even if it is more costly.

<comment><USER7> As a typical Mac snob, I used to care a lot about using native widgets. But UIKit doesn't even ship with a good-looking button class, and native apps often rewrite UI elements because the builtins are not very flexible (hello UITabBar). In theory that should make it easier for toolkits like Flutter to gain ground.

<comment><USER8> > But UIKit doesn't even ship with a good-looking button class

There are so few times when one should want to use a plain button in iOS anyway. Most times when a user needs to make a choice or start a task, they pick it from a UITableView, UIAlertController presented as an action sheet, or press a UINavigationItem.

> often rewrite UI elements because the builtins are not very flexible (hello > UITabBar)

What's specifically missing here? You have items, each has an icon and text, they can also have badges. Tapping on items changes the currently shown content view. What's a tab bar supposed to do besides that?

A lot of the times I see these sorts of basic UI paradigms recreated, or the typical iOS HIG ignored by recreating an Android-style UI, the app can sometimes break when iOS has a major (or even minor) update or ignore accessibility guidelines. They're usually not significantly different in function, usually just aesthetics, and not usually sufficiently so to justify the cost.

<comment><USER7> > There are so few times when one should want to use a plain button in iOS > anyway.

Almost every first-party app starts with a "Data & Privacy"/"What's New" dialog that uses a blue pill button, and almost every third-party app has a big fat "log in" button. Or look at Apple's redesigned Maps app. I don't know if I've ever worked on an app that didn't have its own ad-hoc button class.

> What's a tab bar supposed to do besides that?

Facebook, Instagram, Tweetbot etc. seem to have their own implementations because they want to hide the labels. Spotify has one to animate the icons when tapped. Audible has one to show the album art in the middle item. I'm going through my third-party apps right now, and only WhatsApp seems to use UITabBar as it was intended.

> the app can sometimes break when iOS has a major (or even minor) update

So did UITabBar earlier this year: [https://stackoverflow.com/q/53084806](https://stackoverflow.com/q/53084806)

I nudge my clients towards stock UIKit components as much as possible, for all the reasons you mentioned, but I don't think UIKit is that much better than e.g. Flutter in the way that AppKit is many times better than Electron.

<comment><USER8> > Facebook, Instagram, Tweetbot etc. seem to have their own implementations > because they want to hide the labels

All one has to do, to hide the labels, is set the labels to "" and adjust the image insets to account for the empty space.

> Audible has one to show the album art in the middle item

That's possible with stock UITabBar. Just set the appropriate image for the UITabBarItem and, again, adjust the image insets.

> and only WhatsApp seems to use UITabBar as it was intended

That's surprising. I don't use WhatsApp anymore, but most of it seemed custom. Well, that scores WA one point, I guess.

> I don't think UIKit is that much better than e.g. Flutter in the way that > AppKit is many times better than Electron

Until you want to use iOS' built-in accessibility features, and you are disappointed to see that third party apps needlessly reimplemented widgets and didn't do the extra work to make them accessible.

Sadly, accessibility is always seen as an optional extra, not a fundamental feature. It's been a fundamental feature of AppKit and UIKit since time immemorial.

When some of these apps make it to macOS via Project Catalyst, this issue might become exacerbated to some extent.

<comment><USER7> You can hide the labels in a stock UITabBar, but you can't change its size, and I suspect this is what motivated Facebook and others to hide the labels in the first place.

You are right about the Audible use case, it might actually be using using a stock UITabBar. And in my experience WhatsApp has always been a pretty good platform citizen. It's one the very few icons on my home screen that tries to match Apple's style.

Agreed about a11y, I'm glad that Apple keeps bringing it up as a core feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of Cappucino, which professed to let you build a single-page webapp using "Objective-J," a strange hybrid of Javascript and ObjC.

[https://www.cappuccino.dev/](https://www.cappuccino.dev/)

<comment><USER10> Whatever happened to that project? They were one of the early guys trying to do full blown "modern" JS apps on the web around the time when backbone.js came out, but with a more desktopy approach.

Edit: I forgot, they were one of the first YC companies. Looks like the parent company got acquired by Motorola and somewhat shutdown their 280slides/Atlas projects. One founder also later started RunKit which was bought by Stripe. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/280_North,_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/280_North,_Inc).

<comment><USER11> They hit 1.0 in April of last year.

[https://www.cappuccino.dev/blog/](https://www.cappuccino.dev/blog/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is insane. It's bringing the arguably typing of Swift with the flexibility of designing a web app. It may not be feasible (yet) to build a non-trivial web app, but I'll be watching this project from time to time. Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, what an interesting project. I wonder if you could reroute the connection over a websocket and serve an actual webpage off of it? It'd be a great demo to have the SwiftWebUI page served using SwiftWebUI ;)

Also: it would be _really_ nice if SwiftWebUI used actual HTML elements rather than styled divs.

</comment><comment><USER14> Learning Swift is something that I considered when the "TensorFlow in Swift" announcement was made. That project is still in the early days but if eventually the turtles all the way down Swift TensorFlow implementation is complete and mature, then it would be very compelling to have one good programming language for most work. Right now I jump around between using Haskell, Common Lisp, and Python. Perhaps in a year Swift might be a reasonable language for everything I work on - I will wait and see.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's weird that there are 49 comments and not a single mention of React.

SwiftUI is basically React implemented in Apple's proprietary language rather than a preprocessed JavaScript-XML hybrid [1]. More options is a good thing, but it hardly seems revolutionary.

[1] This works much better than it sounds like. I'm a long-term C/C++/Obj-C programmer and was very sceptical of JSX, but React is actually very nice to use. The toolchain is kind of byzantine but seems to be settling slowly on reasonable defaults.

<comment><USER16> well, to be fair, react wasn't exactly completely new with its idea either... what's old is new again

<comment><USER17> Sure, but it is one of the most popular way to develop web apps today. So it seems kind of relevant to contrast against it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me a lot about ASP.net Webforms. Maybe this is better conceived but trying to program the web like a desktop app created more problems than what it tried to solve.

<comment><USER19> My first thought also. Also I remember some of the design documents of JSF, it was designed to enable views to be rendered everywhere (Java ME, web, desktop). It only added complexity and in the end nobody used it because the paradigms are so different.

<comment><USER20> It also scaled poorly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Unlike some other efforts this doesn't just render SwiftUI Views as HTML. It > also sets up a connection between the browser and the code hosted in the > Swift server, allowing for interaction - buttons, pickers, steppers, lists, > navigation, you get it all!

Sounds like Phoenix LiveView, and IMO it's a very good approach. We need more things like it.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is super cool! I built the airpptx.github.io project - which similarly uses powerpoint elements to translate to html. The challenges are in the translation of native elements to web elements. I'm going to take a look at your codebase and see if I can help.

</comment><comment><USER23> This seems to me to have a serious architectural issue. If I read it right, the app is rendered in the browser but is processing state changes and doing HTML rendering of the state tree on the server side? How is that going to scale?

This is a really neat adaptation of the SwiftUI API to the web but it seems like the guts of it needs to run in the browser to be practical.

Perhaps we'll eventually see the Swift compiler support a WASM target?

[edit] Like Qt is doing? [https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/wasm.html](https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/wasm.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> It would be great if one of these efforts gets us to something that actually works well as replacement for html/css; the ones that work (what you build is how it will look) feel like Flash (you lose SEO, copy/paste, accessibility etc) while the ones that try to fix that really do not work because you cannot really get the result you were aiming for design and feature wise. Webassembly did not fix (as far as I know) the SEO issue. This will all happen and for me, it cannot happen fast enough!

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe Apple should bless this project, by letting it use the name WebObjects?

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm looking forward for a connection between SwiftUI and GTK or Qt, so we could have a fully functional user interface on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER27> Coming from a job working on a WebObjects behemoth this is terrifying for me ...

<comment><USER28> What was the job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Offtopic: Always Right Institute LOL

Is there a way to join this institute? I would love to have this on my CV and professional profile.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is great -- I was sorry not to see the web target at WWDC, especially given Apple's WebObjects history.

</comment><comment><USER31> Looks like vaadin or kweb

<comment><USER32> and the OG of them all, GWT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So this is basically Flutter but for Swift?

<comment><USER34> Not really. Flutter has its own layout rendering engine, and uses low level APIs in the browser to circumvent the default rendering. This is what allows Flutter to do, say, efficient table views on the web, which is kind of a holy grail of web rendering.

SwiftWebUI currently seems to rely on normal rendering:

> SwiftWebUI tries to replicate common SwiftUI layouts, but doesn't fully > succeed yet. After all it has to deal with the layout system the browser > provides. Help wanted, flexbox experts welcome!

<comment><USER35> > Flutter has its own layout rendering engine, and uses low level APIs in the > browser to circumvent the default rendering.

Does this mean that Flutter on the web is really Flutter on Chrome? Or does is support other web browsers well?

<comment><USER36> See [https://flutter.dev/web](https://flutter.dev/web). They claim use of DOM and CSS, but the demos I just looked at are rendering completely to canvas, with an empty accessibility tree and effectively no CSS.

<comment><USER34> Seems like it. Text is not selectable in the latest version of the flutter web preview, for example. But it's an early tech preview version, so I'll judge it more harshly when it's 1.0 :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why smallpox is no more, but polio and other diseases persist - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-smallpox-is-no-more-but-polio-and-other-diseases-persist-20191203/ <comment><USER2> <the laboratory-weakened virus used in the oral polio vaccine can very rapidly regain its strength if it starts spreading on its own.

After a child is vaccinated with live polio virus, the virus replicates inside the child's intestine and eventually is excreted.

In places with poor sanitation, fecal matter can enter the drinking water supply and the virus is able to start spreading from person to person.

"We discovered there's only a few [mutations] that have to happen and they happen rather quickly in the first month or two post-vaccination," Andino says.

"As the virus starts circulating in the community, it acquires further mutations that make it basically indistinguishable from the wild-type virus.

It's polio in terms of virulence and in terms of how the virus spreads."

In June, the World Health Organization reported 15 cases of children paralyzed in Syria by vaccine-derived forms of polio.

These cases come on top of two other vaccine-derived polio cases earlier this year in Syria and four in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.>

[https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/28/5344030...](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/28/534403083/mutant- strains-of-polio-vaccine-now-cause-more-paralysis-than-wild-polio)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wild-type polio could very well be gone by now if the CIA hadn't burned Western doctors' goodwill in Pakistan by using fake polio vaccines to take DNA from children suspected to be related to Osama bin Laden.

This isn't close to the most evil thing the CIA has done, but it makes me the most unreasonably angry.

<comment><USER4> What the hell. This sounds comically villainous. On the other hand we _are_ talking about the CIA here. Got a link?

<comment><USER5> The CIA have crafted a wonderful brand: with their actions, they've created a (truthful) universal public image that they'd stoop to the southern tip of Hell to get whatever they want, completely numbing the public to any possible action. If the CIA had a good reputation, hearing something like "They undermined public faith in vaccines, leading to multiple modern-day problems and epidemics" would lead to skepticism, and then riots.

Instead, we all know the substance of the agency's actions, and of the character of its men. As a result, we're mildly surprised when we hear this, and don't feel it's a substantial deviation from the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a more interesting dilemma, one which I could hardly believe once I heard it:

> _More Polio Cases Now Caused by Vaccine Than by Wild Virus_

If that's true, at what point do we _stop_ vaccinating for it?

1\. [https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/11/25/health/ap-af- med...](https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/11/25/health/ap-af-med-africa- polio.html)

2\. [https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/28/5344030...](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/28/534403083/mutant- strains-of-polio-vaccine-now-cause-more-paralysis-than-wild-polio)

<comment><USER7> To be clear, it's the cheap, oral, live virus polio vaccine that's causing the problem.

They don't use that in the US, at all, and we don't have the issue.

We don't need to stop polio vaccination...we need to find a reasonable way to replace the low budget version.

<comment><USER8> The live vaccine is not simply a "low budget version", it's more effective.

<comment><USER7> It is not.

<comment><USER9> There's a number of reasons the live polio vaccine is preferred in developing countries. The biggest is that the OPV vaccine, as the name suggests, is _oral_. You don't need needles, which means it's easier to mass administer, you don't have to deal with sharps, etc. I think people vastly underestimate the logistical difficulties of delivering vaccines, especially injectables that require a cold chain like IPV.

It also sheds, which is good if you're struggling with vaccine coverage. Whether this is a downside or not is a highly dynamic question - as we get closer, the side effects become a bigger deal, but part of the _reason_ they're a big deal is because WT polio is so heavily suppressed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Small pox is still available in highly secure laboratories of Both US and Russia. Also, FDA approves small pox vaccine. [https://www.fda.gov/news- events/press-announcements/fda-appr...](https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press- announcements/fda-approves-first-live-non-replicating-vaccine-prevent- smallpox-and-monkeypox)

[https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/who-gets- vaccina...](https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/vaccine-basics/who-gets- vaccination.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Several articles in the news including the one in Quanta [1,2,3] appear to have caused some misunderstanding. What is clear so far is that "circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses (cVDPVs) can emerge in settings with low population immunity...," therefore, "all countries must maintain high population immunity." [4] It was found that "compared with January 2017–June 2018, the number of reported cVDPV outbreaks more than tripled, from nine to 29," in the most recent survey. [4] As a result, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative" is planning future use of a novel type 2 OPV, stabilized to decrease the likelihood of reversion to neurovirulence." One of the most significant barriers to polio eradication is "reaching every child – including inconsistent campaign quality, insecurity, conflict, massive mobile populations, and, in some instances, parental refusal to the vaccine."[5]

It is false to say that somehow cVDPVs had been kept a secret or their importance downplayed. [6] There are critical reasons to remain vigilant of any adverse consequences but keep in mind that every year "hundreds of thousands of cases due to wild polio virus are prevented. Well over 10 million cases have been averted since large-scale administration of OPV began 20 years ago." [7]

[1] [https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-smallpox-is-no-more- but-p...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-smallpox-is-no-more-but-polio- and-other-diseases-persist-20191203/)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/11/25/health/ap-af- med...](https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/11/25/health/ap-af-med-africa- polio.html)

[3] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/more-polio- cases...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/more-polio-cases-now- caused-by-vaccine-than-by-wild- virus/2019/11/25/1a4d087e-0f76-11ea-924c-b34d09bbc948_story.html)

[4] [https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6845a4.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6845a4.htm)

[5] [http://polioeradication.org/news-post/global-leaders- pledge-...](http://polioeradication.org/news-post/global-leaders-pledge- us2-6-billion-to-eradicate-polio-at-the-reaching-the-last-mile-forum-in-abu- dhabi/)

[6] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236293/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236293/)

[7] [https://www.who.int/features/qa/64/en/](https://www.who.int/features/qa/64/en/)</comment>


Show HN: Price protection on airfare. If fares go up, we pay you. - <AUTHOR> https://levelskies.com/

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool that they have a contest going. I just submitted my guess... hoping for the $20 credit!

</comment><comment><USER3> "It looks like you've encountered an error: Origin is not supported. Destination is not supported."

Too bad. Seems like non-US locations are not supported yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right. We are currently offering our service out of 10 major hubs in the US, although we do cover international routes. We're training our pricing algorithm and expanding the routes we cover all the time so expect to see many more hubs soon.

Here's a list of the airports you can currently fly out of:

• Atlanta, GA - Hartsfield-Jackson Airport (ATL)

• Boston, MA - Financial District - Waterfront (BOS)

• Chicago, IL - O'Hare International (ORD)

• Dallas, TX - Dallas-Fort Worth Airport (DFW)

• Los Angeles, CA - Los Angeles Airport (LAX)

• New York, NY - JFK Airport (JFK)

• Philadelphia, PA - Philadelphia Airport (PHL)

• San Diego, CA - San Diego International (SAN)

• San Francisco, CA - San Francisco Airport (SFO)

• Washington, DC - Dulles Airport (IAD)</comment></comment>


Slack is Screwed - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/10/probeat-slack-is-screwed/ <comment><USER2> Great clickbait title, venturebeat.

> (Google and Microsoft are entering the group chat space..) In other words, > Slack doesn't offer anything that Google and Microsoft can't replicate.

Of course Google and Microsoft can replicate the functionality of Slack -- they have smart, talented staff and chatrooms are a solved problem. However, where Slack excels is in cutting across organizational units, skill-sets, and getting people to use it. It's persistent-history IRC without a technical barrier and great marketing/user acquisition/word-of-mouth.

Unless you're a Microsoft tech-org (meaning C#/.net is the norm, not exception), there's a high likelihood that the only Microsoft software that engineering and design departments have installed is Skype; if I was at Slack, wouldn't sweat the scenario of sales, marketing, and engineering suddenly adopting Microsoft (in fact, "Microsoft Teams" was ostensibly announced in November and no one in my circles has mentioned it).

Google is a trickier problem for Slack. Everyone uses Gmail and Google is the landing page of the HTTP-internet. However, and maybe this is contentious, Google's need to integrate their myriad services turns users away. Not to beat a dead horse, but Google Plus could not have asked for better conditions for organic growth and it still somehow turned into a ghost town.

> Almost every business either has G Suite or Office 365... As a company, why > the hell would you shell out for one of them and Slack?

But, to my experience and opinion, "already paid for" and "close enough" may peel away some users from Slack and towards Google -- this is why orgs end up using HipChat.

<comment><USER3> One of the organizations that I am currently employed with is a remote .NET business. We use Slack for our communications. Office365 is separate from Visual Studio Team Services. You'll find very few purist organisations, as most use whatever is convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slack is _way_ too expensive. $9/month/user quickly becomes an insane amount of money for large organizations to spend on something that is essentially an IRC client.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can't wait for it to die off. The typical "all day meeting with the everyone in your company and no agenda" usage is terrible and the software does very little to discourage it holistically.

</comment><comment><USER6> Having competitors doesn't mean you're screwed.

<comment><USER7> Excessive statements on headlines help click through ratios though

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh God, how many stupid, power hungry, buggy chat apps will I have to install on my phone. Make it stop

<comment><USER9> Chat / audio / video and related comms software seems to be a lemon market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Office365 and G Suite are costly for many SMEs. There's plenty of space there for Slack.

<comment><USER10> The pricing for all of Gsuite($5) or O365($10) seems about on par with just paying for Slack($8), unless you're using the free tier, and those businesses don't really matter to anyone by definition.

<comment><USER7> I would argue that the free tier matters to any company that offers one, otherwise they would not offer it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think too many companies are scared of Microsoft anymore. This isn't the 90s.</comment>


Danny Cohen, Inventor of the First Flight Simulator, Dies at 81 - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute/ieee-member-news/danny-cohen-inventor-of-the-first-flight-simulator-dies-at-81 <comment><USER2> He died in August and there was a good thread about him back then: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20689675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20689675)

</comment><comment><USER3> First computer flight simulator. Earlier devices such as [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_Trainer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_Trainer) were used and mechanically based.

<comment><USER4> These non-computer machines were incredible, too.

I remember one at Grumman Aerospace. They had a model of the landing area that looked like a giant model railroad set, but it was vertically mounted. There was a camera mounted on rails that could do X, Y, and Z, motion that corresponded to how the airplane was being piloted. The view from the camera was what was shown in the cockpit monitor.

<comment><USER5> The first Link trainers did not have any visual display. As everything is harder to do on instruments than with a view, such simulators are very useful for everything but initial training and advanced maneuvering (such as aerobatics, combat, in-flight refuelling, and a lot of the things helicopters are used for.)</comment></comment></comment>


Some light quantum mechanics [3Blue1Brown] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzRCDLre1b4 <comment><AUTHOR> Complementary video (Bell's Theorem) on MinutePhysics: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs)</comment>


DNSSEC KSK Rollover Postponed - <AUTHOR> https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2017-09-27-en <comment><AUTHOR> Let's just be clear:

The IETF fervently requests that you enroll your domain names in their DNSSEC program. Doing so will provide your users with essentially no security improvements, even at the margin, that they wouldn't get from simply using LetsEncrypt.

At the same time, once enrolled, the weird little pockets of the Internet that actually look for DNSSEC records when they do DNS lookups will instantly become susceptible to forgetting that your domain exists entirely if any misconfiguration occurs. That's not a hypothetical concern: the week HBO launched HBO Now, their cord-cutting all-online streaming service, it vanished for Comcast users whose DNS servers at the time enforced DNSSEC.

Now, faced with the requirement to perform what needs to be a totally routine management operation for the DNSSEC PKI --- periodically rotating keys --- ICANN is _postponing for months_ because ISPs can't reliably handle the rollover. DNSSEC usage is growing every day, the DNSSEC advocates say. Huge portions of the Internet now resolve DNSSEC records. But if ICANN tries to rotate keys, the whole system will break.

The reality is that if the root DNSSEC private keys were leaked to Pastebin today, not a single mainstream site on the Internet would be jeopardized. To a first approximation, _nobody on the Internet relies on DNSSEC_. TLS was designed to assume the DNS was insecure. No browser implements DNSSEC. Your operating system --- thankfully --- probably won't disappear sites based on DNSSEC misconfigurations, or, for that matter, check DNSSEC at all.

DNSSEC is 1990s crypto. Every new DNSSEC resolver that gets deployed makes it that much harder to eventually deploy modern cryptography to solve real security problems in the DNS, whatever they may be. Enough is enough! Kill DNSSEC and go back to the drawing board.

<comment><USER2> Forgive an uninformed comment, but isn't DNSSEC the only viable route away from globally trusted CAs? And the CA model is just fundamentally wrong in many ways (still better than nothing or trust on first use though).

<comment><USER3> DNSSEC has a CA-like trust model.

It's only a route to the same thing, but with weaker crypto, no Certificate Transparency, and no ability to distrust bad actors (distrusting Symantec's Verisign CA is feasible, but dropping Verisign's `.com` is not).

<comment><USER4> >DNSSEC has a CA-like trust model.

Not really.

You cannot get .tk operator to sign .jp domain (unless they're both controlled by same authority, which usually isn't the case).

<comment><AUTHOR> Who cares? The majority of commercially important domain names live under parts of the DNS hierarchy that are _de jure_ controlled by the Five Eyes governments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Obviously some resolvers are misconfigured and a depressingly large number of production DNS servers around the internet will be running remarkably outdated software that couldn't handle the KSK rollover via the RFC 5011 method properly (though how many of these actually have DNSSEC enabled is an open question). For example, I've heard of resolvers breaking because they mishandled the transition and replaced KSK-2010 with KSK-2017 as soon as they got it.

I saw the postponement late last night, and my immediate but completely untested pet theory is that the reason they're getting so many 'broken' resolvers running such new software (RFC 8145 was published in April 2017, unbound 1.6.4 was released June 27, 2017) is short-lived container instances that only have the old root trust anchor reporting in before they've had a chance to obtain the new KSK - if they even stay up long enough to get it.

From the root-dnssec-announce mailing list, it sounds like more information is due Friday:

"Duane Wessels started the research on this and has done a great job. He's presenting it at DNS-OARC in San Jose on Friday."

<comment><USER6> I'm looking forward to the talk on Friday (and the easy conversation starter at NANOG... we can't keep talking about dying clock silicon forever)... but I absolutely agree with tptacek on this one, DNSSEC is worse than useless (solves no actual security problems; introduces many new problems; absurdly complex and poorly implemented across the board), and this doesn't help the optics one bit. I've gotten myself down to one DNSSEC zone I have to run (a .gov, lord help us all) and have been trying to get the resign going since the new key became available with literally zero forward movement. Lots of fun.

(Aside: this was submitted previously but got no traction: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15362516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15362516) Is this the dupe-detector-avoider in action?)

<comment><USER7> So, how do you suggest to replace DNSSEC then, assuming that your enemy is a nation state intercepting your DNS queries and responding with NSA QUANTUM before the legitimate server does?

<comment><USER8> Replace it with nothing.

<comment><USER7> Great, then my entire TLS setup is useless, and I can just use plaintext HTTP.

The whole point is that at least CAs enforce DNSSEC, so no one can get a certificate for my site except for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mandatory: [https://moxie.org/blog/ssl-and-the-future-of- authenticity/](https://moxie.org/blog/ssl-and-the-future-of-authenticity/)</comment>


Made a Test for Porn Addiction - <AUTHOR> https://pornaddictiontest.com/ <comment><USER2> > However, porn is unhealthy in any amount.

Uh, I disagree, like a lot.

Porn does a lot of nice things:

\- it does some form of sex education when parents/school/society does none

\- it lets people realize what sex is about (think about amateur categories and how you can see people not that different from you having sex and realizing that different shapes and sizes, all work)

\- it lets you explore your own sexuality (could you have immagine you would have liked that kind of things?)

\- it lets you explore sexuality with your own partner (people get bored of the same sex every time, you know?)

And so much more.

Of course as with many other things (alchool, for example) you should not get too much of it.. But I disagree completely with the statement that "porn is bad in any amount".

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry to do this, but I disagree in spirit with just about every point that you've made.

> it does some form of sex education when parents/school/society does none

Education? Porn is "education?" Porn is to sex education as war movies are to combat training.

> it lets people realize what sex is about (think about amateur categories and > how you can see people not that different from you having sex and realizing > that different shapes and sizes, all work)

If I learn what "sex is about" through porn, then I haven't yet learned that sex can be intimate, or that it can result in babies.

> it lets you explore your own sexuality (could you have immagine you would > have liked that kind of things?)

It seems limiting to "explore your sexuality" in the novelty of visual and auditory stimulation. Sort of one dimensional. What about touching, smells, or interaction with another person?

> it lets you explore sexuality with your own partner (people get bored of the > same sex every time, you know?)

That seems like a two-way conversation (between you and your partner) becoming a three-way conversation where you include the ideas of the porn industry.

<comment><USER4> Apply your reasoning to other subjects and you are essentially saying fiction is a useless device to explore the world and yourself with... which I couldn't disagree with enough.

<comment><USER3> Well, it's a good thing that I never said that.

<comment><USER4> Oh really, so why does the subject of sex not benefit from these qualities of fiction?

<comment><USER3> I never said that it didn't.

<comment><USER4> > [...] Porn is to sex education as war movies are to combat training.

> If I learn what "sex is about" through porn [...]

> It seems limiting to "explore your sexuality" in the novelty of visual and > auditory stimulation [...]

These arguments are all against the fictional nature of porn as a substitute for sex or sex education... which no one is suggesting, so it's a straw-man. Porn is not a replacement, it is both less and more, just like other fictions. The only time the OP suggested it as a replacement is where there is no alternative, which is perfectly reasonable.

War films are not a substitute for combat training because they are not supposed to be. The remainder of this argument is for the value of fiction, which seems a little unnecessary.

<comment><USER2> > The only time the OP suggested it as a replacement is where there is no > alternative, which is perfectly reasonable.

Thank you, you got my point.

> War films are not a substitute for combat training because they are not > supposed to be. The remainder of this argument is for the value of fiction, > which seems a little unnecessary.

War movies can depict war as something awesome as well as something awful. Needless to say, there are movies that depict war the former way and movies that depict war in the latter way.

The very same way, there are many kinds ("genres") of porn that illustrate sexuality in many ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This should be talked about as much a drugs and alcohol. I once watched a great dev get terminated because he would repeatedly and instinctively pull up porn sites at work, like in the same manner you might get frustrated at an error message and pull up Hacker News as a distraction, this guys would do it with porn. So sad. He did it in front of me once, I was like 'Whoa bro, wtf is going on here, not cool.', he just muttered 'sorry' and something about muscle memory. I did not rat him out but apparently he had done it several times before, other employees noticed and had told HR. HR had started to review his web history, one day they asked me to stay late for an emergency meeting, they explained that it had happened again (probably the 3rd of 4th time) and someone made a written complaint so they had no choice but to terminate him for cause, I elected not to fight for him. He is a good developer, I hope he found some help. He was the kind of dev you don't need to micro-manage, his estimates were always fairly accurate and turned in code that met requirements. I had a side conversation with our IT manager after the termination and asked how much time they thought he was spending on those sites, apparently very little, he would bring up the home pages of his favorite sites then quickly realize what he was doing and close them, we are not talking about porn surfing sessions but they couldn't have a guy known as the 'porn dude' working for them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not exactly a balanced, unbiased look at this controversial issue, is it?

> So far, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has agreed that there is > insufficient evidence to support diagnoses for sex and porn addiction. In > 2010, the APA rejected the inclusion of "sex addiction" in the Diagnostic > and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). A new condition called > "hypersexual disorder" was proposed for the DSM-5 but, in 2012, the APA > rejected it as well for lack of evidence.

> when UCLA researchers studied the response to viewing sexually explicit > images in people who self-defined as being unable to regulate their porn > viewing, the results showed no similar response [to addiction].... The > authors concluded that there was no evidence to say that even problem sexual > regulation fit the definition of addiction as defined by brain response and > that these people simply had high sex drives.

>people who develop addictions initially show high levels of response in the pleasure centers of the brain... one of the hallmarks of true addiction is that the pleasure received from the object of the addiction wanes over time as the person no longer wants the object but, rather, needs the object. In contrast, even people who report very strong "addiction" to sex continue to show activation of the pleasure centers of the brain when viewing sexually explicit images. This response is similar to the response people have to chocolate, ice cream and other highly desired pleasures.

[https://www.thedailybeast.com/your-porn-addiction-isnt- real](https://www.thedailybeast.com/your-porn-addiction-isnt-real)

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/close-and- personal/2...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/close-and- personal/201609/anthony-weiner-is-not-sex-addict-neither-is-anyone-else-0)

You might consider backing off the unsupported blanket statements like "100% of people feel better after quitting to watch porn" and "porn is unhealthy in any amount". As it is the site smells more like zealotry than a fair test.

<comment><USER7> Thank you science friend!

Find more of the goods here too:

[http://www.realyourbrainonporn.com](http://www.realyourbrainonporn.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The very first question is "I felt that porn is an important part of my life", and the options are "never", "sometimes", "always", etc. Is it asking for how much of the time I have that feeling (meaning if I say anything but "always" or "never", I'm saying that my opinion changes with regularity), or is it asking how much of the time porn is an important part of my life (which doesn't make sense to me because either something is or is not an important part of the whole of one's life - it can't sometimes be an important piece of your entire life and other times not, unless you've had a gradual change of heart that you want to reflect in your answer). In other words, this immediately feels like a meaningless question.

<comment><USER8> Another example:

>When I vowed not to watch porn anymore, I could only do it for a short period of time

How are you supposed to answer if you've never vowed to never again watch porn...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Instead of the word porn, I substituted the word dog and "play with dog."

I might be addicted to my dog.

Should I seek help, or is my addiction socially approved so I'm all good?

</comment><comment><USER10> I feel like the questions are essentially "are you addicted to porn?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's based on a study. I'm trying to get a better test made!

<comment><USER5> maybe ask more quantitative questions, how many porn sessions per day?, how long is each session?.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I really appreciate all the feedback @znpy @crosseye_jack @xwkd @ppseafield and everyone else.

We're going to be making changes and updates to the site and will try to make it better.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Kiss of death guys, 500 error. Going to try to fix ASAP!

Brand new site.

</comment><comment><USER11> Site is broken... welp, back to surfing porn!

<comment><AUTHOR> FIXING NOW!!!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If anyone here is an expert and can help me fix this kiss of death 500 error please message!

<comment><USER12> Can you give details of what happened? Any server side errors/exceptions? I am at work so I can't open your site

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did we miss the party? See this website with scientifically-accurate information: www.realyourbrainonporn.com Simple, real scientists, and focused on falsification studies (more important to model testing).

<comment><USER13> That site is run by a porn industry shill. See this link for a debunking of he above page - [https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/relevant-research-and- articl...](https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/relevant-research-and-articles- about-the-studies/critiques-of-questionable-debunking-propaganda-pieces/pro- porn-science-alliance/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Site is back up!

<comment><USER14> Just got the error too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm getting a 500 error when I click Take the Test.

<comment><USER16> If you think you need to take a test, you might be addicted! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The moment you need no know about outage really fast (ideal case for amixr.io)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you ever wanted to know if you're reliant on Pornography, check this out.

Porn really affects us more than we realize.</comment>


Tesla Model S Center Console - <AUTHOR> http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:149623

<comment><USER2> Since there is all that extra room... The 80s called, can we please have bench-seats back?

I had an old crown vic a few years ago and I missed those huge sofa-like bench-seats all the time. Modern bucket seats in comparison are incredibly constructing and claustrophobic. Not every car needs to feel like a racecar. Sometimes I want a comfy roadtrip on my floating sofa.

<comment><USER3> How would current generation airbags come into play with bench seats? A lot of manufactures include side airbags right into the seat bolsters.

<comment><USER4> I suspect the rising popularity of dual airbags helped the demise of the middle front seat.

<comment><USER5> The middle front seat is alive and well in pickups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's Tesla's (obviously much more expensive and with less DIY cred) center console concept: [http://shop.teslamotors.com/collections/model-s/products/pre...](http://shop.teslamotors.com/collections/model-s/products/premium- center-console) .

</comment><comment><USER7> "This is a self-printable Tesla Model S Center Console."

It can print out ITSELF???

<comment><USER8> Depends on whether the language assigns this==self. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tesla removed the console and now users want it back. Was this a bad design choice on Tesla's part?

<comment><USER10> Tesla has a fancy console on the way as an add-on item. Personally, I'm OK without it -- the interior is super roomy, and lack of a console adds to that feeling.

<comment><USER11> It is a great place to drop my bag / backpack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I need one of these. Want to sell one?

<comment><USER13> [http://www.shapeways.com/](http://www.shapeways.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would recommend epoxy instead of superglue.</comment>


Putting Online Privacy in Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/putting-online-privacy-in-perspective.html

<comment><USER2> In the real world, what your friends reveal about you is likely to be much more harmful to your life than what facebook reveals.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could anyone point me in the direction of cases when people were hurt by their information being stored for too long?

<comment><USER4> It's only just started happening, so no.

Though you are not clear on your reasons for asking, I can only conclude you are trying to make a point. I detest this type of argument, it's equivalent to 'only people who have something to hide...'. The potential consequences so massively outweigh the potential benefits that it's almost a moral imperative to stamp this practice out.

In the very best case scenario it could be the cause of future embarrassment. It will destroy careers, snuff out potential great leaders, break marriages, finish friendships. Lies are a regrettable but essential part of a happy society.

In the worst it will be the basis of whether or not you get sent to a death camp by some future government in your country.

Even the best case scenario seems distasteful to me.

As for the article, glad to see I'm not the only one thinking those thoughts. Credit companies are a modern invention of quite freaky consequence. As for someone like Tesco running round with the shopping habits of a large majority of the UK, very worrying.

Trouble is it's all so overwhelming when you actually think about it, it's very easy to file under 'problem someone else should worry about' in your brain. It is one of these things that people will only lament when it gets abused.</comment></comment>


10 Future Web Trends - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_future_web_trends.php <comment><USER2> I'm sort of suspicious of the "semantic web" stuff. On the surface, it looks good, but there are some architecture astronaut type people that I've seen involved and who I don't trust to "make something I want". Maybe it won't be this huge thing that takes everything by storm, but will find some niches where it's really that much better than what we've got now... What do you guys think?

<comment><USER3> The list was crap, but the semantic web isn't. It's really just the idea of putting machine-readable data on the web, which isn't a particularly crazy idea.

It doesn't even need any new tech; you could do the semantic web with XML, microformats, JSON or any structured data format. RDF, SPARQL, etc. just make the job (a lot) easier.

The only problem the semantic web has is that everybody seems to think it's this crazy complex concept. I'd love to know where the marketing screwed up.

<comment><USER4> Probably the fact that the marketing really is: "add truckloads of markup to everything you write using this bunch of over-engineered standards and, magic!, you have the semantic web".

I guess that if you want to see this semantic web happen, they should focus their marketing efforts on website designers (as opposed to content producers). Most web designers are willing to drink any Kool-Aid you feed them.

<comment><USER3> > add truckloads of markup to everything you write

It worked for RSS.

What's over-engineered about it? RDF is elegant in its simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of those 'the house of tommorrow' cartoons they made in the 60s.

</comment><comment><USER6> Those all are current trends, not _future_</comment>


Ask HN: How to get around "please link to a side project you're proud of" - <AUTHOR>

It seems that 90% of job postings require or highly value completed side projects. I understand why an employer would value these activities. They show a dedication and love of the craft, and are a potentially good way to demonstrate ability.
The problem is I don't have any completed side projects. Between 40-50 hours at work, 5-10 hours commuting there, 3-5 hours exercising, 3-5 hours cooking, 5-10 hours reading and keeping up with the latest, having a relationship, family, and a social life, etc, it doesn't leave a lot of room to work on hobby projects. I'm also fairly new to the game (just over 1.5 years), and I have trouble committing to any one project and seeing to it's completion.
Anyone have experience getting around this hurdle?
Should I take a couple weeks off work and just get something done, regardless of how much I enjoy the process or the profit/value potential of the project?
Would you recommend out-sourcing the slow/painful bits (which for me is CSS and design)? <comment><USER2> > I'm also fairly new to the game (just over 1.5 years)

I've never been asked to show a side project (or even sample code). By the time those practices became common, I had more than 5 years of experience at real companies, where I'd done real things.

If you can get along enough in your career, people will stop needing to use technical validation. For better or worse, they'll use social validation instead.

"Surely someone couldn't have been a Senior Developer at [whatever company] for 2 years if he sucks at coding," they'll think. They'll be wrong some of the time, but that's beside the point.

> having a relationship, family, and a social life, etc

Unfortunately, some companies still think the best workers are the ones that are absolutely obsessed with work and are compelled to be on the clock all the time.

There truly are companies that value work-life balance, though. Be honest with your interviewer and say, "I work 50 hours a week, and my family, girlfriend/boyfriend, and health are important to me. I have lots of ideas for side projects, but they haven't taken priority over my loved ones and health."

If that interviewer rejects you, their values aren't well-aligned with yours. They might have wanted you to work 100 hours a week, even if it meant low productivity and burning out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just do something small. A tiny .js library for something. Whatever. Open source something tiny and useful, put it on Github, done. It probably won't take you more than 8 hours total.

</comment><comment><USER4> "I have trouble committing to any one project and seeing to it's completion"

this is exactly why I, as an employer, would be curious to see if you had done any side projects. it shows you have a track record of going out on your own, building something, and getting stuff done. which is an amazing trait in any potential employee, especially at a startup.

so I don't see a way to "get around" it. How about some project from school?

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe you could describe something you actually built for... well, work, which is what they want you for anyway, right? You'd want to be kind of careful not to violate any confidentiality agreements, but in the end I think if you "have a life" you shouldn't be ashamed of it.

<comment><USER6> From the OP comments about work/value proposition of side projects, the current work you are doing at your job should be the focus as the above mentioned.

How I take it, side projects give a candidate an opportunity to present a passion project and discuss the why, how, what of it and they did so because they _wanted_ to, rather than someone asking them to. Ultimately, I think the _why_ is a very important piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would get really frustrated at that question as well. Due to those same circumstances. Family, Work, etc. Especially, when I was trying to get into an entry level programming gig. I think what ultimately got me over this hurdle was getting on GitHub. GitHub allowed me to have this public place that I could point to. At first, it was very sparse. But as time moved forward and I forced myself to upload even the most trivial things, I began to collect a lot of my coding samples. Whenever I wanted to learn a new technology like RoR or whatever, I committed it to GitHub. It became my playground. Now, I actually have something I can point people to. Overtime, you can clean it up and point people to your better stuff.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm going to focus on your last line...

"out-sourcing the slow/painful bits"

Which is exactly why I don't get the obsession with side projects or work samples. There is no guarantee that the person showing the work actually did the work. At best, it means they have access to people that can do the work, which I suppose is something.

Not that I am accusing you of cheating or lying or anything, just pointing out that in a world where outsourcing is easy and common that you can't take these things at face value.

</comment><comment><USER9> In my experience, it takes a while (more than 1.5 years) to start accumulating completed side projects. Some easy ways that helped me get the ball rolling: 1) doing a hackathon, 2) making an interesting personal website, 3) building CLIs/APIs to avoid the design/css part. But, it does get easier to complete side projects as you become more comfortable with your tools and your interests as a programmer.

<comment><USER10> But one could also argue that a good programmer shouldn't do a lot of side projects to be able to focus on the "real" work. The best code is often written away from the computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "My work product is proprietary"

I've had to do exactly one FizzBuzz, and some light SQL. Mostly social validation and sometimes reference checking seems to be the norm. I haven't gotten any pushback on lack of a public code repository.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have the opposite problem. All my side projects have the appearance of money making businesses, and I can't show them either the site or the code (it's private in Github too)

<comment><USER13> Give them samples of code from the project.</comment></comment>


Mew is a mail reader for Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://www.mew.org/en/ <comment><USER2> Stuff like this makes me want to make the jump (from vim). There are _cats_ on the front page.</comment>