Jane Jacobs: The Champion of Little Plans - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/06/07/the-champion-of-little-plans/ <comment><USER2> For those who have read _Death and Life of Great American Cities_ and _The Power Broker_ , most of this article tells history you already know.

After that part, it's about applying her principles to today's issues beyond cities to entrepreneurship versus large corporations and red tape and how to serve people and their lives.

The article didn't apply her principles to the environment, where I find a relevant parallel: people in traffic jams felt, "if only this road had another lane, then I wouldn't have to endure this traffic jam" so we built more lanes and roads. After generations, people learned that empty roads helped only temporarily, eventually leading people to use them and create more traffic than before the expansion.

The parallel is that people see pollution today and think, "if only a new technology reduced this pollution, I wouldn't have to breathe this polluted air / endure sea levels rising / etc" so we develop new technologies. We haven't yet learned the parallel with roads that more technologies help only temporarily, eventually leading people to use them and create more pollution.

I've overstated things to simplify, but there are shades of gray. We need some roads, but more isn't necessarily better and short-term solutions often worsen the situation. Same with technology, as Jevon's paradox, among other effects, illustrates.

In complex systems, if you don't address the leverage point of the beliefs and goals of the system, changing elements in it rarely changes the system, no matter how wonderful the new technology seems, be it LED lighting, nuclear power, carbon sequestration, space travel, and so on. In a system based on beliefs that we can expand out of any problem, they'll make the system expand faster. In a system designed to serve people, new technologies would help serve people better, but we don't live in such a system yet.

We could use an environmental Jane Jacobs.

<comment><USER3> > We haven't yet learned the parallel with roads that more technologies help > only temporarily, eventually leading people to use them and create more > pollution.

This is a false equivalency. Traffic is very much the limiting factor in the use of roads. Pollution is absolutely not the limiting factor in the use of technology. The volume of pollution produced does not expand to some magical limit in response to changes in process in the same way that traffic expands to fill roadways in response to road expansion.

<comment><USER4> > Pollution is absolutely not the limiting factor in the use of technology. > The volume of pollution produced does not expand to some magical limit in > response to changes in process in the same way that traffic expands to fill > roadways in response to road expansion.

Yep, and this is a false equivalency too. Traffic does not "expand to fill roadways" in that way, we are just so under-provisioned on transit infrastructure that it gives the artificial appearance of this. By this flawed logic, we should never build Hospitals (because it would 'make more' sick people, they would 'expand to fill hospitals'). Or we should never build schools (because that would 'make more' uneducated people).

This isn't new, grossly misunderstanding induced demand is par for the course in that field. But it's worth mentioning every time this comes up.

<comment><USER5> Yes, traffic does expand to fill roadways if all you do is build roadways and population and car-ownership increases. One solution to traffic congestion is, yes to provision more transit infrastructure, but that usually means subways and cycling paths in a city, a better train system in the countryside. Another solution is to redesign the city so that people don't need to move as much. Build vertically, encourage varied local businesses where people live, rather than in a mall outside town and relocate things that you don't need in a city centre (i.e. industry).

<comment><USER6> Satisfying more people's desire for transportation is a good thing. Roads can be an inefficient way to do that, but it's baffling how people talk about "extra" traffic like there's no public value in enabling it.

<comment><USER7> The post you replied to explained why it shouldn't be baffling. Individual agents all optimize to the changes in factors offered by new roads leading to a non optimal society of people commuting hours to get to jobs and big box stores from "less expensive" housing before calculating commute costs and externalities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A slight tangent but Jane Jacobs book _Systems Of Survival_ is excellent, thought-provoking and insightful

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

</comment><comment><USER9> It's fascinating how many problems urban development architecture can actually solve. When a citys population grows, the economy grows even faste. Drug and mental problems can be solved by giving people better housing conditions.

<comment><USER10> These are daring statements!

In the light of the gigantic failure of 20th century early modernist architect's to solve many social problems, despite their loud claims to the contrary. What did early modernist architects give us? Brutalism, car-friendly and pedestrian-repelling architecture following the blueprint of Le Corbusier "Radiant City" [1] and the Athens Charter [2]. Some solution to social problems ...

In the light of the extreme failure of most of 20th century's modernist architecture, the burden of proof is firmly in the architects & urban planner's court.

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

<comment><USER11> That's exactly the sort of thing Jacobs was against, though. She believed a functioning city needed to have a mixture of uses -- not just residential or just commercial and that great cities had discovered that by accident. She was a proponent of "New Urbanism" which (at least in the US) is a popular trend -- new developments aren't just residential suburbs or shopping malls but often have things like apartment/condo buildings with stores and restaurants in the lower levels making pedestrianism a practical option.

<comment><USER12> She generally favored cities developing somewhat organically (little plans as the headline says) and in keeping with the needs and wishes of the residents.

Today I think you see a certain cherry-picking of Jacobs' beliefs going on. A lot of people latch onto her opposition to running a highway through Washington Square Park because they don't like car-centric culture.

That's all well and good. But, as you suggest, she also tended to be against other types of large-scale urban planning. She probably would have been skeptical of the school of thought that the SF housing situation would be so much better if they'd just bulldoze the Mission and build residential towers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


States to Move Forward with Antitrust Probe of Big Tech Firms - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/attorneys-general-to-move-forward-with-antitrust-probe-of-big-tech-11566247753?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I am not sure why people are so anti big tech investigations. There is data available that says they are among the top 10 lobbyists at DC. And who would want this industry to be plagued with monopolies ?

<comment><USER3> Because they're clearly not monopolies in the usual sense, just maybe oligopolies (note the "mono" in monopoly: it means "one"). If I want search I can use Bing and get results that are usually good enough, sometimes even better than Google's. If I want a phone, I can choose between Apple and Android, and maybe even niche brands like Jolla. If I want to message somebody, I can use Slack, WhatsApp, Skype, WeChat, Line, Telegram, Signal... If I want to post pictures or videos of myself, there's YouTube, TikTok, Facebook/Instagram. If I want to buy ads, I can buy from Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter. They're only monopolies if we define the class of businesses so narrowly that each business model is a new class, such that each firm is a monopoly.

Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.

<comment><USER4> >>Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.

You know, you might have shed some light on the core issue here. Usually for tangible goods, it is about choice, at an affordable cost. In the case of tech however, it is not about choice, but it is actually about _access_ , at an affordable cost.

In theory, you could also just set up your own wireless mesh network to reach the internet. Its actually really simple: figure out the basic hardware, and then the software which goes with it, and then get the cooperation of your immediate neighborhood, and then the community at large, and don't centralize anything so you don't become branded as an ISP. Of course, the problem is that it is prohibitively expensive, at least in terms of time. So you might say "Well, it makes no sense. I will rather pay the very high price that my ISP charges". So you have just perpetuated the ISP's monopoly, because there is now one less person who has a good reason to potentially contribute to the wireless mesh network.

You can use Telegram instead of WhatsApp, but now you don't have access (because most of your friends are not going to move to Telegram just because you are such an amazing friend).

But here is the important thing: the fact that all these tech giants use every single dark UX pattern imaginable (to increase access on their products), and don't allow unfettered data export (to decrease access for competitors), means they are well aware of this and try to make access prohibitively expensive (again, in terms of time) if you chose one of their competitors.

I don't have a solution, but I think that is why the monopoly label makes sense.

<comment><USER5> One potential solution is to mandate some form of open cross-platform system, where the big tech companies are forced to give up our data and allow us to freely share it with others. So Telegram and WhatsApp would still both exist, but if I download Telegram, I should be able to communicate with WhatsApp users as easily as Telegram users.

<comment><USER6> I*ve been wanting something like this for a while, but I usually use Facebook as an example.

Right now, facebook is like a phone company that only allows folks to communicate with others using the same company. If you could see pages on other platforms and chat with users on other platforms - at least to an extent - that would open up some space for competition and overcome the most difficult part of building any "replacement" or competition to facebook.

All that said, I think this is probably a problem that is more complex than I make it out to be and it might or might not be a feasible solution. The first hurdle would be deciding on the standards for this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Given that Microsoft now owns GitHub, I would add them into this list too.

Also, perhaps some of the focus should also shift towards preventing such acquisitions (Google + YouTube, Facebook + WhatsApp), which the tech community at large can immediately identify as a potential monopoly threat. A simplistic way to do this would be to look at how much the company pays for the acquisition, but I am sure others here can come up with better metrics.

Also, Facebook should not be clubbed with the other companies in this list. What they are doing isn't some poorly defined "tech monopoly consolidation". They are just a completely fraudulent company headed by someone who should probably not be running _any_ company. Tim Cook's point may have been self- serving, but he was absolutely right when he said that "if I were Facebook, I would not be in this situation".

<comment><USER7> No, GitHub doesn't give Microsoft any market control. Git is an open protocol inherently.

<comment><USER8> I've worked for 7 software companies in my career. Every single one of them used Github, and I don't believe my experience was unusual in this regard.

Your argument implies that all Github does is service the Git protocol, but we all know it does so much more than that. From a cloud-based source control standpoint, Microsoft absolutely gained market control. An open protocol != cloud-based SAAS company.

<comment><USER7> GitHub doesn't do anything but centralise a bunch of services other companies (including Microsoft) have SaaS for. There's literally hundreds of git hosting platforms, kaban boards, issue trackers, CI services, code search tools out there.. All GitHub does is bring it together. It does not really have any kind of lock-in.

<comment><USER9> It does have lock-in because almost everyone is on GitHub and if they move they lose access to that community.

e.: people mentioning "Github profiles" when discussing preparing for interviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pet peeves:

* WKWebView is the only browser engine allowed on iOS.

* Apps can only be distributed through the iOS app store.

* No formal appeals processes based on established judicial principles for either Apple or Google.

<comment><USER11> ?? So don't buy an iPhone? It's their ecosystem. You are owed nothing.

<comment><USER12> > So don't buy an iPhone?

You don't get to choose which phone the customer for your app already bought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's amazing how well connected industries like big oil and big Ag seem to operate with impunity while the nascent bad boys are put under the investigation spotlight.

Perhaps Big Tech hasn't hired enough lobbyists.

<comment><USER3> Big Oil and Big Ag aren't an existential threat to the business model of the traditional news media, and the traditional news media still have a lot of power to influence opinions.

An experiment: try counting the number of positive news articles about Google/Facebook you see and compare it to the number of negative ones.

<comment><USER7> The down votes are concerning. Regardless of your opinion on FAANGXYZ there are other industries which aren't being talked about enough (banks, oil companies, etc..), and we all know why. Talk about tech, yes, but we don't need a sustained smear campaign like we've been getting the past 3 years.

<comment><USER14> But keep in mind the 3 year smear campaign followed a multi-year media love fest for Big Tech.

The Tech industry has spent billions on PR. That spending propped up a massive media infrastructure — how many reporters cover the tech beat? How many of those reporters exist because their publication host events and conferences, run advertorials, print "Special Features", etc. paid for in large part by the tech industry? — and the industry naively thought they had the leverage to control the narrative. They were wrong and now the massive infrastructure they built to help them market their products has turned on them. The amount of noise being generated is a function of the size of the "problem" but it's also a function of the size of the media-industrial complex built by the industry.

Ag and Oil are also under scrutiny but you shouldn't be surprised they get less attention. They haven't spent nearly as much over the last decade twirling shiny objects to distract from poor business practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sure, why not have investigations around antitrust and other issues from Big Tech firms. Include Verizon / AT&T / and telcos, and do it for companies in all other industries, too.

<comment><USER9> Because resources are limited and big tech is currently more harmful than some lame US-only ISPs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This probe doesn't make any sense. Lawmakers are either seriously misguided, or have an agenda against specific tech companies.

One aspect of the investigation claims that tech companies are stifling competition and that the big names are monopolistic. I'd argue that's as far from reality as possible - it's never been _easier_ to start a tech company, and the barrier to entry is extremely low. You know a market with a high barrier to entry, and literal laws preventing new competition? Internet service providers. Investigate the ISPs instead.

The second aspect of the probe surrounds concerns about personal data and its aggregation. But why bother investigating how Google et al are handling this data when there are clear offenders who have behaved with gross negligence and suffered no consequences (Equifax)? If those companies are not investigated, what possible reason could there be to investigate Google (who have not suffered a large-scale data breach) other than politically-motivated harassment? You know what would be more productive than investigating big tech companies - passing actual legislation like the GDPR to set up a framework to prevent the kind of privacy issue these legislators are supposedly concerned with.

<comment><USER17> have you ever tried to start a competitor to facebook? plenty of platforms have, and you haven't ever heard of them because whilst better, facebook has a monopoly by way of critical mass... it's almost impossible to pull significant populations away from their platform: not even google could, and google plus was an excellent product; far better than facebook in almost every way

<comment><USER16> I've heard of plenty of social media platforms (Diaspora, G+, LiveJournal) that have failed to gain traction for various reasons. I'm not convinced that it's because one of their competitors was just too big. The same argument could have been made that MySpace would never be dethroned a decade ago.

And I've also witnessed many successful social media platforms evolve in the post-Facebook era (Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok). There are also a plethora of small communities like DeviantArt, image boards, and specialty forums. My point is, of course cloning an existing platform won't pull populations away from it - users are sticky. That's true with any product. Folks need a reason to move, and once they have that reason, they're happy to do so. The beauty of social media is you don't even have to _move_ , you can just have accounts in both places.

So I don't think the fact that a Facebook clone failed means that Facebook has a monopoly on social media. They might have a strong momentum with users that prefer Facebook-flavored social media, but given the market of all the different available platforms, it doesn't seem like there is a lot of demand for Facebook #2. Having a differentiator is the killer, and that makes the difference between G+ and TikTok.</comment></comment></comment>


How do you include the online Standford courses on your CV? - <AUTHOR>

I am thinking of starting two courses that Standford provides online. The coursera courses.
Has anyone included these on their CV before? If I was sending off job applications right now, should I have something like:
Education NameOfCourse - University - Graduation Year
NameOfSubject - Standford Online Course - Currently Ongoing
Any thoughts would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> Just say what it is and let the reader decide how important it is. I say something like, Machine Learning 2011 (ml-class.org; free, online, no-credit Stanford course). Though personally, if I haven't even begun a class I wouldn't mention it - what is an employer to do with that info? Perhaps you'd get a plus for taking classes but...

</comment><comment><USER3> You make sure you write Stanford and not Standford...</comment>


Ask HN: Can we have blockquote syntax for comments? - <AUTHOR> At this point it's become pretty established to use code formatting to quote other users, but it really is a poor solution for that. Lines are not broken correctly and the whole thing is basically unreadable on mobile. Having this very simple feature would greatly improve readability and discussion.<p>Upvotes for visibility would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I use two spaces for code:

      10 Print "Hello"
      20 Goto 10

And I use a > and italics for quotes:

> _At this point it 's become pretty established to use code formatting to > quote other users, but it really is a poor solution for that. Lines are not > broken correctly and the whole thing is basically unreadable on mobile. > Having this very simple feature would greatly improve readability and > discussion._

so it has nice linebreaks and it is clear where the quotation ends.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do the second version as well, but most people don't, and not having a clear, obvious option means most comments that quote others are unreadable on mobile.

 _> "There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it."_</comment></comment>


IRS Greenlights Tax Breaks for Buyers of 23andMe Genetic Tests - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-greenlights-tax-breaks-for-buyers-of-23andme-genetic-tests-11563800520?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> This sounds like that story about Google paying people $5 to scan their face.

It's a trap. Don't fall for it.</comment>


How do you decode .sgstn stenograph stenonote? - <AUTHOR>

How do you decode the .sgstn stenograph stenonote of the public stenographic record of the Public Meetings of Boston City Council. The public stenographic record of Public Meetings is made available in .sgstn stenograph stenonote not full plain English text. <comment><USER3> 1) Boston City council may have some legal requirement to make these files available to people with disabilities under some disabilities law. You could contact a group for people with hearing impairment to ask for their advice.

2) I remember when you used to be able to search for a file extension and get useful information. Now I search and I get useless, hopeless, results. Really awful. SEO has poisoned the WWW and search engines are not doing a good enough job of repairing that damage. :-(

2b) Doing a websearch returns many posts made to various forums asking for this media to be made open. Perhaps these are all from the same person on a campaign.

3) You could buy the software, and load the files. (Also, possibly export them to an open format?)

4) You could ask someone at Bountify to create a file-reader for you. (<https://bountify.co/>) Make sure to leave good information, and an easy link to one of these files.

5) You could ask the makers of the machine to create a simple, limited feature, reader for the files. They don't appear to have one at their website. ([http://www.stenograph.com/pages.aspx?docid=757&id=40001](http://www.stenograph.com/pages.aspx?docid=757&id=40001))

6) You could investigate Open Source - <USER2> (<http://plover.stenoknight.com/>) might be able to convert the software. Or maybe someone could add conversion routines to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue is now getting the dictionary file used by the Boston City Council stenographer (or re-creating it, by matching the decoded steno "chords" to what's spoken during the video of the Council meeting).</comment></comment>


Libraries Are Not a Crime - <AUTHOR> https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/08/brian-frye-libraries-not-a-crime/ <comment><USER2> There will be many here who see no ethical issue with this type of lending and that is their prerogative. So, without debating the ethics of this type of information sharing, it is clearly of the same type as old services like Napster and The Pirate Bay. As such, authors don't object to libraries as the article asserts, rather they object to what _they_ view as piracy.

From a creator's perspective you have a site that did not pay for a single copy of your work, yet is willing to share our unlimited numbers of copies of your work. Authors believe this is clearly not how a library functions but rather exactly how piracy sites work.</comment>


The Rise and Fall of the "Bus Plunge" Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2006/11/the_rise_and_fall_of_the_bus_plunge_story.html <comment><USER2> The comedy a capella group _The Bobs_ did a song profiling such a situation:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgcu3OQX2SM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgcu3OQX2SM)

"There are no folk songs about bus disasters. Until now."</comment>


Scientists discover new helium chemistry - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10131.html <comment><USER2> Word for word blogspam of

[https://www.gl.ciw.edu/news/scientists-discover-new- helium-c...](https://www.gl.ciw.edu/news/scientists-discover-new-helium- chemistry)</comment>


Can Wikipedia be Fixed? - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/can-wikipedia-be-fixed.html

<comment><USER2> Basically this is a demand for "certainty theatre", where they don't care if Britannica is wrong, they just want some warm glow that comes from the sense that someone, someone in "authority", is _doing something_ , even if some part of them knows it's ineffective, pointless, expensive and inconvenient (in fact probably the more expensive and inconvenient to them the better. No pain, no gain).

The fact that Wikipedia is right in their face about the fact that what they're reading may not be true and they may have to do some kind of evaluation of what they're being told is, bizarrely, taken as some kind of failing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think of Wikipedia as a jumping off point. By starting out searching Wikipedia to learn a few terms about a topic, I can go out to the wider web or a library to research in more depth quicker and more efficiently. It's a "Cliff's Notes" for everything. In that regard, Wikipedia isn't broken.

If you want Wikipedia to be a canonical, verifiable source of all human knowledge then I don't think it could ever work. It'd be impossible to corral all the experts to working on the same platform (even assuming one platform could work for everything).</comment>


Why is it so tough to kill Email - <AUTHOR> http://blog.yashchandra.com/?p=105

<comment><USER2> Why would you _want_ to kill email?</comment>


A tale of two formats: Converting JSON to CSV - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@peterandersson/a-tale-of-two-formats-converting-json-to-csv-eaf69d4880d2#.3lk3pamt7 <comment><USER2> This sounds like the kind of problem which could've been resolved with 10 lines of Python (or your choice of scripting language)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right! I can be quite stubborn when I set my mind on things though :)</comment></comment>


AI as puppetry, and rediscovering a long forgotten game - <AUTHOR> http://www.pawfal.org/dave/blog/2015/07/ai-as-puppetry-and-rediscovering-a-long-forgotten-game/

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't diss puppetry too much, even though there are reasons to move beyond it.

For instance, IBM Watson started life as a television performer and still is behind the scene in IBM's TV ads. So far as presentation of self and other things that will help people relate to an A.I. it is not bad to think of the A.I. as an actor and the people developing it as writers, directors, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> to run on os x:

> brew install scons freeglut openal-soft

> scons

> ./geo

</comment><comment><USER4> Pot, meet kettle.</comment>


In bringing Office to iOS, Microsoft is playing a dangerous game - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/12/in-bringing-office-to-ios-microsoft-is-playing-a-dangerous-game/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not so sure it's as much gloom and doom as the author portrays. If Microsoft doesn't try to maintain it's business division software dominance on the most popular platforms, that line of business is doomed. And it's not a small business [1]. If Microsoft executes well on these apps and ties in Office 365, SkyDrive, Lync, and/or Sharepoint, this would leave them with a very nice recurring revenue stream and continue their productivity application dominance.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/10/microsoft-1q13-earni...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/10/microsoft-1q13-earnings- strong-enterprise-division-fails-to-offset-slow-pc-market/)</comment>


Known - unknown of the project development process - <AUTHOR> http://education.digtheinfo.com/?p=37

<comment><USER2> Good for a start up!</comment>


Ask HN: Personal Observations on Generation Z? (Born 1996 and earlier) - <AUTHOR> Most of the people here are not part of Generation Z, but might be raising kids that are part of it or have other experiences with them. This would be the first generation to grow up with major social media, smartphones, and not remembering a pre-Recession economy. The oldest of them are just starting college!<p>Would anyone mind sharing their observations or experiences with members of this generation? <comment><USER2> Can anyone ELI5 what the fascination for labeling generations is? It seems so arbitrary and a lot of the talk about "Generation X/Y/Z" or "Millennials" is headache-inducing.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the purposes of this thread, It's more a convenience than anything. You can see the divide between generations with the media they consume as well as what events shaped their outlook on society.

Obviously it's not black and white, and there's a hefty gradient between generations, but it's easier to say "Millennials" than "People born roughly between the ages of the 1980s and 2000s".

That said, I'm sorry for any headache induced by my post. Some ibuprofen might help.

<comment><USER2> > That said, I'm sorry for any headache induced by my post. Some ibuprofen > might help.

Yours didn't, I was just wondering why so many people have adopted this turn of phrase. Most other discussions have.</comment></comment></comment>


Tillerson to Shut Cyber Office in State Department Reorganization - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-19/tillerson-is-said-to-shut-cyber-office-in-state-s- <comment><USER2> The submission link is broken: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-19/tillerson...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-19/tillerson- is-said-to-shut-cyber-office-in-state-s-reorganization)</comment>


San Francisco's Class War, By the Numbers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-nib/700c51a43a4 <comment><USER2> It was interesting in pando's take on this it turns out that a BART train driver earns as much as a Google developer :-)

And I bet the average developer in silicon roundabout earns a lot less than the average london tube driver £50k (and that is presumably with out overtime and a much better pension)</comment>


Show HN: My technology+law podcast, Technically Legal - <AUTHOR> http://www.technicallylegal.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple of friends from law school and I just recorded the 95th episode of our law and technology podcast.

We're looking to improve. What can we do better?</comment>


Achieving Anonymity Online Remains Difficult Despite Evolving Privacy Tools - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/are-you-ever-truly-anonymous-online

<comment><USER2> Fun fact: Ghostery tells me, this article is framed by 67(!) trackers. Yes. Online anonymity is hard. One reason are morons who sell out their users to every tracking vendor with a little cash at hand.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article refers to browser "fingerprinting" referred to in this EFF research: [https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser- uniqueness.pdf](https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf) Curious if browser companies are working to remove the traceability of their browsers (other than Google, of course).

<comment><USER3> The issue is more significant than just changing a simple browser user-agent string. To completely prevent fingerprinting, you must also eliminate all browser differences (e.g. vender prefixes). Additionally, remember that the lack of information can also be information.

Also keep in mind that it's quite difficult to prevent leaking of other information. An example: OS type can be determined from lower-level protocol information like TTL and window size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something I recently became aware of is that some sites (AT&T Wireless and HBOGo) know when you are using privacy mode. How are they doing this?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the very least, they can detect that your browser isn't accepting cookies. They might interpret that as Privacy Mode.</comment></comment>


Github is MySpace for hackers - <AUTHOR> http://tomayko.com/weblog/2008/02/26/github-is-myspace-for-hackers <comment><USER2> Invite-only betas make THOG ANGRY! Grrr! Arrg!

Allow me to vent my rage by quoting Wil Shipley again:

 _Don't announce until it can be downloaded. Don't let it be downloaded until it can be bought._

Seriously. Here's the P.R., right here on the front page of news.yc, ground zero of the elite-hacker P.R. machine, and the site isn't ready. Momentum: halted. Opportunity: wasted.

<comment><USER3> Let's bet.

<comment><USER2> Bet... what?

<comment><USER3> Sure, maybe a bit of momentum halted, but when they open for public interest will definitely still be there. Seeing the large influx of new git users lately, and GitHub being one of the two main repository hosting facilities and the large number of people craving for an invite. They will manage just alright.

<comment><USER2> Well, we'll never know what they lost, will they? It's not like we can turn back the clock and launch it a second time. When upside potential dies, it dies with a whimper, not a bang.

I agree that this product seems very nice, and that it might be cool enough that it will do just fine. On the other hand, as you point out, they have competition already. More will be coming. They could easily get lost in a sea of competitors within the next six months. Every geek on this site probably imagines that they could build a site like gitweb in their spare time. I know I do. And it's not like the cost of moving a project from gitweb to a competitor is going to be that high: you do one "git pull" and ask your clients to update their URLs. Maybe you clone a couple of wiki pages.

The biggest problem with free private beta is that, when they finally announce some prices, they probably will get another round of P.R... in the form of unreasonable people complaining that the prices are too high and talking up the alternatives. Even if their prices turn out to be incredibly reasonable, they will be higher than they are now... and folks don't like having things that were free taken away from them, no matter how polite and logical the sales pitch is. It sets off the inner bait-and-switch detector, which is a very highly developed mental organ in a consumer-oriented society like ours, and it just makes you unhappy. Unhappy customers are never a good thing. And this problem defies logic: Just look at all the people who complain about paying $20 a month for a Slicehost VPS because it's so much more expensive than the $6.95 oversold shared hosting plan at VapidHoster.com.

It's a particularly hard sell to convince people that a wrapper around a _free-software tool_ is worth money... and it gets even harder when you consider that 100% of the customers are the kind of hard-core Unix programmers for whom the gitosis docs are light bedtime reading. Launching without a price tag and then trying to paste one on later just makes that whole argument more difficult.

<comment><USER4> What github offers is community and project maintenance around git. This is not something git gives you on its own, nor is it trivial to simulate with free tools. I've recently put a project up and had people who follow me ask about the project and offer code, just because I put it up. They're building a focused, targeted community with opt-in listens (like twitter's very successful model) for code. It's a fantastic idea.

Running github is not free, and writing it has been an uncompensated investment for its maintainers. I am sure they hope to make at least enough money to pay for the bandwidth and hardware. It's doubtful people will begrudge them that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suppose that "MySpace" was meant as a good thing, contrary to what I initially thought, ad-filled with black text on a black background and sparkly animated gifs.

<comment><USER6> You forgot the neon green marquee text in alternating caps and lowercase proclaiming the person is "misunderstood/forged in fire" or some other emo crap.

<comment><USER7> Well at least theres no default friend named "Tom"

...

At least, I hope not.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm sure they named him Paul.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "no longer a pain in the ass"

One of the better slogans I've read in a while.

</comment><comment><USER9> This really is a very cool little community . . . they're going to make a killing when they start charging.

<comment><USER10> totally agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've got 5 invites. Email me your YC username if you want one. altano gmail com.

<comment><USER12> Looks pretty cool. I got invited yesterday, and just noticed 5 invites too. You can email max maxwellterry.com for one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How will this be different from expert exchange?</comment>


Ask HN: Who has applied to YC S14? - <AUTHOR>

With the deadline 2 weeks away, I'd be interested in hearing who has applied. Also, what geographies, and demographics etc. <comment><USER2> Hi!

We're applying yo YC and we're based in London—we are Community Capital and we help businesses raise finance from their customers www.communitycapital.co</comment>


Downsides of Being Clever - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247201 <comment><USER2> Is Lisa Simpson lonely?

I mean, If you go to play with the other kids, and they want to do something you don't enjoy, and what you find fun to do no kid does... Does it mean you are lonely?

When I was a kid I loved to play sports like the other kids, and was very good at it, so I was very social,but I also loved reading tons of books and mathematics. Most of the other kids did not.

When you read Kant, Descartes, Stefan Zweig(in german) books that tell you how to raise a kid while you are the kid!, Asimov (in english), Feynman ... all the other kids behavior becomes so childish and stupid.

You could be alone while standing with other people.

For me the fact that Lisa Simpson is alone is not that she is lonely, but the consequence of being unique while other unique people live far away.

I got to find and regularly meet other people like me only as an adult. Most of them are really successful now, but most of them also lived Hell in the school days.

They were alone, but they are not lonely.

<comment><USER3> Word. When I got to MIT, I found my community. I didn't realize up to then that I had been restraining some of my nerdiness.

Same thing with my wife. When we met, I discovered that I didn't have to censor the literary references... she read way more than I.

I love being around people I can be myself with.

<comment><USER4> Ah yes, embracing your inner elitist.

<comment><USER3> That response is why I usually censor myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another way to look at it would be that intelligence is just a tool every person has. A tool we are all free to use and abuse as we please. It allows one possessing a lot of intelligence to achieve once goals quicker and more efficiently. However, the goals them selves can be as good, evil, misguided, or downright stupid as humanly possible.

A very intelligent person with a good goal can achieve amazing things, including happiness. But very rarely even the most intelligent of us ever really know what we want, and in that lies the problem. Given a misguided goal, high intelligence can quickly amplify your efforts of digging your self deeper and deeper into a whole.

So, in the end intelligence is like a gun, a nice tool to have as long as you use it wisely, carefully, and for it's intended purpose.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> very rarely even the most intelligent of us ever really know what we want_

Here's a comic strip on the relative merits of questions and answers, [http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the- park](http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park)

<comment><USER6> If your question can't really be answered, it's probably just ill-posed in the first place.

<comment><USER7> That is a very narrow mindset.

For starters, there are important falsifiable questions that theoretically could be answered, but which would require resources (including time) orders of magnitude beyond any single human organization has had control over during recorded history. Maybe some of those could be answered today if, say, the whole world's GNP was redirected towards that goal... but this is not going to happen. Multiple people have multiple, often contradicting, worthy goals.

Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer. What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately incomplete perspective of the whole issue. Of course, you need to believe that these other perspectives offer value that Science(TM) cannot before you even begin to consider them.

<comment><USER6> >For starters, there are important falsifiable questions that theoretically could be answered, but which would require resources (including time) orders of magnitude beyond any single human organization has had control over during recorded history.

Ok, so they're well-posed questions. So?

>Then, there are the problems for which there is not a single correct answer. What Schumacher called "divergent problems", which are the bread and butter of the humanities. Each approach to take give you a unique but ultimately incomplete perspective of the whole issue.

This sounds like the place of the argument. I think these questions aren't well-posed: they're actually being used to imply a large number of smaller questions. You can usually get a well-posed question by trying to break down one of these questions, or expose the bad reasoning that led to considering things like, "Well gosh, what's it all about anyway, when you get right down to it?" real questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The most notable, and sad, case concerns the maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford University aged 12, she dropped out of her course before taking her finals and started waitressing. She later worked as a call girl, entertaining clients with her ability to recite equations during sexual acts."

The _sad_ case?? According to whom?

She's working in an area she enjoys and controls her own life, something she didn't have as a "prodigy".

[http://inquiringfeminist.com/about-me/](http://inquiringfeminist.com/about- me/)

<comment><USER9> It's sad for those who understand what she may have contributed to humanity, knowledge in general, etc.

There are no guarantees how impactful your work will be but if more of the 7 billion people on this planet could contribute, we'd all be better off.

<comment><USER10> Meh. I think we'd all be better off if we did what was good for us and for people in our environment, rather than trying to save the world.

<comment><USER9> Well, you could be a great doctor or teacher, for example. Great architect or artist? Poet, author? There are many ways to contribute.

<comment><USER11> But you can't be a great call girl?

<comment><USER9> Sure. Now can you figure out why that's different than being a doctor or teacher?

<comment><USER12> Not really. Care to explain?

<comment><USER9> Nope. If you don't get it, it's probably lost on you, which makes it even more painful to see people so gifted squander their abilities. There are so many problems to solve and so few people who can solve them.

<comment><USER11> Personally I'm happy enough when I see people just choosing activities that don't cause more problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When you are smart, trivial things, like making "good" or rational choices are simply boring. This boredom naturally increases with the number of trivial things. When confronted to boredom, intelligent people will generally choose something stimulating, if not on an intellectual level, at least on some other level. And since they are very good at finding lateral solutions to problems, they will go for out of the box, so-called irrational, things/choices. The world is boring, plagued by overly simple, artificially complicated, problems and life goes by like water between your fingers. To survive and be productive when intelligent, you've got to be happily endowed with autistic features, which not all intelligent people are. The world is beating its own records of waste every day and that goes for intelligence too. So, one might as well have a less boring life. All this is not a downside of being clever. It's the downside of living in a pathetically wasteful, boring and often plain stupid world.

<comment><USER14> On the contrary the simplest possible solutions are nearly always the most difficult to find. Believing that a complex solution is the answer is symptomatic of not understanding the problem - which is another trait of intelligent people: belief that they can solve problems beyond the scope of their current ability (i.e. believe that they are smarter than they are), or too much haste when approaching a problem.

Possibly this stems from the expectations curse outlined in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A standardized test for 'wisdom' as quoted below seems possible and worth developing. In addition to personal self-improvement, a lot of companies would be interested. Does anyone here know of any such tests?

> In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social > dilemmas – ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt > crises disclosed to Dear Abby, the Washington Post's agony aunt. As the > volunteers talked, a panel of psychologists judged their reasoning and > weakness to bias: whether it was a rounded argument, whether the candidates > were ready to admit the limits of their knowledge – their "intellectual > humility" – and whether they were ignoring important details that didn't fit > their theory.

> High scores turned out to predict greater life satisfaction, relationship > quality, and, crucially, reduced anxiety and rumination – all the qualities > that seem to be absent in classically smart people. Wiser reasoning even > seemed to ensure a longer life – those with the higher scores were less > likely to die over intervening years. Crucially, Grossmann found that IQ was > not related to any of these measures, and certainly didn't predict greater > wisdom. "People who are very sharp may generate, very quickly, arguments > [for] why their claims are the correct ones – but may do it in a very biased > fashion."

<comment><USER16> This was also one of the more interesting tidbits for me. I'd love to see such a test. I wonder if it's easier to 'pass' or get a high score on a test like this in a written format rather than the real life type scenarios typically encountered where its not obvious that one is being tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The lede to this article is silly. IQ leads to substantial difference between groups, but is not perfectly correlated with success, so that there is still substantial variation between individuals with the same IQ. What is do difficult to understand about this?

> the Termites' [1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more] average salary was > twice that of the average white-collar job. > Terman concluded that > "intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated". > Over the > course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about > the same as the national average. > Why don't the benefits of sharper > intelligence pay off in the long term?

They _do_ pay off _on average_ for _certain measures_.

</comment><comment><USER18> In the case of the 'Termites' reporting unease over not achieving their potential: perhaps something to do with being studied all their lives and asked about it?

</comment><comment><USER19> Why don't we see people talk about the downsides of being talented( in sports)..

Why is being talented in a bookish or intellectual sense looked down upon? so much so clever kids are asked to not show of their cleverness.

We don't ask sporty kids (or people) to be less sporty..

Is there an underlying principle at work here that threatens the average populace?

<comment><USER20> Did you actually read the article? The starting premise behind it was that intelligent people ending up not using their life to showcase their intelligence was a problem worthy of study.

The downsides of being talented at sports are well known: most don't make it and many of those that do have a marginal income which lasts until they're in their mid-30s at best. Apart from the confidence that comes with having being respected for your sporting prowess as a young age (and possibly a free degree if you're an elite kid in the US), there aren't many fringe benefits that come from being [known as] an almost sportsperson, and physical faculties decline faster and are less versatile than mental ones. Which is part of the reason why they're actually _frequently_ told they should stop devoting so much time to sport and make sure they pass their exams...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Probing more deeply, Penney found that this seemed to correlate with verbal > intelligence – the kind tested by word games in IQ tests, compared to > prowess at spatial puzzles (which, in fact, seemed to reduce the risk of > anxiety). He speculates that greater eloquence might also make you more > likely to verbalise anxieties and ruminate over them.

While I'm nowhere near the same IQ as some of the people on that list, I do believe I have strong verbal intelligence. And yes, I do suffer a lot from anxiety, most of which stems from me explaining these anxieties in my own head.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Clever" in the article means "high IQ". Some interesting nuggets. E.g.:

       maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford
       University aged 12, she dropped out of her
       course before taking her finals and started
       waitressing. She later worked as a call girl

and

       fair, unbiased decision-making is largely
       independent of IQ

and

       someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice
       as likely to max out their credit card.

etc.

I was initially going to skim the article, but I went back and read the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER23> I really wish more people grokked Stanovich's algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence thing. It is so much better at explaining reality than trying to say "well they're smart but they have ~character flaws~ so they don't succeed"!

<comment><USER24> i wonder if anyone could tell me the difference between Stanovich's autonomous VS algorithmic mind and Kahneman's Fast VS slow thinking?

<comment><USER25> (disclaimer: I have no understanding of the subject, I just searched the Internet)

This longish article by Stanovich himself (link: [http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning_fil...](http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning_files/Stanovich_Two_MInds.pdf)) seems to answer your question (and falcolas' question as well). I am reading it right now and basically it seems that he proposes a three-level model as a refinement of Kahneman's two-level model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What if the causation is the opposite? What if the people who ruminate more or are more anxious about conversations become smarter and more eloquent, by taking more time analyzing those things?

<comment><USER27> If we stick to IQ as the definition of 'cleverness' (which can be argued, of course), then this is not really true. IQ cannot be significantly increased with learning, conversation, etc. I used to be* a Mensa member, and it's really surprising and eye opening to see the variety of people there. You can find university teachers and enterpreneurs, but they are not too common. The average Mensa member is really an average citizen with an average job - librarian in a small town, sysadmin in an elementary school, or just an unemployed, depressed twenty-something.

*: you need to pay membership fee to be a member, and I found it really uninteresting after a while to go to Mensa meetings. IQ is not something that can really connect people.

<comment><USER25> I am curious what do these meetings look like. Could you describe them? Why did you find them uninteresting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> seems to be a dupe of this BBC Article [0]. Sufiah Yosuf responds on her blog here [1].

[0]: [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150413-the-downsides-of- be...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150413-the-downsides-of-being-clever)

[1]: [http://inquiringfeminist.com/2015/04/14/hello-new- readers/](http://inquiringfeminist.com/2015/04/14/hello-new-readers/)

</comment><comment><USER29> > TerryADavis: Highs and lows balance for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER30> I agree with the wisdom part. but wait... maybe I'm biased because I can relate with it, which means it doesn't apply to me, which means i can't relate with it. My mind is an escher drawing.

</comment><comment><USER31> I thought the most interesting observation was somewhat buried, specifically the way the author closely links intelligence to anxiety. That has a ring of truth to it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Ramblings:

I was recently talking with coworkers about intelligence, and the many forms of it that exist beyond just raw cognitive quickness, of course in the context of the company. There are social skills and being able to interact with people, curiosity, the ability to absorb information quickly, the ability to make cognitive leaps quickly, the ability to just get things done, etc.

I would say that these all qualify as different forms of intelligence. They all have their uses. Some can be trained / improved more than others. They also can conflict with each other at times. For example, one of my coworkers talked about how he spent a couple hours investigating the inner-workings of the Java garbage collector because of a bug that actually was caused by some code that was accidentally allocating orders of magnitude extra memory than intended. I laughed and said I was lazier and would never have bothered looking so deeply and would have just assumed I did something stupid. I see this as curiosity + quick cognitive leaps vs. getting things done.

Jumping to the end, the article talks about wisdom as a learnable skill. In this context, I would say that wisdom is yet another type of intelligence, one that can have an impact on your other intelligences, and it is one that is quite trainable.

Onto happiness - I think it's a bit of a shame that society doesn't attempt to teach "happiness"[0] more. Maybe this is a stretch, but I feel like there are some legitimate fundamental ideas and mental skills that could help a lot of people live more fulfilling lives.

In the case of worrying, for example, it would be helpful to be able to quickly identify _that_ you're worrying (which can be hard to catch!), ask yourself why you're worrying, and then either come up with an plan to resolve it if it's solvable or, in the case of agonizing over the human condition, accepting it as something that just is. This is something that you can practice.

Or goals. Schools seem to emphasize setting goals and creating plans to achieve them. But I feel like I was never taught about what to do once I reached a goal, or what to think about goals in general. Every time I reached a goal, I was satisfied briefly, and then I felt sort of an emptiness that accompanied the thought of "That's it? What now?" Now that I've done plenty of reading (e.g. Mastery by George Leonard), I've learned to accept that while it's useful to set goals, they're inherently unsatisfying to achieve. Fulfillment lies in the struggle to achieve them, and the struggle never ends.

Maybe these kinds of things are hard to teach since they're so inherently personal and learning them requires tight integration with personal motivations (which is hard to do on a grand scale), and maybe what works for me wouldn't work for many others, but I still feel like there must be some "happiness" knowledge nuggets that could be taught broadly.

[0] I prefer fulfillment to happiness because it's way more realistic. Minds are pretty chaotic, and I've found that even when I _should_ be happy since everything is going well, I can be unhappy. Likewise, even when a lot of bad things happen, I can be really happy. Fulfillment, on the other hand, seems a lot more stable and less vulnerable to the random meandering of mood.

</comment><comment><USER4> People here seem to like talking about _trade-offs_ , specifically technical ones. Maybe intelligence is just another trade-off.

<comment><USER33> Purely biologically speaking it is a known trade-off. Intelligence allows tool usage and abstract reasoning about one's surroundings, but it comes of the cost of using up fantastic amounts of energy, which is why even in humans intelligence is not continuously used at the highest level of processing.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget higher child infant mortality and premature births. Humans are born several months earlier than optimal in order to be able to fit that huge head of ours through the birth canal.

<comment><USER34> That's not my understanding of the modern interpretation of head size and pelvis size. I believe current thinking is that the (healthy) mother simply cannot metabolise nutrients efficiently enough to sustain further growth of the (healthy) foetus beyond a certain size. Evolutionarily, the pelvis has adapted as far as necessary, and no further.

<comment><USER34> Although actually your statement and mine aren't incompatible.

Anyway, it's quite a fascinating area of study, including biomechanics, anthropology, metabolism, and more: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


9 Essential Tools that will Power your Startup to Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.johnlarkin.me/tools-for-startups.html

<comment><USER2> "7 unlikely recommendations", "9 essential tools that will power your success", these do not belong to HN. It's a pity I can't downvote.</comment>


Why did Borland fail? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail/answer/Danny-Thorpe?share=1& <comment><USER4> As a former Borland employee (not for very long, 2006-2009, and actually working in their Austrian offices, which originally became part of the company through the Segue acquisition), I certainly didn't have the complete picture, but our managers, even going as far as those located in Cupertino, and later Austin, were quite open about what Borland's issue was: even with the rise of Java, they thought they could continue in the IDE business like they did before. Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially zero. They eventually realized that the whole IDE market was dead, so that was spun off into CodeGear, JBuilder was relaunched as an Eclipse distribution with "premium" extensions, and CodeGear was ultimately sold to Embarcadero, while the rest of the company was trying to refocus on producing software for other parts of the development lifecycle, from requirements management to automated testing and test management (hence Segue) to SCM. Company performance was atrocious, and that really screwed over people that took part in the employee share program, but they somehow managed to make it over to get acquired by Micro Focus.

<comment><USER5> Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

<comment><USER4> I'm not saying the market is still dead, but for a company like Borland, 10 years ago there was nothing they could have done to recover from Eclipse taking over the market. Even then, IntelliJ was a relative niche product (compared to the vast ubiquity of Eclipse), and JetBrains did diversify their product portfolio to both more aspects of the development lifecycle and to more specialized needs in IDEs. Anyway, my point was that Eclipse was a game- changer that triggered great change in Borland.

<comment><USER6> I regard Eclipse as a tool of the Devil. I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse giving me the goatse but now I'm going to use TextWrangler and Ant.

<comment><USER7>
      > I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse [...]

Is there a particular reason to choose Eclipse instead of Android Studio? Google is pushing its weight on the latter with their Eclipse+ADT combo being essentially on life support (and for good reason since Android Studio provides a vastly better experience).

Moreover, the next version of Android Studio will include C/C++ support based on JetBrains' CLion that will cover development with the NDK.

<comment><USER6> I didn't know about Android Studio, I'll give it a try.

I actually like IDEs quite a lot, what I don't like are IDEs like netbeans, eclipse, visual studio or xcode.

I loved codewarrior absolutely to death, I was heavily into thinkc, the first development tool I ever bought with my own money was lightspeedc which fit on a floppy.

<comment><USER8> Metrowerks Codewarrior has fond memories for me too (although I have never had a problem with Eclipse aside from bloated J2EE bundles like WSAD etc. It's easy to set it up to be quick and unobstrusive I've found).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used Delphi for more tan 10 years, so this is what I believe it went wrong:

        * They lost Anders Hejlsberg
        * Free compilers got aceptable.
        * Lack of back compatibility, new VCL components from  one version weren't compatible with older ones, every new versión require to biy the new components.
        * To expensive.
        * No new books to learn Delphi, they are to old.

I'm still using Delphi 7 for some projects.

<comment> T-A Pretty much my view too. Anyone who knew Delphi immediately went "OMG that's Delphi/VCL with C-like syntax!" when they saw C#/.NET ca ~2000. And once Microsoft started giving away VS Express for free in 2005, Borland's original market - IDEs and compilers for the masses - was well and truly dead.

It's easy to blame management for shifting focus to enterprise software, but they had to try doing something new.

<comment><USER10> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg)

"In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft." "Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the language C#."

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000)

1997: "Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. After Borland's counteroffer last October, Microsoft offered another $1.5 million bonus, the complaint says."

<comment><USER11> The first time I saw Hejlsberg was from this delphi easter egg:

[http://www.blong.com/Undocumented/Delphi1.htm](http://www.blong.com/Undocumented/Delphi1.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Compilers used to be something you paid money for. It took a while, but open source and I would say gcc in particular killed that.

It's funny how gcc was around for a long time, but it was only in the 2000s that cash cow compilers started dying. I think that coincides a bit with Linux and OS X becoming popular for developers. For example, it wasn't until 2005 that Microsoft started providing a VS express SKU.

You see Linux start to kill old school commercial Unix (like Sun) around the same time. Probably the same trend.

<comment><USER13> I remember in the 90s advocating for things like gcc and the absolute scorn I would receive. "A free compiler!!! What kind of crap must that be??". You paid for compilers, you paid for your version control, you paid for your bug tracker, and that was that.

Interestingly, at that company (a defense contractor) it was the government more than anything that changed that attitude. There were a lot of projects initiated by the DoD designed to test whether Linux and other open software were a good choice. Attitudes slowly came around.

And it (paid=good) is not an entirely unfounded position. There was some really bad OS software, and Visual Studio is still top by some measures (quality of the debugger). But the amount of pain noncompliance of the VS compiler brought was just frustrating. And if you want really fast code on x86 it still makes sense to buy the Intel compilers (C++ and Fortran).

<comment><USER14> If the VS debugger is king of the hill, then it must be really grim out there. At least half the time, I'm using printf debugging because actually running in the debugger brings my entire machine (16 GB RAM, quad-core intel) to a standstill.

<comment><USER12> Folks who have figured out windbg's learning curve will know that VS isn't even the best debugger from Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Answers to two (closed) Stack Exchange questions are relevant:

What happened to Borland Delphi? [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what- ha...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-happened-to- borland-delphi)

Why has C prevailed over Pascal? [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why- ha...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-has-c- prevailed-over-pascal)

<comment><USER16> A closed stackexchange question? Ya don't say!

<comment><USER17> And here I thought it was just the stackoverflow mods that closed everything and you were supposed to take stuff like this to stackexchange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I laughed at "...building the software analogs of sewer systems, utility poles, or synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats."

It derives from a Steven Wright Joke:

"All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a department store... with a pricing gun... She said, "Give me all of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store..."

[http://www.humournet.com/misc.humour/steven_wright.txt](http://www.humournet.com/misc.humour/steven_wright.txt)

</comment><comment><USER19> They started out making Turbo Pascal a great product that anyone could afford, but it was so much cheaper than the "professional tools" everyone else was selling that businesses wouldn't take them seriously - there had to be a catch to the cheap price. So eventually Borland suddenly decided to at least triple the price starting with one of its versions, but it didn't work, they didn't gain ground against Microsoft and they lost the hobbyist developer.

<comment><USER20> That is a good summation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Turbo Pascal was the first software I remember buying in a retail box. Before then it was all copied and school-given software, but something in 15 year old me really felt it was worth buying this tool.

It was. That purchase spawned a career out of my evening hobby. Then, a few years later, when I was mostly using C or VB, and only firing up Pascal for fun now and then, Delphi came out. I was super excited. Until I realized I could barely use it, and none of my local book stores had anything on it that was helpful to read.

By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development.. .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003. That purchase brought me real jobs, at real companies.

So, for me.. Borland got me curious, got me hooked, then I switched to tools that got me money. Maybe that's because the ecosystem had changed, but I can't be the only one.

<comment><USER22> > By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development.. > .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003.

The _web_ was around for about decade before Microsoft .NET arrived. In fact I remember coding Delphi in an evaluation copy of the IDE given away on a cover CD from .Net magazine (not to be confused with Microsoft .NET). And then a few years later downloading a pirated copy of a beta release of Visual Studio .NET.

It was actually the web that introduced me to Borland's Windows IDEs. I'd used Turbo Pascal extensively, but then got hooked on Visual Studio once I migrated away from DOS. Then I started seeing talk of these Borland development environments for Windows and thought " _I love TP, so why not give these a shot_ ". I actually much preferred those IDE's to Visual Studio as well, but alas my career and personal interest was switching to non-Windows technologies at that point and thus I never really found a practical use for Borland's Windows compilers.

A few years back I did need to throw together a basic Windows app for some clients, but by that point Delphi was dead and I'd forgotten a lot of Pascal's nuances anyway. So I ended up knocking up something in VB.NET; which was actually less painful than I remembered from the .NET 1.0 days. In fact almost pleasurable. But for all of Pascal / Delphi's warts, I did very much prefer that language over any of the iterations of Visual Basic. In fact I think I'd probably go further and say I preferred it over C/C++ as well.

<comment><USER23> Actually I remember that Delphi was way more advanced on the TCP/IP side compared to Visual Basic. I remember downloading (for free) quite complete TCP/IP VCLs that included http, ftp, icmp etc.. compared to VB that had nothing (at least for free).

<comment><USER22> VB and VB.NET are different languages. But yeah, Delphi ran circles around VB in nearly every measurable way. I don't think anyone would seriously argue that VB6 was a better language nor had the better tooling. And earlier versions of VB would have only compared even worse.

As for what libraries VB had for networking, there was some HTTP OCX that was bundled with Internet Explorer (and I don't mean the Trident renderer), which was awful. But aside that, there was only a basic wrapper around the Winsock C libraries. To be fair, the Winsock OCX was pretty decent fot what it was, but you were left to write all the host layers (OSI) for yourself.

<comment><USER23> I am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages :) Actually at the time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet (wikipedia says 2012), and it was invented by the guy cited in this thread as ex chief dev of Delphi:

My post was just to say that Delphi had quite advanced TCP/IP components options compared to other languages of that time (I cited VB because it was supposed to be the "easiest" language of the period)

<comment><USER22> _> Actually at the time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet (wikipedia says 2012)_

I assume you mean 2002? FYI .NET was available to some developers before 2002, that was just the first non-beta release :)

 _> I am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages...I cited VB because it was supposed to be the "easiest" language of the period_

I mistook your post to reference Visual Basic because I mentioned it in my post where I discussed VB.NET. I say this because opening your post with "actually" suggested you meant your reply as a correction to my comment. So it wasn't clear to me that your post was intended purely as an interesting yet tangential anecdote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have to say that Borland TurboPascal 3.0 (or earlier) was one of the finest pieces of software that I have ever seen. A full fledged Pascal compiler and a Wordstar compatible editor in a 29K binary. Where have those days gone?

<comment><USER25> The speed of the compiler! What an amazing environment. If they had continued to evolve with the tech industry they would have been gods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> _In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yokam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yokam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."_

They stopped selling $49.95 compilers with IDEs and tried to be an enterprise company. People still buy IDEs and compilers. If they had kept doing what they were doing and improving their products, they would have been fine. Instead, they wanted the big money and it didn't happen.

<comment><USER27> They also sold $299 and $499 compilers

It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers

<comment><USER28> > _It 's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers_

People still do. For example, Intel sells several compilers: [https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel- compilers](https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-compilers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not a single mention of all the dirty tricks by Microsoft?!

What a shallow memory. I remember how Microsoft cornered Borland and others to use some undocumented features of their OS, then make them incompatible. Remember, back in the 90s updating software on mass scale was a PITA, end users were expected to never update.

Also abusing their dominance to aggressively target key developers and contractors, copying any good application in the ecosystem and _bundling_ it.

But SV didn't learn the lesson and we are now in more abusive walled gardens for or mobile phones. And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today.

<comment><USER30> > And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are > today.

Compared to what Microsoft used to be like - recently Microsoft has made some pretty, surprising, awesome moves.

Specifically their open source movement (including .Net). You would never have seen that 10-20 years ago. I'm sure if you walked into Gates's office and said "I think we should open source this" \- I have a feeling he would fire you on the spot.

They even now support Linux on their Azure platform - and that's not a it- will-run-but-you-are-on-your-own.

Now, I'm not saying Microsoft is a saint or that I would want to work for them. But considering they didn't take action against the mono or ReactOS projects makes them ok in my book (not that they would have any real legal case - but they could drag those projects through an expensive lawsuit which would just end up with a deal to cease development).

<comment><USER31> I've said this before (and was downvoted naturally):

Microsoft's new Open Source strategy needs to be viewed with exactly the same amount of suspicion as IBM's and Oracle's.

It may just be a move to reduce their expenses, since they may get unpaid software contributions and testing (Oracle's CEO pretty much admitted this in an interview).

<comment><USER14> I view it as an attack on the LAMP stack. Mono with self-hosted HTTP throw OWIN seems like a killer option. Let's face it, C# is a much better language for development than Java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Borland gets a lot of mentions in this book, which is very interesting as well as entertaining:

"In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters" [http://www.amazon.com/Search-Stupidity-High-Tech- Marketing-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Search-Stupidity-High-Tech-Marketing- Disasters/dp/1590591046/?tag=dedasys-20)

I'd highly recommend it. Technology changes, but people don't.

</comment><comment><USER33> The Borland Turbo languages where the Cat's Pajamas.

Microsoft countered with the Quick languages.

Borland made Turbo Pascal for Windows and with Objects and then made Delphi.

Microsoft countered with Visual BASIC.

Borland made Borland C++ and JBuiilder.

Microsoft countered with Visual C++ and Visual J++/J# and then later Visual C#.

The free IDEs and Free compiler languages ate into Borland's sales. Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, BlueJ, Sublime Text, GNU C/C++, Apple XCode, FreePascal/Lazarus, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Python, Code::Blocks, etc.

In 2005 Microsoft introduce Visual Studio Express a free version of their development tools.

Like Amiga, Borland had the superior technology, but cheaper/free alternatives undercut their sales.

Mostly it was the free and open source revolution that did Borland in.

</comment><comment><USER34>
       In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked
       Del Yokam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you
       saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers
       for a hundred $1 million customers?"  Yokam replied
       without hesitation "Absolutely."

Any day of the week! Why is this even in question?

<comment><USER35> Losing one customer can either mean: a) losing $100 b) losing $1'000'000\. What do you pick?

<comment><USER36> The inverse is also true.

<comment><USER37> The inverse is the same.

Losing $1mil can either mean: a) losing 10000 customers b) losing 1 customer. What do you pick?

There are more customers who can afford 100$ than 1mil. That's the important factor, not the way you want to present the numbers.

<comment><USER38> Not really. Small customers are sensitive to fads and trends, while enterprise customers (particularly in the field of software, as we all know!) will stick with a product well past its sell-by date as long as it "works." You have a lot more time to pivot when you start losing enterprise customers than small customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Borland had its moments, Delphi(RAD successor to Turbo Pascal) was a total hit with Delphi 7 being the pinacle, unfortunatelly after that all went down the hill. Later on in 2008 Embarcadero Technologies picked up Delphi and has been selling it ever since.

If anyone is interested, Delphi today is on life support and exists only because it still has a strong base of followers from the Borland time. The rapid cost of development has pushed Delphi out of reach for younger generations who are not used to paying for development tools.

</comment><comment><USER40> (My memory could be off; it was a long time ago, and I was young)

I believe that I first began learning to program in Turbo C or C++ and Turbo Pascal, far before I ever encountered Microsoft development tools, except maybe VB6, or other open source ones. I was young, in high school or earlier at the time, taking a summer school "computer camp" at a local college [1]. I remember learning Visual Delhi and C++Builder, and being amazed. I think Microsoft only had VB6 at the time. Visual Delphi and C++Builder were polished, and I was super excited to build applications with them, and I did.

Then VB began evolving, Microsoft released .NET. One Borland renamed themselves Inprise and seemed to disappear.(Inprise -> Enterprise?)

If Borland hand't build these consumer products, I might not have gotten into programming, or as early as I did. It helped me find my scientific/intellectual/professional love and, which led to a job at Amazon I continue to practice and are very happy with today.

Farewell, Borland! You did good. You helped inspire this student to learn computer science and begin his career.

[1] Scripps or Harvey Mudd -- somewhere in the Claremont Colleges, in Steele Hall.

</comment><comment><USER41> I loved Turbo C. I learned C from it. The manuals were beautiful, lucid and generous. Borland C++ 3.1 was head & shoulders above Programmer's Workbench. Unfortunately it fell apart at 4.5.

</comment><comment><USER42> Borland specialized in supplying tools that assisted in building windows-only desktop GUIs which would in turn access a database sitting somewhere on a LAN. As soon as the market moved to web GUIs, and hosting on linux, they were dead.

</comment><comment><USER43> Embarcadero is still not getting it right. They know how to build great tech but are terrible marketers. Consider for example right now they sell a range of cross platform development tools. But there's no way to view a range of impressive showcase/example apps on each platform to see what can be done. So there's no strong motivation to use their tools.

People evaluating new development tools want to see and be impressed by what can be done with it. That sort of thing just isn't a priority for Embarcadero.

</comment><comment><USER44> IMO it was the Internet. C and Pascal dominated till 1994, then Java books were everywhere. I loved TP5 (the manual was awesome) but dropped everything to learn Java which promised the world: write once, run everywhere and Internet applications! Woohoo. Then Perl and Javascript were on the scene. WIRED magazine! Very exciting times. Netscape Navigator Gold baby. Delphi was "Microsloth Windoze" not even on my radar.

</comment><comment><USER45> On the non-dev front, I used Quattro Pro a bunch and loved it. What I really enjoyed was their word processor, Sprint.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_\(word_processor\))

Sprint gave complete control over all the aspects of document production. Loved it.

<comment><USER46> What aspects of document production did the competition not provide control over?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is an interesting comment. I think you can actually move from the IDE space and gradually bring in features that are of interest to Enterprise customers, who then adopt your product.

I'm watching Qlikview do this right now - their original product was and still is a client app for Windows. It allows any business user to pull through datasets of pretty much any source as a poor mans ETL, then it allows that user to do BI tasks in a very simple way. Where they are succeeding is that they haven't given up on this market, but are using it to drive interest from inside companies - eventually skunkworks divisions show its value to the business, which then buys the server software and licenses.

It's growing pretty rapidly, and they seem to have a sustainable model. But it's driven by the individual user.

</comment><comment><USER48> Not having been a developer in the Borland era, the most valuable take-away for me is this statement:

"On paper this may seem like a fairly minor adjustment, if you have the attitude (as Borland executive management had) that developers are a dime a dozen and any developer can be applied to any product or problem space. That may work for technical programming skills but it doesn't work for passion."

Regardless of what the technical abilities of the product, it's a good reminder that a product made great by the hard work of people who believe in it should be mindful to prioritize their ambitions in product decisions. This is particularly relevant in the open source world.

</comment><comment><USER49> related: [http://www.vcljs.com/](http://www.vcljs.com/) I wondered myself if a Delphi approach is existing for web pages anywhere... and found it. hehe

</comment><comment><USER50> Pro tip: Add an ? to make the annoying quora "login" dialog disappear, www.quora.com/Diary/? even this will make it disappear, no need to add the ?share=1 thing :D

</comment><comment><USER51> It was a long time ago, and I can't find anything to corroborate this on internet searches, but:

Didn't Borland attempt to charge for the use of a c runtime module? They attempted to profit from software developed using their c compiler. So, not only would they make money selling the compiler, but anyone that used programs written with their compiler would have to pay also.

Somewhere around that time, they lost the whole c compiler market, I think.

<comment><USER52> Not sure if it's the same thing you're talking about, but waaay back they did a license change for their language products that said something along the lines of anything produced with their compilers belonged to them. There was a huge outcry and pretty much right away they said "oops! our lawyers got a bit happy" and fixed it. I don't recall exactly when that was. Their Pascal was "Borland Pascal" at the time. I think that was an honest mistake, as I doubt anyone there at the time would have thought they'd get away with that.

<comment><USER53> Around 1991 timeframe, if I recall correctly.

Basically the EULA forbade the use of Borland C++ to write compilers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Borland was beloved company that made tools that made programming enjoyable. Answer covers all the main points, I can only be sad that they don't exist today and can make tools. Delphi with all my good will is simply not the tool I would use today even if it wasn't priced as it is.

<comment><USER55> Why not? If you were to develop Windows desktop applications today, what choices do you have that compete with Delphi? (Serious question)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Microsoft poached some people. [http://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms- over-staff-poac...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms-over-staff- poaching/)

</comment><comment><USER57> Delphi was very popular in post-USSR countries. But very few people bought it. Probably 90% used illegal copies. I guess most people didn't even realize it, because they bought it on CD and paid $2 for it.

</comment><comment><USER58> You could ask the same question about companies such as Novell or Sun.

<comment><USER59> Sun ignored the rise of commodity hardware. They were relying on the Internet and Wall Street bubble in the late 90's. When those both popped, a Sun took a big hit.

Anyway, why does answering this help with Borland?

<comment><USER12> Sun also had an overpriced compiler, to go with the overpriced Unix running on overpriced hardware. Then it saw these replaced with free, free, and cheaper products, respectively.

<comment><USER59> Sun made its money from hardware. I never worked anywhere that used Sun's compilers. It was always gcc.

<comment><USER53> I did.

We always used the UNIX vendor compilers back when I was doing UNIX development in the .com days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Great write up. I always wondered where they went. This was my first IDE when I took Computer Science 101 in junior college.

</comment><comment><USER61> It's simple, it got disrupted by free compilers and Microsoft's .NET

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm wondering what LispWorks guys would say about it.

</comment><comment><USER63> Eclipse.

<comment><USER64> Actually, what made me stop using Borland (C++ Builder) was switching to Linux (going to open source GCC and wxWidgets library) and web (Browsers and PHP getting good enough to build bigger projects in it).

Borland failed to deliver usable solutions for Linux and web at the time and after I got used to new tools I simply did not bother to try anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Because it was a lousy strategy to try to beat Microsoft in its own game - creating developer tools?) Also adapting a huge codebase for each new windows cost too much.

</comment><comment><USER6> It was for quite similar reasons that Live Picture failed.

We had a good product with fanatically devoted users; graphic artists persisted with LP on Mac OS 9 for years after Mac OS X came into common use.

The problem was that former Apple and Pepsi CEO John Sculley was a major invester. Live Picture's image editing product, also called Live Picture - <USER2> regarded as a tool by Wall Street and as Sculley told us one day, "The street does not value tools companies".

So he tried to turn us into some manner of internet company so we could have a big IPO. Really the best he could come up with was that our - <USER3> superior - competitor to apple's quicktime VR be used over the web for consumer product research.

He actually showed us a demo that depicted a virtual convenience store shelf in which one could use the mouse to pick up a tube of toothpaste than look it over.

LP original retailed for $4k but at the time it was $600. So he was going to drop a wildly popular six hundred dollar product so we could make a little coin by measuring websurfer response to animated toothpaste?

The $4K to $600 pricing drop was also a serious problem. While $4K was definitely too expensive, dropping the price so abruptly alienated our early adopters.

A while after I left LP, I found a Java memory leak detection tool called I think Optimize-It. And yes garbage collected languages do suffer memory leaks if you don't know what you're doing, often seriously so as when I had to configure a job to reboot a client's server because it kept running out of swap space.

Optimize-It was independently developed and published at first but Borland acquired it, then sold it for quite a lot of money.

While a tool like that is indeed valuable, it's a lot cheaper to just reboot your server every night at midnight.

It should have sold for maybe $200 rather than the thousands of dollars that Borland charged.

I am quite sad as Borland, Live Picture, Microport, Seagate and the Santa Cruz Operation once offered really good tech employment to Santa Cruz County.

There are other companies there now so it's not like there is no work, but attempting to transform what really was a tools company so it would sell during the internet bubble threw well over fifty hard-working, incredibly dedicated and talented people out of work.

A coworker and good friend became homeless and quite desperate. I am pleased to report he did finally find a job and so was able to pay for a place to live but when I spoke to him while he was homeless he had lost all hope of survival. Someone like him should never have been homeless.

<comment><USER66> Decisions by companies listed at the stock exchange have to be seen from that perspective. Software business is an asset business. Software licences are not apples. For some strange reasons some analysts do believe that a certain kind of asset is more profitable - selling licences lead to a higher turnover. That's how software is seen from the investor's perspective.

Software is craftsmanship + plus 'copy' from the distribution perspective.

That's why open source really provides good results. Open source is free because there is no barter involved. There is no real declining marginal utility. Every technology that was in the position to grow a reputation busts exactly the moment the last user installed a copy ...

The marginal utility has to be introduced by design :). Then you get money ... because you have a price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> As good guess as any else.

</comment><comment><USER68> See Wikipedia on where Phillipe's successes have been and is doing today: a smart watch running 2 yrs per charge. His horolog tech is being pursued by at least two Swiss firms in the Jura. 'Phillipe the Phoenix` is a facile adaptor I admire.</comment>


Mercedes-Benz and Bosch are testing self-driving taxis in San Jose - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21002911/mercedes-benz-bosch-self-driving-taxi-car-sclass-san-jose-autonomous <comment><USER2>
      San Carlos Street and Stevens Creek Boulevard

... which is the same roadway. It changes names at Bascom Avenue. This implies that they avoid even the simplest turns.</comment>


Data mining your emails - <AUTHOR> https://www.EmailParser.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi There. I have developed a small tool to data mine and capture data of incoming emails. What do you think? any sugestions?</comment>


Inferno Distributed Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/inferno-os/

<comment><USER2> Strange thing to post without further comment.

I'm a professional Limbo / Inferno programmer if you want to ask any questions.

Some of my code is here

<http://www.kix.in/plan9/mirror/sources/contrib/maht/limbo/>

<comment><USER2> I'll also anticipate the questions :

Inferno is an operating system built using similar principles to Plan 9. Everything is a file and 9p is the glue (called Styx in Inferno). However the core of the system is the Emu virtual machine. The system and drivers are written in C but the userland programs are written in Limbo and executed in the VM which can JIT compile it if necessary. It runs on multiple architectures X86, ARM, PowerPC and Sparc.

Another great feature is that the whole shebang can run as a user application in Windows / Linux / OSX / BSD / Plan9 / Solaris and even as an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer!

There is a program wm/wm which presents a draw device with the same protocol as Plan9 which takes a headache out of porting familiar Plan9 programs like Acme. This has also enabled a spin-off Acme-SAC (Stand Alone Client) which is basically Acme for $OS - <http://www.caerwyn.com/acme/>

Limbo is a statically typed, garbage collected language with built in primitives for CSP style coding ( <http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/> )

        hear(c : chan of string; ip : string)
        {
            result : string;
            # code here for opening and listening
            c <-= result;
        }

        c := array[4] of chan of string;
        spawn(hear, c[0], "126.96.36.199");
        spawn(hear, c[1], "184.108.40.206");
        spawn(hear, c[2], "22.214.171.124");
        spawn(hear, c[3], "126.96.36.199");

        (i, s) := <-c;
        sys->print("%s came from %d\n", i, j);

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a great fan of projects that are _really_ pushing the envelope and came across Inferno. Pretty impressive what you guys are doing there, it is this kind of development that I hope will one day lift us out of the rut we are stuck in.</comment></comment></comment>


Fascinating graphics show who owns all the major brands in the world - <AUTHOR> http://sploid.gizmodo.com/fascinating-graphic-shows-who-owns-all-the-major-brands-1599537576 <comment><USER2> The magic number here seems to be about 4-6. I wonder if its some sort of optimization. The pool is small enough enough to maximize purchasing deals, lobbying power, vertical integration, etc. But the pool is big enough for individuals to avoid anti-trust regulation. Single companies can easily spurn public opinion (such as Comcast with regional monopolies). But a group of companies could operate in a way to avoid that. I wonder if the recent populist movements will turn their ire from immigration to big companies. Or if the companies will manage to walk to line and avoid appearing "too big."</comment>


Monster Beats By Dr Dre Diddy In-ear Headphones With ControlTalk pink - <AUTHOR> http://www.buybeatsbydreheadphones.net/in-ear/diddy-beats/monster-beats-by-dr-dre-diddy-in-ear-headphones-with-controltalk-pink#.T5dbuPYx_lg.hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.buybeatsbydreheadphones.net/in- ear/tour/monster-b...](http://www.buybeatsbydreheadphones.net/in- ear/tour/monster-beats-by-dr-dre-tour-high-resolution-in-ear-black-headphones- with-controltalk)</comment>


The UK Legalizes Eugenics (three parent in-vitro fertilization) - <AUTHOR> http://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/parenting/uk-begins-three-parent-ivf-debate-1.1384671#.UFcnVkasj2g

<comment><USER2> The submission's title is very misleading.

According to the article (titled "UK begins three-parent IVF debate") they are starting a debate on the issue and seeking comments from the people.

They plan to send a report to the UK government in early 2013, which could then possibly lead to legalising the procedure.</comment>


256 Shades of Grey - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/31/256-shades-of-grey/

<comment><USER2> Working with code without syntax highlighting would be aweful. Also, text right now _is_ rendered with subpixel precision, e.g. Microsoft's ClearType [0].

Because only the horizontal resolution would be tripled, you would have a distinction between horizontal and vertical edges - i.e. if the difference in resolution would be noticable at all (which I'm not convinced of if you already have a Retina-ized screen), it'd be very bothersome to only have it in one direction, exactly because the difference would be noticable.

I love how he claims it would save on RAM and graphics power, while in effect it would require equal or more amounts of each, since you're just replacing one 24-bit pixel with 3 8-bit pixels. Arithmetic on one 24-bit pixel is faster than doing it three times on 8-bit values, so you'd need much more processing power and at least an equal amount of RAM. A thoroughly poorly researched article.

The idea strikes me as completely useless. The author probably read about Leica's digital B&W camera and thought it was ingenious.

[0]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType>

</comment><comment><USER3> The HP Omnibook 300 is what you need. B + W screen, essential productivity programs in ROM. Windows 3.1. No wireless, but it wasn't needed in 1993. Maybe they'll update it?</comment>


Participate in the Pokémon GO Field Test - <AUTHOR> http://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-news/participate-in-the-pokemon-go-field-test/ <comment><USER2> Been testing in AU last few weeks, update mid last week was good improvement.

Recommend for people who leave the house ;) (I go days without catching things when I'm lazy)</comment>


Introducing AirCall.io, a flexible, scalable customer hotline tool for startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.rudebaguette.com/2014/01/09/efounders-latest-saas-startup-aircall-io-flexible-scalable-customer-hotline-startups/

<comment><USER2> Is it really built on top of Twilio?

</comment><comment><USER3> how much will it cost?</comment>


Motorola insider talks about fall of technology icon - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/26/motorola-insider-tells-all-about-the-fall-of-a-technology-icon/

<comment><AUTHOR> The letter attached to this article is one of the hardest hitting letters I've ever read and makes for a good read.</comment>


Show HN: Twitter's reaction to the #Oscars2015 - <AUTHOR> http://ecesena.github.io/oscars2015/

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Code is also available [1]. Made with React, material-ui, dygraphs.

Data collected/analyzed with GCloud tools (will blog about that soon - <USER2> feel free to ask, it's good pre-feedback for the posts)

[1] [https://github.com/ecesena/oscars2015](https://github.com/ecesena/oscars2015)</comment>