A Flannery O'Connor Reading List - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/flannery-oconnor-reading-list <comment><USER2> Pleasant surprise to see my favorite author on HN! If you're interested in _her_ writing as opposed to what she read (what this article if focused on), I'd recommend starting with her short story collection _A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories_ [0], which includes my favorite short story, the eponymous _A Good Man Is Hard To Find_.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Man_Is_Hard_to_Find_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Man_Is_Hard_to_Find_and_Other_Stories)

<comment><USER3> My favorite is "Good Country People." A fable, in some sense, for those of us who sometimes find that we're a little more confident than we have a right to be.

<comment><USER4> This is a fantastic story. Parker's Back, as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Flannery O'Connor is great. I'm curious if anyone else heard about her through the TV show Lost. Some of my favorite parts of that show were the references.

[http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Everything_That_Rises_Must_C...](http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Everything_That_Rises_Must_Converge)</comment>


Indian Supreme Court rules homosexuality a sin - <AUTHOR> http://m.timesofindia.com/india/Homosexuality-is-criminal-offence-Supreme-Court-rules/articleshow/27208873.cms

<comment><USER2> What?</comment>


Color, Now Down Two of Three Leaders, Lesson in Lean Startup Philosophy - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/color_now_down_two_of_three_leaders_looks_like_a_l.php#.Ths_w1L9sOY.hackernews

<comment><USER2> So I just fired up Color again, because every time I hear a gloom-and-doom story about Color, I feel the need to look at the car crash again.

And once again, sitting in my office, Los Angeles, a place where you would expect there to be some serious use of Color, I'm presented with, again, the exact same screen I saw when I first started it up a few months ago.

That is to say-- nothing.

Everyone talks about how the Color _technology_ is so revolutionary, but I have yet to see the thing actually work. I've gone to big concerts and fired it up. I've been to Disneyland and fired it up (don't laugh, other social- place apps are _huge_ at Disneyland. Foursquare gets massive traffic from The Mouse). All of these places, you would think there would be _something_ on Color. Nothing. Just that silly black screen with the guy taking the picture of the other guy's crotch. (Cannot unsee that image from the startup, now, thanks)

It's like the guys at Color built the product on the assumption that hundreds of millions of people would use it on day one. I'm sure the app works great in the densest portions of the Bay Area on Friday night after a Foocamp, but it is just absolutely useless on any kind of day-to-day, social sort of usage.

Path isn't much better, but at the very least I can see that there were photos last shared 21 days ago from friends, so there's at least a _little_ temptation to, you know, _actually use the app_. For all the love about Color's technology, I don't believe that they have gotten anything right at all. It would be so, so easy to just dynamically expand the breadth of the "anonymous social network" created around your phone, but the FAQ page is like a winning card for Web 2.0 Social Media Bullshit Bingo.

Seriously, here's the tagline for Color:

"It also means that any photo taken within about 150ft. of other users of the Color app are automatically shared to their devices."

There you go. One Geospatial query, form upload, and fancy Objective-C frontend, and you have Color.

</comment><comment><USER3> No VCs have called to ask me my opinion, but I'm very ok with color.com imploding. IIRC, Paul Graham suggested that startups be described as questions. Color's question was, "Can we make ____, give it away for free, have it become really popular, and gather profile information we can monetize?"

So they now know that _____ is not really popular, and although they raised a tonne of money to do it, closing its doors quickly and moving on to other things is not a disaster.

Pivoting would be neat, but maybe they ought to just give the remaining money back to their investors and move along to the next idea.

<comment><USER4> Just out of curiosity, do VC's call you to ask your opinion on things like this?

<comment><USER3> Given my career, I would short the stock of any VC that asked me for investment advice.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, that just means you're statistically more likely to succeed on your next attempt.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that's what it means, statistically :)

<comment><USER7> Bayesian or frequentist? ;)

<comment><USER6> Doesn't matter, a bad history in investing doesn't statistically mean that you're more likely to get it right the next time, that would mean that everyone gets it right eventually if they just keep trying, which isn't really how investing seems to work.

Even if investing was a lottery, it past failures don't indicate future success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The reasons why Color appears to be imploding can't be known for sure.

I'd guess that it might have something to do with the lack of product...

<comment><USER9> I wonder how they would have fared if it wasn't publicly known that they received zillions in funding or that they spent 350k on a domain name.

Had they been in stealth mode and didn't feel compelled to release as half- baked product too early, maybe it may have turned out differently.

<comment><USER10> Had the product been at all good, a million jaded TC/HN readers yelling bubble wouldn't have stopped them from succeeding. It was the half ass product too early that killed them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Color 'launched' a few days after SXSW, and the founder wasn't particularly aware of the event or able to recognize the lost opportunity. SXSW would have given it the dense mass of people required to give a great first impression

<comment><USER12> I found Bill Nguyen's response quite strange when asked about this.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WGdwY6h5JI&t=25m30s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WGdwY6h5JI&t=25m30s)

"Robert(Scoble) is right, everyone's right, we should have done it, we could have done it, we didn't because I don't like conferences. Again, my bad, it's my responsiblity, I just didn't want to do it."

<comment><USER13> Wow. I don't know if Bill Nguyen realizes this, but when you have a consumer based product, you NEED to launch it when there are a lot of potential customers to use it! That is without a doubt the worst thing that I've ever heard an entrepreneur say as long as I've been following tech. When this company crashes and burns, perhaps Mr. Nguyen will realize that being an entrepreneur sometimes means having to do things you don't want to do. Did you really think Steve Jobs was excited to go to Redmond, proverbial hat in hand to ask Bill Gates for a bailout? Of course not! But he did it because it was necessary for the long term health of the company. I truly think Bill Nguyen doesn't get it.

<comment><USER10> While Color has made a lot of mistakes, Bill Nguyen has accomplished more than 99.x% of entrepreneurs. He wanted something different from his product launch for whatever reason, maybe simply because he didn't feel like dealing with the madness of SXSW. It wasn't the best choice, but it's a far cry from him being clueless. I'm certainly in no position to question his abilities as an entrepreneur, and definitely not for one or two questionable decisions.

<comment><USER14> From his comments though, the only reason that they didn't launch at SXSW was bacause he didn't "like" conferences.

Honestly, it seems to me that he was either too hubristical or naïve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm always fascinated by journalists ability to take two distant factual details and design an entire plotline and article between them.

<comment><USER16> Same. Even better: <http://xkcd.com/904/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the arguments for the high initial valuation was the 'rock-star' team : Which would lead to a decent purchase price for the company even if the product didn't take off.

However, the rock-star team is only valuable if it can stay together. Gathering up a bunch of rock-star soloists is much cheaper...

</comment><comment><USER18> I rarely say this. But seriously, this:

 _Lean Startup philosophy says the last thing you want to do is raise a whole lot of money, build a product in secret, then spring it on a world that may not want what you've built at all._

<comment><USER19> not all startups are lean. seriously, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Alright from Color's perspective losing a couple of big names is bad. But from everyone's view their technology is cool (or interesting at least) and they've got a truckload full of money.

This could be a good thing, the three headed startup hydra could have been a bad thing - too many chiefs not enough indians and likely a lot of different product directions. This is a chance to hunker down figure out what people want and the right way to deliver it. They've got enough cash to keep user groups in testing for years. This can be fixed. Lean is good. Lean with 3-5 years of runway is even better.

</comment><comment><USER21> i always hate to see products fail, but it is kinda nice to see reality set in for Color, rather than a 2001-esque media frenzy and IPO. it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, the bubble isn't as bad this time around.

<comment><USER22> Interesting, I came just to say that as someone who was defending the possibility that there may be a real company in there a few months ago, I'm now willing to admit this is definitely a credit on the "bubble" side of the argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't think there is anything wrong with over-funding a promising startup. With Color, the problem was in the vision and execution, which can happen no matter how much money is in the bank.

While I appreciate the mentality behind a lean startup, I can also understand the benefits of a "fat startup."

Color was entering a crowded space-- there were a ton of photo sharing apps, but nothing close to a clear winner. In theory, putting $41 million into one "killer" photo sharing app makes a lot more sense than putting $3 million into a dozen average photo sharing apps. Unfortunately, things didn't work out for Color.

A large number of start ups fail, merely because they don't have enough engineers. Companies like Google (Google+, Google Docs, etc) or even network TV (Hulu) have been able to buy their way into markets, merely because they can turn out a full featured product relatively quickly, and back it with proper bizdev and marketing.

<comment><USER24> Agreed, but Lean startup is not just about overfunding, it also means not building your product in secret, which is what they did, which is why they are in mess.

"Eric Ries, the Lean Startup philosophy says the last thing you want to do is raise a whole lot of money, build a product in secret, then spring it on a world that may not want what you've built at all"

They should not have built this product in stealth mode then release it at the wrong time(missing SWSX). Investors should be worried, what they thought is a great team is no longer there. One was fired, the other resigned now there is only Bill Nguyen. I think it will be hard to attract talented leaders after seeing cofounders leaving and being fired. Forget pivoting, Bill can't even keep his star team together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's really hard to estimate how a product to be successful in Silicon Valley. Take Google+ example, what's so novel about it? Nothing, i must say. Twitter integrated with Disqus by your address book. But first they get good reviews, and use old tactic of invitation only system like gmail.

As a weak social creature myself, i find the Color app idea very interesting. I eager to find someone take photo in the place i am in. I constantly open and refresh if someone took but none i find. Why nobody is using it? I remember once showing the app and its idea behind to my friend and he also find it very curios and love it. But where are the users?

Press takes what it wants, don't rely on them. They may interest in your investment or office furniture or whatever they want. Press might dumb your app almost instantly, but you have to respond to criticism very early. However, i see no app updated since months i guess.

Here is the road map for a loving user: bucket all criticisms that made to Color. prioritize according to who made them, their power in press/social media. change UI, revamp and go to real events. go to all Geek conferences after parties, music festivals and shout your app. This app needs on the ground fight not online tech bloggers.

</comment><comment><USER26> Would it have been so hard to just put text labels on the buttons and release a new version of the mobile app?

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't understand: DJ Patil joined Color five months ago (according to his LinkedIn profile), yet Color is more than one year old.

Why is he called a co-founder? He doesn't even say so on his LinkedIn profile (a lot of people claim to be a Color co-founder, though).

</comment><comment><USER28> Funny to contrast this with their coverage 3 months ago...! (as I've done here: <http://swombat.com/2011/7/11/color-com> )

<comment><USER29> Note those two posts were authored by two different people at RWW. I wrote this one but not the one you reference 3 months ago.

<comment><USER28> Sure, but you're both prominent writers at RWW - I'm not criticising you guys personally, or even RWW.. it's perfectly fine for authors, or even a publication, to change its stance - just the apparent randomness and diametrical opposition of points coming from the same publication a mere three months apart...

As a person in the firing line, it feels pretty crazy to have the same site praise you as "the next twitter" one day and shoot you down with all they've got three months later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hope Color bounces back. I don't like all this hating on them based on pure speculation and no insider knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER31> Color Funding literally took down the mood of Valley entrepreneurs who really work worth while :(</comment>


US Senate blocks attempt to stop FBI accessing browsing history without warrant - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fbi-browsing-history-government-senate-patriot-act-amendment-a9514941.html <comment><USER2> By 1 vote. Where was Bernie?

<comment><USER3> Social distancing</comment></comment>


Using ZSH - <AUTHOR> http://jbw.cc/2010/07/20/using-zsh/

<comment><USER2> This is pretty convincing for me—I've been holding off on switching from bash for years now.

The single thing keeping me back is that bash is _the_ shell to use, and some scripts you need to setup xxx thing are written _for_ bash, and trying to debug some small difference in behavior between zsh and bash is something I don't want to find myself doing.

Has anyone else not switched because of this, or switched after grappling with similar issues? What are your thoughts?

<comment><USER3> I used to use zsh, long long ago. Then, when I became a sysadmin I switched to bash because of its ubiquity. I've been a bash user for well over a decade, until recently when I switched back to zsh.

During my switch, I learned a few things. First, it really wasn't particularly painful to switch all my personal scripts to zsh. I guess I probably wasn't using that many bashisms, and the few I was using were easily convertible to zsh syntax.

Second, day to day use of zsh does not feel all that much different from bash, and it really takes very little time to get used to if you already know bash. Of course, learning and getting comfortable with using some of the completely different zsh features will take time. I'm learning them in small bites.

Third, despite bash's ubiquity, I now wish I'd just used zsh all along, as they're really not different enough to hamper the use of bash when you need to use it.

Fourth, (depending on what you want to do) getting in to the nitty-gritty of configuring zsh is not always easy. zsh is thoroughly documented, but at the same time the documentation is not very user friendly, and there really aren't enough well-written introductory tutorials to quickly get you up to speed on doing more advanced things like writing your own completion widgets (or even editing existing ones, as they're so poorly commented). So if you want to customize zsh's more advanced features, be prepared to spend a lot of time with the man pages and user's guide.

On the other hand, there are some really helpful people on freenode's #zsh channel. With their help your transition to zsh should be pretty painless.

As to your particular concern about debugging existing bash scripts, I wouldn't worry too much about it. The shells are really not so different in syntax that you'd be completely lost when you wanted to debug some bash script. And if you do run in to problems with them, you could always ask for help on freenode's #bash.

<comment><USER4> One last thing you forgot to mention. zsh is rarely installed on remote hosts. bash is everywhere.

This is a game changer in my case where I can simply download my configuration, load it in the current session and start using all my scripts, aliases on a remote host in less than a minute.

Don't get me wrong, I'm using zsh for personal stuff and computers I have complete control over. But, if I have to write a script, I'll make sure it works with Bash first.

<comment><USER3> _"I can simply download my configuration, load it in the current session and start using all my scripts, aliases on a remote host in less than a minute"_

Nothing's stopping you from uploading zsh itself to your remote hosts along with your .zshrc.

Or just use the package manager to install zsh on those machines. On any modern Linux distro it's as easy as typing something like "emerge zsh" or "apt-get install zsh".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's why I have't changed over. I've used bash for years and know it pretty well. I dabbled with zsh a few times, but in the end it came down to the benefit not being worth the cost.

The cost is that the default config requires a fair bit of tweaking to get usable, and the knowledge to do that tweaking is not easily found, not so newbie-friendly as another commenter above mentions, so I have to learn a bunch of beginner stuff first before I can start to get the extra power benefits.

FWIW, I found that _really_ understanding readline and .inputrc gave me much greater power in bash for less effort than having to learn zsh. The extra return of zsh wasn't worth the effort.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am going to use your blog post to make the switch over from bash. I've tried zsh 2 times but reverted (can't recall why).

Please keep logging your journey. Also, what are the problems you have faced ? What did not work ? Any bash_profile or bashrc lines you could not convert? Any bash scripts that did not run ?

<comment><USER7> I would check out Oh-My-ZSH on GitHub (<https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my- zsh>). This makes it very quick and painless to get ZSH set up.

As for any problems, I didn't really face any. I'm not a system admin so bash wasn't a big part of my day to day. I can still run bash scripts in ZSH (because of the shebang line) and there wasn't anything in my bash_profile that could not be converted. Because of this, there was hardly anything to stopping me using ZSH.

But check out oh-my-zsh it's a good starting point which I found soon after I had set up my own configuration and I now use it too.

<comment><USER6> Your first easy installation procedure fails, and asks me to use this: \--no- check-certificate

I used this with wget and it works. I hope this is okay. Thanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fixed a typo in the HTML for your viewing pleasure...

</comment><comment><USER8> Bash's dead, baby. Viva zsh!</comment>


Ask HN: How do you challenge yourself every day? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm bad at this, sometimes I struggle to convince myself I know how to try "hard" at something. Usually I just try to "try" at something hard enough that I get frustrated enough to quit or palpably get something done.</comment>


Real-world aimbot: The $17,000 rifle with a Linux-powered scope - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/145332-real-world-aimbot-the-17000-rifle-with-a-linux-powered-scope?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=real-world-aimbot-the-17000-rifle-with-a-linux-powered-scope <comment><USER3> I'd just like to point out something that nobody has addressed so far, which is that this setup _triples_ the accurate range of the rifle compared to a human operator. That is absolutely astonishing. If the accurate range increase would apply to larger caliber rifles, this means that with a .50 sniper rifle, it could be used to snipe targets almost a mile away. It wouldn't even take a human sniper being in position.

...In fact, the $17,000 price tag is probably cheaper than training a human sniper. I'm sure we'll see this in military use in the next 20 years.

<comment><USER4> This system in no way triples the effective range of these rifles. The "error budget" analysis in the Army Research Laboratory report is purely estimated; it's not based on real world observations. Unless I'm reading it wrong, the error budget analysis is pure fiction.

Take the hit percentages from Table 5 for the .300WM - they claim a baseline hit percentage of _only 34% at 600 yards_ which is ridiculously low. I've directly observed marksmen shooting the (far inferior) .223 cartridge at 600 yards _with open sights_ at one of the more difficult ranges in the U.S. With no spotting, hit percentages are consistently close to 100%.

We see snipers in operational environments getting kills _at over a mile_ with a .338 Lapua - one of the longest was 2600 yards. According to this report, that sniper would have had only a 4% chance of making the shot _if is was 1000 yards closer_.

I don't see any way to rectify what we see in the real world with the conclusions from this report.

> I'm sure we'll see this in military use in the next 20 years.

The individual technologies in this new integrated scope have been available in dedicated spotting scopes for years. The advancement here seems to be packaging it up into a single weapon-mountable scope. I don't think there's a whole lot of value add for this setup for the military over the separate spotting systems currently in use.

<comment><USER5> Yow, if you're reading that correctly, then no one should be bothering to buy .338 Lapua rifles, since their whole point is to get reliable results beyond the 800-1200 yards you can in theory get from .30 envelope rounds like .308/7.62 NATO and .300 WM, but without the gross overkill of .50 BMG, which was intended for a material destruction role, not anti-personal.

<comment><USER4> Right, yet in real life we see effective use of those rounds out to double that 1200 yard range.

And, of course, accuracy is only one part of effectiveness. Stopping power is also important, especially in the military role, and varies greatly between cartridges; for instance .338LM is something like 5000 ft.lbs. at the muzzle vs. .308 which is somewhere around 2900.

Regarding .50 BMG - I'm not sure there is such thing as overkill if you're one of those guys on a two-way range. ;)

<comment><USER5> Heh, but with 63% more muzzle energy than .338 LM ... well, I don't have to tell you this, but for the larger audience we're talking about a heavier weapon and more recoil, a lot more muzzle blast (more likely to be observed by the enemy), the rounds are heavier and bigger (pxlpshr has a point about the impracticability), etc. etc. Snipers have used it mostly because it was available, not because it was well suited for the purpose. And of course sometimes they're called upon to ... discretely destroy material.

They haven't caught on yet, but Barrett and others have been working on cartridges with 400 instead of 600 grain bullets and noticeably less energy: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.416_Barrett#Muzzle_velocity>

<comment><USER6> I thought the .416 Barrett was basically designed to get around laws that explicitly prohibit .50 BMG, rather than to be a superior alternative. (It's possible I'm thinking of .408 Cheytac here though.)

<comment><USER5> Partly, but since Barrett has a firm policy of not selling to jurisdictions like California that ban civilian use of .50 BMG only so much. It's also intended to be a superior alternative for the non-material sniping role,

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Next step: quadcopter based delivery of a gun like this (presumably one with a shorter or retractable barrel). Imagine: from the comfort of your office 1000's of kilometers away, you can have a gun fly out of a container, fly to the mark's backyard, wait until he gets home, shoot him in the head, and fly off before the cops or anyone else has a chance to even realize what happened! I've thought about the idea several times over the last few years, way cool that at least part of it is working. Or way scary, depending on how you look at it.

<comment><USER8> why… have you been thinking so long about 'remote murders'?

<comment><USER7> Well not so much thinking about (committing) murders, more hypothesizing on what the next logical evolution of drones would be, and how (once they have been developed and mass-produced by the military) they will be used by organized crime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It makes me sad that software like Linux written in a benevolent co-operative spirit ends up being used for such a purpose.

Makes you wonder if there needs to be a software license with a stipulation along the lines of "must not be used for evil", though I guess that would need defining.

<comment><USER10> JSON cannot be used for evil, unless you have permission from Crockford: <http://www.json.org/license.html>

<comment><USER11> Incidentally, IBM have permission from Crockford to be evil or to have evil sublicensees: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764024>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> More of an autofire than an aimbot. Those were used to make it more difficult to spot a cheater in-game while watching from his point of view because the aiming process still looked natural — the crosshair didn't magically jumped to the target. The cheat just chose the best moment to fire.

<comment><USER13> Wow, if online cheaters were not difficult enough to catch already! Without client-side verification (such as PunkBuster) it sounds "even more" impossible to distinguish between really good players and cheaters. I wonder if such libraries are still being developed.

<comment><USER14> Such libraries are _constantly_ being developed. There's a very large market for cheats for online video games, especially highly competitive ones (Counter-strike, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Actually, for civilian (or police) purposes I'd like to see a system that lets you mark targets that you _don't_ want to hit, then automatically prevents you from shooting at or near them when you're aiming at your real target.

</comment><comment><USER16> What is the point, there is no skill in this....oh wait...you get to press a button to select the target, yeah 1337 skills required for this. On the upside, hopefully the animals will suffer less due to better accuracy on kill zone.

Personally hunting is not my thing but I have no problem with others hunting, this rifle, however, just seems a step too far.

<comment><USER15> I had a similar reaction to the hunting shown in the video, but if you're shooting for animal control purposes rather than recreation it makes more sense.

<comment><USER3> In some places in the US, deer are pests, and state conservation agents actually shoot them to thin their numbers. Otherwise, lacking a sufficient number of natural predators in the area, the population would explode to a number greater than the land could handle. This would cause a significant portion of the deer population to die of famine and disease, and cause local flora and crops to be eaten bare.

<comment><USER17> Actually, wildlife bounties are more common than you think and are often offered to the general public. This isn't a complete listing (as I know some Maine counties offer bounties on coyotes and yet it isn't listed), but gives you a general idea: <http://www.bornfreeusa.org/b4a2_bounty.php>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Consumer tech like this scares the crap out of me.

<comment><USER6> Why?

<comment><USER18> An interesting question that has a very long answer, but I'll try to be brief.

As a starting point, I was raised to think guns are bad. And psychologically I am fearful of even low tech firearms. Whether the two are related is unknown, however the phobia is real.

This goes beyond a phobia of encountering them personally - I am fearful for the results weapons bring upon humanity. And think that the time and energy spent on creating instruments of destruction would be better spent elsewhere.

I understand this is marketed as a hunting rifle. I eat meat. I understand some people like to hunt. Yet I am fearful of the repercussions of technology like this being used outside of the realm of hunting things like deer - <USER2> example, being used to hunt things like humans.

I am also fearful of this because it showed up at CES. It costs $17k. Its hooked up to an iPad. I know this specific model is not rigged to fire without manual operation. But someone with enough knowledge to hack something like this, but not build one from scratch, can do nasty things. So in 10 or 15 years, when the price point is down, and remote servos and triggers are off the shelf toys for the iPad8, this thing becomes a toy sentry.

I have a vivid imagination too, and some of it is dystopian future stuff. So that probably explains a lot.

Now I have a question for you: Does this scare you? And if not, then why?

<comment><USER6> Thanks for taking the time to respond. No, it doesn't scare me.

Guns in general don't scare me, because I see them as tools that generally have a lot more positive effect than negative effect. There will always be bad people who would do others harm, whether with guns or with something else.

If guns didn't exist in America, the next crazy person who wants to go out in a blaze of ignominy will just drive his car into a crowd, or make homemade explosives, or something else. Guns give the good guys a fighting chance, leveling the playing field. And by "good guy" here I mean both the unassuming guy who carries a concealed handgun every day (me, for example) as well as the 90-pound girl who protects herself from a home invasion. (To say nothing of the whole defense-against-tyranny thing.)

Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox about all that. This gun _in particular_ doesn't scare me because there are already far more practical and cheaper ways to do bad things. If you want to throw servos and a camera on a rifle, you can do that today. It doesnt need to be something that compensates for wind speed, and you won't use a bolt-action rifle if your goal is to kill a bunch of people remotely. Or you just build a bomb or something, like I said above.

<comment><USER9> ... and logic like this is why I'm glad I live in Europe. Please examine recent events in your country to see how ridiculous your opinions are.

<comment><USER5> Repeating a post from a recent gun control thread, you're actually doing noticeably worse than the US:

From Wikipedia, school shootings in Europe in this century, last two numbers are killed and wounded:

      R., Georg, 18, Sep. 17 2009, Germany, 0, 10-15
      Kretschmer, Tim, 17, March 11, 2009, Germany, 15, 9-13
      De Gelder, Kim, 20, Jan. 16/23,, 2009, Belgium, 4, 12
      Saari, Matti Juhani, 22, Sep. 23, 2008, Finland, 10, 1-3
      Auvinen, Pekka-Eric, 18, Nov. 7, 2007, Jokela, Finland, 8, 1
      Bosse, Bastian, 18, Nov. 20, 2006, Germany, 0, 22
      Steinhäuser, Robert, 19, April 26, 2002, Germany, 16, 1

Other spree shootings in Europe in this century:

      Merah, Mohammed, 23,  March 11–22, 2012, Toulouse & Montauban, France, 7, 8
      Amrani, Nordine, 33,  Dec. 13, 2011, Liège, Belgium, 6, 123 (he also used grenades)
      Breivik, Anders Behring, 32, July 22, 2011, Norway, 75, 242 (a bomb killed 8)
      van der Vlis, Tristan, 24, April 9, 2011, Netherlands, 6, 17
      Radmacher, Sabine, 41, Sep. 19, 2010, Germany, 3, 18 (arson was also used)
      Bird, Derrick, 52, June 2, 2010, United Kingdom, 12, 11
      Sacco, Angelo Secondo, 54, June 28, 2005, Italy, 3, 9
      Antonello, Mauro, 40,  Oct. 15, 2002, Italy, 7
      Durn, Richard, 33,  March 27, 2002, France, 8, 19
      Selamet, Ozan, 42,  Jan. 18, 2002, Belgium, 6 (2 strangled)
      Roux-Durrafourt, Jean-Pierre, 44,  Oct. 29, 2001, France, 4, 7
      Leibacher, Friedrich, 57, Sep. 27, 2001, Switzerland, 14, 18
      Kaya, Hakan, 24,  Dec. 22, 2000, Germany, 6

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting piece of technology.

Sounds a lot like the XM-25 grenade launcher (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25_CDTE>) but without the air burst grenades.

I wonder why this has not been developed by the military / government.

<comment><USER20> "I wonder why this has not been developed by the military / government."

They actually outlined this in the article. The reason pretty much boils down to the fact that gear specifically for the military has to adhere to whatever crazy shit the higher ups demand. This makes developing a proof of concept/ fully functioning, marketable device rather difficult as the costs begin to skyrocket.

These guys took the opposite route: develop the tech, bring it to market, then let the military get in on it if they like it.

<comment><USER5> A very large fraction of the small arms optics technology that the US military has been using in this century has followed exactly that part. Aimpoint, EOTech, maybe others, and of course conventional scopes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Warning, don't miss this line from the story:

"If it doesn't upset you to see animals being hunted, the video at the end of the story gives you a good idea of how a PGF works in practice."

The video shows animals being shot!

<comment><USER22> If you're not a vegetarian, it's important to know where your food comes from :)

<comment><USER9> If you're an omnivore your meat probably comes from intensively farmed animals kept inside their entire life, before being beheaded on a conveyer belt or shot with a bolt gun. Not by a hunter sporting the latest rifle on the open plains.

<comment><USER23> The conditions in feeding operations are often fairly grim, but cattle operations are often open (i.e., the animals are confined outdoors) and they buy in lots of animals from breeders that feed from pasture for a year or so.

Basically, it would be more expensive to keep them inside for their entire life, so that doesn't happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe the government should consider banning Linux. I know you guys hate this idea but if it can be used to make weapons ...

</comment><comment><USER25> Does the military have similar technology?

<comment><USER3> How could the answer possibly be no?

<comment><USER25> I was just surprised to first hear about this on a civilian application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Cool toy. I'd love to take it out on the range for a few hundred rounds!</comment>


How to Train an Animator, by Walt Disney - <AUTHOR> http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/how-to-train-animator-by-walt-disney.html <comment><USER2> I'm finding it absolutely amazing how well Walt Disney knew the field of animation. This letter could have been written last month with no modifications and still have been as applicable to animators as it was in 1935.

<comment><USER3> Not so surprising really.

Disney, and a few artists under his direction, more or less created the system and criteria used to create and judge animation; at least in the USA, from a professional standpoint. Anyone in the west who is taught "animation principles" is taught material developed pretty much as ordered in this letter. What was known as "Disney Animation" and later "Hollywood Animation" was developed to Disney's specification and taste. (Despite what many think, Disney _was_ an animator, just not a very good one. However few would argue that he was a fantastic producer and aesthete.)

Now...

There _are_ other systems and "principles" and methods of staging for animation that are _very_ different from the ones Disney helped to develop. Some of them use some of the same tools developed by Disney Studios and their followers, but take them in very different directions. This is particularly true to animators working in countries other than the USA. (Take a look at films from Russia and the former Easter Block countries for some interesting counter examples. Or hell, at some of the fantastic stuff coming out of Japan these days.)

When I see a Pixar movie I see animators using "Disney" techniques as applied to the new medium; Disney is very much in their DNA. I'm still looking for the 3D animators to grow a set of principles for designed 3D, as opposed to those developed for "pencil" drawings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this was a gem..

What illusion does that person, fat with pot-belly, give you as you see him? What do you think of as you see him walking along? Does he look like a bowl of jelly? Does he look like an inflated balloon with arms and legs dangling? Does he look like a roly-poly?

In other words, analyze the fat person's walk and the reasons for his walking that way.... BUT DON'T STOP UNTIL YOU'VE HAD THE GROUP BRING OUT ALL THE COMEDY THAT CAN BE EXPRESSED WITH THAT FAT PERSON'S WALK; also all the character - but drive for the comedy side of the character.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting from a historical perspective but it reads like the ramblings of a micromanager.

</comment><comment><USER6> A copy of this should be rolled up and used to thwack the producers of _Tangled_.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the "From: Walt" on the top of the paper, just under Walt Disney production.</comment>


Clay 0.1.0 - Clay Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/clay-language/browse_thread/thread/f7df29a245b2d1da?pli=1

<comment><USER2> A better explanation for this language is at <http://claylabs.com/clay/>. The language focuses on improving generic programming by reducing template verbosity via "whole program type propagation".

</comment><comment><USER3> I perused the documentation briefly and was left with the question: What does this allow me to do now that was previously impossible and/or extremely difficult.

Not saying anything bad about the language itself, as I've not used it, but the documentation that is linked does not give me any idea as to why I might want to try it.

<comment><USER4> It's an expressive systems language with lambdas. So, anything you would be using C for + the power you get from lambdas and generic types. In a way you could think of it as Go with a more advanced type system, and without the garbage collection.

I'm looking forward to writing a game in Clay to measure its true performance in a realtime system.

<comment><USER5> Has anybody wrapped a rendering library, do you know?

<comment><USER4> There was an opengl library at one point, I'm not sure of the state of it now though. I think it still works.

<comment><USER5> It looks like glut and opengl are included with the standard libraries. Unfortunately I can't find any building information so I can't do anything with it.

<comment><USER6> What build information is missing? The README.txt describes how to build the compiler; it's a fairly typical cmake setup.

<comment><USER5> Yep, I'm an idiot. I grabbed the binaries from the official site instead of from the repo.

I was tired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can somebody elaborate on what "No garbage collection" means? What are the implications?

<comment><USER8> It means that you have to make sure to deallocate any memory you allocate when you are done with it. Basically, the same as C and C++, as opposed to garbage- collected languages like Python or Java, which will automatically detect when you are done with a chunk of memory and deallocate it for you.

<comment><USER9> Does the type system help out in any way with this? I know linear types can be used to enforce memory management, but IIRC (I haven't looked recently) Clay's type system was more oriented towards generics than this sort of strictness.

<comment><USER6> You're correct; Clay's type system doesn't help much with memory safety. It's flexible enough to express RAII-based ownership semantics like C++, so you can manage dynamic memory with reference counted, uniquely-owned, or other policy- enforcing pointer objects, but also like C++, the language doesn't prevent you from taking nonowning references to arbitrary data behind the type system's back and using those references after the owning object has freed the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems somewhat similar to Rust. How do they compare?

<comment><USER6> Clay is a lot more flexible and metaprogrammable than Rust. Clay allows ad-hoc overloading with predication based on arbitrary compile-time computation, whereas Rust's polymorphism support is more strictly based on Hindley-Milner parametric polymorphism and type classes. On the other hand, Rust, by baking features like shared/unique pointers and logging into the language, is able to provide much stronger safety guarantees with a much simpler type system than Clay would need to provide the equivalent guarantees. Rust also requires a runtime, which supports some cool features like lightweight tasks, cycle collection, and builtin logging, whereas Clay sticks to a "no runtime other than libc" mandate. Overall, Rust will probably be a much better choice for large-scale application development than Clay. The cool thing about Clay is that it's like a scripting language for LLVM. It's great for flexibly generating small amounts of native code without runtime dependencies.

<comment><USER10> This certainly piqued my interest. Do you reckon that eventually some of the interesting features (such as tasks, channels and smart pointers) of Rust could be implemented in Clay as libraries, with type safety and everything?

<comment><USER6> Clay has shared and unique pointer implementations in its library. Naive channels could be mostly implemented in the library as well, but I think they might need language support to pull some of the tricks Rust and Go do to make them fast, and Clay's type system would need to better guard against unintended sharing to make them safe. The Rust and Go developers are contributing the groundwork for lightweight tasks into LLVM, so with runtime library support Clay could potentially inherit that support. I think a region type system would fill in the safety holes; the Deca language (<http://code.google.com/p/decac/>) is very similar to Clay (no runtime requirements, variant-based dynamic dispatch) and successfully uses region typing to provide safe memory access.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Finland considering legalization of unsecured home WiFi networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/06/12/finland-considering-legalization-unsecured-wifi-networks/

<comment><USER2> The article is misleading. The original finnish piece of news says the _use_ of unsecured wireless networks is going to be legalized. Having an unsecured home network has never been illegal.

The legislators are justifying the legalization with the relatively small harm caused by the 'lending', ease of securing the network and the difficulty of figuring out what is actgually meant to be public and what is not.</comment>


Ask HN: Review our startup, TimeCarrot - <AUTHOR>

www.timecarrot.com
We've built a web and desktop app that tracks user-specified procrastination sources and allows setting of commitments to limit your procrastination.
If you never procrastinate, then you wouldn't need it. But if you are like me, you spend hours on facebook or hulu during finals week or do other self-sabotaging things online when important deadlines loom close.  Thus putting money on the line could help you stay productive.
TimeCarrot works by having you specify your procrastination sources (either a website or application). You then make a commitment to limit your procrastination to x hours for any period of time. If you reach your goal, you get your money back.  If not, then either a friend or charity gets it.
I had a chance to meet Paul Graham at the last startup school event at Stanford, and chatted with him about TimeCarrot when it was just an idea. I told him I would like to apply to YC with this. He once wrote "Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it." (http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html) He said the idea was interesting but wanted to be convinced that users would stick with it and use it.  Honestly, I don't know if it works beyond the small proportion of friends at Stanford. That's why I am posting it here in hopes that I will get honest feedback from people who don't care about our feelings. It is our first ever project and we would greatly appreciate your critique ranging from the idea itself to UI, user experience flow etc.  It is still in beta and we are still working on it daily.
Thanks a bunch!
Bek <comment><USER2> Quick question:

Is the desktop app _only_ for Mac? What about Win; and more importantly, Linux?

First reaction on Design/UI/UX/Flow : 7/10 :)

Edit: Added: > we would greatly appreciate your critique ranging from the idea ....

This is more by way of a suggestion rather than a critique - why restrict the concept to just online procrastination; why not expand it to cover just about any kind of resolve? e.g. to quit smoking, to start workouts, etc.

HTH

<comment><AUTHOR> That's where the inspiration came from, but it was easier to monitor time use than to measure the cotinine levels in someone's body.

<comment><USER2> Try peer monitoring/evaluation for all things off-line. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> forgot to mention, stickk.com does that with other types of commitments that require peer monitoring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://www.timecarrot.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a tiny thing, but really makes a difference to some people including me. In OSX, the standard convention has been to make all icons in the menu bar black. Yours is orange - is there any way of having a black alternative?

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, I wasn't aware of the convention. Seeing DropBox's color, we went with our own. Thanks for letting us know, we will definitely try to include it for our next update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds interesting!</comment>


How Estonia became a leader in technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/07/economist-explains-21?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/howdidestoniabecomealeaderintechnology <comment><USER2> One little critique I have, is about Estonia's e-voting.

That's a total black box technology. Basically what they did is said "ok, let's vote using internet, and we'll believe results are true". They do not know is someone hacked them, etc. Voting data from the servers was transferred using personal computer and flash drive of some random sysadmin. It's horrible. In my opinion, they do e-voting for the sake of doing it and being 'first'. Though big thumbs up for e-citizenship.

IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies. 3G works almost anywhere, 4G in cities. Internet is cheap and super fast (if you do not have 100Mbps connection - you have slow internet connection). You do your taxes, get your doctor appointments using internet and so on, for a very long time (since 2010 at least). All Baltic states have prominent startups, though Estonians where first to sell startup for big bucks (Skype).

<comment><USER3> It's not black box technology, they're entire government systems are open source.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/estonia- publishes...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/estonia-publishes- its-e-voting-source-code-on-github/)

<comment><USER4> Not sure what to think about this: [https://github.com/vvk- ehk/evalimine/blob/098ff93f9f159c977d...](https://github.com/vvk- ehk/evalimine/blob/098ff93f9f159c977d60584606a1dabce755f5f1/ivote- server/hes/vote_analyzer.py)

<comment><USER5> geeez, they should really start using python 3 instead, python 2 is so last decade

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Estonia's success is not so much about ditching legacy technology as it is about shedding "legacy thinking"_

This is the key. I think many people does not understand this or does not approve of this. By going digital (like e-governance), use of paper is avoided but the procedure remains same. Does it save time? Sure, it does. But the process remains tedious as ever.

<comment><USER7> > By going digital (like e-governance), use of paper is avoided but the > procedure remains same. Does it save time? Sure, it does. But the process > remains tedious as ever.

what's your point ? Ditching the process of having a government ?

<comment><USER8> It seems that usually when moving from paper to digital forms, the original form is just reimplemented to be filled out on a computer. Where rethinking the actual process might actually reduce the actual interaction that is required from a person, to an automated system which can induce information that would otherwise be filled manually.

In Finland when filling your tax forms online, the form comes prefilled with numbers that are calculated from your tax info of the previous year. If there are no changes in your salary or benefits, you can just agree to the the form and it is done, without typing out anything.

<comment><USER9> >It seems that usually when moving from paper to digital forms, the original form is just reimplemented to be filled out on a computer.

In Germany as a business owner I'm required to file taxes electronically. But then in the last step I still have to print out some of forms and send them via snail mail to the German tax office.

And don't get me started about registering a new company. It takes weeks and you need to visit a notary. (Coincidentally last week I created a UK Ltd to hold some intellectual property. It took 20 minutes and I paid the fee via PayPal. And the next day everything was ready to go.)

There are really different school of thoughts when it comes to administration. And you can't just slap an electronic form ontop of an over-regulated dinosaur and automagically become a modern & agile institution.

<comment><USER3> This is probably because they haven't found a way yet to put a stamp on a digital form ;)

<comment><USER10> Really? Scammers could do that ten years ago.

I assumed Germany was more organized than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Estonians are everywhere - that's why they're successful. Everywhere I was in an accelerator, reporters and people from Estonia came in order to learn how things are done - this is a long and deliberate process.

Once an Estonian journalist even wrote about our company - was fun! [http://majandus24.postimees.ee/2080692/iisraeli-poisid- leiut...](http://majandus24.postimees.ee/2080692/iisraeli-poisid-leiutasid- finantsnou-andva-telefoniaplikatsiooni)

Other countries in the area (namely Finland) also do this and fly around - we've had teams from Italy come visit us in Tel Aviv and other countries.

I can only imagine how it feels in the valley and how much visits you get.

<comment><USER12> LOL, you got this all wrong. The government is pushing technology quite hard on Estonians (for a variety of justified reasons) THAT's why you see many Estonian teams floating around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This link from the article comments is also worth reading to get a full picture, which seems to be not all that great: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/meet-doteebubble-the- myster...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/meet-doteebubble-the-mysterious- estonian-start-up-critic-who-throws-cold-water-on-government-backed-ventures/)

<comment><USER14> "In many cases, the companies that received government money were being run by people with no experience in the field. We wrote about an incubator for gaming startups, where none of the people running the incubator had ever worked in the gaming industry! Then there was the incubator that received nearly 700,000 euros from the government to set up in a small town of 20,000 people to promote creative arts startups, which as far as we can tell was just a few women making dresses and jewelry."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> (2013).

Also, how has Estonia as a country benefited from this so far? The GDP/person seems to be stalling , although generally growing fast since the 00s. [http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries/EE?display=graph)

</comment><comment><USER16> It's just like the lean startup process. In Finland and especially in Sweden, things are talked being talked about for years or decades. We need to plan, think, prepare, study, blah blah, whatever. You know what? Meanwhile Estonians did it, actually several years ago. Skipping (or doing really leanly) most of these major time and resource wasters.

<comment><USER17> I've never lived/worked in either but it seems both Finland and Sweden have really successful and huge tech industries though?

<comment><USER11> Finland was really hurt when Nokia fell - startups at scale and as a national priority are relatively new there. They're spending a lot of money and they have an excellent education system compared to a lot of other places but this sort of mental shift takes time.

Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame. Contrary to that - in Israel failure at founding a startup is considered great because you tried and forfeited a comfy life for a while which people will respect you for.

Finland is spending a lot of money to change that perception - there are whole institutions that are working on it and they're doing a really good job but it takes time.

<comment><USER18> >Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame.

Maybe 10-15 years ago. Now with the rise of successful startups and the national interest towards them, working at a startup is considered good and trendy and rather, most of the CS students avoid large companies. Even my mom was proud and supportive when I cofounded a startup, and she's always been the one to advocate for a good and stable job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> first time Estonia was on my radar was in 1998 on a Linux Conference in Singapore. The number of companies present from a small country like Estonia was astonishing. They have come a long way since and really know how to foster entrepreneurship and the local tech community. A lot of governments (sigh France) could learn from their hands-off approach.

</comment><comment><USER20> @trymas/ "IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies." <\- I can only agree that they are in the forefront of using IT, not producing anything noticeable, with rare exceptions like Skype messenger, MikroTik routers and FlyZip algorhythm.

</comment><comment><USER21> Note to editors: this is from 2013!

</comment><comment><USER22> Leader in technology, but laggard in population dynamics? (depopulated to the 1970s level recently) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eesti_rahvaarv_1970-2009....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eesti_rahvaarv_1970-2009.png)

</comment><comment><USER23> Didn't read because of huge popup window.

</comment><comment><USER24> Estonia is basically one big city, no country side. It is easy to score high in broadband speed etc, if no rural areas are decreasing average speed.

<comment><USER25> Wrong. [https://email@example.com,25,7z](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,25,7z)</comment></comment>


All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware <comment><USER2> Kinda like the boy who cried wolf, we've heard this song and dance a bit too often. I for one will wait for actual independent reviews, and I predict those reviews won't be positive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't calling it 'self-driving' internally ruin any court cases inn the future? Seems like another legal gaff.

<comment><USER4> As they did with "autopilot", they will just nit away the meaning of self- driving to mean something besides autonomous driving. Soon FSD for Musk will have always meant "all the individual capabilities that can eventually lead up robotaxis." Robotaxis are the new word, and 5 years later they'll find a way for that not to be fully autonomous vehicles either.</comment></comment>


Controlling monitor brightness from Linux - <AUTHOR> https://milek7.pl/ddcbacklight/ <comment><USER2> I wish I could find _something_ in Linux that would allow me to reduce the backlight brightness on my old MacBook Pro [4,1 model, I think].

I've tried a million widgets and hacks but that ol' thing just keeps shining out at full brightness. Shame really as, otherwise –running a light Linux environment– it would make a decent emergency spare machine.</comment>


Lessons from self-publishing a technical eBook - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1216175468681940992 <comment><USER2> Great Twitter thread! (For anyone trying to sell a book online...)

Some takeaway excerpts:

"2\. If nobody knows who you are, you're going to have to solve that problem first."

\---

"5\. You're going to be the writer, publisher, distributor, and promoter. Don't self-publish with Amazon. They take a 65% cut for ebooks > $9.99, and if you're going to do all the work yourself, what's the point?

Put it on @Gumroad @ 3.5%. They're awesome! And follow @shl."

\---

"6\. Paid ads don't seem to work, but I might have been lucky.

I tried Google, Quora, LinkedIn, and Reddit.

Nothing worked (either cost-per-click too high, or clicks don't convert), except on one Reddit sub: r/aws.

So far I sold $812 & spent $525 from r/aws ads. $100/day budget."

"But if I had no sales from my own organic reach, I wouldn't have had anything to share on those forums.

The order matters!

\---

Sales from external forums:

HN: 164 - $4,592

Reddit: 68 - $1,904

Indie Hackers: 24 - $672

LinkedIn: 5 - $190

\---

Total: 261 - $7,358 (18%)"</comment>


Google App Engine: Viable for startup that intends (hopes!) to be bought? - <AUTHOR>

I'm considering using Google App Engine for a new startup but am concerned that using the Google Datastore (BigTable), Google Authentication, etc will limit the interest of future suitors.
My principal concern is that it will harder for them to migrate our startup (embedded in Google's operations) into their existing infrastructure. Any advice? <comment><USER2> Yes, it will make it harder for acquirers to integrate your technology. But it'll be hard, regardless. It might even take a near-total rewrite.

Then again, you probably don't want to make it easier for an acquirer to negotiate your price down based on more and more aspects of the software that are harder to integrate--there will be some due diligence after the letter of intent is signed, and you'll want them to find that the technology is far better than they'd expected rather than far worse. I'd suggest pretty strongly making sure everything you do is abstract enough to roll on other platforms without too much pain. For BigTable, just make sure you don't do anything that won't move to Hadoop+Hbase reasonably easily, for example. Authentication...abstract it out. If you support OpenID, too, you'll be able to roll out anywhere.

Sure, Google is not evil, but no reason to trust your entire business to a potential competitor or a potential acquirer that might like having that kind of advantage over you in the negotiations.

<comment><USER2> Then again, as I read this, I realize that the vast majority of potential acquirers (everyone except Google and maybe Yahoo), are going to want you to run on their existing infrastructure (meaning some kind of SQL database). So, being tied to a BigTable like structure might be a negative, even if you can run on Hbase, too. I dunno.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I shared the same concern, that's why I opted for the more expensive way of building a staging infrastructure for our next project. Data management structure and procedure can become an issue for any migration.</comment>


Ask YC: Resources for Writing Business Plans? - <AUTHOR>

Yeah, I know: a lot of startups don't need business plans. You can bootstrap.
Some ideas don't fall under that tent, though, and will require some funding -- therefore, a business plan.
Does anyone know of good examples online (real-world plans would be awesome), guides, wisdom, advice? Please share. <comment><USER2> The last time I checked there weren't actually any good books or websites on writing business plans. There is a business plans for dummies book, but it's really bad.

The startup wikia has a decent template and some links:

<http://startup.wikia.com/wiki/Business_plan>

There are lots of different templates. The important thing to remember is that you shouldn't feel compelled to put everything on the template into the actual business plan. A lot of the categories just don't apply or are of trivial importance for any given startup. The best way to learn is to find examples. The libraries at most business schools will have examples of student created business plans. Since ideas tend to overlap, there will almost certainly be several business plans that are similar to your idea or are at least in the same genre.

The Thousand Rand Challenge materials, while not the format you want, ask some useful questions:

<http://startup.wikia.com/wiki/Thousand_Rand_Challenge>

Sorry for the disjointed nature of this post, I just had a quadruple espresso and I don't normally drink coffee.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've used the Scotiabank business plan writer before and fount it to be pretty good. It is an online app now but the last time I used it, the writer was a standalone program. I imagine that it's the same though.

<http://cgi.scotiabank.com/planwriter/scotia_sb.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a good starting point...

<http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/07/how-to-write-a-.html>

There's tons of gold in his blog. Go mine it.</comment>


How Much Would Donald Trump's American-Made iPhone Actually Cost? - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-much-would-donald-trumps-american-made-iphone-actually-cost <comment><USER2> "It would be kind of nutty to ship components halfway around the world [from Asia to the US], adding a layer of complexity to the manufacturing process when everything is much more easily accessible in Asia."

Well, except that the raw materials used are being shipped _to_ those plants in the first place... and shipping costs are at historical lows.

"Doing some back-of-the-envelope math, Wiens said that consumers could pay around $50 more for an iPhone that was assembled in the US versus one that was assembled in China."

The last figure I saw was something like $16.84 total labor assembly costs for the iPhone 5.

</comment><comment><USER3> And... there's no estimation of how much would it cost.</comment>


"Now people with just 12 weeks coding experience are asking for £50,000" - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/11958438/Immigration-clampdown-will-hurt-UK-technology-start-ups-warn-top-entrepreneurs.html <comment><USER2> That seems hyperbolic, but maybe I'm just out of touch with the London market?</comment>


Misuse of Deep Learning in Nature Journal's Earthquake Aftershock Paper - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/c4ylga/d_misuse_of_deep_learning_in_nature_journals/ <comment><USER2> Well, posting arguments on Reddit or GitHub is not how peer review or academic correspondence works ("peer" means someone who has a track record of publications in the field s/he is reviewing). Those arguments need to be written as a formal comment and submitted to the journal. It too needs to go through peer review. Otherwise it'd be too easy to troll a scientist.</comment>


Two examples of bad user experience caused by HTTP prefix being hidden in Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=60528

<comment><USER2> I repeatedly posted about this being terrible on reddit, I was repeatedly told to stop bitching.

It's a pain, surely this is something that you don't do, the user highlights "foo.com" and is instead given "<http://foo.com>. It's as bad as the sites that use Javascript to inject "read more @ <http://bar.com..>.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was optional, but don't expect that of Chrome, oh no.

It also leads to an inconsistent experience, I'll quote myself: "If the URL you're using is <http://website.com> and you copy website.com, you get <http://website.com>, but if the URL you're using is <https://website.com> and you copy website.com, you get website.com. It not only messes with copying by changing what you copied into what it thinks you want, it's inconsistent with that guessing."

<comment><USER3> selecting text in the addressbar should cause it to switch modes to reveal the full URL for the user to select.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't.

<comment><USER3> I was saying "should" as in "it'd be nice if it did".

But in retrospect I see why that was confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why Chrome don't implement something similar to LocationBar2[1]. It expands to include the protocol when URL bar is focused, and hides the protocol on unfocus. It also tries to make sure text width never changes when protocol is hidden by center-aligned the domain part, e.g.

        URL: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829087

When protocol is hidden, will be displayed as:

        URL:     news.ycombinator.com   /item?id=1829087

[1]: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4014/>

<comment><USER2> The fact that they don't lends weight to the spdy _conspiracy_ theory (can it be called that that?)

<comment><USER6> I think its more likely that they realise most people don't understand what the http/https bit is all about, so its much simpler if you ignore it altogether.

I honestly think http/https should beside the point. Websites should transparently redirect to https if they need to (so the padlock appears), but there is no need to signal this to the user with some cryptic techno-gabble.

<comment><USER7> Shoulda, coulda, woulda ...

The web largely of sites that could do things better, but don't. We have to work around that, because you and everyone else here knows in the deepest pits of our little black hearts that these sites won't be fixed.

<comment><USER6> I should imagine google, having access to a 'quite' large web index, would know if hiding the http/https would break the Internet for the majority of web users. I am guessing this actually only happens in a very few edge cases, and those edge cases should fix their sites, not hold back development for everybody else!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find Chrome full of little annoyances like this. I tried to move to it because of the huge speed advantage over firefox but gave up pretty quickly.

I understand - and generally approve - the drive towards simplicity, but things should be made as simple as possible, and no simpler. (With apologies to Einstein.) Chrome crosses that line in several ways which ends up causing more confusion than it solves.

<comment><USER9> Chrome on the Mac is still lacking. In Safari if I right click and copy an image I can paste that directly in Mail. Using Chrome I get a broken image icon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it kind of silly to be hiding protocols in URLs, while, at the same time, sites are adding the ugly-ass #! shebang ajax crawlability thing[1], right in the middle of URLS - a scheme brought to you by ... google :p

[1] see [http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting- started...](http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I want to know why your server is listening on port 80 only to kick out 404 pages. If you require SSL for all traffic, then you really only have two logical choices, either only listen on 443 or redirect from 80 to 443.

Now, if you only use https for authentication, not redirecting to the SSL- enabled url is a far, far greater transgression against UX than hiding the protocol in the address bar.

Simply put, this seems like a nitpick rarely exposed outside of corner cases and other UX mistakes.

<comment><USER12> Saying that the solution is for server admins to do something misses the point. Even if you're right, as a user I have no way to get a random server's config changed. Therefore I want the option to configure my client so that I don't run into the issue.

<comment><USER13> If your client does not do what you want use a different client. Or you can run Chromium and add whatever features you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's amazing how many people jumped into the comments section to say "I agree" or "I disagree." Whenever the Chrome devs get up this morning and check their tracker, I imagine they will be very annoyed.

<comment> mkr-hn I clicked the little star to register support, and now I'm getting every "I agree" post in my inbox. Very annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not directly related (but not totally unrelated), try to search for "PDF/A" in the "ominous bar" => error.

What you're looking for:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A>

What you get:

 _This webpage is not available. The webpage at<http://pdf/a> might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address._

The reason for this, is probably that anything with a slash in it has to be interpreted as a url, since there is no protocol left to make the difference between a web address and a search...

<comment><USER16> That seems like a pretty easy fix. Just ensure that you have a .something somewhere in the address, before the first slash.

<comment><USER15> Maybe my post wasn't completely clear: I want to _search_ for PDF/A, and actually the expected result is the Google result page for this search, ie:

<http://www.google.fr/search?q=pdf/a>

What I get instead is an error because Chrome tries to access the non-existent web page <http://PDF/a>

<comment><USER16> Sorry, no, it was my post that wasn't clear. That should be easy behaviour for Google to code for. The current implementation seems buggy; at least the fix wouldn't be difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why this sudden outrage? This has been the case ever since Google Chrome took the step of obscuring the HTTP protocol scheme way back in April 2010, and been mentioned way back then as well.

See: <http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467#c19> for a developer's comment where he explains the 'feature'.

This seems to be a case of reporting an existing 'feature' (however much you may dislike it) as a bug.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because from what I've seen, the Chrome devs appreciate concrete use cases. I've seen little of those, and many "plz fix it suxx!!!" posts, so I thought I'd contribute some, well, concrete use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hehe.. check out the subtle tabs on the images posted in comment #36.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you have a website that respondes to HTTPS traffic and not HTTP traffic, and you are targeting everyday Internet users, you don't deserve traffic!

Most people dont understand the difference between the cryptic labels HTTP and HTTPS. Why should they? Why force users to become experts in Internet protocols to use the Internet?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not targeting everyday internet users. As I mention in the ticket, it's our internal servers.

Hiding the label makes sense, but the way it's solved in Google Chrome has some trade-offs that some (which according to the number of tickets on the issue is more than just a few) people may not be willing to live with.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4014/> \- sirn mentioned this Firefox addon in a comment, looks like a good solution.

I'd also say the iOS-like animation I propose in the ticket makes more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I still haven't seen a good reason for hiding it in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER20> These are poor counter-examples.

<comment><USER6> I honestly think the first example is a feature not a problem (its a good thing!) and the second is an edge case that will never happen to the vast majority of web users.

Whereas hiding the http/https prefix simplifies the web browsing experience for the vast majority of web users. Worth keeping!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> concur, hiding the http is annoying to me</comment>


Some thoughts on differential equation notation – functional vs. classical - <AUTHOR> http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/dir3/dxdoc/ <comment><USER2> This short notation for differential operators is very common in physics since decades. Even better, for instance, while some folks in differential geometry (ie. General relativity, especially the astronomy community) dont write out the operator "any more" but indicates it with a notation like X_{,i} which means \partial_i X.

I don't like that notation, but I always would abbreviate a differential operator :)

<comment><AUTHOR> How standard is the f \circ (g, h) notation for composition of n-ary functions? I do see it in Wikipedia, but I hadn't come across it myself until looking at Sussman et al. Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_composition#Multivari...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_composition#Multivariate_functions)</comment></comment>


The Tao of Programming - <AUTHOR> http://repetae.net/computer/tao.html The Tao of Programming <comment><USER2> This is a copy of:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Programming>

with another online version:

<http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a very old document, but packed full of interesting and useful ideas. I particularly recall being impressed with section 3.3 as a young lad, but section 5.1 also has the acid bite of truth.</comment>


Manhattan Faces a Reckoning If Working from Home Becomes the Norm - ezequiel-garzon https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/nyregion/coronavirus-work-from-home.html <comment><AUTHOR> The M&A book-talking will continue until asset prices drop below purchase triggers.</comment>


Ask HN: How did the open-source monitoring service netdata raise 20M? - <AUTHOR> Dear readers,
Today I am very thankful to use the netdata tool to monitor few Kubernetes clusters (https://www.netdata.cloud/). It's a free, open-source on GitHub and useful product. They have wonderful UIs, great quality of code, high performance.
The main issue, as with many open-source projects, is that they have no business model, not event a premium service,
and yet they were able to leverage 20M$ from Bain Capital Ventures and Marathon Venture Capital. Considering these funds religiously capitalist, I can't imagine them suddenly having an interest in IT innovation
or any altruistic concern to help the rest of the world. At the end, this is a monitoring tool doing the same as its well-established open-source competitors (like prometheus and grafana), therefore, the industry didn't need another monitoring tool.
Is there any business model I don't see? Is it a form of whitewashing, or a simple marketing operation intending to give them more credit and attractiveness? Or, have these VCs really become angels?
--
T. Webber <comment><USER2> Yes, there is. according to this ([https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/netdata- a-monitoring-start...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/netdata-a-monitoring- startup-with-50-year-old-founder-announces-17m-series-a/)):

"In addition to the open-source version of the product, there is a SaaS version, which also has what he calls a "massively free plan." He says the open-source monitoring agent is "a gift to the world." The SaaS tool is about democratizing monitoring and the pay version is even different from most monitoring tools, charging by the seat instead of by the amount of infrastructure you are monitoring."

</comment><comment><USER3> You can read all about it here: [https://blog.netdata.cloud/posts/netdata- cloud-announcement/](https://blog.netdata.cloud/posts/netdata-cloud- announcement/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe they collect your data and sell it? See [https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366](https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366)

<comment><USER3> Did you actually read that thread?</comment></comment>


Monads in Scala - <AUTHOR> http://lamp.epfl.ch/~emir/bqbase/2005/01/20/monad.html <comment><AUTHOR> There is also this excellent PDF from the Melbourne Scala Users Group:

<http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~bjpop/slides/scala_monads.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER2> Scala existed in 2005? I had no idea.

<comment><USER3> I remembered Martin Odersky said it was publicly available since 2004.

<comment><USER4> I think work itself started way back in 2001, but 2004 may have been the first time it was publicly usable.</comment></comment></comment>


Has Your Watch Appreciated 158%? - <AUTHOR> http://www.watchely.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Watchely is the new solution to watch sales and research.

Watchely aims to close the gap between watch buyers and sellers, helping them approach online and auction watch sales more informed through intelligent analytics. We've utilized the power of big data science to help build a better marketplace.

<comment><USER2> I am seeing a number of errors with the CSS and JS of the site. It appears to be trying to load off of a secure domain(https) but the link provided is http.

Changing the url to https threw an SSL connection error.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info ssyphon, I will take a look with my dev. Would the site not load at all for you?

<comment><USER2> This is what I am seeing:

[http://imgur.com/a/ecu68#cNXpwO5](http://imgur.com/a/ecu68#cNXpwO5)

If your dev needs help, just drop an email address here and Ill send you guys an email and try to help things get sorted out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info, shoot me a note at email@example.com and lets chat about fixing it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to save the news - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/how-to-save-the-news/8095/1/

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the official title, but I would rather have entered "How Google views the news industry". There's very little in this piece about saving it, and in my opinion Google (as described in the article) is missing a few important points on the monetization picture:

1) Relatively few local businesses are savvy enough or sufficiently interested in online display advertising, even though Google (and Facebook, ESPN, etc.) have tried their darndest to make it easy for them. The only way most newspapers and other local publications have been able to sign up local businesses for local print campaigns is by employing boots on the ground to cold call and visit in person these companies, and pressure them into buying ads.

2) There is a huge oversupply of online information sources for people to turn to, including news sources from all over the world, company websites, social networks, forums, etc. The increase in the amount of available pages on which to serve ads, combined with the decreased amount of time that people will spend on news sites, will greatly reduce the price of news pages that contain display advertising. The article did not address this fundamental problem with the online news industry going forward.

One other thing: Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying, _In the future model, you'll have subscriptions to information sources that will have advertisements embedded in them, like a newspaper. You'll just leave out the print part. I am quite sure that this will happen._

To me, this seems like a 1990s vision of the future of news -- basically duplicate online what newspapers are doing in print. While this is already happening, it's not working. Considering the two points listed above and the many other online trends working against the news industry, I don't think the industry will shift to a successful version of the vision described by Schmidt.</comment>


Google will abandon Android - <AUTHOR> http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/03/31/google-will-abandon-android

<comment><USER2> posted shortly ago - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3781362></comment>


Show HN: Khan as a Service - <AUTHOR> http://khanaas.com/ <comment><USER2> I was really disappointed actually. I was expecting it to do some clever analysis to figure out where the stress on the words should go.

JAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACKSOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!!! [http://khanaas.com/kirk/jackson/](http://khanaas.com/kirk/jackson/)

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOB!!! [http://khanaas.com/kirk/bob/](http://khanaas.com/kirk/bob/)

though, maybe Bob is a bad example :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Done, thanks to a mysterious pull request.

[https://github.com/mmartin0/khanaas/pull/1](https://github.com/mmartin0/khanaas/pull/1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Latest update: developer behind the hit KHANAAS turns down a 3 billion offer. Says service is worth so much more. "We're shooting for a galaxy far, far away. No, seriously, we'll be exploring Star Wars memes next. Selling out at this point would just be crazyyyyyyyyyyy."

</comment><comment><USER4> For anybody confused, this is from Spock's death scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. Youtube link of the "kaaaahn" exclamation: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRnSnfiUI54](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRnSnfiUI54)

<comment><USER5> * This is from the scene where Khan has caused Kirk (along with his son David, David's mother Carol, and his officers McCoy, Saavik, and Chekhov) to become apparently marooned without hope of rescue inside an artificially habitable cave on an otherwise barren planetoid. The scream is (well, maybe not "is", as the entire explanation... but at least in some large part, not entirely unintended, is) meant to sell the idea that the Enterprise is too badly damaged to survive Khan's coming attack, and communicate Kirk's supposed anguish at the fulfillment of Khan's plan to maroon Kirk on a dead planet, as Kirk had previously left him and his wife (a highly debatable sentiment [0]).

Spock is alive on the Enterprise, hiding on the other side of the planet from Khan, and dies later in the film, after retrieving Kirk and participating in the ensuing space battle. Right youtube link, though.

You might be confused by it's counterpart in 'Star Trek: Into Darkness' (also represented by this service), where it's said by Spock on Kirk's death.

\----

[0] but one which is explored more fully in a set of recent "prime universe" comics: [http://memory- beta.wikia.com/wiki/Khan:_Ruling_in_Hell](http://memory- beta.wikia.com/wiki/Khan:_Ruling_in_Hell)

<comment><USER4> Not sure what I was confused about. It was late and it's been a while since I've seen that scene. Thanks for correcting :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you add some text to speach, and word-stress analysis i might sign up for the enterprise package

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought it was about bring khan academy style learning into elementry schools and working our way up??? o well fuck it

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great. I love it. It would be nice to have a sound file to go along with the image.

</comment><comment><USER9> Please someone build a "(X-As-A-Service)-As-A-Service" so the metaness can kill any future jokes about "As-A-Service". Some are funny (I loved the /dev/null, it was clever) but this one is just further and further declining an idea to everything without trying to be funny or clever.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is fantastic. My dad and I would go around yelling this all the time when I was growing up.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think maybe I just had a nerd aneurysm.</comment>


Loving Latin at the End of the World - <AUTHOR> http://bostonreview.net/politics/joel-christensen-loving-latin-end-world <comment><USER2> What I don't understand is this binary, black/white view of the oppressed Vs oppressor, where the powerful are always wrong. Classical civilization is amazing for its achievements in a world that was filled with oppression, rape, cruelty, horror, etc. It did not invent these things. It showed a way out.

This freedom, initially for the few, has grown measurably to encompass nearly the entire globe. Never before in all of history has there been such real support for the plight of the underprivileged. Far from being in opposition to classical civilization, it is the extension of its ideas, to create a more beautiful and harmonious world. Beauty is not unity or totalitarian, but, in a classical sense, diversity in unity.

<comment><USER3> The powerful are always wrong when they are white men. Otherwise, they are always right.

<comment><USER2> That's not the issue I'm referring to. While I agree that prejudice against white men exists, it's not really a terrible burden and doesn't really matter in my view.

But, if we believe that the philosophical ideals underlying modern society are fundamentally evil or rejectable -- that is a serious deal to me.

I reject the idea we should be born with shame for the whole of western human civilization as an evil upon the earth. We need to appreciate what we've all come from.

When we know that we come from societies that are thousands of years old, we can better prepare for a positive future, thousands of years in the future.

Taking white dudes down a notch, I have no issue with that. But I take issue with associating the classics with fascism -- and promoting the idea that reading and loving the classics is a sort of fascist act. No way. For instance, I think that if more people read Plato and understand his role in history, they would be happier -- and happier about the world they live in.

<comment><USER3> For ages fascists have tried to propagate the idea that classics support their views; everyone dismissed them as preposterous.

Now, it's the left that says it, to promote the idea that they are just, and no one is else, ever, even 2000 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > but all the while it has remained a totemic language—attractive to religious > schools, nationalists, and traditionalists alike for its implicit cultural > but all the while it has remained a totemic language—attractive to religious > schools, nationalists, and traditionalists alike for its implicit cultural > authority, its tradition of exclusivity, power, and prestige.authority, its > tradition of exclusivity, power, and prestige.

There is an author who has never spent a minute in any of these schools or talked with anyone in them. What ignorant trash.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's the end of the world, and deep in the apocalyptic hell-scape of 2019 Massachusetts, some random professor whines that Latin is problematic.

</comment><comment><USER6> Joel is a family friend. I personally don't know him very well but I remember a great demonstration of his encyclopedic knowledge of the classics at my bar mitzvah. Great to see him getting published.

</comment><comment><USER7> Edgy drivel mixed with guilt by association: how pathetically needy of recognition the writer must be.

</comment><comment><USER8> > There is a real-world danger to this aestheticizing attitude toward > linguistic study, this appeal to "beauty" and "pleasure."

I can't imagine feeling this way and being a classicist. Like, why even bother?

> Brexit

> Trump

> Boris Johnson

> Nazis

Ugh. It's like bingo at this point.

</comment><comment><USER9> Much of my writing style comes from Caesar's _Commentarii de Bello Gallico_ ;)

<comment><USER10> With many of your posts having been read by me, I don't notice much use of the ablative absolute.

<comment><USER9> I meant that I strive to write simply and directly. Using short sentences.

More recently, though, I owe a lot to Abercrombie and Stover. Who also write like that.</comment></comment></comment>


Froskell: Haskell with unlockable features for teaching programming - <AUTHOR> https://secure.plaimi.net/papers/2015-01-16-froskell-programming-language.html

<comment><USER2> I am not sure the "unlockable" features idea is a good one.

Firstly, that seems to imply that students will first learn what "simple error message" means, and later, when they make the same mistake, get shown "gobbledygook gook gook". Why would they spend time learning that new message, if, for all they know, a few lessons on, the same mistake may produce yet another error message?

Secondly, the good student may generalize from the subject of a lesson (for example because they may have experience with another language), guess at advanced syntax and try it out, and hurt their nose because their language doesn't _yet_ support the feature.

I would think that the only good way forward is to spend time improving the error messages in the full language. Possibly, that requires redesigning the language (for example, having if...fi, do...od, and while...wend may be superior to using braces everywhere)

Yes, that is hard work. In many languages, writing a parser that accepts valid programs is way easier than writing a parser that gives meaningful error messages and recovers from errors in the to be parsed code well.

If you have that, maybe, labeling parts of error messages as 'irrelevant for this lesson' by graying them out might help, but I think you should present all possible causes of parse errors up front.

[aside: from the title alone, I guessed this was a game where achievements allowed you to buy language features: "your next task is to draw a Pythagorean tree. You have 367 coins. You can buy recursive function calls for 100 coins, Unicode emoji output for 150, floating point arithmetic for 250, or goniometric functions for 200?"]

<comment><USER3> Agreed on all parts, give or take. An addition: I don't see how one could suppress error messages relating to features that haven't been unlocked without causing program validity itself to be dependent on what features you have unlocked. Either that or have programs that don't have any observable error messages but still don't work. And that's a _nasty_ side effect.

Note that a recursive-descent parser is actually probably the best approach for this. They have the combination of being simple and relatively easy to generate relevant error messages and recover from errors that you often don't get with other parsers.

The classic shortfall of a recursive-descent parser (exponential-time worst case complexity) doesn't generally apply to this sort of thing, as generally the programs are relatively short.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would find this sort of thing infuriating. Every time you learn a syntax, it gets replaced by another? Your error messages depend on how far along you are? Worse: program correctness depends on how far along you are? Good luck going to a TA with that one...

Also, it's shooting yourself in the foot w.r.t. those people who come into the program already knowing something. Driving away the advanced people isn't the best thing in the world.

As an aside, that first example pretty much sums up why I don't like Haskell. Not the error message, but that it doesn't work in the first place.

It's too bad, because I know I'm kind of shooting myself in the foot. But first impressions leave a mark.

</comment><comment><USER4> The idea of a progression of "Student Languages" with reduced features, better error messages, and a supporting IDE is exactly what the PLT Group provides in the form of Racket. The only "features" it lacks are a monetization strategy in general and one that sounds like in-app-purchases in particular and the IDE running online (Racket's DrRacket is a stand-alone desktop application, but runs natively on Windows, OSX, and *nix including with native UI as applicable).

It has good documentation to boot. And in my opinion that's one of the truly critical factors for a pedagogical language. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if the authors of this proposal are here, but I wonder if they have heard of Elm: [http://elm-lang.org/](http://elm-lang.org/)

If they are not completely married to Haskell, they might consider using Elm instead. Why? Like Haskell, it's a functional language in the ML family. It already has a browser-based IDE, and has a lot of built-in features that make it well-suited to writing the kinds of programs beginners might be interested in, like games.

Starting with Elm, the authors would be a lot closer to their goals; they could focus on just implementing the concept of "unlockable" features in the existing Elm IDE.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _Like Haskell, it 's a functional language in the ML family._

Haskell isn't in the ML family. It's a successor to the concepts used in David Turner's languages (but more specifically Miranda), themselves born out of a language named Hope that came out nearly the same time as ML.</comment></comment>


Learning languages makes you smarter - <AUTHOR> https://wordbrewery.com/blog/learning/infographics/learning-languages-makes-you-smarter/ <comment><USER2> Apparently being able to communicate in multiple languages will also help people recover from strokes quicker and better: [http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2015/stroke-191115](http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2015/stroke-191115)

The following is only anecdotal evidence, but my father could communicate in quite a few languages (Dutch and English of course, but in his youth he could also speak Italian IIRC). I would say that he recovered for 90% after a heavy stroke. Doctors were really surprised by his recovery. On the other hand, my uncle, who also had a stoke recently, could really only speak Dutch and he did not recover much. He can speak only some simple words, can't use half his body, etc…

Since strokes are quite prevalent in my family (my father had a stroke, my aunt, and my grandfather), I will be trying to live as healthy as possible, but at the same time I am trying to learn Thai. I also know Dutch and English of course and back in high school we learned the basics of German and French. I hope if I ever get a stroke, I still will be able to do computer dev afterwards.</comment>