The Online Confessionary - <AUTHOR> http://www.confessly.com/

<comment><USER2> Ah like grouphug.us. I like your seven sins angle though.

</comment><comment><USER3> a startupweekend bay area proud production - try it now, it's fun (and of course we know you are a sinner)</comment>


"I'd just use an n-by-k array of closures to represent this." - <AUTHOR> Paul Graham has claimed quite a few times that OOP isn't very significant. From http://www.paulgraham.com/pfaq.html: "A lot of what seem to be OO problems turn out not to be if you have random access to the concepts that together comprise object-orientedness. If I were writing a CAD program or a simulation, for example, I'd probably use OO abstractions (though I'd probably end up creating my own OO model with macros instead of using whatever came with the language)."
I wonder, if you had 5 different Paul Grahams working on different subsystems of the same project, if they'd each create 5 different mutually incompatible object models, with no code reuse between them. How about performance? The CLR and the JVM use a lot of techniques to make method dispatch efficient; why reinvent the wheel if you need performance?
In the particular case of a serial port protocol, I could easily see how the protocol could involve keeping track of state, in which case an object would be extremely convenient. Stuffing all that into a single closure could easily become awkward; what you want is a way to manage state and behavior together, which is exactly what an object does.
Yes, objects matter more if you don't closures, because then you can simulate them using the so-called strategy pattern. But nevertheless both closures and objects are something I use frequently based on what reads easier and is easier to express.
I say this as someone who has used Lisp, who programs with map, filter, and fold all day long, and so on. I like Lisp, and also I think objects are a good idea. If you actually are working with real-world things, the ability to create a domain-model is a wonderful resource. Having a language as powerful as CLOS to work with is a blessing and I think that should be recognized, that's all. <comment><USER2> You make an extremely significant qualification here:

 _If you actually are working with real-world things_

A lot of computation involves abstractions that _don't_ correspond to real world things. Modeling techniques aren't nearly as applicable in cases when there's nothing objective (like a chemical system) or semi-objective (like a business process) to model.

Freud said sometimes a cigar is only a cigar. Well, sometimes a function is only a function.

I worked for years on OO projects and slowly came to realize that many complex object models act like a straitjacket. They're highly coupled and thus difficult to change. This of course is the exact opposite of the benefit most often claimed for OO. It's one of the oddities of the software world that people repeat for a very long time assumptions that their own experience is contradicting. Once you've accepted a language or a paradigm as a way of thinking, you frame all problems in terms of it and you just don't see its weaknesses even when they're directly affecting you. OO was oversold way beyond its roots in simulation, partly because of the irrational economics of the software industry, and a lot of people were trained not to think about programming from any other point of view.

When a partner and I began working in Common Lisp we made a conscious effort _not_ to take the approach we were accustomed to. For example, we didn't begin by asking "What are our objects?" We simply let ourselves follow the path of least resistance, programming incrementally in a functional style. I fully expected to end up with an object model but that never happened: we just had a lot of orthogonal functions that were easily organized in a modular fashion. Subsequent experience has borne this out, and in fact most times I have defined object models in CLOS, I've regretted it. (Generic functions are a different story.)

I'm not claiming OO isn't useful, which would be absurd as people mean different things by OO anyway. But I am sympathetic to Paul Graham's statements about objects (and also about design patterns being human compilers) because I was becoming aware of these aspects of my own experience by the time I encountered them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I only think you can even talk about a domain model if there actually is some kind of world (real or imaginary) or some collection of entities to model.

<comment><USER2> By the way, do you know the book _Domain-Driven Design_? I think it is the most sophisticated book on OO and domain modeling. But I also think that it's straining beyond OO toward a design style that is not really about object models, but rather about how to create a good language for talking about one's problem. (The application then reduces to a series of statements in that language.) Lisp programmers would be comfortable with this distinction. In the book it's obscured by the fact that the examples are in Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just to review, this stream of comments leads us to the invention of a new unit, the "Hypothetical Paul Graham" or HPG, which represents the amount of BS required to defend poor coding practice.

Absolute reliance on OO even in non-real systems is a 5 HPG proposition, as it would apparently require five hypothetical Paul Grahams before the use of closures to simulate objects became too complex.

A language that does not include functional abstraction is at least a 10 HPG proposition. We would need to posit at least ten hypothetical Paul Grahams before the dangerous ability to simply define one's own functions (even redefine system functions, oh my!) and pass them around would become dangerously confusing.

This raises the question: is there a theoretical limit of HPGs? How many would be required before we could justify just writing machine instructions?

</comment><comment><USER4> "I wonder, if you had 5 different Paul Grahams working on different subsystems of the same project"

In fact, I think having one Paul Graham working on the project would be better than having 5. Especially "if they'd each create 5 different mutually incompatible object models, with no code reuse between them".

Overhead and incoherence kill.

<comment><AUTHOR> One person can't do all the work on many modern software projects.

Needlessly reinventing the wheel in an incompatible, inefficient way is pointless.

Suppose you're working on a 3D game. There'll be plenty of work for one person each for AI, sound, networking, graphics, networking, and game logic. The game logic code will probably touch all those different parts. If each person is like Paul Graham and thinks he'll roll his own fucking object system it's going to be a nightmare.

<comment><USER2> _If each person is like Paul Graham and thinks he'll roll his own fucking object system_

This is a total non-issue. Graham's original comment was that even in situations where an object model was appropriate, he wouldn't necessarily use the OO constructs of an OO language to build one. It had nothing to do with working on a team or not. Conversely, five intelligent programmers would quickly recognize areas of potential conflict and agree on a common approach. This has nothing to do with using OO or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Classes require a LOT of thinking ahead of time. I will admit that a well designed class model can produce a quality long term solution to a problem. However, a poorly designed class model is the WORST thing you can possibly write. I'd take functions/closures/whatever over a bad class model.

I don't use classes because I'm never willing to pay the design forward. I want to get the product working without spending a long time designing. If you have any freedom as to what you're building, your time is better spent thinking about which features to add.

</comment><comment><USER6> The word "OOP" is so ill-defined that we can't begin to have a meaningful discussion unless you tell us precisely what you mean by it. In particular, what is an "object" and how is it different from a collection of closures?</comment>


Ask HN: What does your portfolio website look like? - <AUTHOR> I am in the process of seriously starting my freelancing career and I was just wondering what other people's portfolio websites look like.<p>If you know of other people with great portfolio websites that'd be fine too. <comment><USER2> Existing site is like half-resume/half-portfolio. Simple "funny" style, currently working on a new and modernized site. [http://cgermano.com](http://cgermano.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mine is [https://folio.artemix.org/](https://folio.artemix.org/)

I'm a backend developer and I mainly focus on clearness, simplicity and accessibility when developing websites.

</comment><comment><USER4> Something like [https://nerds.company/](https://nerds.company/) ?</comment>


Ask HN: How can I improve my podcast about european entrepreneurship? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I have just published an interview style podcast for entrepreneurs in Europe.
https://itunes.apple.com/be/podcast/open-up-europe!-podcast/id1020257211
My question is - how can I make it better?
Are there anybody amongst you who is interested in launching europe? What are your thoughts?
Thank you all in advance. <comment><USER2> It would probably be better to give the HN audience a link that will work on multiple platforms. Not everyone uses or likes Apple.</comment>


Visual Studio for Mac Preview - <AUTHOR> https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-for-mac/ <comment><USER2> FWIW, this is actually a rebranding of Xamarin Studio, so it only handles C# and F#. It's a bit puzzling, as VSCode seemed to be the tool that was going to take over all the Xamarin Studio features.

<comment><USER3> If I had to really take a guess here, this is what I'd speculate.

This is only the first step for Visual Studio Mac. The next will be to begin bringing feature parity to the Mac version (My gut feeling is that VB.NET won't make the leap, but with Roslyn, maybe I'm wrong).

I feel this isn't stated enough. VSCode, albeit made by Microsoft, goes way beyond Microsoft's core interests. Given that you can now enable language support for around 470-ish languages, I don't think that their game here is to be a replacement for anything. I have an even crazier suspicion about what VSCode is really about.

So if you've lived with Visual Studio for years, you know that it's been COM based for a looonnnnggg time (since inception). I think VSCode serves two interests. The first interest is to bring non-Microsoft users in the fold with the hopes that they may go "This ain't so bad, maybe I'll give other stuff a try". I think the second is that they need a playground to figure out how to, excuse me here, "unfuck" the core architecture of Visual Studio. If they can write suitable replacements for core functionality, let them bake and mature for some time, then BOOM! they can replace the VS components.

Like I said, just a crazy opinion based on what I've seen so far.

<comment><USER4> Mozilla underwent a process of "DeCOMification", because they went too far with XP/COM, and wanted to dial it way back.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specif...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__all__&product=&content=decomify&comments=0&comments=1)

<comment><USER5> Can someone link to a synopsis describing what "COM" is? It's hard to search for. (e.g. _microsoft com visual studio_ )

<comment><USER4> Glad you asked! One of my favorite topics. ;)

COM is essentially a formal way of using C++ vtables [1] from C and other languages, so you can create and consume components in any language, and call back and forth between them. It's a way of expressing a rational subset of how C++ classes work and format in memory, in a way that can be implemented in other languages.

It was the outcome of the C / C++ / Visual Basic language wars at Microsoft.

The original 16 bit version of Visual Basic version 1 through 3 had a plug-in extension mechanism called VBX -- Visual Basic Extensions [2].

They were extremely popular and became a victim of their own success, after a whole industry grew up around them, and people started using them for all kinds of things they weren't intended for, and wanted to use them from other languages and frameworks like Borland. Microsoft had to do something about that to mitigate the success disaster of VBX, so they invented COM.

At the time, Microsoft was transitioning from Win16 to Win32, so they came up with the 32 bit COM definition, also known as OCX's, or OLE Controls, which they later called ActiveX, because COM was so hard to search for, and they wanted to take the spotlight away from Java with a new buzzword.

So they brewed up a bunch of ugly C macrology that enabled C programmers (or Visual Studio wizards) to define COM interfaces in header and implementation files that just happened to lay out memory in the exact same way as vtables of C++ pure virtual classes.

While C++ programs would use other ugly macros to declare actual honest-for- god C++ classes to implement COM interfaces.

And Visual Basic programmers would ... do whatever it was that Visual Basic programmers did.

COM's IUnknown::QueryInterface [4] method is essentially like C++'s dynamic_cast [5]. But it also adds some object aggregation features [6] that let you compose multiple sub-objects together by aggregation instead of using monolithic inheritance. You could implement "tear off interfaces" [7] that lazily create aggregated sub-objects on demand, useful for implementing callback interfaces.

MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) is a set of C++ wrappers around the lower level Win32 interfaces, plus a huge framework for implementing GUI widgets and dialogs on top of Win32, and for wrapping rube-goldbergesque OLE Automation interfaces around C++ classes. For some time MFC was the primary way of implementing COM interfaces in C++, but it was infamous for being horribly complex, with all its ugly macros, Hungarian notation, and bizarre programming conventions.

Later on Microsoft came out with the C++-only ActiveX Template Library (ATL) [8], which, although it was still necessarily quite ugly, was a more elegant and powerful way of implementing COM components in C++, didn't have the baggage of supporting C, and let you implement COM/OLE/ActiveX components without the hideous MFC framework. ATL was popular for implementing all kinds of Internet Explorer plug-ins.

OLE was actually a layer of COM interfaces and MIDL (Microsoft Interface Definition Language) on top of COM, which adds the IDispatch interface for dynamically querying and invoking methods and properties at runtime, and variant types [9]: tagged unions for representing polymorphic data (i.e. VB data types) and passing parameters to OLE IDispatch functions.

OLE was the glue necessary for integrating COM components into the Visual Basic runtime, so it directly supported Visual Basic data types, calling conventions and semantics like indexed properties.

OLE also provided an interface definition language (ILD) you could compile into binary type libraries, use to generate boilerplate C and C++ interfaces, and OLE also had COM interfaces and structures for providing those type libraries at runtime. It also had a lot of persistence, runtime reflection, and user-interface related stuff for plugging components and dialogs together in windows, providing property sheets, editing and configuring controls, etc.

MIDL supported defining components with "dual interfaces" [10]: both an OLE IDispatch interfaces taking variant type parameters, and also more efficient lower level COM interface taking primitive types. Runtimes like Visual Basic knew how to integrate dual interfaces and could bind to the more efficient underlying COM interfaces, instead of going through the slower generic dynamic IDispatch interfaces.

IDL also described the intricacies of DCOM [11] interfaces (for in-process and networked remote procedure calls), parameter marshalling [12], and all kinds of other bizarre stuff. DCOM is where COM went off the deep end.

At its core, COM was essentially a very simple and ingenious idea that elegantly solved some real world problems, but it eventually evolved into something extremely complex that attempted to solve many other unrelated problems, and which required a massive amount of tooling, and that depended on Microsoft's Visual Studio and Win32 environment.

Microsoft actually ported ActiveX to the Mac using ATL and Metrowerks Code Warrior, in order to implement Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac [13] (which was actually the best web browser on the Mac at the time, by far). But not a lot of third parties (except for me and a few other crazy people) ever used ActiveX on the Mac.

However it did become quite fashionable for other organizations to create portable COM knock-offs to solve some (hopefully fewer) of the same problems, but which were incompatible with Microsoft's tooling and COM itself (which kind of missed the main points of COM, but hey).

For example, Macromedia came up with MOA (Macromedia Open Architecture) [13], their COM-like plug-in extension mechanism for Director and other products.

And Mozilla came up with XP/COM [14], for implementing components in Mozilla/Firefox/XULRunner/etc, enabling programmers to implement and consume XP/COM components in C++ or JavaScript. Of course it has its own IDL and tooling, and suffers from many of the same problems that COM did.

Mozilla didn't go nearly as far down the rabbit hole as Microsoft did, and later backtracked in their valiant "deCOMification" aka "deCOMtamination" and "outparamdelling" efforts [15].

At this point in history, I think it's best to skip the "component technology" middleman and integrate extensions directly into the JavaScript engine itself. Which brings us back to the sub-topic of VSCode!

[1] Virtual Method Table: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_method_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_method_table)

[2] VBX: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_Extension](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_Extension)

[3] Variant Type: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_type)

[4] IUnknown::QueryInterface: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms682521\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[5] dynamic_cast: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ff4...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ff485837\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[6] Aggregation: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms686558\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[7] Tear Off Interface: [http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/com- tech/atl/performance/article...](http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/com- tech/atl/performance/article.php/c3613/ATL-TearOff-Interfaces.htm)

[8] ActiveX Template Library: [http://www.drdobbs.com/windows/the-activex- template-library/...](http://www.drdobbs.com/windows/the-activex-template- library/184410220)

[9] Variant Types: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_type)

[11] Distributed COM: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_Model)

[12] Marshalling: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshalling_(computer_science)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshalling_\(computer_science\))

[13] Macromedia Open Architecture (MOA): [https://www.adobe.com/support/xtras/info/moa.html](https://www.adobe.com/support/xtras/info/moa.html)

[14] XP/COM: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM)

[15] deCOMtamination: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:DeCOMtamination](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:DeCOMtamination) [http://taras.glek.net/blog/categories/decomtamination/](http://taras.glek.net/blog/categories/decomtamination/) [https://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/category/decomtamination/](https://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/category/decomtamination/)

<comment><USER6> > COM is essentially a formal way of using C++ vtables

No, it is actually quite actual, I guess you haven't looked into how Windows 8, 8.x, 10 and UWP applications work.

Great summary, though.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! By essentially I did mean actually, or literally (in the literal sense (in the literal sense (in the literal sense ...))). ;) [http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/essentially](http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/essentially)

<comment><USER6> I guess I misunderstood "formal" as "a former".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I went to install it and it seems to be forcing me to download another full Android SDK to a private location without the option the specifying the existing Android SDK location that I already have set up. A quick search show this as an open issue that is 5 years old [https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=859](https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=859)

I lost interest already.

<comment><USER8> Same thing here. I don't care about Android development, just about Xamarin for iOS and Mac and .NET Core. I cancelled the installation as it tries to install some Java and Android SDK which I don't want. Better luck next time.

<comment><USER9> It sounds like you're done messing with it; but if you're not, you can install it without the Android/Java stuff. If you let the installer start running, but deny it elevation to write to your system directories when prompted, it will throw up a "manual install" dialog with instructions and links to download the individual components separately.

Then you can download just the IDE, the Mono framework, and the Xamarin.Mac or Xamarin.iOS pieces if you want them.

<comment><USER10> You can also just go straight into the app menu and there's a "Show manual installation instructions" item there that pulls up the same dialog

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> __UPDATED WITH SCREENSHOTS __

I have it and have installed it,Initial thoughts:

( I use VS Pro every day BTW)

here are some screenshots

[https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nbsetrwnoirbhr0/AAAuF0FHR2nACBaft...](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nbsetrwnoirbhr0/AAAuF0FHR2nACBaftY3xwNoMa?dl=0)

-Great first step, I can only see raw code and code behind views

-No visual Layout view yet, but its greyed out in the View Menu, when selecting .aspx File (Source|Changes|Blame|Log|Merge)

-Looks like its so far, meant for lightweight projects

-Git integration is much simpler to setup/use

<comment><USER12> Does it feel responsive whilst typing?

I'm used to Sublime and when I tried VS Code it felt kind of laggy.

<comment><USER11> so far yes, no lag either :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.visualstudio.com/visual-studio-pre-release- downl...](https://www.visualstudio.com/visual-studio-pre-release-downloads/)

^^ download link

<comment><USER14> This was the link I successfully used to install.

<comment><USER15> I really expected this to be behind a registration or survey form but no - just a straight link to a dmg no questions asked, can't believe it's Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So Microsoft names all their products Visual Studio now. Before it used to be that everything was called Windows.

So its just like the 3 versions of Skype that Microsoft offers.

</comment><comment><USER17> Xamarin studio is in many ways lighter and more asynchronous than vs proper, so there is some upside. But it's missing visual studio's absolutely killer feature, which is the superb c# repl. Add that and my windows virtual machine will start gathering a lot of dust.

<comment><USER18> We just released Workbooks 1.0 [0]. You can use it on both Windows and Mac, and run your code in a variety of platforms.

Try a Console workbook for something quite similar to (and in some ways more powerful than) the Visual Studio REPL.

Workbooks go beyond the REPL and can include rich content so that they can be saved and shared. But I use it every day for random REPL tasks that I used to use `csharp` for.

[0] [https://developer.xamarin.com/releases/interactive/interacti...](https://developer.xamarin.com/releases/interactive/interactive-1.0.0/)

<comment><USER17> Wow, I did not know about this. I just spent 30 minutes playing with it and am intrigued and hope this will reach its full potential, then it could be something rather special. For now though...

Evaluation is painfully slow, especially when running in the Android context.

Restrictions and missing functionality around importing packages from nuget.

This could really do wonders for Android UI development, I've dreamt of having as tight a feedback loop on Android as I have on the web, and this could one day bring us there. Unfortunately I couldn't find any easy or obvious way to inflate views from xml, and/or supply my own custom activities that I can then manipulate from the workbook.

Would be great to know what your roadmap is for this product...

<comment><USER18> Thanks for playing with it! You cheated and went outside the scope of the VS REPL though. :-P

* On Windows, first evaluation can take a few seconds (and we're working on that), but subsequent evaluations should feel instant. If that's not the case, would love a bug filed so we can explore a bit more. Of course, there is the startup penalty of launching the Android app and potentially an Android emulator, but I assume you're talking about evaluations _after_ the workbook has connected.

* Agreed! Our NuGet functionality needs a lot of work, but our goal is to have it work as easily as it does in the IDE.

* I don't personally know much about Android view XML, but creating new custom Activities or other Java subclasses at runtime is a significant technical challenge. We have a bug [0] to track it, if you want to subscribe to any updates. This is an unfortunate limitation on Android, for sure.

We don't have a published roadmap at this time, but you can definitely expect to hear more about this tool in the future. We have a pretty frequent release cadence, too.

[0] [https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=45382](https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=45382)

<comment><USER17> To clarify...

I'm on a Mac. Tried it scoped to console and evaluations were not instant, but decent. Certainly slower than the Mono REPL. Then tried it scoped to Android and even after everything was warmed up the evaluations were still quite slow. Running against a six-month old build of the Xamarin Android emulator, running a Nexus 4 (Android 4.4) image.

My pleasure and thanks for your efforts!

<comment><USER18> Hmm...I'm curious what your hardware is like. Maybe I'm spoiled with my 2014 MacBook Pro?

<comment><USER17> Nope, I'm also on a late-2014 MBP. It's no slouch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I kind of feel like we are being astro-turfed by Microsoft.

* Google joins .NET Foundation as Samsung brings .NET support to Tizen

* Visual Studio for Mac Preview

* Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate

* Microsoft announces the next version SQL Server for Windows and Linux

* Announcing .NET Core 1.1

* Microsoft Becomes Linux Foundation Platinum Member

* Visual Studio Mobile Center Preview

* Announcing the Fastest ASP.NET Yet, ASP.NET Core 1.1 RTM

(And before you tell me I'm wrong because I can't _PROVE_ it, let me remind you I said I _FEEL_ like we are being astro-turfed.)

<comment><USER20> It's only happening because Microsoft's Connect conference started today. A lot of new and updated things were announced during the keynote, and stories about them showed up here on HN shortly afterward. Since Connect is Microsoft's developer conference, a lot of things announced there tend to end up on HN.

The same things tends to happen when there's a Google and Apple conference or event. No astroturfing involved; just HN members watching the keynote and posting things they think the community will find interesting.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. This is what happened last year around the same time, when they announced new versions of TypeScript, and the introduction of VSCode, etc. etc. etc.

Not complaining, it's great to see what Microsoft has been up to summarized in a single day or two, rather than a trickling of news that I might lose over a span of a year. It's a bit spammy, but since they moved to supporting Open Source, the announcements really check a lot of boxes for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can we change the title to "Xamarin Studio for Mac renamed Visual Studio for Mac".

<comment><USER23> "The IDE formerly known as Xamarin Studio for Mac." Or maybe just a graphic symbol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm dubious. I've been burned twice by MS pushing a product on the Mac platform & then yanking support. In both cases the answer was effectively "Well, switch to Windows."

I genuinely hope Microsoft is really changing. But there is a _lot_ of bad history associated with the company. It takes a long time to change the culture of a company, and a long time to regain user's trust.

<comment><USER25> It's a rebranding of Xamarin Studio, they're not going to stop support for it any time soon. Even if they did, just use Code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This raises a question: What compilers/toolchains did MS Macintosh Business Unit use during the second part of the 1990s?

<comment><USER27> My guess would be Macintosh Programmer's Workshop [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Workshop)

<comment><USER28> At the time, nobody really used MPW, maybe except Apple. Mostly Metrowerks CodeWarrior was used.

<comment><USER29> Not /strictly/ nobody - the 3DO version of The 11th Hour was crafted under MPW, using Norcroft C. But yes, CodeWarrior certainly dominated, particularly as the 90s closed.

<comment><USER28> Obviously, I meant Joel Spolky's definition of "nobody" \- _Please understand that I 'm talking about large trends here, and therefore when I say things like "nobody" I really mean "fewer than 10,000,000 people," and so on and so forth_.

Strictly speaking wrt this definition, if MPW had 10M users, it would be a runaway success. But nobody cared, even when it became free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I know that there's a lot of comments about this just being a rename of Xamarin Studio, but hopefully this is pointer in the direction Microsoft may go in eventually joining the two IDEs and in a major version or two we might actually have a Visual Studio on Windows and Mac(and maybe Linux?) that are pretty close to each other.

<comment><USER31> It's not necessarily a rename of Xamarin, Xamarin Studio for mac was built on top of Monodevelop ( [http://www.monodevelop.com/](http://www.monodevelop.com/) ) and they are using the same thing as base for Visual Studio as well which is why they are all so similar. Im sure microsoft will keep adding features and make it have feature parity with the windows version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm installing it right now, and I'm getting admin access requests -- way more than I should.

<comment><USER33> The Intel HAXM Android emulator requires kernel extensions. I'm puzzled why anything else needs admin though.

<comment><USER34> It's Microsoft's habit. Even Outlook for Mac requires admin access (which scares the crap out of me).

<comment><USER35> Microsoft was never good at avoiding installers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> When trying to open up a project I'm getting : Error trying to load the project 'Users/user/Projects/Project/ProjectName/ProjectName.csproj': Version string portion was too short or too long

Anyone know why this would be? This runs fine on windows VS

</comment><comment><USER37> On Live they just announced it few minutes ago. Its official!!! Visual Studio on Mac :P

<comment><USER38> I'm really confused - because when I go to the site, it doesn't really say "Visual Studio" \- it references tooling and Visual Studio Code. So am I missing something?

<comment><USER39> Apparently is not really Visual Studios(as in its not a port of the Windows IDE known by the same name). [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/11/micros...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/11/microsoft-is-going-to-pretend-to-release-visual-studio-for- mac/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Was hoping for Objective C support when I saw it. Would love to get rid of Xcode.

<comment><USER23> Objective C support? Never going to happen. Swift support? Unlikely, but a stronger possibility thanks to its cross-platform support. I wouldn't hold my breath though.

<comment><USER41> Objective C is just as open as Swift is I think

<comment><USER42> Swift is FLOSS, Apache Licensed and built and collaborated on GitHub: [https://github.com/apple/swift](https://github.com/apple/swift)

Objective C has not had an official open source release, so far as I know.

ETA: Arguing of course how close the gcc/clang implementations of Objective C may or may not be to the Xcode compilers, of course.

<comment><USER43> Xcode uses Clang/LLVM to compile Objective-C (and used gcc before adopting LLVM). To my knowledge there's nothing closed source involved in the compiler. I had Clang/LLVM compiling Objective-C on Linux a long time ago. Visual Studio for _Windows_ has been able to compile Objective-C for about a year (see [https://developer.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/bridges/ios](https://developer.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/bridges/ios)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps a bit premature. This link is live at: [https://www.visualstudio.com/](https://www.visualstudio.com/) But...404ing from there too.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've never used Visual Studio, so I'd like to know how easy and reliable it is to work on a remote Python code on your local Visual Studio. I've tried using sshfs with vim to do that, but it's too slow and hinders my productivity. I'm wondering how other folks here do similar stuff, preferably without changing my editor from vim to something else (I've been suggested to use atom-sync).

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm looking for macbook pro alternatives... so wondering, do you think one day it would be posible to have Visual Studio for PC compile iOS projects?

<comment><USER46> As in, native ones written in Swift which utilize Foundation and UIKit?

I would say almost certainly not.

<comment><USER45> Makes sense for Swift. What about ReactNative apps?

<comment><USER47> RN iOS apps still need XCode so it seems unlikely again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Doesn't install on OSX 10.7 - not exactly a surprise, but there aren't any system requirements on the download page that I can see.

<comment><USER49> Hey,

Good catch! I will request that we add system requirements to out page. I am going to suggest they are added to [https://developer.xamarin.com/releases/vs- mac/preview/vs-mac...](https://developer.xamarin.com/releases/vs- mac/preview/vs-mac-preview1/)

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on Xamarin

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> My feedback on Visual Studio for Mac: I created a basic mobile application. I didn't write any code - just started with a new application and clicked run. When I launched it for iOS it worked. When I launched it for Android it crashed immediately. OK...

<comment><USER49> Hey! I work on the Xamarin team at Microsoft, and I would like to help out on this! Are you able to send me the crash logs or application output? Thanks!

<comment><USER50> Sure here are the logs:

[art] Not late-enabling -Xcheck:jni (already on) [AndroidRuntime] Shutting down VM [AndroidRuntime] FATAL EXCEPTION: main [AndroidRuntime] Process: com.greenrobot.testapp, PID: 3218 [AndroidRuntime] java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to get provider mono.MonoRuntimeProvider: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to find application Mono.Android.Platform.ApiLevel_23 or Xamarin.Android.Platform! [AndroidRuntime] at android.app.ActivityThread.installProvider(ActivityThread.java:5156) [AndroidRuntime] at android.app.ActivityThread.installContentProviders(ActivityThread.java:4748) [AndroidRuntime] at android.app.ActivityThread.handleBindApplication(ActivityThread.java:4688) [AndroidRuntime] at android.app.ActivityThread.-wrap1(ActivityThread.java) [AndroidRuntime] at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1405) [AndroidRuntime] at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:102) [AndroidRuntime] at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:148) [AndroidRuntime] at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:5417) [AndroidRuntime] at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method) [AndroidRuntime] at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:726) [AndroidRuntime] at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:616) [AndroidRuntime] Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to find application Mono.Android.Platform.ApiLevel_23 or Xamarin.Android.Platform! [AndroidRuntime] at mono.MonoRuntimeProvider.attachInfo(MonoRuntimeProvider.java:38) [AndroidRuntime] at android.app.ActivityThread.installProvider(ActivityThread.java:5153) [AndroidRuntime] ... 10 more [AndroidRuntime] Caused by: android.content.pm.PackageManager$NameNotFoundException: Xamarin.Android.Platform [AndroidRuntime] at android.app.ApplicationPackageManager.getApplicationInfo(ApplicationPackageManager.java:304) [AndroidRuntime] at mono.MonoRuntimeProvider.attachInfo(MonoRuntimeProvider.java:32) [AndroidRuntime] ... 11 more [Process] Sending signal. PID: 3218 SIG: 9

Email me at email@example.com if you have any questions and don't want to post them publicly.

<comment><USER49> Hey,

Just emailed you via our support system :)

Thanks!

<comment><USER50> Thank you, the problem is now resolved for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm just waiting for it to be available on Linux.

And no, MonoDevelop isn't the same thing. I'd like to be able to develop Android apps using Xamarin on Linux, but MonoDevelop provides me no way to even install Xamarin Android.

</comment><comment><USER52> Kind of confused by what this actually is. Can I do .NET development from a Mac on this? As in, working in a ".NET Shop", use OS X as a development machine instead of Windows?

<comment><USER21> You could, but you don't get the same experience or UI kit as you do with Visual Studio. Which is fine if you want to develop cross-platform apps, or you just care about developing apps for macOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is confirmed to be Xamarin Studio rebranded as VS for mac.

</comment><comment><USER4> How well does this support Unity development and debugging?

<comment><USER54> Is my number one question as well, as I use Unity/MonoDevelop combo all day every day. And, as much as Mono crashes on Mac, it's still a pretty darn solid IDE overall, especially coming from bare-bones tools like Sublime & TextMate.

I downloaded this a bit ago and the install just finished; thus far (<5 minutes invested, admittedly) I'm at a loss as to how I'd even open the Unity project code, much less get the integration setup. Hopefully someone more familiar with VS & Unity on Windows may be able to provide some guidance...

<comment><USER55> If you install OmniSharp, it gives you all the linting, compiling and code completion you need. I develop for Unity using Vim and OmniSharp, and it works great. I haven't tried Sublime with OmniSharp, but a colleague of mine reports that it works great, he doesn't miss MonoDevelop at all. The only thing you're missing, really, is the debugging stuff in MonoDevelop, but I hardly ever used that anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'm excited but it errors out for me on the Java installer failing to open a DMG it downloaded. Seems odd that it requires Java at all…

</comment><comment><USER57> The installer crapped out on my clean macOS VM.

:(

My development Mac is pretty sensitive to the version of mono installed, so I don't want to screw around with it.

</comment><comment><USER58> So this isn't just for Mac apps? Are there templates for .NET Core console and web apps?

<comment><USER59> Yes, there are templates for .NET Core Console and ASP.NET Core apps

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Does it support ASP.NET MVC 5?

<comment><USER61> Well I've been trying to work with MVC 5 in MonoDevelop and the integration seems to be there, but I get crashes when opening Razor markup files (*.cshtml).

So... maybe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Can anyone guestimate how much this thing will actually cost?

</comment><comment><USER63> I was like what the hell is Mac Preview?

</comment><comment><USER64> I like this tea cup - alternative to j.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link change: [https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio- mac/](https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/)

Moderator, can you update?

<comment><USER65> Just an FYI.. The download button doesn't seem to work. Seems some files on this page has a CORS policy violation: "Access to Font at '[https://c.s-microsoft.com/static/fonts/segoe-ui/west- europea...](https://c.s-microsoft.com/static/fonts/segoe-ui/west- european/normal/latest.woff') from origin '[https://c.s-microsoft.com'](https://c.s-microsoft.com') has been blocked by CORS policy: The 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header has a value '[https://www.microsoft.com'](https://www.microsoft.com') that is not equal to the supplied origin. Origin '[https://www.visualstudio.com'](https://www.visualstudio.com') is therefore not allowed access."

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Given the title, and the fact that this site is currently down, I can't help but think that this could've be the cruelest yet funniest April Fool's joke ever.</comment>


Email tags and notes? - <AUTHOR>

Is there an email provider that allows you to add tags or attach notes to specific emails? It would be great if there was such a feature (on gmail, for instance) and if you could access a tag cloud (or search for) of all the tags you have embedded.<p>If there isn't, somebody please feel free to design something like this. <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be possible to use GMail's labels to approximate tags? You can add them to email conversations, search them, and automatically filter conversations into them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do use Gmail's labels but they are mostly for broader categories. If you have an email you'd like to reply to about, let's say, a payment system, you could tag it "follow up about paypal micro-payments". This would be labeled as "work" or "finace" etc. but if you're getting back to it a few days or weeks later, you could view your cloud for paypal or micro-payments.</comment></comment>


Browning Fever: A story of fandom, literary societies, and impenetrable verse - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/browning-fever <comment><USER2> As a side note, many in Britain have heard of this Victorian man of letters because of two excellent films (1951, 1994) of Terence Rattigan's 1948 play The Browning Version, where one of his works serves as a McGuffin. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Browning_Version](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Browning_Version)

<comment><USER3> Ah hadn't heard of these. Will check them out.

As to the article: good reading. I was always mildly curious why literary societies should grow around Robert Browning of all people. It's bewildering: America gripped by Browning fever? A children's performance of Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin drawing more people than a baseball game...in TEXAS?! Truly the past is a foreign country.</comment></comment>


Disney's Cable Channels See Steep Subscriber Losses - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disneys-cable-channels-see-steep-844007 <comment><USER2> Disney markets to young people. It is the young people that grew up watching videos on the Internet instead of TV so they are more likely to be cord cutters.

My own son quit watching Cable TV and watches Youtube for free and then Netflix with his Uncle's account.

We might just cut out our Cable TV service and buy a Roku box or something and keep the Internet part. Buy a Tivo HD DVR that uses digital over the air channels for local TV.

<comment><USER3> The kids today are "cable nevers"; cord-cutters are folks who got rid of existing accounts. I'm in my late 40s, but cut the cord about 9 years ago.

I think the cutters are worse for the industry then the nevers. Not only did they lose me as a customer, but I taught my kid that cable is unnecessary. I'm not sure how they are going to convince him to buy cable when he moves out.</comment></comment>


Farm – A New Framework for Transfer Learning for NLP - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/deepset-ai/FARM <comment><USER2> It's early to say, but it looks really useful. We will have to see how it develops.</comment>


Syria Internet Down As Egypt Blackout Catches On In Middle East - <AUTHOR> http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/General+News/82156/Reports%3A-Syria-Internet-Down-As-Egypt-Blackout-Catches-On-In-Middle-East.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting, are the Syrians afraid that the Egyptians will find ways to communicate or are they afraid that the flames of revolution will spread and spoil their plans for dynasty?

If Mubarak is successfully ousted a lot of people might wake up to the possibility of throwing out their abusive leaders, I'll bet that plenty of middle east despots are not sleeping well tonight, if at all and that one or two of them might check the contents of their 'bug-out-bags'.

<comment><USER3> Is conservative let-suicide-bomb-westerners style Islam a populist movement that might take hold, or is it viewed by he protestors as just as undesirable as the current regime?

<comment><USER2> Would you call the IRA a style of Catholicism? Would you call the abortion clinic bombers a style of Christianity?

Individuals transgressing the law are no reason to paint a large group of people with the same brush.

<comment><USER4> What about a country where the head of the church is also the head of the armed forces? Where nuclear missile submarines are launched with "god bless her and all who sail in her"?

Where belief in God, the head of state and the superiority over foreigners are pretty much the same creed

<comment><USER5> > Where nuclear missile submarines are launched with "god bless her and all > who sail in her"?

Are you referring to the United States? Officially speaking, by the word of the President of the United States, the USA invaded Iraq because God spoke to George W. Bush and God told him to invade Iraq.

Source: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/10_october/06/bush.shtml)

<comment><USER2> I think the GP is referring to England.

The English head of state (the Queen) is also the head of the church of England.

see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_England>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This doesn't seem to be the case: <http://twitter.com/#!/olaonline/status/31020613325819904>

Also seems to be backed up by others: <http://twitter.com/#!/olaonline/status/31020613325819904> <http://twitter.com/Firas_Atraqchi/status/31010020443299840> <http://twitter.com/#!/beshr/status/31037492174004225></comment>


Badass of the Week: Nikola Tesla - <AUTHOR> http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tesla.html# <comment><USER2> More like badass of the 20th century.

<comment><USER3> Nikola Tesla lived in 19th and 20th century, implementing among other things the wireless remote control in 19th century and apparently also just for this purposes the equvalents of "and" and "or" circuits!

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

<http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab_remotec.html>

His originality attracted a lot of unbalanced writing though, and calling him such names is in my opinion unbalanced.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best mail server practices for deliverability? - <AUTHOR>

I've run my own mail server for a long time. It's not high volume; just me and accounts for various friends. I've never been an open relay or a spam source, but lately I've been getting reports of emails ending up in the spam folders of a major email provider. I'm looking to make sure I have all my email ducks in a row.<p>If you run your own mail server, what have you done to make sure your mail server's mail is getting delivered? And if you work at a major email provider, what do you recommend legitimate small email hosts do to look maximally non-spammy? <comment><USER2> Off the top of my head: Don't emit backscatter. Don't allow spam to be sent out. Have matching A and PTR RRs in place. Create SPF records. Sign outgoing mail using DKIM. Make sure you accept mail for abuse@ and postmaster@.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am pretty interested in the Gmail alternative / run your own mailserver threads. Gmail simply lacks the "WOW!!!" it had when I first signed up.

A few other issues that have had me looking for alternatives:

* False choices for new tech. If don't say Yes to transitioning to something like Google Hangouts, they make it really easy for you to push the button that says yes to hangouts.

* Google Apps for Business is pretty expensive when I actually see how people use it. 9/10 it is just for them to have the Gmail interface with their own domain. A lot of people forget that Google Docs exists until they accidentally click the "Open in Drive" or whatever.

* Spam protection has degraded with time. I receive more junk mail now then ever before. I think part of the email is because of the next bullet

* Wrong emails happen very frequently. Probably 2-3 times a week for me I receive a wrong email from someone _thinking_ they own my Gmail account. It has happened three times with Apple purchases alone. A custom domain would help mitigate this. These aren't malicious. They have my last name, but a different first name, but we have the same initial so I can easily see how they mess it up. Also the majority of people still don't realize the Gmail + sign trick or that periods don't matter.

* Lack of features. You added tabs? Thanks, ummm, I guess. Thank you for putting that in the Promotions tab when before every semi-clever person already had a filter set to move things like that into their own "Promotions" tab. That's the big innovation?

In other words, almost everytime I check ShowHN I'm hoping for a new Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have no issues with mail delivery. Here's what I did.

Step 1, get a Gmail account. Step 2, live your life.

If you're worried about privacy, don't. I've personally taken email data from co-located machines to give to the government.

If it's a hobby, find a better one. Email administration is terrible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why hello, newly anonymous account created just to be a dick. How surprising! [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19](http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19)

<comment><USER4> Don't attack me, attack my arguments.

You really aren't being any more private with your own mail server and it is a very difficult thing to get right.

Large providers have peer agreements to help ensure delivery. You cannot get better delivery than Gmail on your own.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not attacking you, I'm pointing out your shitty behavior. If you would like people to pay attention to your arguments, try standing behind your words. Similarly, try not being a dick.

You could also try making some actual arguments. All I noticed was some value judgments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And for what it's worth, what I've set up lately includes SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

<comment><USER5> SPF only protects your domain from being spoofed by others, and DMARC helps you get reports about who might be doing that. You have a different problem here in that you are somehow being identified as spammy by this big organization's filters. The only way to combat that is to discover why. It could simply be that you are co-located with spammers: your outgoing SMTP is emanating from a spammy IP block, and you are collateral damage.

One important consideration for "deliverability" is who you choose for passing on your SMTP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reliable sources inform me that some big providers are using SPF, DKIM, and possibly DMARC as a sign of non-spammyness.

I would love to discover any other reasons why my mail is getting filed with spam. For what it's worth, searching various blocklists for my and neighboring IPs doesn't turn up anything.

<comment><USER5> If so, those big providers are wrong.

SPF, and those other mechanisms, are about authentication; but spam is not defined as e-mail which is not authentic, but rather as unsolicited, bulk mail.

That is to say, any scoundrel with a domain can publish an SPF record.

For example owner of "cheappharmaonline.com" can create an SPF record which says that the SMTP servers of "dirty-spammers.com" are allowed to send messages with "cheappharmaonline.com" as the SMTP sender. So when a machine from "dirty-spammers.com" connects to to receivers and sends "MAIL From: firstname.lastname@example.com", that connection will cheerfully pass SPF checks.

What the check indicates is that the mail is not a forgery: yes, it really is a genuine spam from the owner of cheappharmaonline.com, and not a competitor forging that domain.

Receivers must implement SPF checks in addition to existing anti-spam measures, not instead of them. Anyone who thinks that messages which pass SPF are "non spammy" will eventually learn otherwise.

<comment><USER5> Case in point: I just got a piece of spam with the subject "75% OFF Internet Marketing Services: Grow Your Business". It has a DKIM signature and passed SPF.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I agree that this shouldn't matter. But I can't have my email not getting delivered until it does.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup School 2009 Notes & Summary - <AUTHOR> http://journal.markbao.com/2009/10/startup-school-2009-summary/

<comment><USER2> am I the only one that really dislikes when people flaunt their age?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well--I only have another ~6 months where I can, so better take advantage of it, no? (The press loves it.) If I can get a great connection from someone that is impressed by my work _and_ age, I would take it. Founders like to take whatever advantages they have, right?

But oy! Yell at me in private. mark[at]markbao[dot]com. I'd rather this thread be a discussion about Startup School than other issues such as this.

<comment><USER2> I suppose. I found the _eight_ startups more surprising if you're a founder. I've found one startup [full time] takes over 150% of my capacity. How do you know you're executing that well if you're thinly spread?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, yeah, certainly. I've been trying to figure out how to maximize efficiency in all the stuff that's going on. Part of it is doing a _lot_ of strategy planning beforehand. It's true that I'm thinly spread, but I do work with co- founders, developers and sales agents that help, you know, share the work of the startup. I don't try to say that I'm a single founder in all those startups. That, along with a fairly intense work ethic (80 hours a week ish not including school) it works out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of the wisest things I've hard _anyone_ say about running a company, wasn't in there.

"We're fine with making mistakes and looking stupid. Eventually you get judged not by how you look, but by the value you provide to people. There's a lot of pressures inside companies where people want to optimize for how things _look_." -- Mark Zuckerberg

</comment><comment><USER4> I met Mark at the Startup School reception at YCombinator the night before Startup School. He is a very knowledgeable and genuine person. I wish I would of had the same passion as he does at his young age.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great summary of what went on. I'll definitely apply for #SUS 2010. Jason Fried delivers once again:

\- The bootstrapped company starts off thinking: we need to make money.

\- The funded company starts of thinking: we need to spend money. these investors have given us x million dollars—we should spend it!

I speak to so many aspiring web entrepreneurs who are spending way too much time searching for money when they should be using their skills to improve their products. If you want to start manufacturing widgets in a huge factory, that is a huge cap-ex. However, if you're building a web-service you can get a rough prototype out of the door - I'd say get it done.

IDEO's motto: "Prototype early & often"

</comment><comment><USER6> These notes are great. Can't believe how young you are. Very impressive. Your companies have similar aspirations to my work.

I'll be following your work, interested to see how it goes for you.</comment>


Why the sun shines for Oracle and it's Cloudy for others - <AUTHOR> http://vanpupi.stepi.net/index.php/2017/02/23/why-the-sun-shines-for-oracle-and-its-cloudy-for-others/ <comment><USER2> I've joked in the past that my Oracle is my 5th favorite database behind postgres, sqlserver, mysql and being punched in the face, the reason isn't anti oracle hate, it's because when I've used oracle db it feels like the company is actively trying to dissuade me.

To connect from node on a mac unlike postgres, mysql or sqlserver where you just install a module (that may or may not need to compile via node-gyp) you must

1\. make an oracle account 1a. make sure you prassword donesn't contain <>();%or \ 1b. if your password is too long then oracle truncates them either on storage or verification but not both 1c. try get your co worker to try to log into his oracle account on your computer 1d. just use his account on his computer 2\. download the various versions of instant client you need 3\. follow these obtuse [1] install steps 4\. add a tnsnames.ora file somewhere 5\. when login fails update your host file to match the name of current host system

To say I would never use this voluntarily is an understatement, the only reason we are using this is because somebody already on oracle is handing us a wad of cash to use oracle, I don't really see those people who use it being the types who need a free trial to get onto the cloud, people use oracle because they can't quite oracle.

1\. [https://github.com/oracle/node- oracledb/blob/master/INSTALL....](https://github.com/oracle/node- oracledb/blob/master/INSTALL.md#instosx)

<comment><USER3> having to integrate with oracle software on a pretty regular basis I have come to realize: Oracle software is extremely complex, simple things take more effort than they should.

Oracle tools are not optimized for developers of today. A key selling point to enterprises is your developers could be more productive with their point and click IDE/interfaces.

These days with the tooling around open source I believe you can get things done much faster (and have done this) the code is more maintainable etc.

Second disadvantage consider oracles commerce framework atg. They have their own concepts and terms for things that are in open source solutions making it confusing for developers familiar with open source frameworks. This could be on purpose to sell more consulting for partners.

Next the is the cost of training and up skilling junior devs. With open source you could probably teach yourself try searching for oracle atg tutorials. Check the # of stackover flow questions vs magneto.

Fourth: I have seen people who are "oracle developers" (fusion, odi, erp, atg etc) are mostly just product specialists. Give them a text editor and tell them to write something and deploy to a paas , commit to version control and they struggle.

Finally the software tends to be ops heavy encouraging bad practices like no version control or automation.

All of these factors are not considered in the purchase or "ROI" calculation, but some of them could seriously hurt your return.

I have seen companies spend millions in implementation of an oracle product only to use < 10 % of features and the same business objectives could have been achieved at the fraction of the cost.

* excuse typos on mobile

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The fact that you need Watson to figure out Oracle licensing has soured me on ever using them for anything in the future.

Running Oracle databases on Windows doesn't just suck, it's extremely more expensive for licensing. Oracle almost forces you to instead set up Oracle Linux servers for this purpose.

I've also been seeing Microsoft reaching out to Oracle customers trying to incentivize them to switch to Azure/Windows/SQL Server. "We'll throw in some money for the engineering effort to switch!", things like that.

</comment><comment><USER5> From the article;

"So for Oracle in my opinion, the sun is still shining on premises and I do hope for them the clouds will come, but the way it is now, I'm afraid they'll miss this train."

It's way beyond that. Larry Ellison didn't just miss the train, he said where the train was going was crap, and sat on sidelines for way too long. They had a chance early on but LE thought he was smarter than everyone else.

Oracle's saving grace is it's legacy business. Lots of older and bigger companies have Oracle and they can upsell those customers.

But every day a new tech company is born and none of them are adding Oracle. Baring a minor miracle it will be a slow but still profitable decline. There isn't much of a chance they will catch up, much less keep pace.

<comment><USER6> Larry Ellison said the future was in "Grid Computing" (whatever that means) which is why a lot of versions of Oracle software had a 'g' appended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like Oracle is starting to "lose the hearts and minds" even of the faithful:

[http://www.vesterli.com/2017/02/14/losing-hearts-and- minds/](http://www.vesterli.com/2017/02/14/losing-hearts-and-minds/)

key quote: "If you are an Oracle developer with more than 10 years until retirement, I advise you to start planning for your time after Oracle."

It's too bad, I really like Oracle APEX, (the rapid web and mobile development framework that is included with the DB) since you can build and deploy highly functional/rich apps very quickly, which is the big thing end users care about. (i.e. the same reason foxpro and MS Access were so popular).

Anecdotally, I've been hearing from my consulting peers that companies are actively looking to move off Oracle as they don't like being "bullied onto the cloud", and are starting to look at the migration tools in EDB Postgres. That might be a good source of consulting revenues going forward...

</comment><comment><USER8> We do work with Oracle for our storage hardware in our data center. As a SAN provider, they get the job done. But the only reason we would consider expanding our use of them to other layers of our stack is because there are performance benefits to using them across the entire stack. But that is it. We haven't found any other meaningful reasons to use their products at higher layers. So I'm not sure I would make the leap to trusting them as a cloud player -- I know they have the tools, but I don't really think of them as being full-stack players. They have always been pretty bottom-heavy in where their expertise falls.

<comment><USER9> Without paying for Oracle licenses how much more hardware or optimization man power could you afford?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only thing I learned from this post is that there are people who like Oracle and want to use them more.

<comment><USER11> I like Oracle's product. It's reliable, and very fast. You can find people who've been using it for a long time and understand how to get the last ounce of performance from your database. Unlike some of the OSS database engines, you don't get halfway into a project and find you can't index dates, or some certain kind of query is slow and there's no way around it.

That said, dealing with Oracle the company is painful, and I wouldn't do it if I were by myself or running a small shop. Fortunately, I work for BigCo, and we have People who do that sort of thing. By the time it gets to me all the business stuff is worked out, the database is installed, and I'm getting an email with my account information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oracle will live in the same way IBM lives. Java EE + Oracle is the new COBOL + Mainframes

<comment><USER7> Oracle is not just the DB though, they have a lot of applications across several industries, such as utilities, health care, etc. And, there is also Oracle E-Business suite, which is a big competitor to SAP in the financial management system space.

So, they have other sources of revenue as well, and can likely build a large revenue stream of subscription services for business applications. (i.e. running PeopleSoft, EBS, etc. in the cloud).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oracle have been investing heavily in what they're referring to as their "next generation" cloud. See here [https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/bare- metal](https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/bare-metal) (supports VMs too). They've invested quite heavily in development centres in Seattle and SFBA with a bunch of hires from AWS, Azure, Joyent etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Oracle seems to be investing heavily in cloud solutions. They are not yet the member of CNCF. May be it is unimportant or maybe they think some Java EE solution shoved in Oracle cloud would be what is required by customers.

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought all Oracle Cloud was running in AWS for now?

<comment><USER16> Can't possibly be true if you hear all the shade Andy Jassy throws towards Oracle.</comment></comment>


The Rise and Fall of Internet Art Communities - <AUTHOR> https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rise-fall-internet-art-communities <comment><USER2> As soon as you introduce any kind of an algorithm that favors activity, it's no longer a community. It's a dopamine cash cow waiting for people to naturally fall off because they lose interest. There might be other factors, but this is definitely high on the list.

The same goes for many other modern "communities". Everything is robotized. Configured to feed you with stuff rather than incentivize discovery and a sense of curiosity.

Of course, it's sad that old school forums are literally non-existent. vBulletin, phpBB, IPB -- these are the real internet forums. These days, people want flashy colors, but most importantly, everything handed to them on a golden platter. Albeit, this is likely an issue with concentration and attention span.

 _A vicious cycle._

<comment><USER3> Old school forums are far from non-existent. They are simply not money makers, and typically focused on specialized topics. They still exist in large numbers.

One of the biggest shifts that has hurt the visibility of forums these days is not in everything becoming gamified with internet points, or "robotized" with preference-oriented content.

IMO it's actually our societal inability to pay attention to one topic for more than a few minutes at a time. We've become so well trained by the constant drip feed of randomized content, and the chase-the-rabbit research methodology of wikipedia, that when you encounter a forum in your search results, you probably didn't even consciously realize it because you skimmed it for the content you were looking for and moved on.

<comment><USER4> Specialized forums certainly still exist, but according to my perception, the activity on many of them has decreased A LOT compared to 10-15 years ago.

People spend much more time on FB, Instagram et al.

Reddit is an interesting hybrid. it does allow for specialized communities, but still engages in the "content feeding" mentioned above.

In forums, deep discussions can/could go on for weeks on the same topic. This completely impossible in today's main platforms.

Hackernews is just as guilty of this!

Few people read submissions older than a day or two, and a miniscule amount of them comment. Because no-one is going to answer anyway. That's my biggest gripe with this community.

<comment><USER5> I've developed a bad habit over the years: just reading the comments. Articles are always so structured and long winded, it often feels like you get the entire gist of the link from a headline and the comment discussion. Trying to change that by reading more of the headlines (at least skimming or reading sections), but it costs more time.

<comment><USER6> This is worse here where many frequent front page domains behave distastefully toward their users (paywalls, clickbait, Ads on top, bottom, right, inline, and in popovers...). Luckily, originals sources to poor articles are often posted in the comments too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If people wanted the community feeling back, they'd go back to old-school forums. They have few content-discovery mechanisms (limited search, no post rankings, no reblog mechanism, chronological post ordering), so your experimental content has the same chance to be seen as the popular stuff, and they have easily-created subcommunities. I've seen long-running threads develop their own community feel. Forums were built for that exact purpose; they don't facilitate content aggregation and sharing like modern platforms.

There's nothing stopping everyone going back to forums, except that when it comes down to it, people seem to value being able to share/see/rank content easily more than they value a sense of community.

<comment><USER8> Just my opinion here, but I don't think our lizard brains are quite so highly evolved.

I don't compulsively check my phone because I "value" the content. I value what I read in books far more. But my attention span seems to be in free fall and I haven't picked up a book in months.

I think it is _very_ possible to want something (I.e. a return to old school forums), but not act in a corresponding way.

Social media is digital drugs.

<comment><USER9> > Social media is digital drugs.

Old-school forums are drugs too, I'm addicted to one myself ;). Mostly for the drama and back-and-forth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sad that Elfwood wasn't mentioned, many now very successful fantasy and science fiction artists were present on Elfwood back before professional artists homepages became the norm. It was a really fascinating community for it's time.

<comment><USER11> Elfwood had its own problems:

[http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/elfwood- part-1](http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/elfwood-part-1)

[http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/elfwood- part-2](http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/elfwood-part-2)

<comment><USER12> First time I heard of WT and was sad to see it ended in 2016. Was any info ever given as to why? Was unable to find an answer on the site or searching.

<comment><USER11> The last few comics are about this, although they are somewhat vague. She seems to keep posting on Patreon, though, but only patron-only posts, so I couldn't tell you what's in them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> About 6 years ago, I decided to take a crack at redefining how Art was generated, consumed, and shared : [https://vimeo.com/73825583](https://vimeo.com/73825583)

Thus JuicyCanvas.com was born : [https://JuicyCanvas.com](https://JuicyCanvas.com) \-- With a bold Manifesto: [https://juicycanvas.com/manifesto/](https://juicycanvas.com/manifesto/)

It was the first social marketplace where visual artists & designers could upload their work to be 'forked' aka 'remixed' by 'remixer' users [1], who then could curate, share, and sell to their friends, fans, and communities.

We managed to attract +500 incredible artists from over 50 Countries who were bold enough to allow their works to have such freedom of re-interpretation.

It was to be the end of 'zombie consumption'..and the beginning of `active consumers` who could finally break free of mass produced art & fashion.

But like all new behaviors/habits, these things take a lot of time to catch on...and time was sadly not our side this time.

Perhaps one day soon, such an idea will rise again...and stick around with more...juice.

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

</comment><comment><USER14> It's sort of weird that this article which focuses on community engagement around art production would be posted on artsy, a site targeted toward people addicted to the art world.

</comment><comment><USER15> I used to run one named ArtGrounds.com between 2005 and 2012. It was one of those small and cozy Internet communities. Three things killed it:

1\. I kept twisting knobs to make it grow faster until people got fed up and left.

2\. Internet art communities were dying in general.

3\. Sketcher, the Java applet I had developed for multi-user real-time collaborative digital painting using pressure sensitive Wacom digitisers — the main draw of the site — was rapidly getting outdated as the Web began to reject Java. HTML5 was still a few years away, making it impossible to implement high-performance graphics apps in the browser. By the time WebGL made the kind of rendering I needed viable in a browser, the site was long gone.

That era of web development was a frustrating time for me. Java in the browser was abandoned without offering a full replacement for its number crunching, graphics and media capabilities. My strong suite was the kind of software you typically write in C/C++ and the web ecosystem just wasn't able to do that kind of thing at the time. I basically sat there and wanted WASM and WebGL and all these other rich web technologies to exist, but they just didn't.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not sure if anyone else remembers it as fondly, but one of my all time favorite online Art experiences was Ryder Ripps' Dump.fm. Just infinite scrolling chat. With endless streams of animated gifs. Artists would "riff" on each other's works in real time. It felt like a Global Party of the Mind. And perhaps a terrific group therapy session at the same time ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> One community that always amaze me with its resilience is Newgrounds. It has been around since 1995 and even survived the death of flash.

<comment><USER9> It's still active, in terms of new content being uploaded to it?

I spent a lot of time there around 2006-08 (I think). There was a lot of good content, but finding it wasn't easy.

<comment><USER17> It is. There's also more than games (for a little while now). They have an audio/music section and a visual art section.

<comment><USER9> I think I was there when the visual art section opened, but I never spent much time there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting, but it doesn't mention hell.com and the many related sites. Lots of seizure-inducing flash. I see that [https://medialounge.org/](https://medialounge.org/) is still there, but I don't have flashplayer installed.

> <meta http-equiv="content-type" name="medialounge - metamash mediation" > content="There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer > not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite. > The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend > to be frightful. It is a constant interplay of ideas, a collection of story > synopses that work better than novels ever could. Ideas are thrown away as > quickly as they arrive. An incomplete, but not false, image of the universe, > I am a mistake, a ghost" >

</comment><comment><USER19> The demoscene has its ups and downs but is active and vibrant as ever.

<comment><USER20> There was something amazing about having your cracked key generator adored with art from the scene.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I expected ASCII and ANSI art to be mentioned. But well, that was at least partly the pre-internet era.

</comment><comment><USER22> I thought Tumblr's 'adult content' ban was due to the Apple appstore refusing to host the app? If not why would Tumblr ever make that decision? There were so many other ways to approach it - shadow banning for example.

<comment><USER23> Tumblr is dead anyway for me because of their faulty and illegal GDPR support.

<comment><USER24> Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER23> Foundational Partners

Oath works with select partners that process your data to provide significant functionality for our products and services. For more information about these partners, and to understand and manage their use of your data, see:

        Google (Privacy Policy)
        Amazon (Privacy Policy)
        Facebook (Privacy Policy)
        Teads (Privacy Policy)
        Nielsen (Privacy Policy)

You cannot turn off Facebook tracking for example.

This is in violation of GDPR because it is not possible to access essential functionality without tracking.

This illegal implementation is even worse than before because it now forces me to explicitly agree with the tracking.

It essentially means that I could not access Tumblr anymore.

<comment><USER24> _It essentially means that I could not access Tumblr anymore._

But that's actually okay, no? I mean, you can make a decision what's more important to you...

<comment><USER23> Yes, this is not my tragedy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Capitalism is inherently incompatible with how art (and culture in general) works. This is quite funny to me; the US "soft power" of the 20th century was based on the fundamental acceptance of differentiation (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiation_(sociology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiation_\(sociology\))) and thus won agains the authorititarian left; now by ignoring this we are just destroying ourselves.

I hate this timeline.

PS: A Discourse forum would make for a great platform IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER26> Mark Zuckerberg ruined the internet

<comment><USER27> Internet users ruined the internet. Mark is a facilitator, sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Gosh those days. Tripod, angelfire, and geocities... young people wont understand it today</comment>


UK police use terror powers to seize BBC Newsnight journalist's laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-use-terror-powers-to-seize-bbc-newsnight-journalists-laptop-a6712636.html <comment><USER2> In the title, change "UK" to "Chinese State" and you might not bat an eyelid.

The democracy we have is a Frankenstein version of the democracy many think we have. And in the same way you would hesitate at calling Frankenstein human, I would hesitate at calling what we have a democracy.

I'll still have it over the alternatives but what a mediocre state we've ended up in.

Needs to be fixed.

<comment><USER3> It's still democracy and it still protects against extreme runaway government power. Ultimately the issue is that people want this. People are scared of terrorists. People do want the government to bend the rules to track them down. That's exactly what democracy is supposed to be.

What it's not supposed to be is what everyone wants, fair, right or ensuring people's information is kept secret from the government.

In short, politicians do what their voters demand.

<comment><USER4> People are scared of what they're told is scary. You and I aren't scared of being bitten by a black widow while we sleep because we know the chances are remote (or in my case, nonexistant given where I live), and it's not really something we think about.

The media constantly harassing the population with the big bad scary terrorist who's out to get you, of course people watching said media are going to be scared of that, even if the chances are remote.

People "want" this because they are scared of a primarily fabricated threat. What people _really_ want is for the "threat" to go away, but that's as simple as having better media that doesn't distort truth for financial gains.

<comment><USER5> Arguing the obvious: you're saying that they should fear the big scary police state. That's exactly "people are scared of what they're told is scary".

<comment><USER4> You're partly correct. But I'm not actually saying "you should fear x". I'm making observations on mass media and a conjecture on the underlying fears of people, then just letting you figure out what you think about it. I also do not hold any power or credibility over my audience, I'm just some guy on the internet.

Contrast this to media entities, in a position of trust, twisting the world to conform to whatever they gain most out of. Do you yourself feel that the mass media sources you are familiar with fairly represent and report on the issues they address?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Short term gain for long term pain from the security services here.

Journalists and researchers into Islamic groups like IS, should be left in peace to carry out research into how these militant groups operate and function.

The security services have struggled to make inroads on these groups. Unable to place effective spies and get Intel, especially on home grown cells.

Journalists therefore provide a double function in these challenging times. They provide the public with valuable insights into the psyche behind these groups, and in parallel they gain important access to people in these groups that no one else can.

The flip side of this coin, is that journalists need to be acutely aware that they are not used as an IS marketing and propaganda platform.

If journalist fear arrest from the state in order to divulge their sources then these groups stop talking to them.

My gut feeling is that this was exactly the security services intention. The article hints at the journalists links to an alleged pro-militant employer, so it is quite possible that they view him as a sympathiser.

One needs to understand the psyche of people who work in the security services and special branch. They are very polarised in their beliefs and their opinions. They tend to be racist, xenophobic and have a tendency to group people in tidy mental boxes. They see the world in black and white. There is no grey. They are massively insular and have very much an "us and them mentality". They have comparatively a large amount of power, and enjoy using it. They know that they can bend rules like this and will only get a public slap on the wrists and a quiet pat on the back from their superiors. Therefore they know that they can for a warning shot across this young Muslim journalist's bow, and get away with it.

My two cents.

<comment><USER7> I'm fairly certain you don't actually know anything like enough people who work for any of the security services in the UK to make this an informed opinion. Because you couldn't be more wrong. A populist viewpoint with no basis whatsoever in reality.

Not surprising, but disappointing.

For the avoidance of doubt, no, I don't support what's happened here. It's ill-judged (no pun intended) to say the least.

<comment><USER4> > A populist viewpoint with no basis whatsoever in reality.

What you just said serves no purpose. Can you please provide sources and alternative viewpoints people can actually discuss, rather than belittle someone for commenting on a story?

<comment><USER7> Happily.

[http://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/spy- career-s...](http://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/spy-career- secret-service)

[http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/3180](http://www.varsity.co.uk/news/3180)

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/forget- bon...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/forget-bond- mi5-wants-cat-loving-twentysomethings-424915.html)

For starters. They're not normal people, in that they're recruited by elitist institutions from other elitist institutions. Not dissimilar to how branches of our industry work, although the profile for who they want is somewhat different. But for the most part, in terms of personality, they're fairly normal people.

There aren't any mustachioed villains sitting around wondering how best to abuse their powers. Yes, there's some who enjoy wielding the power they have, but the same is true in business, and doctors like performing surgery.

Mischaracterising people like this does no service to the reader, no better than people who take controversial political figures and characture and demonise them. In the end, it just makes for a lower level of discourse and a worldview lacking in nuance. Ironically, what the poster was complaining about.

<comment><USER8> Comparing them to tech industry folks is not doing you any favors; the tech industry is EXTREMELY insular and thinks in almost lockstep. Look at the magic contentless words people use like "disruption" like a mantra to express group identity and nothing more. The tech industry clings onto weird extreme political views that are laughably absurd to almost anyone else, the extreme libertarians you see at the forefront, the anti-education people, the people who want to remove all patents and IP.

Coming here is like entering a weird extremist alternate-reality echo chamber on the weirdest issues the tech industry seems to have a hard-on for. Poll us on any issue relating to technology or politics and you will find we are so radically different from the general population.

And we're (almost) all white, middle-upper class Indian or East Asian men. If the intelligence community is anything like that I'm much more afraid than before I read your post.

And the fact that you start out by saying they are cherry-picked from elite institutions and then you go on to say they are normal -- the first notion completely contradicts the second. Elite institutions often come with narcissism, a notion that you know better than the rest of the world, a single-minded determination that it takes to excel in a particular area (the educational system) eschewing any other considerations it takes to be a full, complete normal human being.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The BBC article has some more on this [0]:

> "It did not resist Thames Valley's application for an order under the > Terrorism Act in court because the act does not afford grounds under which > it could be opposed.

> "It is troubling that this legislation does not provide the opportunity for > the media to mount a freedom of speech defence."

[0] [http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34666281](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34666281)

<comment><USER10> Was it freedom of speech when the BBC informed the Argentines that their bomb fuses were wrongly set to attack British ships, or when they warned them of the impending attack on Goose Green?

I get what you're saying but the BBC plays both sides of this argument.

<comment><USER11> You are aware that it was the Number 10 (Prime Minister's office) that provided the information on Goose Green to the BBC, the BBC then reported it?

The worst/only criticism of the BBC that I have read (from e.g. Mrs Thatcher's autobiography) is that the BBC should have double-checked with the PM's office to make sure they'd not really been so incompetent as to 'unintentionally' announce news of an impending operation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And why exactly are people wondering that it's always the fictionalized UK that turns into a fascist dictatorship and not any other country?

<comment><USER13> Because it's pretty much the only country in Europe that's never had a facist government.

<comment><USER14> Hehe, that's a good one. The UK has pretty much the only European fascist government to survive the second world war.

I mean, what else would you call close collusion between "loyal" industry and state? WWII wasn't "freedom v. fascism" \- it was one lot of fascists against the others - and the ones that won just had better branding. Fewer skulls on uniforms, just as much pomp and pageantry, more economic fascism than social.

<comment><USER13> The UK only has a facist government if you're willing to reduce the term to meaning "one I don't like". Take a country with one of the most diverse capitals on earth, with one of the last protectionist and most liberal capitalist systems in the world, democratic traditions that go back to the magna carta, and you get ... not facism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, I nearly said something mildly snarky about the US having at least not stooped _this_ low. But, then I remembered that Glenn Greenwald's partner's laptop was stolen from their home immediately after Greenwald mentioned on the phone he would be sending copies of encrypted communications from Snowden. The obvious candidate for that theft would be the US government. And, that would probably be even more despicable than doing it out in the open like this.

Nonetheless, I find it hard to believe people exist who want to live in a world like this, where privacy and free speech mean nothing. And, yet, when given the chance to build a world like this, so many weaselly little tyrants in bureaucratic roles take every opportunity to push people around, making the world sadder and more bleak for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER16> "terror powers" seems quite appropriate - that this is legal at all is terrifying

</comment><comment><USER17> Will UK folks actually protest this or have they become like the US public, completely complacent and apathetic to all intrusions, as long as they can still go shopping at the mall, watch football and get drunk every weekend?

So the pattern is basically, pass insane laws because "terrorist" then use the incredibly broad and overreaching laws beyond abuse for anything they want to do.

Exactly the pattern law enforcement does with every single tool they are given, physical or virtual.

<comment><USER18> > Will UK folks actually protest this or have they become like the US public, > completely complacent and apathetic to all intrusions, as long as they can > still go shopping at the mall, watch football and get drunk every weekend?

Exactly this.

I'm British and I'm completely fucking tired of living here and watching how right-wing, xenophobic, poor-bashing and just all-round ignorant and unpleasant people are and are becoming.

I feel absolutely no kinship with my countrymen, because most seem completely unwilling to think for themselves. It semms like they would rather just be told who to hate on any given day by a media known for its lies, and by politicians known for their utter greed and contempt for the people.

I'm currently looking into moving away and possibly even renouncing my citizenship in future.

The problem is, where to move to?

<comment><USER19> I think you're wearing rose tinted glasses. You say "are becoming" but do you have real evidence that the past was a utopia of rationality where propaganda fell on deaf ears, nobody was ever scared of any threats and everyone loved deeply religious immigrants?

Because the UK I know from my history readings has things like the cold war, the Falklands war, massive tribal struggles between political left and right, and if you go back to Orwell's time you find he found it tough to get published because the idea that Stalin was a bad guy was deemed terribly gauche.

The UK has not had any truly evil governments for a very long time (perhaps, if we judge them by the standards of their day, the answer might be that it's never had an unusually evil government). It's not like Germany where they're super sensitive about privacy and democracy thanks to their experiences the Nazis and then the communists. So not very surprisingly, British people tend to be very trusting of their governments as they never saw how bad things can really get. See: popular support for Cameron executing a British citizen by drone strike, merely because he was in Syria and GCHQ promised cross-our- hearts-and-hope-to-die that he was a Bad Guy™.

This lack of experience doesn't excuse things, mind you .... just explain them. British people (like me) _should_ look to the experiences of other countries to learn from their mistakes and _should_ make sure to avoid them.

But modern UK is not significantly worse than even the recent past where it did things like run a global empire, persecuted gay people, had no minimum wage, etc. And Cameron, for all his faults, has actually been a pretty centrist PM (for a Tory). Certainly more than his backbenches would like.

<comment><USER18> All I can say is, I really, _really_ dislike this country and the political system that operates it.

My personal and political beliefs seem to be completely at odds with most of the British public and I feel like I would be crazy to stay. I mean, we have a _monarch_ and an unelected upper house of parliament. What the hell am I doing here?

My identity as a British person means very little to me. I was born on this patch of dirt, someone stamped 'British person' on my arse and here I am.

<comment><USER19> If you mean you're significantly more left wing than many people, well you'll see that split everywhere in the democratic world, even in Scotland.

Yes, there's a monarch. Who does diddly squat other than putting on a dog and pony show for visiting dignitaries - which happens to be useful for trade purposes (see recent visit of the Chinese president) - giving people entertainment and attracting tourists. So the monarchy is tolerated. That tolerance would vaporise if say Charles came to the throne and started trying to fuck with government policies. You'd pretty quickly see the monarchy put in a purely ceremonial role and the country transition to a kind of pseudo- republic which would be a republic in all but name, in which people still pretend to be loyal to the King even though he has no power at all.

So I wouldn't worry about that.

The house of lords has such limited power I wouldn't worry about that either: it can slow legislation down but can't stop it due to the Parliament Act. Like the monarchy, it's a tolerated holdover from earlier times that doesn't really impact much of anything.

If these are the worst things about Britain you can think of, I'd suggest you have a case of grass-is-always-greener syndrome (btw, I'm British and I live in Switzerland ... but not because I thought the UK sucked so bad I had to get out).

<comment><USER18> They are not even close to the worst things I can think of about Britain, they are just the most visible to people.

The two I mentioned I mostly symbolic, true but that's even more reason to get rid of them. Screw the financial benefit.

They are representative of obscene wealth, privilige and elitism and have no place in a democratic society, symbolic or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm scared by how terror laws can be used to justify anything the state wants to do. I think it's too late to stop it now.

<comment><USER21> Far from the first time - they used them to try to settle a banking dispute with Iceland once!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The situation here is even worse than it looks like. You've got two government departments, one way or another both reporting to Downing Street 10. Suddenly one government department confiscates government assets from another department. This is not supposed to be possible. If they wanted assets from another department, they were supposed to politely ask. If the request was refused, and they believe they were right, they should appeal.

</comment><comment><USER23> And I'm okay with this. He talking to ISIS fighters over the internet. He was naive to think that MI6 wouldn't want to know precisely what he has been up to. I'm sure he is innocent and I'm sure MI6 aren't interested in him either; but more concerned with who he has been talking to. And don't worry, I'm sure he will get his computer back once they've cloned the hard disk.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can anyone explain how and why British society moved from "Mind the gap" and "Keep calm and .." to this permanent state of fear?

</comment><comment><USER25> Reporters ought to protect their sources. Nothing that's discoverable should contain sensitive information. In UK, encryption doesn't suffice. Maybe there's a market for anonymous contact management.</comment>