A new prototyping tool for Vue developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.overvue.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> My team and I made a developer tool for Vue that allows you create and visualize Vue components and their hierarchy, then export the resulting boilerplate code. You can upload a mockup image, create components and select their children, view live generated code snippets for each component, view the components in mockup format and a hierarchy tree view, and open and save your projects. This is open sourced, if you're interested, please fork and clone and check out our code!

<comment><USER2> Good job! Will definitely check it out!</comment></comment>


Academic Phrasebank - <AUTHOR> http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/ <comment><USER2> As someone who has done his fair share of academic writing I feel like this will contribute to the literature being more tedious, hackneyed and unreadable. Academic writing tends to not have a very good reputation and rightly so. Most of it is terrible ...</comment>


Xiaomi Edgeless Mi Mix concept next month $520 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/25/13401440/xiaomi-mi-mix-concept-phone-specs-release-date-price <comment><USER2> Pretty impressive, and truly gorgeous product shots.

Here's a "hands-on-video": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-qI2iCnDHo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-qI2iCnDHo)

It's not what I'd call "edgeless", but it does have a very slim bezel.</comment>


C'mon, Digital Ocean, why are you so evil? - <AUTHOR> 1. I just signed up at DigitalOcean. Brand new account!
2. Then I payed 5 USD in order to... I don't know, they asked, I payed.
3. Then I saw a lock message of "Verification Process" - Waited for 30 minutes.
4. I opened a nice and friendly ticket support asking why in the hell they are taking an eternity to verify my account, this ticket below (original at http://prntscr.com/gzfqu6)
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
Hello DO team,
I am a brannnnd new user, I was happy when I sign up on you.
BUT, Whyyyyyy do you have this "Reviewing process" of a brannnd new account? There's nothing to review here. I sign up, I payed, gooo forward!
I was looking for a AWS alternative, but cmon....
I am jumping the window right now because of you... Ahhhhhhhhh.... Puft.
No, kidding. I am still here. Please answer me. I am waiting for get my servers UP, my client is waiting as well. Huuuurrrrryyy up Dude.
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
5. Then I received en email 5 minutes later with this kind words below
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
Hi There,
We've finished reviewing your account and cannot allow you access to the DigitalOcean platform. This decision is final and no other information is required.
Regards,
Trust & Safety DigitalOcean Suppor
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
5. If I try to open DigitalOcean site, I get an "account loocked" message like this: http://prntscr.com/gzfr7y
6. Whyyyyyy, Jesus, whyyyyyyy? They might have regex filter: "There's AWS letters in the ticket support? Ban!" </comment><comment><USER2> All hosting providers are under attack from criminal cryptocurrency miners. They sign up with stolen credit card numbers, mine cryptocurrency, and profit. The hosting provider gets a chargeback from the credit card company and lose a lot of money. So they try to defend against this with fraud detection heuristics. Unfortunately, these sometimes throw false positives, especially for non-US addresses and shared IP addresses.

Asking an existing customer friend to vouch for you might help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. I was suspecting this as well.

They could do a rule like:

Approve new accounts instantly, then monitor all servers for 1 week. If a CPU server are higher then 80% for 5 minutes, trigger a ticket support so the DigitalOcean team can take a look closer, and shut down the server based on what you have told me.

Both kind of criminals (miners and spammers) use a lot of CPU. This kind of rule could avoid, I think.

Ok. Thanks mate. See you!

<comment><USER3> Hosting providers have to put up with all kind of people..

<comment><USER4> Yeah like OP who sounds like a jackass.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Decision Trees in C# - <AUTHOR> http://crsouza.blogspot.com/2012/01/decision-trees-in-c.html

<comment><USER2> the MSR video of decision-tree based body recognition/segmentation was pretty neat [http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/145347/CVPR%202011%20-%20...](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/145347/CVPR%202011%20-%20Final%20Video.mp4) . is there a list of good applications of this technique besides credit checks and face recognizers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Decision trees have proven to be sucessful in direct marketing/ecommerce applications such as incremental response modeling. Because of their explicit nature, decision trees trees can be used for workflow optimization in industrial environments as well.</comment></comment>


Level11.tasteless.eu/index.php – need help with "Hard" - <AUTHOR>

I've already solved "Easy" - http://level11.tasteless.eu/index.php?file=php://filter/convert.base64-encode/resource=config.easy.inc.php
I was told that the "Hard" version is essentially the same as "Easy", except that the keyword "php" is filtered, so "Easy"'s solution won't work anymore, ie. I can imagine something like `preg_match("/php/i", $file)` is filtering it on "Hard" version.
__errors I managed to trigger__
http://level11.tasteless.eu/index.php?hard=1&file[]=test.txt
Warning: trim() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /var/www/chall/level11/index.php on line 32
http://level11.tasteless.eu/index.php?hard=0&file[0]="php://filter/convert.base64-encode/resource=config.easy.inc.php
Warning: preg_match() expects parameter 2 to be string, array given in /var/www/chall/level11/index.php on line 35
...these show the path of the file, as well as functions to bypass
__filter functions that work__
convert.base64-encode, convert.base64-decode, zlib.deflate, bzip2.compress <comment><AUTHOR> solved</comment>


For SxSW goers: find out if isScobleInThisRoom.com?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.isscobleinthisroom.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Or: "How can you tell you're an internet celebrity? By having people code your name into a web app".

<comment><USER2> Yes. I mean, I do love Robert, he's an awesome guy, but... _seriously_? Who does something like that? Then, I actually read the front page:

" _It was coded by Tom Scott (email, Twitter), who isn't going to SxSW, doesn't really know who Scoble is, and is a bit worried that he's actually being too sarcastic about something he doesn't understand._ "

Sounds about right ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you made the same thing for your ex-girlfriend, she'd probably be able to get a restraining order against you.

</comment><comment><USER4> #actuallyWINNING Which is pretty much the opposite of Charlie Sheen #WINNING</comment>


Build a Serverless Web Application - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/resources/refarch/refarch-webapp/ <comment><USER2> I think this is the same as www.turbo360.co which uses a node/express based syntax as an approach to abstract away some of the lower level details of AWS.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, turbo is built on Lambda, which makes it really cheap to host web apps. It's cool to see how it works under the hood! Here's what I built with it: [http://squaremeals-hdmqb6.turbo360-vertex.com/](http://squaremeals- hdmqb6.turbo360-vertex.com/)</comment></comment>


Roads not taken: on the closing of CompuServe's forums - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/roads-not-taken-closing-compuserves-forums/ <comment><USER2> Had no idea CompuServe still existed. The last I remember logging on was in 1995. My first foray onto the Internet was with CompuServe. I remember they used SLIP and you could bridge from their network onto the Internet. What a great blast from the past!</comment>


Pinterest Wins $7.2M and Injunction Against Cybersquatter - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130930/pinterest-wins-7-2m-and-injunction-against-cybersquatter/

<comment><USER2> > _A San Francisco judge awarded Pinterest $7.2 million in damages and legal > fees_ ... _against Qian Jin, a Chinese cybersquatter_

Uhm... so that's a US judge awarding damages against a Chinese person. What does this translates to practically speaking? This guy won't be able to enter the US. What else? Will it be up to the domain registrar to comply with the US court decision? What if the registrar is not US-based?

<comment><USER3> They're .com addresses, supposedly the court can get Verisign to pull them.

[http://blog.easydns.org/2012/02/29/verisign-seizes-com- domai...](http://blog.easydns.org/2012/02/29/verisign-seizes-com-domain- registered-via-foreign-registrar-on-behalf-of-us-authorities/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It says "Order granting default judgement", does that mean that the guy didn't show up or have an attorney present to represent him? That sounds like he didn't try fighting the suit and Pinterest won by default (same thing happens civil suits when the defendant pulls a no-show).

<comment><USER5> Exactly. From the article: "since the defendant didn't even respond to the complaint, it's not exactly clear whether he will pay up."

So not only is this a default judgement, but the $7.2 million will probably never materialize because the defendant is in China. However, I'm guessing that Pinterest will get control over the domains (which, to them, is probably more important) because the registrars are US-based.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like the defendant is just a "shell company". Qian Jin in Chinese is 金钱, or gold.

</comment><comment><USER7> there you go... Who owns The Switch?</comment>


Show HN: Simple Ruby on Rails job board - <AUTHOR> http://rorworks.com <comment><USER2> It's a chicken-and-egg problem but right now there's 0 jobs posted so the value to look at the page is pretty minimal.

I give the same feedback I gave other SaaS in the past: to get me to spend $50 I need to know who you are. Registered company address, VAT number or such. An email address on a whois-protected domain isn't enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your feedback. I'm a game developer. But lately I want to switch job to web development. And this is the first website I made and published using ruby on rails.</comment></comment>


So You're Out of Energy Again - <AUTHOR> https://www.auxoro.com/the-aux-1/2020/6/23/so-youre-out-of-energyagain <comment><USER2> Almost everyone begins their YouTube video or podcast with "What's up, folks." It makes no sense.</comment>


Erlang inventor: Why do we need modules and files? - <AUTHOR> http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058769.html <comment><USER2> You don't need both modules and files. Decades of Smalltalk development experience backs this up.

Files should be an implementation detail. It should be just one back-end option out of many for persisting code.

There needs to be some way of conceptualizing a set of code. The programmer needs to perform operations on sets of code. (Merging, diffs, patches, etc...) Programmers need to store code and share it with other programmers. Files are good at doing all of these things, but none of these have anything to do with some special inherent quality only files possess.

Smalltalkers have been operating on the level of granularity of individual methods for quite awhile. It brings a lot of nice flexibility.

I would suggest that Namespaces have enough overlapping functionality with other "set of code" type entities, that they can just subsume the role of those other entities. The Java community has shown that it's workable for every project to have its own namespace. Namespaces also resolve a lot of name collision problems that keep cropping up. (Isn't that dandy?)

EDIT: The entire set of libraries for a variety of programming languages is readily available. It would be a cool project to re-granulize the commonly used library corpus for a particular programming language at the level of individual functions. There would be a lot of small-granularity dependency information that wouldn't be available but some of it could be inferred. Statically typed languages could have more of it inferred than dynamically typed languages, but there could still be a lot for the latter.

<comment><USER3> Plain text files are a communication protocol.

Files allow you to give code to your friends without extraordinary means, to use generalized programs like git and grep, and to post a copy up on the web.

Files also mean that your IDE doesn't have to try to be an OS. (Still can if it wants to, hello Emacs.)

<comment><USER2> _Plain text files are a communication protocol._

That's just plain wrong. They are something you can send over communication protocols. They are a very useful tool for sharing, transmitting, and storing information. I'm fine with files as all of those things. When files subsume conceptual territory -- this is when there's inertia.

It would be like people insisting that novels can only exist in the form of bound rectangular slabs of dead tree. Once you free concepts from implementation details, new flexibility is enabled.

 _Files allow you to give code to your friends without extraordinary means, to use generalized programs like git and grep, and to post a copy up on the web._

Yes, but to fulfill these functions, they _do not_ have to stake out conceptual territory, like becoming the granularity at which your version control system must operate. Again, decades of Smalltalk development shows that you can use files to give code to friends, use programs like git (Monticello is git for Smalltalk) and grep, and post copies on the web. Smalltalkers do all of the above _without files subsuming more conceptual function_ than just being files -- a particular means of storing and sharing information.

<comment><USER4> So what plain-text source encodings are is a serialization format. Now that's interesting, because running with that thought, what if there were multiple equivalent serializations for the same program? What if one were more convenient than another for certain transformations? Would that let us build better tools?

At some level, and in some domains, this already exists: the multiple serializations of RDF (N3, Turtle, RDF/XML, etc) plus OWL is very loosely equivalent to Prolog. There are very popular domain-specific non-textual programming environments too – the three obvious ones are Excel, LabVIEW and Max/MSP.

There's got to be something in that for someone.

<comment><USER2> _So what plain-text source encodings are is a serialization format._

Thank you! Well put! Actually, source code is just a human-readable serialization format. There's a lot to be done with that idea as well.

<comment><USER4> Isn't a lot of this the whole Lisp thing again? (The human-readable serialization format for Lisp is, as I understand it, damn close to being an ASCII serialization of the AST for Lisp, hence...)

<comment><USER2> Well, yes and no. Lisp is an ASCII serialization of the Lisp AST. This isn't true for most other languages. There is no reason why source for most languages couldn't be serialized as a combination of the AST and the stream of lexical tokens. This would have a few interesting advantages. For example, everyone could have the source formatting of their preference.

EDIT: Another example -- someone could implement a language homomorphic with Python without significant whitespace and curly brackets.

<comment> timmy-turner Even for lisp, you would have to define an extended syntax for it and modify the parser to additionally read and store whitespaces, comments and newlines. This way you will be able to serialize your source to plaintext without loosing the original format. Non text sourcecode also allows for way smarter tooling, tree diffs on the AST, graphical repls and improved rendering of sourcecode.

<comment><USER2> _Even for lisp, you would have to define an extended syntax for it and modify the parser to additionally read and store whitespaces, comments and newlines._

Note I said AST + stream of lexical tokens. If you store the whitespace and comments as tokens, such information can be preserved, including formatting hints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand his frustration, but a single global namespace is not the solution. This would be a regression to the place that PHP has been trying to escape from.

If modules aren't available, then people will invent pseudo namespace qualifiers (e.g., misc_foo). A global namespace will become like the .com TLD --a few early landgrabbers with the cool names like foo and bar, then a bevy of latecomers with fooo and baaar67.

The module/namespace concept isn't a 100% solution, but it's sufficient. People understand hierarchy. It's simple and effective. And it also solves the global-visibility/encapsulation issue that he sidestepped.

<comment><USER6> Is misc.foo better than misc_foo?

My point being - a point also raised by Joe - is that just "adding dots" doesn't solve anything.

<comment><USER7> I would rather have misc.foo (or in python terms, from misc import foo), than this_is_a_unique_function_name_that_does_foo, or '0000100302foo' with a ton of metadata to explain what it does and why it's better than every other similar function.

I'm trying to imagine visually parsing a program where the function names are merely unique identifiers that don't necessarily relate to their function, and it's not going well.

<comment><USER8> From what I understand, it'd be more:

from global_database import foo291 as foo

and you'd have lots of meta information associated to foo291 so you could easily find it by doing:

db-search blah

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where all these grand proposals break down is when you actually have to deal with real, domain-specific problems. It's not too hard to clearly express what the split_string() function or the multiply() function do, so namespace collisions aren't a problem. But what about the function that "assigns" an "activity" to a "user?" All of a sudden, every single person is going to mean something different by those three words, and it suddenly requires a huge amount of context to find that function. Searching for something that assigns activities to users as some sort of global search is worthless; the only stuff you care about is the set of functions within your code base that deal with those concepts, or perhaps within some library that you understand and whose notions of users, activities, and assignment matches what you need to do. So you need some unit to pull in that's larger than just a bag of functions; you need a group of functions that collectively operate on the same sets of data in consistent ways. And that's just a fundamentally hard problem; finding the right split so that you have a set of functions that can be used together, that are reusable, that don't rely on or expose additional concepts or libraries, that's all very difficult. Just flattening the function namespace, killing modules, and doing global searches doesn't do anything for that problem. Again, as much as we all wish that the proper unit of reusability in programming is a single function, since it makes life easier, in most complicated cases that's simply not the case. That's why we have classes, or modules, or namespaces, or packages in the first place: they're all various attempts to group together functions that work together on the same kinds of data, that share the same understanding of that data and that work towards the same goal. Just punting on that encapsulation problem doesn't make it go away.

<comment><USER10> He is probably imagining that the name of that function would be "nameofproject_assign_user_activity/2", and that you would typically use it along with some others from the same source, following some conventions. Seems that obviates modules to me. In Erlang you give the name of the module with a function anyway, so names like that harm nothing. It would be real nice to type "map" instead of "lists:map" though.

<comment><USER9> Sure . . . I mean, C doesn't exactly have namespaces, and neither did PHP at first, and you can write code in them, so it's not that it's somehow not possible to uniquely name functions. But it's pretty annoying, and I'd say that many people who are used to modules and namespaces miss them when they move to a world that doesn't have those things. They exist as A) syntactic sugar, so that you can just say assign_user_activity() instead of my_company_my_project_assign_user_activity and B) as a strong organizing principle (potentially that has tooling around it). The former point is just annoying; my argument was that the latter is really the point of modules or namespaces.

Maybe I want to find all the functions related to assignment: how do I do that? Do I just look on disk? Do I use tags or metadata? Do I assume some naming convention? It's a problem you have to solve somehow, and solving it requires effort, because it's an explicit organizational effort. Modules or namespaces or packages or classes give you a way to say "this stuff goes together" and to encapsulate and abstract large units of related functionality, and to do so in a way that tools and programs understand. In a Java IDE, my IDE will auto-complete all the functions on a class; in a REPL I can just print out all the methods on an object. That's a useful organizing principle, and it's one that you lose if you totally flatten the namespace.

You could argue that organization isn't one-dimensional or hierarchical, which is what namespaces and such force on you, and it's a reasonable statement. But replacing it with nothing explicit and relying on extensive developer metadata and documentation so you can search for things? That seems even more idealistic. When was the last time you saw every single function, even private ones, documented and tagged so correctly and up-to-date on a real-world, large-scale project that you'd rely on them to serve as the only organizing principle in your application?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is significantly similar to part of a note I wrote a month or two ago, about 'Software as web' <http://www.hxa.name/notes/note- hxa7241-20110314T2011Z.html>

Functions calling (linking) each other, and being built out of available pieces, ideally at a global scale -- this is just like the structure of the web.

* Functions should have URLs

* Functions should be augmented with metadata, like their language/platform

* There should be more and more fully defined IMT/MIME data types for lots of data

(Although I am more casual about this idea, and am only thinking half- seriously.)

</comment><comment><USER12> So you'll start prefixing all names with a string so they don't clash. Then you'll notice all your related code uses these strings, what a waste, so you'll create a "module" in order to be able to drop the string in a defined context. Thus namespaces/modules are reinvented. Function drives form.

</comment><comment><USER13> Let me rephrase this: Search don't sort.

There cannot be a single organizational hierarchy that is intuitive to all users.

So lets try a flat namespace where every class and method can be found both by name, metadata, comments etc. Think the chrome universal search autocomplete.

Content should be addressable by more than any one namespace!

</comment><comment><USER14> Isn't the problem more about access than storage?

We naturally recoil from the global namespace idea because we (rightly) anticipate huge issues with organization and duplication, so we want a hierarchical structure (files and modules) to keep our functions organized.

How about leaving our storage hierarchical for organizational purposes, but streamlining access? Instead of always using tedious import and require statements, simply call/use your functions, objects, gems, plugins, etc. directly and let the compiler and/or runtime infer from your usage which you are referring to in the case of ambiguity. Only if the ambiguity cannot be resolved in this manner would the programmer need to be explicit. Intelligent metadata and indexing could also add a lot of power to this sort of system.

Currently even our best languages require a large amount of cruft and legwork that is only really necessary in those 5% of cases where ambiguity can't be automatically inferred away. Seems like optimizing for the edge case if I've ever seen it.

</comment><comment><USER15> No one has mentioned that modules/packages hold together code that shares _concepts_.

Surely getting rid of Java _packages_ and keeping the _classes_ would be far less extreme than what Joe is suggesting for Erlang -- yet then we would have a zillion "meanings" of things like Image, Server, PDFFile, etc.

What about the Erlang functions that aren't "file2md5" and "downcase_char"? Is he way over-generalizing, or do Erlang programs typically just munge data in obvious ways?

<comment><USER16> You can package code without making the package a formal part of the namespace. Having a global namespace doesn't preclude packaging code, even if they are traditionally mixed as one thing. Many Smalltalk's have a single global namespace, it works pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Modules are units of encapsulation.

In my experience, if you have trouble deciding where a function "foo" needs to go to -- you probably have divided your code across arbitrary/poor boundaries.

Modules should have clean API's that do not leak implementation details and of course the implementation itself.

If you break down the barriers between modules, you remain with only implementation details.

A well-written module that's divided across meaningful boundaries can usually be read in separation of the project it is a part of and actually understood as whole.

All that said, I think storage of code could be done far better than serialization in text files, but that's another matter, and whatever code editing form we use, we should still have "modules".

<comment><USER16> Sounds like you didn't read the article, he specifically addressed encapsulation and an alternative way of doing it.

<comment><USER17> I read the article, and I couldn't find any explanation of how to regain the lost encapsulation.

I see him mentioning anonymous inner functions and that "reusing modules" is hard. Did you mean to refer to this?

Anonymous inner functions are more difficult to share across multiple components that share their intricate knowledge of the implementation details and would be stored in a module. I do not think they are a viable replacement for an explicit boundary around multiple components.

About reuse of modules being hard -- I think this again stems from poorly designed module APIs and semantics. Well-designed modules (e.g: STL's modules, Haskell's data structure modules) are very easy to re-use.

I completely agree with him on the difficulty/arbitrarity of module naming, though. I don't think modules should be given a made-up name, but rather found by more informative "meta-data" and addressed by auto-generated unique names.

<comment><USER16> I'm referring to the section where he talks about a new syntax for hiding helper functions so as not to expose them to the outside world. That was specifically about addressing your encapsulation concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From a collaboration point of view, the thought of programming with single- function modules sounds like a nightmare. Now you don't have to find and install matching versions of five libraries, you have to find suitable versions of a hundred functions.

Perhaps nice people step in to stop the suffering and provide packages of function versions which are mutually compatible and which are usually used together -- but that's modules again.

<comment><USER2> _Perhaps nice people step in to stop the suffering and provide packages of function versions which are mutually compatible and which are usually used together -- but that's modules again_

Not exactly. You've sort of moved the large globs of stuff from the back-end to the front-end, where the grouping is more useful.

I'm reminded of difficulties, like the kind faced when purchasing 1.5" electrical tape. That stuff's mostly used only by pro electricians, so you won't find it retail, and it's even hard to find a particular brand from a contractor's supply outfit, and when you do, you have to buy it in big lots, like a whole box of 10 rolls. What if you just want to fix a drum and you need a particular make of tape made by Scotch and you only want one roll? Out of luck.

So say you need a particular function. You end up importing this entire module, which has dependencies that also are defined in large-granularity terms (other modules) that have their own dependencies. So to use one function, you get saddled with a whole heap of dependency overhead. You're really paying the price for "a whole box" where what you really need is just one particular thing.

But if everything was stored in easily accessible public repositories _at the granularity of individual functions_ , this wouldn't be the case. You'd be able to pull the particular version of the function you need, and it would just pull the particular versions of the functions it depends on, and so on.

Things would be a whole lot more memory efficient. Another way to think of it: modules are a lot less modular than than they really should be.

<comment><USER19> _So say you need a particular function. You end up importing this entire module, which has dependencies that also are defined in large-granularity terms (other modules) that have their own dependencies. So to use one function, you get saddled with a whole heap of dependency overhead._

Just playing the devil's advocate here: in this use case, why not just write the function yourself?

<comment><USER2> Because, if there was a way to quickly find and import the right function (with small-granularity dependencies), it would be much faster in a great many cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The more I think about it the more I think program development should viewed > as changing the state of a Key-Value database.

This is pretty much how I view my programming in Common Lisp.

<comment><USER2> _The more I think about it the more I think program development should viewed as changing the state of a Key-Value database._

This is also how a lot of Smalltalkers operate.

<comment><USER16> Yea, Joe is slowly coming around to the idea of image based development instead of file based development. He's a few decades too late to be original, but it's still a great idea.

Of course, throwing out files has consequences on the tools you use, big time. Ask any Smalltalk'er.

<comment><USER2> _Of course, throwing out files has consequences on the tools you use, big time. Ask any Smalltalk'er._

You can ask me. Who said anything about _throwing out_ files? I use file-based tools all the time. I've grepped files and diffed them. I've exported a Class as a file, done some operation on it with another tool, then filed it back into the image. Whatever tool is best for the job. There's in-image tools, but I'm not limited to them.

Not being shackled to files has tremendous positive consequences. For example, I am free to _code in the debugger_ almost 100% of the time. Even irb and iPython can look a bit restricted in comparison. If I do something esoteric to low-level code and crash the image, there's a _transactional log_ of my code changes I can recover from, almost with impunity.

The choice of text editors for main development is rather restricted, though. (But with a pattern of very short methods as the norm, and the ability to customize the browsers at the level of individual methods, this isn't that big a deal.)

<comment><USER16> I'll venture a guess that you didn't read my profile.

<comment><USER2> Nope. Didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this just exacerbates the problem with erlangs flat namespace, right now it is impossible to have 2 versions of a library inside the same vm because they both exist inside the same namespace, it is insane the amount of people that have had very obscure errors because they happened to call a module "http.erl"

I would appreciate a solution that is a first class solution 'in code' as opposed to some special case with module loaders, but I would like to see people talking about the problems they are solving before pontificating about solutions

</comment><comment><USER22> This is kinda off the point, but I'm surprised at the spelling and punctuation mistakes in that mail--generally high-profile hackers have excellent written English.

i.e. "but their isn't", "Do we need module's at all?", "do suggest alternative syntax's here."

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure his native language is english; he may be swedish.

<comment><USER24> I'm almost positive he's British, or at least he has a British accent of sorts: <http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Erlang-Joe-Armstrong>

Also, regarding his writing, he did at least preface his post with _This is a brain-dump-stream-of-consciousness-thing._ Despite being a stickler for grammar rules myself, if I don't proofread my writing, there are bound to be plenty of grammar errors and typos that pop up, especially if my brain is really flying with ideas and my fingers are struggling to keep up. His post had that feel to it as well. A bunch of ideas, semi-related, bouncing ideas around haphazardly.

<comment><USER25> I went to a talk he gave a year or so ago on a set of libraries he'd written. He was just like that in person. A complete mad professor.

He showed us his early design documents of erlang, including original compile times and performance measurements. Awesome stuff.

He does sound British, but there's a certain foreign-ness about the way he speaks (probably picked up from Ericsson).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Emacs is using single namespace, and people are just contributing .el scripts here and there (put in the right place, they get automatically loaded - (I'm just an user of these .el scripts - mainly for lisp/lua development))

Also "C" - single namespace, and though very verbose sometimes, google it, and you'll find result (saved me many times looking for Win32 API, GTK, Cairo, lua api, etc.)

But what about data? Static data, vars, etc. Also some languages/systems have initialization/deinitialization of the module (register/unregister, etc.)

But in general I like the idea, and thought about it, now I'm even thinking more.

He talks about putting them in database, well each database would have to have a name - maybe that's the name of the package (and you can rename), and you can merge. And if the DB is say SQL - you can even operate on merging databases way better than the methods of "ar, lib (msvc), ranlib, etc." or whatever the language/runtime provides

</comment><comment><USER27> Erlang modules hold nothing _but_ functions. In most popular languages there can be mutable data, too, either public or private; this extra complication is what would tip it over from interesting to silly in my mind. For Erlang it strikes me as worth exploring, and then maybe the result could be generalized to other languages.

He considers private implementation-only functions using letrec, but what about multiple public functions sharing the same privates? You can model them as an object (or rather a nullary function returning a tuple or some other representation of a table, since Erlang modules have functions only). Hurrah, we've reified modules, oh well.

I'll bet these points are addressed in the long followup thread.

(Obligatory mention of Zooko's triangle: <http://www.zooko.com/distnames.html> )

</comment><comment><USER28> This issue of where to place functions is something I have been curious about, too.

In the Lisp community, what are the standards for where to store your generic methods as opposed to defined classes they work with? Rephrased, if I define classes Foo and Bar, and I write generic method foobar (accepts as params instances of Foo and Bar), where do I put foobar?

In the C++ world, where should I put my friend functions that suffer a similar lack of obvious home?

I have often seen solutions where some package/class is chosen arbitrarily as the "proper" home for these cross-class communicators, but I have long felt like this is a compromise rather than good organization. And yes, I recognize that there are at least two kinds of organizations: In what file is my code? In what namespace is my code? I am concerned with the namespace aspect.

<comment><USER29> >Rephrased, if I define classes Foo and Bar, and I write generic method foobar (accepts as params instances of Foo and Bar), where do I put foobar?

This sounds similar to the expression problem.

[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Clojure-Expression- Proble...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Clojure-Expression-Problem)

<comment><USER28> Generics/friends/multimethods are one of the solutions identified on the slides you posted (and protocols are interesting), but I did not see mention of appropriate namespaces for these.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Erlang's module system isn't just a namespace mechanism; it really lends itself well to stuff like gen_server where you need to provide a set of callbacks. I'm surprised he didn't even touch on this in his post, as it definitely seems like one of Erlang's strengths to me....

<comment><USER31> This gets touched on a bit later. [http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang- questions/2011-May/058775...](http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang- questions/2011-May/058775.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Joe Armstrong is a really interesting guy. I think he was my favorite interview in Coders at Work.

</comment><comment><USER33> Armstrong doesn't seem to be saying anything about one of the more damning problems he points out - encapsulation. All functions in a module are available to each other, but hidden from code not in that module.

His solution of simply storing all code in a key-value DB only makes this worse in exchange for the dubious benefit of removing the ? "where do I put this new function?". Since he makes a big deal of encapsulation, his solution seems questionable.

EDIT - Please don't upvote this. I'm wrong in an incredibly silly way, and my wrongness doesn't need to be rewarded. If you feel generous, upvote ericflo instead for pointing out just how badly I missed the point.

<comment><USER34> Actually he addresses that and proposes syntax to address it.

        let fib = fun(N) -> fib(N, 1, 0) end
        in
           fib(N, A, B) when N < 2 -> A;
           fib(N, A, B) -> fib(N-1, A+B, A).
        end.

Where everything in the "in" block would be hidden.

<comment><USER33> You are absolutely right. When I read his post, that's squirreled away in a discussion about syntax and I missed it. I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It seems that this might maker code easier to write (the first time around) at the expense of making it more difficult to read. That's totally counter to the prevailing wisdom.

I'd also be curious to know what metadata the functions could be tagged with to make them sufficiently easy to find. The module and project that a function or type belongs to provides a lot of contextual information about it; coming up with metadata which captures that information without simply duplicating it (and therefore reinventing modules under another guise) sounds fairly non- trivial.

</comment><comment><USER36> Intriguing idea.

Extending it to absurdity:

All functions should be stored in a searchable key/value database, where the key is a cryptographically signed canonical representation of the function source code. By "canonical representation" I mean a translation to a canonical form of the lambda calculus, so as to capture the complete meaning unambiguously.

This database would, of course, translate the lambda calculus to erlang, lisp, haskell, php, what-have-you, on demand at the view layer.

Metadata would need to be extensive, but we could crowd-source that Wikipedia- fashion.

</comment><comment><USER37> The problem is exclusive containment. Folders/directories are an example of hierarchical exclusive containment. The author suggests avoiding the problems associated with this by getting rid of the hierarchy.

However, the author is onto something: storing functions in a database. Using the file system results in exclusive containment (file can't be in two different directories - link don't count) that a database can avoid.

If you are lost, think of Gmail's tags with nesting. You can still have the hierarchy but data can be "located" under different tags. A lot of times the problem is using the file system as the back end. Python's modules, for instance, do not inherently enforce exclusive containment; the file system imposes this constraint.

I had a chat with Jeff Bone a year ago after I read his partially-related rant here: [http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of- Mon-20091109/0545...](http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of- Mon-20091109/054578.html)

I wish I could paste everything he said to me in here; he pointed me to a lot of examples of good file system / graph database examples that get a lot of these things right. Quick further reading list: Original ReiserFS design, BeFS design, FluidDB, LUFS, and Tannenbaum's design for the directory services and file system of Ameoba.

</comment><comment><USER38> I like this idea. The problem I see is when you have different, but equally valid implementations.

In this case, it would make sense to back the name up with the developer/company name. But with no _further_ decoration, as discussed. That way, it's clear _which_ function implementation you're referring to. You can still have the mainstream (popular? chosen by the project's team?) implementations be referenced by function name alone. Any other implementations would need the dev/company name. That way you can have different parts of the project still able to reference different implementations of the same function.

The alternative would be to decorate the function with the implementation detail. And I think that's going against the simplicity he's after. Worse still is you'd still need to know you'll be supporting multiple implementations up front.

</comment><comment><USER39> You already have this with CommonJS packages and modules as used by Node, RingoJS, Akshell and others.

The latest additions to require() mean that if you do something like require('foo') and there's a directory 'foo' in your require path that contains a package.json file (i.e. if you have package foo installed via the likes of npm), then the main module mentioned in that package.json file (which contains the meta data Joe speaks of) is immediately available to you. The module isn't a function, but rather an object, but then JavaScript isn't a purely functional language.

Now, admittedly, currently you need to pre install the packages, but there's no reason why require couldn't be modified to install them for you if they're unavailable or, if your code ran on a platform like Akshell, the packages wouldn't already be available to you.

<comment><USER40> Actually in node at least modules can export functions directly, just assign a function to `module.exports` and when you require() that module you'll get a function back. Plus you can add attributes to that function since functions are also objects.

<comment><USER39> That's cool, I had overlooked that. I guess the point is that there's no key value store for modules, whereas for packages there's npm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> My first thought after reading the beginnings of his bulleted list: PHP? Haha. Still reading. It feels almost surreal to be reading the brain dump // stream of consciousness of someone who's created something so great. He talks just like you or I. Very fascinating.

<comment><USER42> There's nothing special about getting something like that done. There's nothing special about people who spend time on that kind of stuff either, save for the fact that they spend time on it. It's not difficult to be at the top, what's difficult is getting there and having enough resolve and persistence to do it. Only change is painful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Does anybody remember Apple Dylan (<http://wiki.opendylan.org/wiki/view.dsp?title=Apple%20Dylan>)? I never used it myself, but I remember reading a lot about it in the late 1990's because I was using Macintosh Common Lisp at the time. In the Apple Dylan IDE, every function, class, and module was an object in an object database; there were no files at all. The IDE was at least 10 years ahead of its time, and as a result the performance was terrible. But it's surprising that nobody has revived the idea of a source database.

<comment><USER44> the idea of storing code in DB isn't new. there are couple "exotic" system which do it, SAP R/3 being one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Dependent typing has some interesting things to say about modules, or lack thereof. Cayenne[1] is a functional language that doesn't have modules as its type system is expressive enough to cope with the necessary encapsulation -- you can create the module structure just by using types.

Unfortunately, dependent types make typechecking undecidable so there are drawbacks to this approach...

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayenne_(programming_language)>

</comment><comment><USER46> This is how PHP works, and I think it's smart. But to avoid the pitfalls of PHP, the new global functions need to be named in a way that's logical and unlikely to step on any toes.

<comment><USER47> ..Really? There's a reason they are and have been trying to move away from this script kiddie style of programming..

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Wouldn't it be interesting to draw a parallel with natural languages. All english words belong to a single namespace, in a way. And even though English language is highly homonymic we don't have difficulties understanding it, for the most part. We figure out the meaning based on the context. In this sense PL's namespaces seem to be analogous to the natural language context.

</comment><comment><USER49> Many of these ideas are already present in picolisp

</comment><comment><USER50> Erlang meet Forth!!!

</comment><comment><USER51> All machine state should be globally, transparently persisted like this if you ask me. Sort of like a persistent heap.

</comment><comment><USER52>
      #import stocklib as lib
      import fancylib as lib

      a = lib.Lib()

<comment><USER53> Or even more well recognised:

      try:
          import cStringIO as StringIO
      except:
          import StringIO

      strio = StringIO.StringIO()

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Honestly the stupidest shit I have read this month. PHP did that too, and they always do smart things right?

The guy might have a PhD, but he knows nothing about usability of languages. He also dissed OOP, but I guess having concepts that accurately represent data are shit too.</comment>


Apple promotes Eddie Cue again to guide iAd, iCloud to success - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/apple-head-of-internet-services-promoted-to-guide-iad-icloud-to-success.ars <comment><USER2> > iAd has reportedly been underperforming since its release in 2010;

The reason why I don't use iAd is because I can't. I wanted to put an ad banner across the top (or bottom) of my Landscape app at all times. My app used UISplitViewController which must be full-screen at all times and must be the root view controller. AdBannerView must be in a UIViewController and must be visible at all times. I have no problem with AdBannerView being visible at all times and UISplitViewController taking up the rest of the screen at all times. But the requirements conflict and to overcome them, I tried tons of different hacks but nothing was stable or guaranteed to work.

I would have loved to use iAd in my iPad app but since it was not possible out of the box, I didn't bother trying to use it in production. What turned me away from iAd was not the difficulty in implementation but the realization that not ONE person at Apple thought "hmm, how does one put AdBannerView in an app that uses UISplitViewController?"</comment>


Why Men Love War (1984) - <AUTHOR> http://public.wsu.edu/~hughesc/why_men_love_war.htm <comment><USER2> At its core, this piece claims "no life without death, no love without war" \- and that there is no more intense experience of all of these than in the midst of war. This is one of the great paradoxes of progress. In the most peaceful age in human history (read Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" for a deep statistical defense of this fact), our deepest fear is no longer death of the body, but death of the soul. Most of us have no need to worry about death in the form of starvation, or bullets, or awful diseases. Their replacement is the fear of an inconsequential life: of dying without having ever really lived. The greatest danger for many of us is traveling the well-sterilized paths, starting on the carefully-monitored playground and continuing through the Ivy League education, the comfortable Google job, the eventual promotions and sensible marriage, the repetition of the cycle through our perfectly- protected children, that allow us to deprive ourselves of all experiences of true intensity or meaning.

It's a topic I often wonder about: now there is less war than ever, but also more depression and despair, even among those with peaceful, affluent lives. We humans have always been running from the fires behind us - what if, having outpaced them, we discover that what lies ahead is ice?

<comment><USER3> "It's a topic I often wonder about: now there is less war than ever, but also more depression and despair, even among those with peaceful, affluent lives."

It's an interesting point of view, but here's some food for thought... perhaps there's plenty of despair because there's more to be concerned about than just war and poverty.

Seriously, there's absolutely tons of things messed up about the world we live in, and it can feel overwhelming, which leads to paralysis... people feel powerless to find a better way as individuals. Feeling separated from communities in their immediate vicinity doesn't help either. At least with war, which is truly messed up too, there's an us vs. them, a clearer sense of purpose. In our current world the answers are less clear.

If you'd prefer I mention something concrete that's messed up, I'd almost not know where to begin. For the sake of simplicity in choosing, this was my most recent discovery... it makes me sad that this exists... [http://www.thebigroundtable.com/stories/damage/](http://www.thebigroundtable.com/stories/damage/)

<comment><USER4> Um... wow, that was an amazingly well written piece. Thank you for sharing.

<comment><USER3> It's a tragedy, a beautifully written tragedy. I found it on this subreddit, perhaps you'll find other engaging stories there... [http://www.reddit.com/r/FoodForThought](http://www.reddit.com/r/FoodForThought)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Evolutionary phycologist Malcolm Potts explains this phenomenon as an evolutionary adaptation developed in some species of primates. In particular, we share this behavior, "the war instinct" with our close relative chimpanzee. The behavior is the following: identify your "ingroup", the social group where you live, and then attack an "outgroup", a competing social group. This is an evolutionary-beneficial behavior because it allows a group to gain additional resources: land and females. According to this theory human predisposition for war is innate rather than cultural.

If you are interesting in learning more about this theory, here's the book:

Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World by Malcolm Potts ISBN 978-1935251705

<comment><USER6> An interesting addition / counterpoint to this theory is presented in Frans De Waal's [1] books.

"In 2011, De Waal and his co-workers were the first to report that chimpanzees given a free choice between helping only themselves or helping themselves plus a partner, prefer the latter."

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal)

<comment><USER7> That's what "in-group" means. Whe. Plenty turns to Famine, behavior changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The main thing I liked about war was getting to work with powerful tools and get immediate feedback on your actions. The US does a pretty good job of insulating the military from this in peacetime -- bureaucracy, extremely restrictive rules of engagement, etc. -- but as a contractor in a war zone, as well as for soldiers involved in actual combat operations (5% of those deployed?) it was pretty amazing.

It's pretty much the same high as working at a startup vs. a big company.

<comment><USER9> The problem with the military is that it has unlimited downside. You're literally giving up your freedom. I don't really think western armies experience the realities of war either, at least not to the extent of their opponents.

I think pretty much anything you can do in the military you can do better in civilian life, you just have to be a bit creative. You rarely hear about it though, because no one is trying to recruit people for it. Here's kind of one example though: [http://www.theamphour.com/220-an-interview-with-shaun- meehan...](http://www.theamphour.com/220-an-interview-with-shaun-meehan- doctiloquent-dove-deployer/)

<comment><USER8> Bootstrapping a defense business with ~zero background in defense was tbh one of the most amazing possible things to do in 2003-2005. I probably should have bailed in 2005 or so and go back to startups, but I was still convinced the 2001 recession was there.

<comment><USER9> I do find the idea that showing up counts for a lot, quite romantic (in a good way). Even in the more dubious cases like Viktor Bout [0]. But for the most case it's not an area where I'd personally want to "show up" in. I'd much rather we semi-privatized disaster relief than war.

[0] That documentary with all the home footage is pretty cool, so is "bulletproof salesman".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article "Is There Anything Good About Men?" by Roy Baumeister [1] takes some interesting angles on the reasons and motivations for men choosing war, and generalizes why the worlds most powerful people, as well as the overwhelming majority of most prison populations, are men.

In some ways, the reasons look to clearly stem from culture and society's influence, as discussed in the Baumeister article.

On the other hand, there is definitely a some element of the innate [2] "us vs. them" at play, allowed to run unbridled in the suspenseful environment of war. I imagine this _would_ result in an experience not easily replicated in the real world.

No where else offers this:

1\. You might get to kill "bad people"

2\. You won't get in trouble for it

3\. You don't have time to think or process it. It just happens, split second, you die or they die, you panic, resort to your training, you live. Instead of being punished, you are a hero.

4\. You might die. Hearing a bullet whiz by your head and surviving, followed by the subsequent huge adrenaline rush.

5\. If you don't die, you see yourself as an invincible super hero that gets to save the world.

There are ways to replicate a lot of this, like joining a street gang or getting involved in organized crime, but instead of becoming a hero, you get 20-to-life. Not quite the same risk-reward.

Something about it seems very juvenile, in the sense of getting to do "bad things" with very little risk of negative consequence, and there's some element of "playing super hero" here. It makes me think of going off to college and partying your ass off for a semester, with unlimited access to alcohol and sex, fully funded by the parents, with very little negative consequence. I'm sure many people _do_ look back on that with fond memories. To some people, war is probably like that, on steroids.

[1] [http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm](http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm)

[2] [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/babies-help-unlock-the- origins-o...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/babies-help-unlock-the-origins-of- morality/)

<comment><USER11> I started reading that Baumeister article to complain about the current political climate. Even though it turns out I'm sympathetic to his views there were a few interesting angles, as you put it. One that had never occurred to me:

> The first big, basic difference has to do with what I consider to be the > most underappreciated fact about gender. Consider this question: What > percent of our ancestors were women? It's not a trick question, and it's not > 50%....Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two > years ago. Today's human population is descended from twice as many women as > men.

<comment><USER12> That may be because most men never get any offspring. It's evolutionarily convenient to only have the genetically best men get women pregnant. A common theory is that the reason we have marriage/monogamy is that the men who get left out of sex don't much like this arrangement and would prefer equal allocation of women.

<comment><USER11> I might as well argue that women started polygamy so more of them could be with the top males. If you lack all of the things it might take to attract female partners (health, money, power, social status, charisma, intelligence, humor, etc.) to the extent that you're getting left out of sex, you don't have the clout to design and implement new institutions.

<comment><USER12> There's kinda this thing about numbers, though. 50% of all men is a lot of guys dissatisfied with the status quo. And you don't have to implement new institutions within the existing power structure, you just have to get a group of fellow guys together, run off with some kidnapped girls few will miss and start your own society. Then you invent a religion to justify it, and voila, soon your tribe has reason to go and pillage, burn, rape and convert.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like the plot from Revenge Of The Nerds. Very unlikely because of the same problem as before: the ability to attract females correlates with the skills needed to start a successful new tribe that can compete with the old.

The only way I see to save the argument is to say that the "losers" who left, or were more likely pushed out, stumbled upon some favorable ecology, maybe they stumbled into modern day Europe. But then you're back to geographical determinism and so many things changed in society as agriculture developed that singling out male envy as the cause of monogamy requires more evidence than I think you have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a book that develops a similar thesis, see Chris Hedges' "War is a force that gives us meaning." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Force_That_Gives_Us_Me...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Force_That_Gives_Us_Meaning)

</comment><comment><USER14> I think this whole concept is one reason why people become "doomsday preppers". They choose to view the world in a way that has struggle, meaning, where decisions have consequences. Since they cant live out that frontier existence of 100 years ago, they try to create that world for themselves now.

<comment><USER7> And that's a hedge, like prepping for afterlife!

If doomsday doesn't come, then all choices are equally successful. But if doomsday comes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My impression is many foolish people like the idea of war in prospect -- they like war movies [1] -- but hate it when confronted with its horrible reality.

* First, anyone who applies the slightest intellectual effort will see war is a catastrophe, though occasionally better than its alternative.

* If I remember my history, for both the American Civil War and WWI, people were excited by their beginnings. People picnicked beside the first Civil War battles. Needless to say, they soon learned of their mistakes. Similarly many Americans were excited for the second Iraq war. (And those examples hardly are unusual.)

* Civilians and soldiers who die, are maimed, are raped, are tortured, who see those things happen to family members, or lose their homes, jobs, assets, or see their nations and communities reduced to chaos and poverty, -- they do not love war.

* Those who kill and see others kill usually do not love war. What we compel soldiers to do is horrible, killing is unnatural and damaging to the killer too. We've made others into torturers [2] -- what if you were made to torture or kill someone? War costs many survivors their souls and peace of mind. Read any history of any war's aftermath, including our recent conflicts: Those who return often are not the same. PTSD is widespread, and note the very high number of suicides currently among our soldiers, despite the recent conflicts being among the safest, lowest-intensity wars in American history.

* Those who have experienced prior wars came out of them seeking to end war for ever, for example after WWI (the League of Nations) and WWII (the United Nations and the predecessors to the European Union). Some today mock these people as idealistic, but these were the people who led us to victory in existential wars -- they knew far more of war's reality than we ever will.

The glorification of war, military, and soldiers is highly irresponsible and dangerous. We consign soldiers, affected civilians, and whole nations to nightmarish horrors, and then glorify it so we don't have to think about what we have done. [3]

[1] [http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/01/if-only-america- care...](http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/01/if-only-america-cared-about- actual-wars-much-war-movies/102288)

[2] Not just CIA prisons and Abu Ghraib, but of others too; for example: [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/politics/24abuse.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/politics/24abuse.html)

[3] [http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the- trag...](http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/the-tragedy-of- the-american-military/383516/)

<comment><USER7> Abu gran was done voluntary for no good reason, in opposition to the desires of the home office. Aka it happened because the perpetrators enjoyed it.

<comment><USER15> > Abu gran was done voluntary for no good reason, in opposition to the desires > of the home office. Aka it happened because the perpetrators enjoyed it.

Thanks for offering that. It doesn't match what I've read. My impression is that government and military leadership encouraged such practices as a method of interrogation, legitimized it in the troops' eyes by authorizing and publicly advocating for torture and denial of prisoner's rights, and did not enforce rules against it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Biologically man's closest relatives are chimps and bonobos. Chimps are violent. Bonobos love sex. According to the article war is the perfect combination of the those two aspects. Seems to check out.

</comment><comment><USER17> _" But life without death has no meaning"_

Who came up with this moronic idea?

</comment><comment><USER18> What about women? Mother's in Nazi Germany sent their sons off to war with proud smiles on their faces.

<comment><USER10> _> What about women?_

I wonder the same, and more specifically, about women who have been in war.

<comment><USER19> Oh yes, there is not enough about it. Maybe women have note been part of the military for long enough, or maybe its because they censor themselves more than men, and would never admit to enjoy fighting. I only remember that in Vietnam, the strong advice was given to kill the female enemies first, for they would fight much more furiously and with less fear than the men.

Also, there was a study (sorry, I'll try to find the source) that male bonding behaviour is disturbed when there are women present, due to the implicit rivalry. I suspect thats a reason why women weren't allowed to join the military for a long time. Also I guess the heightened libido in war might lead to problems there.

I'd be very interested in how these things worked for the mixed sex armies in the Israeli wars, any links highly appreciated.

<comment><USER20> > Oh yes, there is not enough about it. Maybe women have note been part of the > military for long enough

I can't speak for most of the world, but I believe the USA only started allowing women into direct combat roles in 2013. So there's certainly not enough data here [for the USA].

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military#Policy_ch...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military#Policy_changes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of drone operators feeling quite the opposite about "modern" warfare.

</comment><comment><USER22> The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I was thinking it is weird that 90% computer games (non-casual ones) are about war, which in our life is around 0%. I also looked down on the military.

Now the war in the Ukraine is happening, and it's an eye-opener (even for those in neighbouring countries). Yes, war is rare nowdays, but when it's on, it trumps everything. Every card you have in your hand, war beats.

When armed and organized people come, money and business and culture bow to them.

It is really that important how games show to us.

<comment><USER23> You're right to look down on the military.

Weapons are ominous tools. They are abhorred by all creatures. Anyone who follows the Way shuns them. In peaceful times, the noble ruler honors the left side. At war, he honors the right side. Weapons are ominous tools. They are not the noble ruler's tools. He only uses them when he can't avoid it. Peace and quiet are preferred. Victory should not be praised. Those who praise victory relish manslaughter. Those who relish manslaughter Cannot reach their goals in the world. At times of joy, the left side is honored. At times of grief, the right side is honored. At battle, the second in command stands to the left, And the commander in chief to the right. This means they stand as in funerals. When many people are killed They should be mourned and lamented. Those who are victorious in war Should follow the rites of funerals.

Tao De Ching - Chapter 31

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> menstruation envy

</comment><comment><USER25> Its a perpetuated scam, part of psychological operations against the populous of the planet.

Whats really sought after is invulnerable no form-factor options with beyond- time communications, that are forced to do security stuff for everyone & more.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is why I believe there is no religious, political, or any sort of particular war. Men (or male I think) just like to kill each other for some very strange reason. It may even biological.

EDIT:

The downvotes seem to prove my point. We just like to hurt each other. Disagree with someone downvote. Disagree with another punch them. Disagree with another, to the sabres.

Why do we do this?

If men did not have a proclivity for harm, I would not get downvotes when people disagree. They would instead correct me and put me on the right path.

<comment><USER26> Downvoters: Go ahead, but please do not delude yourself and think otherwise; for with every downvote you prove your propensity for violence. Feels good doesn't it to just click and see the text go lighter. You can't explain it anymore than those guys can explain the rush of holding a shot gun and contracting their finger repeatedly under the pretense of maintaining peace, or some other reason.

<comment><USER27> Here's a better reason; speech has value, some less than others, a feedback mechanism allowing the audience to make a judgement on how much value a given piece has is no more evidence for the innate psychopathy of men than a mute button on a TV remote or an install of adblocker is.

<comment><USER26> Last statement on this subject:

I will just hold it that I do not agree with all of you and see it as violent. That you do not see as such scares the living crap out of me. Your idea of mute is to downvote, not ignoring a commentator, someone else's idea is just more physical, but ideologically similar.

<comment><USER28> I think I know what you mean. Your comments remind me if an excerpt from a Situationist work, _The Revolution of Everyday Life_ (by Raoul Vaneigem):

 _" an obscene hobbling rhythm. In the ebb and flow of the crowds sucked in and crushed together by the coming and going of suburban trains, and coughed out into streets, offices, factories, there is nothing but timid retreats, brutal attacks, smirking faces and scratches delivered for no apparent reason. Soured by unwanted encounters, wine turns to vinegar in the mouth. Innocent and good-natured crowds? What a laugh! Look how they bristle up, threaten on every side, clumsy and embarrassed in the enemy's territory, far, very far from themselves. Lacking knives, they learn to use their elbows and their eyes."_

[http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/5](http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/5)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What would you do if you have 60k € to spend? - <AUTHOR> So I just turned 30 years old and I have 60k € on my bank account  (basically those are my savings from the last 5 years), but I think it's really stupid not to invest my money in something. So I'm hardly thinking to buy an apartment near to the company I work at (Erlangen, Germany); Actually I found a good but also really expensive (~3200€ per m2) one, which I have to decide if I want to take it at the end of next week.
So my question is, what would you do if you have the money, would you prefer to invest in something else? Take in mind that I don't have nothing else just a "secure" job earning ~36000 € netto per year, I also don't pay to much for rent, and the chance to build a family in the next 7 years it's very likely.
Would you buy the apartment? <comment><USER2> My random advice from the internet: just keep saving the money. The apartment might appreciate in value, but it is by no means a slam-dunk investment. A slam-dunk investment would be picking it up for 1200€ per m2 and selling it on for 2200€ per m2 in a month or so.

Which probably highlights my theory of investment. Winding up with good returns is mostly a matter of dumb luck. The reason is because amateur individuals are up against professionals who spend all day and lots of money figuring out how to separate amateurs from whatever money they place at risk.

One of the ways the professionals accomplish separating amateurs from their money is via promoting the idea that investing is smart and saving is stupid and selling marginal investments.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't hurry!

Take the time to think it out very carefully.

Evaluate the geostrategic situation.

What do you think the situation in the European Union will be in two, five, ten years, thirty years? Seriously?

Would you rather be living where you'd buy that house then?

Consider that it's rather highly probably that very soon the situation will be quite different. The Euro will probably not exist anymore (or it will just be the Mark under a new name). The European Union will either be mostly dismantled, or the situation for the citizen inside it will be very dire, both economically and sociologically.

I would definitely not want to own a lot of Euros nowadays. And I would definitely consider, for _SAFETY_ reasons, to be able to move fast and early, which means having NO immovable possession in the place I'm currently in (in Paris in my case, but that'd be the same on about most of the European Union Territory). On the other hand, I wouldn't invest on the financial market either (most currencies and bonds have a negative return, and share may crash at anytime the dollar or the euro crashes (they're basically playing chicken)). If you don't find something to invest into soon, then the only thing to store your wealth that seems safe and easily movable is gold.

You're still young. You could consider finding a safe place elsewhere in the world. It could be in Germany or in Europe, if you choose it carefully (but remember, almost all the Spanish territory was unsafe for 700 years). But it might be easier for long term to find such a place farther. If I was your age, I'd consider very seriously Russia, and their offer for free land in the far East. A good alternative would be Mars, if you can get selected for a flight there. I could also mention other plans (in which you invest this money and become ludicrously rich), but they're rather improbable.

<comment><USER4> What's the thinking behind these predictions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If buying is expensive and rent is cheap, and you have no need for long-term settling down, you might as well keep renting.

You're young and able to save, which means you can afford to take a little risk with your long-term investments (and don't take goldbug paranoia too seriously--or for that matter, any investment advice from anonymous strangers on the internet. That does not count as "due diligence"!). Diversification is usually called for--keep enough liquid cash to live on for a while if you lose your job, some "safe" investments, and some higher-risk investments.

</comment><comment><USER6> You are young and well ahead of the game.

The only good reason I can see for buying this apartment are 1\. It can be easily sold when you need cash 2\. It can be sold for substantially more than you paid for it. otherwise, you will lose money and its not a good deal. I have definite ideas for how I would grow a nest egg but they are peculiar to me and my situation. You need to find your own way. As signposts along the way: 1.Save more with a target of E100,000 2.While saving start studying investments in general 3.Invest in properties if they meet the above listed conditions

</comment><comment><USER7> I would sell everything in Holland and move to Thailand. I would by a nice serviced condo in the Jomtien area for about 25.000 EUR. The remainder I would use to live here for at least 2 year and work on my own ideas (apps). If I would make money with these apps, would continue, otherwise would maybe freelance or do remote work on the side, save some money before working again on my own ideas.

I think a 25.000 EUR appartement in Pattaya should still be easy to rent out in the high season.</comment>


RandalLinden/Doom-FX - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RandalLinden/DOOM-FX <comment><AUTHOR> Randal Linden has GPL'ed the source code for the SNES+SuperFX port of DOOM. The 6502 assembly is surprisingly clean and easy to read if you're familiar with some assembly.</comment>


Researchers Hack Siri, Alexa, and Google Home by Shining Lasers at Them - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/researchers-hack-siri-alexa-and-google-home-by-shining-lasers-at-them/ <comment><AUTHOR> And the paper link [https://lightcommands.com/](https://lightcommands.com/)</comment>


Facebook takes over Palo Alto - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/real-estate/facebook-takes-over-palo-alto-284714.php <comment><USER2> Can someone explain to me why all these startup companies end up in California? Surely there are much more economical places to run a tech company from. Is it just the connections?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think having Stanford and Berkeley close by is a big reason as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> $600 subsidy to live within a mile of the office! I would live in my car and pocket that. But I would then spend it on one trip to Spagos.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do I hear people complain? Please come and check out how bad it is in LA now :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Palo Alto is getting harder and harder to live in.</comment>


The AI Economist: Improving Equality and Productivity with AI-Driven Tax Policy - <AUTHOR> https://blog.einstein.ai/the-ai-economist/ <comment><AUTHOR> Paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13332](https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13332)

Q&A: [https://www.salesforce.com/company/news- press/stories/2020/4...](https://www.salesforce.com/company/news- press/stories/2020/4/salesforce-ai-economist/)</comment>


Found: The plane wreck that could solve a 50-year-old mystery - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-46624382 <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because I found the use of oral evidence from seamen to narrow the search area interesting.</comment>


New Windows Terminal Preview - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-microsoft-store-preview-release/ <comment><USER2> The fact that I don't have to use that God-forsaken color scheme picker from the old terminal is already a huge selling point.

I'm very excited about the future of this application.

Issues:

* Can't drag window using the space what the console tabs are in

* opinion: would be nice if the tabs didn't require the full path of the console's location

* powershell's psreadline doesn't seem to be working fully (ctrl+space not working)

* when I go to right click the icon on the taskbar so that I can pin it, the acrylic goes away. I realize this is an issue with windows 10 in general though

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE) \-- this advertisting video is super cool and nerdy. Who could have thought someone could win a prize with a terminal in the 1990s, when everybody tried to get rid of terminals as hard as they could?

I wish we could have a modern feature rich terminal with real blurring background and powerful features on X11/Xorg/Qt/Gtk/"the linux world". Konsole (KDE) is amongst the best I know so far.

</comment><comment><USER4> If Windows implements a nice CLI to install apps and tools, *well, it's almost there, but not really), something a la Chocolatey, but 100% free, and standard, and actively developed and supported, then it hands down becomes the best OS for developers. You have almost a real Linux, a real Windows, and a modern Desktop unlike the dated macOS.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have been building from git for a few months.

It's fast, supports Unix copy and paste, emacs key bindings (What bash uses by default), the config format is nice. You can definitely use it as a daily driver.

</comment><comment><USER6> Microsoft pretends to care about a problem that others have solved 30 years ago. Their unique priorities seem to be a background image and transparency. After all, who uses a terminal to write and read text these days? This one just makes you feel nerdy while watching cat videos.

</comment><comment><USER7> Extremely impressive work! It looks stunning.

The WSL integration looks super cool, are you planning any other integrations like Docker, Hyper-V, SSH, or WinRM? Oher machine-local shells like ipython, or aws-shell would be sweet too but I understand not wanting to implement that last one.

I know you could just run some if these as a subprocess but there is some magic in 'Open IPython Tab'

<comment><USER5> You could probably just add ipython to settings.json.

Windows already comes with OpenSSH. Personally I prefer ssh separate from my terminal app.

<comment><USER7> Wait but I just mean the terminal could also be the ssh/winrm connection manager. I'm guessing that could maybe be done in the settings too I suppose.

It would still be OpenSSH under the hood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unify look and feel with VS Code then have VS Code support Windows Terminal sessions as tabs.

[https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/integrated- termina...](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/integrated-terminal)

</comment><comment><USER9> I see it supports background images now.

Who uses this? Why? Why is that worth the reduced readability?

I have a hard time wrapping my head around why such a feature would ever be implemented.

I guess... mischief? When somebody leaves their computer unlocked, you could set the background image to a screenshot of the terminal with a bunch of text. :-(

<comment><USER10> I currently set my terminals to production servers on a different colour scheme as a warning to avoid doing something wrong accidentally. As soon as I saw this feature I thought I'd use it to put a giant alarm sign as background image for production terminals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The screenshots and the video sure look different.

<comment><USER12> They freely admitted at the time that the video was what they eventually wanted the terminal to look like, not what it is now. And it's version 0.2, I'd rather they get the fundamentals right first before adding all the visual flair.</comment></comment>


Google working on 10 gigabit Internet speeds - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/02/12/google-10-gigabit-internet-speeds/5421709/

<comment><USER2> I wish there's more development in Internet speeds in developing countries, this would certainly boost up the pace for service sector across the globe.</comment>


Autodesk announces new 3D printer and open platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/spark <comment><USER2> They should really have a working prototype or at least more than a vague rendered image before announcing something like this.

Can someone explain how the ship in the 3D printer concept rendering is suppose to be have been built and how it's staying in place?

[http://inthefold.autodesk.com/.a/6a017c3334c51a970b01a3fd089...](http://inthefold.autodesk.com/.a/6a017c3334c51a970b01a3fd089f22970b-pi)

In my opinion they should focus on making larger and stronger 3D objects and ways to make it easy and affordable rather than delicate looking model ships. If I could quickly print something like a 2 inch custom pipe joint (that was fairly strong) in a short amount of time then this thing would be very valuable.

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereolithography](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereolithography)

It's literally fused to the surface as it's drawn up from the vat (imagine the apparatus shown in the Wikipedia diagram but upside-down with the laser below the resin vat)

<comment><USER2> The laser is below the resin container? How does that work?

Is there a similar built device that you know of?

<comment><USER3> The formlabs form 1 is a good example: [http://formlabs.com/products/form-1/](http://formlabs.com/products/form-1/)

<comment><USER2> Awesome, thanks, that makes sense now.

[http://youtu.be/enJq2PquuPE?t=1m2s](http://youtu.be/enJq2PquuPE?t=1m2s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like the most they have to show at this point is a 3D rendering of a 3D printer. Anyone know if there is a actually working product behind this or are they just trying to gauge interest or drum up support before actually having anything to show?

<comment><USER5> This seems like a good idea and good business for AutoDesk too. But the announcement might be too early. It seems there is no hardware yet. And more importantly, given AutoDesk's declared strategy, there is no link to a (Github) repo for Spark - their FOSS "OS for 3D printing". According to the BBC article, this 3D printer is intended to promote Spark, just as Nexus One was meant to promote Android, but not become a huge thing in its own right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's nothing new in Autodesk buying up everything they can get their hands on in the parametric modelling space, but I was surprised to see recently that they have made a rash of acquisitions and new product developments targeting the hobbyist/hacker community under their '123D' banner.

<comment><USER7> They're also very unfocused. They bought circuits.io , but doesn't seem to have given it the required treatment for it to grow to be a common tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Autodesk and free--open platform is an oxymoron. Sorry, but I don't trust ths company anymore. If anyone from Autodesk reads this; there are free alternatives to your pricy software--it's not the ninties anymore. I don't Need your software! The last dollar I gave you was for Lightroom 1.0. It's the last dollar you will ever get from me. I lost track of how many times you "updated" Lightroom, and asked for more money. For my purposes, IPhoto has you beat--and Apple gave it away.

<comment><USER9> At tech meetups and conferences they sometimes give away "studio" packs that have a large assortment of Autodesk software for free (non-transferable). They sent it to me on a USB drive.

<comment><USER10> Is the software limited to X months like the educational versions or is it a permenant license?

<comment><USER11> Autodesk's educational licenses (free) last wickedly long. For products that cost several thousand dollars, I don't know what there is to complain about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like DLP (Direct Light Projection) 3D printing and has an eerily similar form factor to the EnvisionTec Perfactory Micro: [http://envisiontec.com/case_studies/bosmans-3d-printing- jewe...](http://envisiontec.com/case_studies/bosmans-3d-printing-jewelry-with- a-perfactory-micro/)

Interested to see how they plan to differentiate this printer from the similar DLP offerings out there already (DLP printers are big in the jewelry industry)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm genuinely surprised they let this out of the bag without any specs or pricing or details of any kind. In fact, being in the 3D printing space I was confused whether "Spark" was the name of the printer, the reference hardware, or the software.</comment>


The Infinite Scroll - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/first_person/the-infinite-scroll.php <comment><USER2> The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm careful on what I click on.

The modern web browsing experience is clearly not what TBL had in mind when he started developing the web.

Newspaper sites seem to want you to do everything but actually read the story you've clicked on to read.

Take this for example: [https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus- doesnt...](https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-doesnt-scare- infectious-disease-21658432)

Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web.

Following this, we have a few short paragraphs that are actually the story we came to read. A huge image, then more links to take you away from the story. Another handful of short paragraphs, another link to take you away from the story and this repeats until we get to the end of the story we came to read. Some comments follow the story (with a bunch of more links to take us away between the two, of course) and then what feels like an infinite scroll of sponsored links.

I think the Daily Mirror is possibly one of the worst (one of many reasons I don't ever visit this site except by mistake or in the case of this comment) but I'm finding more and more websites are almost impossible to read. Which is why I don't really spend much time on the web these days. I'd say the majority of my web browsing habits come via youtube these days.

HN is usually pretty reliable for decent content that is easy to consume, but beware if you click on a link found via Google or DDG (or other mainstream search engines)

<comment><USER3> > The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful > and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm > careful on what I click on.

NoScript is pretty useful for this. If a website doesn't work without JavaScript, odds are very good the author's incentives are something other than to convey information, so the content is probably not worth consuming anyway.

<comment><USER4> I used to use NoScript religiously, but since the move to `quantum` I couldn't seem to get it to work right. Either I couldn't understand the icon system or or was buggy. Has it improved since then?

<comment><USER5> Quantum deprecated the old method of Add-On development in favor of Web Extensions. NoScript didn't have a Web Extensions version initially and has been working out the transition ever since. But that was 2 years ago...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I hear "infinite scroll" I think of the way Facebook or Reddit just keeps loading new content as I scroll. But this article is really mostly about the sorry state of advertising on the web, and talks about sites that just have an infinitely long list of chumbox ads at the bottom of the page. No content, just infinite ads. The use of infinite scroll by Facebook or Reddit is controversial in its own right, but this is really a different kind of "infinite scroll" that I didn't even existed, I guess because I use an ad- blocker.

<comment><USER7> Reddit doesn't use infinite scroll. I think you mean Twitter, no?

<comment><USER8> It does, unless you're on old.reddit.com.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but why WOULDN'T you choose to use old.reddit.com ?

<comment><USER10> There's loads of reasons not to! Monks who are trying to exercise their patience skills would find it very useful for example. Those who stress test input devices for peripherals companies will surely be a fan of the much increased need to click to read a thread as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Personally, I find the "infinite scroll" to be one of the most devious forms of control developers and product folks have leveraged against individuals. It's extremely manipulative and extremely easy to build.

It's just so incredibly asymmetric with who it benefits -- and it's clearly not the users.

</comment><comment><USER12> I cannot fathom how the "toe-fungus" ads still make money. Doesn't every internet user, at this point, have an instinctual spam sense? I don't even see the individual ads; they're just noise. I actually assume that even if I were interested in the headlines, clicking the link wouldn't even take me to that content but to malware and scams. But I don't actually know that because, again, they are so blatant that I've never actually clicked one.

The most likely explanation is that it's older people who didn't grow up on the internet and still don't use it that much. If so, I wonder how the industry will change when nobody's left who's gullible enough to click? Will the quality of ads increase, at least, to where they represent real products? Or will scammers just get more creative?

<comment><USER13> Sadly, I have caught myself looking at those ads and clicking them a few times.

The draw is something similar to browsing Reddit. Endless bullshit and nonsense, but titillating and addictive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used to pay for a digital-only subscription to the San Jose Mercury News. Then one day, some ad (or combination thereof) appeared that caused the text to shift every second: On odd-numbered seconds, the text would reflow slightly; on even-numbered seconds, the content would return to 'normal'.

This behavior made the page effectively unreadable. Reader modes didn't exist for me at the time (or I just wasn't aware of them). Reloading would sometimes fix the issue; sometimes not.

The issue began to occur once in every five articles viewed, and I gave up: When my subscription came up for renewal, I threw the notice away.

</comment><comment><USER13> I hated the infinite scroll in Facebook and I abhor it in the new Reddit site.

For one, I cannot react the 'footer' of the page anymore.

In addition to that, there is a definite performance tax due to the loading content.

<comment><USER15> Okay. Did you have any thoughts about the article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Aza Raskin, the inventor of Infinite Scroll, seriously regrets this invention. He is now co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com) and trying to improve the negative sides of tech.

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

<comment><USER17> While the sentiment is admirable, I don't think it's anything to beat yourself up over. History has shown time and again that some inventions will happen when their prerequisites are filled — if he hadn't built it, sooner or later someone else would have. Simultaneous uncoordinated inventions of similar nature throughout history are a good example of this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even this site had a popup that the article dislikes so much!

<comment><USER8> At least they're self-aware:

> There are a few sites that look and work better—the ones that people pay > for, generally, or ones built with the luxurious snowdrift margins of > Medium—but mostly there are sites like this one and others that are even > worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Funny. The site doesn't even work in my installation of Firefox. I can't scroll.....

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I opened it in Firefox, with the usual adblockers and so forth, and couldn't actually scroll the article at all. I switched to Reader View and was able to read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article _really_ should have included pictures and maybe a short GIF. The description is clear to anyone who's run into these day after day, but the visuals would really drive home how badly this type of UX reflects on the web property's brand.

Surprisingly, for an article named "infinite scroll", there was no mention of actual "infinite scroll" mechanisms on sites like Reddit, Quartz and Techcrunch, where scrolling below a a certain point will auto-load the next article or paginate to the next series of posts.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anybody has examples of websites that do this? It would be useful to see this in action.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can't scroll this website _at all_.

<comment><USER24> I also can not scroll this website.

What a failure hahaha

<comment><USER25> It just takes a while for the content to load.</comment></comment></comment>