Hipmunk for the iPhone - here's how we built it - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hipmunk.com/hipmunk-for-iphone-post-mortem <comment><USER2> It's refreshing to see this level of humility from a developer and a cool startup. No one knows everything, and realizing that is the first step to allowing yourself to learn.

Kudos on a sweet app! I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys build next!

Oh, and thanks for sharing! If everyone was more open about the tools they use, I think apps would be a lot better in general.

<comment><USER3> Creating my first iPhone app for a company too as my graduation project, and have very much the same feeling: "when will the catch me". So far so good, but oh how I hate the tools. First time working with OS X and X Code, an some things just suck. For example, Android's location support is 200x better and has native support for loading a KML file as a route. I have to use someones custom class for iPhone, and can't test "significant movement notification" without an iPhone 4 on hand and actually walking a mile...

<comment><USER4> Apple want to keep their developers trim. This is a feature :)

<comment><USER5> "Even our iPad _developers_ are 1/3 slimmer in the new version."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
         From a UX perspective, I'm really pleased with how
         the pinchable, stretchable, draggable time bars came
         out in the application. They feel really good to use.
         But from a development perspective, this is some of
         the stupidest, craziest code I've ever written in my
         life. Don't ask me how I did it because it did it
         entirely the wrong way. Maybe I'll share once I figure
         out the non-stupid approach.

But this is perhaps the most interesting part of the app that you should talk about. I'm okay with seeing the stupid implementation :)

<comment><USER7> I'm insecure enough sharing code I know works. Code I know is _stupid_ is untenable for me. It comes from starting off as a newb and being led down the wrong path by people who'd blog without really knowing they were wrong. So I'd waste my time, or worse, internalize a bad design pattern because I didn't know any better.

Hard to be that guy.

<comment><USER8> > So I'd waste my time, or worse, internalize a bad design pattern because I > didn't know any better.

Maybe. Or maybe someone would point out that you took a wrong path, you'd be embarrassed for a few minutes and learn the better design pattern way faster.

I say this, but it's not something I do. I'm working on it though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just booked a trip to Key West, FL recently. I used KAYAK and throughout the entire process, I was thinking, there must be a better way. What took me nearly two hours a few weeks ago, would have taken me mere minutes on this site. I will not forget this site.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've never heard of Opacity before but this looks pretty awesome. Anyone else used it for iOS or Mac apps and can weigh in on how well it works?

<comment><USER11> We use Opacity for everything, everything. It's fucking fantastic. I'm torn between telling everyone how great it is, and trying to keep it my secret to give me a competitive edge. Way worth it for the expensive version.

Integrate it with Xcode and treat your vector artwork as source -- when you build the project it will spit out all the little PNG files you need at all the different sizes. Your artists just tweak the opacity files, and when you build the PNGs get made. So awesome. We had to buy an extra copy for the CI server, but it was worth it to never again need to sit around and export png files.

Plus, if you need to draw something with Quartz, you can mock it up first in Opacity, and then have it generate the source code for your drawing, which you then integrate into your class. We quickly made classes that implement dynamically blurred drop shadows, customized numeric "badges" of any size, shape and color, and so on, just by drawing the effect we wanted, generating the source code, and combining the drawing code into a custom class. So awesome. Feels like cheating. (You have to work around Quartz's lack of Unicode support, but still.)

<comment><USER7> > Integrate it with Xcode and treat your vector artwork as source -- when you > build the project it will spit out all the little PNG files you need at all > the different sizes

Whoa, really? Badass. How do you set this up? Have a link?

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I didn't come back to this thread yesterday. The link is [http://likethought.com/lockfocus/2008/05/compiling- opacity-i...](http://likethought.com/lockfocus/2008/05/compiling-opacity- images/)

"Opacity includes opacityutil, a command line utility that can convert images between the formats supported by Opacity. You can use this functionality in Xcode to create a Build Rule that will dynamically convert .opacity images in your project to TIFF files (or any other supported format) at compile time."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kudos to the Hipmunk team !! The fact that a talented young developer sought them out with his vision of a product for them as opposed to the safe/usual choices like facebook/Google etc. , speaks volumes for the excitement they have created around their venture.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just wait until there are free candy dispensers all over the office ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great link to Impostor Syndrome. Another thing I have that I didn't know I had.

</comment><comment><USER14> > I have a confession: At first, I didn't get Hipmunk. I mean, I understood > the merits of the interface, I respected the user focus of the site, all of > that was awesome and drew me to the iPhone project.

Danilo: How did you pitch them? Or did they pitch you?

You have mad design skills (Opacity does rock) for a coder. Dangerous!

<comment><USER7> Thanks for kind words. I actually started with Photoshop around age 13, and didn't learn to program until I was 20, so that helped round me out a little bit.

Short version: I wrote a post about Hipmunk that got Adam's attention, then didn't leave him alone until he gave me the gig. Here's the longer story, if you're curious:

<http://blog.hipmunk.com/hipmunk-for-iphoneipod-touch>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Binary plists over the wire? That's a hardcore innovation that I will file away in the back of my head for next time I'm building a backend for a mobile app.

<comment><USER7> All credit to Apple's WWDC 2010 session on building server driven applications. Great stuff in there, grab the video off of iTunes U if you've joined the developer program. Among other things, they break down the performance of various payload formats.

<https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2010/>

.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Post-mortem means after death...not after the fact.

<comment><USER7> The project to build 1.0 _is_ dead.

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/the-project- postmor...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/the-project- postmortem.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why do you tie my flight searches with my UDID and submit it to third parties like flurry?

<comment><USER7> > Why do you tie my flight searches with my UDID and submit it to third > parties like flurry?

We collect the following data points via a single third party tool, namely Flurry. There aren't any others, aside from the obvious booking partners who book your flight at the end of the process.

\- How long is the import process

\- What tasks throw exceptions or otherwise crash the application

\- Which cities are most chosen

\- How far into the future do users most often search

\- Do people bother with flights displayed lower on the screen

\- Do people bother with the alternate booking mechanisms we made

This is useful to both confirm initial hunches on how the app's UX should work and helps direct modifications and enhancements in future versions. Flurry collects UDIDs for a promotional program they do for app discovery but Hipmunk doesn't participate in that.

<comment><USER17> Can you use their tool without submitting my UDID? If not, can I opt out (other than by not using the app)? I like your app, but that is essentially a tracking supercookie.

Actually if I am not mistaken, it is against the app store TOS to submit a UDID to a third party without the user's consent. Apps that use Flurry's agent in particular took heat from Apple for this. This is basically spyware.

[http://www.tuaw.com/2010/06/02/flurry-agrees-to-stop- device-...](http://www.tuaw.com/2010/06/02/flurry-agrees-to-stop-device-data- collection/) <http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=57992>

Really, there is no reason to track activity by UDID for booking a flight.

I am not trying to troll here - I actually love your website. But I really hate spyware!

For your other uses, most reputable apps ask the user if they would like to participate in a customer feedback program, and inform them what will be collected, and allow them to opt out.

<comment><USER18> I believe PrivaCy supports Flurry, if nothing else works: <http://cydia.saurik.com/package/com.saurik.privacy></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fun with Unicode in Swift - <AUTHOR> https://tworingsoft.com/blog/2018/12/10/fun-with-unicode-in-swift.html <comment><USER2> Unicode in identifiers is an exceptionally bad idea, with a miniscule upside and horrible downsides:

1) As the article demonstrates, this allows obfuscation contests in easy mode. Strangely, the author claims:

> _Nor do I think most of these tricks would get by a code review or go > unnoticed using something as simple as syntax coloring._

How would syntax highlighting catch that? Those are valid identifiers! And yes, these "tricks" would almost certainly go unnoticed in a code review, at least when you don't assume that your coworker is maliciously inserting bugs.

2) Even in the absence of malicious intent, Unicode identifiers open the door to bugs and head-scratchers: different characters looking identical, or the same character encoded in different ways.

3) ASCII letters (a-z, A-Z), digits (0-9), and underscore are kind of the lowest common demoninator. When you allow Unicode identifiers, you don't "internationalize" your code, you're doing the exact opposite! If you're using ä, ö, ü, ß in your API, how is a Canadian supposed to easily use it?

<comment><USER3> _Unicode in identifiers is an exceptionally bad idea_

Unicode identifiers can be perfectly well-defined, and many languages have them. The general idea is an identifier can start with any character that has derived property XID_Start, and the remainder can be any characters that have derived property XID_Continue.

 _different characters looking identical, or the same character encoded in different ways_

Follow the recommendation of UAX #31 and normalize identifiers to NFKC prior to comparing them. For example, the ligature variants in the article should not -- if recommendations are followed -- be different identifiers. Here's some Python (3):

        >>> import unicodedata
        >>> raw = ['vpnTrafficPort', 'vpnTrafficPort', 'vpnTrafficPort', 'vpnTrafficPort']
        >>> normalized = set(unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', s) for s in raw)
        >>> normalized
        {'vpnTrafficPort'}

So there wouldn't be a "surprise" lurking in Python -- all four strings are legal identifiers, but all four of them are also the _same_ identifier (because Python applies normalization).

The real difficulty with Unicode identifiers is in places where you really can't avoid Unicode: user inputs. Those who don't read Unicode technical reports are doomed to suffer the moment they build, say, a user-account system that comes into contact with the real world.

 _When you allow Unicode identifiers, you don 't "internationalize" your code_

No, you let other people _localize their code_. We (the tech world) spent decades making everyone else learn English as a prerequisite to learning a programming language. Now we have the ability to lessen that burden and let the non-ASCII world (which does in fact include English!) spend less time learning English and more time writing code. We probably should do that, even if it seems icky to you.

<comment><USER4> So instead of having to learn English as a prerequisite to understand code bases, you propose that we learn a dozen or more different natural languages instead?

Can you imagine what it would be like if every library had to be released in N different translations? Sounds like an exceptionally bad idea. A huge step back for our field.

<comment><USER3> If you take the position that every codebase everywhere must be available to and understood by every programmer everywhere, sure, you have to settle on a common language. Luckily, I don't think anybody takes that position, or at least takes it seriously.

But there are plenty of monolingual dev teams out there whose shared language isn't English and isn't written in ASCII. Why should they be forced to write code in English if nobody who works with it is an English speaker?

I already regularly see people post questions to Stack Overflow and mailing lists and IRC where names of classes and functions and variables are ASCII but not English (i.e., someone writes a class called "Utilisateur", not "User"). Why not let them just use their language fully?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Zalgo-style" function names for dangerous or weird functions is kind of a cute idea.

In dense scientific code there's always been a place for special characters. (apl, anyone?) To the right kind of programmer, using the proper mathematical notation for operations and variables in a function can greatly improve readability and clarity.

Unicode for use in theorem proving languages also has a role — agda comes to mind here.

</comment><comment><USER6> I made a similar post when I actually fixed unicode identifiers for cperl (the perl5 replacement), according to the unicode security recommendations which everybody else besides me and java chose to ignore. Most languages are horribly insecure. But I eventually complained to rust, and they are adopting these recommendations.

[http://perl11.org/blog/unicode- identifiers.html](http://perl11.org/blog/unicode-identifiers.html)

It's not fun, it's a risk.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps non-ASCII characters in anything but strings should simply be banned by Swiftlint.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how much Auto-complete could save you here.</comment>


New start-up hubs challenging Silicon Valley - study - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL5E8MJK6220121120

<comment><USER2> Ironically, the existing people/companies that are already there aside, Silicon Valley (and California in general) is a horrible place to found a tech startup. The cost of living is high and the taxes are high, with the former being an obstacle for bootstrapping a startup, and the latter being an obstacle when your company grows in size. The Democrats got a supermajority in the state House and Senate in the recent elections, so now they can unilaterally raise taxes, with the Republicans basically left powerless. No doubt many people will start to feel the squeeze in coming months as tax rates shoot up.

One of the big advantages of California is the year-round nice weather, but when you're sitting inside in front a computer, that doesn't really matter all that much. Moreover, a tech company, more so than many other types of businesses, can effectively work with people in remote locations.

Unfortunately, this is a problem that can't be solved easily over short time scales. The only hope is that people start realizing you can be "ramen profitable" a lot quicker if you choose to base your startup in, say, Kansas City (and there's always the nice added bonus of super-fast Google Fiber).

<comment><USER3> The Democrats do not have a majority in the House, the Republicans do. And the Democrats do not control enough of the Senate to be immune to the threat of filibuster.

You are contradicting yourself, regardless. You are arguing that higher taxes will kill those seeking to bootstrap companies -- but if people are bootstrapping and have no income, they pay no taxes, and they most certainly aren't being hit by the only tax increases that are now being discussed: those on high earners making over $200k. It doesn't affect them.

Cost of living really doesn't matter that much to tech startups. If it did, everyone would be rushing to rural Nebraska to bootstrap their startup. In reality, you can find cheap rent anywhere, even SV, you just have to compromise on space and housing/location quality.

<comment><USER2> > The Democrats do not have a majority in the House, the Republicans do. And > the Democrats do not control enough of the Senate to be immune to the threat > of filibuster.

Trying reading my post again:

> The Democrats got a supermajority in the _state_ House and Senate

And this:

> You are arguing that higher taxes will kill those seeking to bootstrap > companies

You really need to work on your reading comprehension. Read this again:

> The cost of living is high and the taxes are high, with the former being an > obstacle for bootstrapping a startup, and the latter being an obstacle when > your company grows in size.

It's the high cost of living that will kill bootstrapping companies, not the high taxes.

> Cost of living really doesn't matter that much to tech startups. If it did, > everyone would be rushing to rural Nebraska to bootstrap their startup.

You've made a common logical fallacy. People aren't "rushing to rural Nebraska to bootstrap their startup" because the high cost of living is a pill worth swallowing considering the networking benefits in SV. That is, there's a net benefit to being in SV vs. being in rural Nebraska. However, like I said in my first post, this is not something inherent to SV - it's just a matter of where the people and companies happen to be at the moment.

Moreover, you've resorted to _reductio ad absurdum_ here. I clearly stated in my first post that a good option in the Midwest for founding a startup would be a medium-sized city like Kansas City, not "rural Nebraska".

> In reality, you can find cheap rent anywhere, even SV, you just have to > compromise on space and housing/location quality.

Which means that if you "compromise on space and housing/location quality" in a place with a lower cost of living, you'd get _even cheaper_ housing. Another common logical fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm proud to be a part of a small but growing one in Madison, Wisconsin.

At the end of the day, the nerdy dream I always had was to transcend physical location, so I'm always surprised how passionate others can be about where they physically live.

</comment><comment><USER5> Although this is probably won't be a popular viewpoint, Silicon Valley is likely reaching the end of its glory days. For the past 30 years or so, it has been able to exist as a largely insulated bubble -- mostly because it has been able to flex and grow as the rate of increasing demand started its exponential slope upward. But the reality of today is that demand for technical workers has outpaced SV's ability to grow. Because it _is_ a peninsula, with limited space for growth and housing, the bubble is not infinite. Prosperity generally demands space, and there's just not enough of it here on this bleeding edge.

So, it's inevitable that other places will eventually benefit from the spillover. The questions are: where and how and when? Whatever cities can employ the most forward-thinking civil engineers and planners to literally build the city of tomorrow will be able to create an environment where cost of living coupled with a good cultural and environmental climate make it totally worth it to build a company elsewhere.

<comment><USER6> The success of Silicon Valley isn't limited to the tech workers though, the entire infrastructure of the area is designed for startup success. All the financiers, lawyers, professors, etc. are 'lazy' in the sense that they prefer their companies and investments to be close to where they live.

There is ample supply of tech workers / infrastructure in NYC, Boston, LA, but the list of cities is a short one. There will absolutely be more companies formed outside of the SV area, but there is still plenty of room for growth here as well. There are a half dozen cheap communities in the East Bay which still have low housing costs, plenty of commercial vacancy, access to public transit and are actually a closer commute compared to driving to San Francisco (with Palo Alto as a center-point).

I have personal experience with two similar companies, one in 'Silicon Valley' proper and one in the East Bay. The company in SV had more employees by a factor of 2x, but was paying 15x more in rent for their commercial space! Both were backed by Sand Hill VCs and had professors from Stanford / Berkeley involved in the efforts. This could just be another data point in the "SV is too expensive camp", but it also points to the affordability of nearby areas which haven't seen the same level of expansion yet. Look up commercial / industrial real estate in Newark / Fremont / Hayward / Milpitas, you'll be shocked at how affordable it still is.

You don't need to build cities from the ground-up to have a climate hospitable for investment and venture success, it's much easier to be proximal to where such a place already exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Until recently I lived in San Antonio, TX and over the last year the startup community there has really begun taking off.

Rackspace is aggressively working to build a community there through efforts like Geekdom[1] and 3 Day Startup[2]. Two of the universities (TU and UTSA) are working with Geekdom to build entrepreneurship programs and companies are starting to come out of these efforts.

SA already has a tech community (Rackspace, Denim Group, the massive development groups at USAA, HEB and cyberdefense firms that are doing really cool but unseen stuff) and Geekdom has become the catalyst to draw them all together.

I was there this weekend for 3DS and I'm about to move back to work on some ideas with people I met over the last 72 hours.

1\. <http://geekdom.com/>

2\. <http://sanantonio.3daystartup.org/>

</comment><comment><USER8> The world economy ( the west + china ) is collapsing. Investors are seeking yield frantically. It's not surprising that high-tech is flourishing in this climate. It's also not surprising that high-tech is now being applied to new industries ( bio-informatics ), and that those industries are based in different geographic areas. SV isn't going away, though. Their are socio- cultural issues at play that took generations to build in the Valley, and replication in other places is not happening overnight. There are a lot of places this article could have gone, but didn't and that was sort of disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER9> I often wonder why more small companies don't locate in smaller "lifestyle" cities to facilitate recruiting. I suppose that places like Seattle, Boulder and Salt Lake fall into this category but as someone who just moved from Seattle to rural Montana near Missoula I am constantly surprised at the number of really talented individuals willing to take paycuts to live and work near the mountains.

</comment><comment><USER10> The advantage of the existing hubs is the difference between a continuous vs. discrete labor market.

If you want a Scala + NoSQL + NLP full-stack expert with 10 years production experience with the JVM and 2 years as a product manager, and you want such a person to start in 3 weeks, you can find that in California-- for some price. In Madison, there are still a lot of great people, but not the massive number of technical people that makes it likely that you'll find an ideal match.

If you can't afford any hiring latency and have strict requirements, you need to be in a hub. All that said, I think these grow-fast-or-die efforts are pretty stupid. If something adds genuine value and isn't just trying to first- post some obvious idea, does it really need to grow at 20% per month?

Also, a lot of these work that startups are doing isn't that complicated and doesn't require the level of people they think they need. I hate that social- climbing useless selectivity of needing awesome people to do mediocre work, largely because these startups lie about their intentions and I'm one of those "awesome" (?) people they're looking to court (and then underemploy on their mediocre idea).

The continuous-market effect goes both ways: if your startup goes belly-up in California, you'll have 4 interviews in a week. If you hauled ass out to the Midwest and that happens, you'll probably have to move _again_ for your next opportunity. Also, some cynical realism: it's harder to start a bidding war (which is how most people get their best jobs) in Minnesota.

The rest of the country has quality people and companies, but not the critical mass of them that creates a continuous market. Investors generally aren't comfortable launching a business in a place with a discrete labor market.

I'd love to see a better distribution of opportunity. It'll (a) generate more eligible places to live, and (b) lower the rents for those of us who stay. However, I think that's a really hard problem to solve, because technology has become so specialized that very few regions are big enough to support a continuous labor market.

Honestly, I'm a major fan of the Midwest: a lot of really great people are out there, and they have no idea what they're worth and what they could do in technology. That said, I tend to think the advantage of the hubs is vast. I'd probably move to California myself (as opposed to #2 New York) if it weren't for strong family reasons to stay here.

<comment> daniel-cussen Since when is New York #2?

I thought that, for tech startups, it was, #1. Silicon Valley, #2 Tel Aviv, #3 Boston/Route 128, and then came some sorting of New York, London, Singapore, that triangle in Virginia, whatever city is in the lead in India, etc.

<comment><USER11> Here is an interesting report on different startup hubs. The top few hubs are Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Seattle, NYC, Boston. NYC is #3 in terms of # of startups, but falls behind on metrics such as talent availability, startup support, and "mindset" (how good the founders are.) Worth a read even if you don't agree with the exact methodology.

[http://cdn2.blog.digital.telefonica.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-...](http://cdn2.blog.digital.telefonica.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/11/Startup-Ecosystem-Report2012.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to Practice SQL - <AUTHOR> Hi,<p>I just completed a master's in data analytics and trying to improve my SQL skills and looking for resources to improve it (I already completed Leetcode and HackerRank). Are there any resources where I can practice writing complex SQL. <comment><USER2> If you have done so many I think the next stop is to get a job. Plus data analytics usually don't require a huge amount of sql imo.</comment>


Benchmarking boot latency on x86 - <AUTHOR> http://benyossef.com/benchmarking-boot-latency-on-x86/ <comment><USER2> This article makes the assumption that the TSC is zero at power on and counts monotonically from then on. The problem is that BIOS vendors know this and sidings try to game it. I have a machine in which it appears that the BIOS resets the TSC partway through POST, probably to improve benchmarks.

(I can tell this is happening because they only reset it on one core, which breaks all kinds of things.)

<comment><USER3> I remember the advice to disable the HPET when Ryzen was released, which also reminds me of this: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/6/3/4](https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/6/3/4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Generally speaking, POST will dominate over OS boot time on modern server hardware. POST is on the order of minutes, _tens of minutes_ for machines with terabytes of memory . . . and that's with the "fast boot" option selected.

I fondly remember the days of desktop systems with their OSes in ROM. You could do "Reset, user interface" about as fast as you could say the words. The whole POST stack has lost its way.

<comment><USER5> The sooner we can get rid of both legy BIOS and EFI in favor of Coreboot or something like it, the better. My son's x86 based Chromebook boots to a login screen from cold power off in just a few seconds, and I've always attributed it to using Coreboot rather than BIOS.

I mostly don't care about boot times (which is saying a lot, as I do FreeBSD kernel development and reboot server class systems dozens of times a day sometimes), that's just a minor benefit of Coreboot. The legacy nature of BIOS and the complexity of EFI both freak me out from a security / stability point of view. And don't even get me started on the crappy server board vendor's java kvm / impi tools. Sigh. The whole crappy ecosystem is due for a disruption.</comment></comment>


Microsoft will patch Windows 10 after NSA told it about a major vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/microsoft-to-patch-windows-10-after-nsa-finds-vulnerability.html <comment><USER2> crypt32.dll

>Update, Jan. 14, 9:20 a.m. ET: The NSA's Neuberger said in a media call this morning that the agency did indeed report this vulnerability to Microsoft, and that this was the first time Microsoft will have credited NSA for reporting a security flaw. Neuberger said NSA researchers discovered the bug in their own research, and that Microsoft's advisory later today will state that Microsoft has seen no active exploitation of it yet.

>According to the NSA, the problem exists in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. Asked why the NSA was focusing on this particular vulnerability, Neuberger said the concern was that it "makes trust vulnerable." The agency declined to say when it discovered the flaw, and that it would wait until Microsoft releases a patch for it later today before discussing further details of the vulnerability.

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/01/cryptic-rumblings- ahead-...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/01/cryptic-rumblings-ahead-of- first-2020-patch-tuesday/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like another ASN1 parser vulnerability.

[https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jan/14/2002234275/-1/-1/0/CSA...](https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jan/14/2002234275/-1/-1/0/CSA- WINDOWS-10-CRYPT-LIB-20190114.PDF)

Nope, even worse. They apparently didn't check the base point: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047573)</comment>


Davos 2015: Banks call for free rein to fight cyber crime - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d94e855c-a209-11e4-bbb8-00144feab7de.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, behind register wall. If that is bad etiquette, I'll remove this.</comment>


Show HN: Soup to nuts e-commerce side project in 10 days - <AUTHOR> https://trumpdicks.com <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote about the experience and did all the management in trello. I'm looking forward to sharing more about how it was made.

I got all the legal, software, ops, and artwork done in 10 days. It was quite a whirlwind.

<comment><USER2> Where did you write about the experience?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I wasn't clear there. It's all in draft form but I wrote every day with the intention of not losing detail. I will publish those posts as I edit them. Inauguration is right around the corner and I have to keep up with that at the moment.</comment></comment></comment>


A re-instatement of Glass-Steagall - <AUTHOR> http://market-ticker.org/archives/1710-Now-Were-Talking!-Glass-Steagall.html <comment><USER2> According to this guy, there are no downsides to a policy that will have the _side effect_ of breaking up all of America's largest financial institutions.

In his closing he says that passing this measure will "usher in a productive explosion in America that we have not seen in the last 50 years."

The last 50 years have already seen the largest sustained economic expansion in all of human history. Is that not good enough somehow?

I want my ten minutes back.

<comment><USER3> I know it is such a great thing that we have all these large financial institutions. You know because they are so large they become too large to fail, and then we get to subsidise them with out tax dollars. Who would want to end that?

<comment><USER4> i seems like your beef with these companies is that we're subsidizing them.

so is the problem the institutions that are asking for money? or our politicians that are giving them money?

<comment><USER5> Well, the institutions can hold the world economy to ransom, so not giving them money would be cutting off our nose to spite ourselves.

Better not to have such powerful and important banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the article: _...will prevent the economic meltdown we are in the middle of from ever happening again..by making it impossible for those banks with access to the sovereign's fractional reserve privilege to speculate with it._

The author doesn't seem to realize that Glass-Steagall won't prevent commercial banks from making bad home loans.

From the article: _Lending went to finance productive assets (e.g. factories, machines, tractors, combines, etc) instead of financial speculation as it had in the 1920s._

Instead of speculating in "finance", lending went to speculate in "productive assets" like equities and bonds.

Seriously, what is this tripe doing on HN?

<comment><USER3> Glass-Steagall will definitely prevent what happened in the current housing crisis. The bubble happened because banks were lending money for homes but were not keeping the loans. Instead they were packaging the loans as securities and selling the securities to third party investors. Thus, the banks did not need to worry that the loans were good, they just needed to worry the loans looked ok to the rating agencies at the time of sale of the securities. The third party investors had no idea who the borrowers were or how trustworthy they were, they just trusted the rating agencies. And the rating agencies turned out to be either stupid or corrupt or both.

This would not have been possible with Glass-Steagall in force. Banks can still make loans but they could not securitize or sell the loans. They had to keep the loans on their books. This means the institutions and even individual people that made the loans would be responsible that they got paid back. Furthermore, all loans that are on the books would be regularly examined by banking examiners from the FDIC. When securitizing the loans, banks mostly avoided examination, on the grounds that they got their money for the loans so it does not matter much whether the loans perform or not.

Now it cannot be guaranteed that Glass-Steagall will prevent bubbles in general, but it is certain that what happened last time could not possibly happen with Glass Steagall in effect.

Regarding your second statement, I think you are confused about it again. When Glass Steagall was in effect regular commercial banks were rather limited as to the securities they could purchase. I believe they were allowed to make only 10 percent of their income from securities. They had to make most of their money by making loans directly to borrowers, instead of trading securities. That is what the article is referring to.

<comment><USER6> _The bubble happened because banks were lending money for homes but were not keeping the loans....This would not have been possible with Glass-Steagall in force._

False. This happened all the time with Glass-Steagall in force. Glass Steagall was repealed in 1999, mortgage backed securities were issued and sold long before then. Many commercial banks traded MBS under Glass-Steagall as a way of reducing their risk; in fact regulatory bodies encouraged them to do this.

You are incorrectly conflating many activities, and assuming Glass-Steagall prevents all of them.

As for my second statement, I'm mocking the article's silly idea that investing in "productive assets" is somehow different from "financial speculation." I'm not making any claims about what percentage of their assets they would speculate with (either in the form of equities or bonds).

<comment><USER3> "False. This happened all the time with Glass-Steagall in force. Glass Steagall was repealed in 1999, mortgage backed securities were issued and sold long before then. Many commercial banks traded MBS under Glass-Steagall as a way of reducing their risk; in fact regulatory bodies encouraged them to do this."

We are really getting into details here. This was technically partially true, because Glass Steagall was being progressively watered down long before it was actually repealed. So commercial banks were allowed to underwrite some securities but again there were limits as to how much they could do. I think the limit started at 5% of revenue and then progressively expanded to 25% as GS was being further watered down. But I doubt banks would have been allowed to create the huge amounts of mortgage backed securities they did after the repeal, even in the most watered down version of GS. Also, when the original article argued for the reinstation of Glass Steagall they probably argued for it in its original non-watered down version.

As to your second statement, you said "Instead of speculating in "finance", lending went to speculate in "productive assets" like equities and bonds." To me this means that you misunderstood what the original article was trying to say. By productive assets the original article meant direct loans to businesses and individuals instead of financial instruments.

<comment><USER6> Glass-Steagall prevented banks from running a trading desk, not from securitizing and selling their loans. You are simply mistaken as to what the law actually means.

 _By productive assets the original article meant direct loans to businesses and individuals instead of financial instruments._

A direct loan to a business is, by definition, speculating on a corporate bond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I heard about Glass-Steagall last month on NPR via Robert Reich ([http://marketplace.publicradio.org//display/web/2009/11/04/p...](http://marketplace.publicradio.org//display/web/2009/11/04/pm- reich/?refid=0&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+APM_Marketplace+%28APM%3A+Marketplace%29))

It sounds like a better approach then many regulations that lead to very little.

<comment><USER8> This Robert Reich?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opxuUj6vFa4>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1TkLgfinE>

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, even if I do agree with you that Robert Reich is a racist, that is an _ad hominem_ argument and I don't see how his racism would have a strong influence on his view of the Glass-Steagall Act.

<comment><USER10> If you think it's racist then you must have skipped the history lesson on The New Deal whereby, in an effort to secure the votes necessary, they (House/Senate) basically had to promise key members that the recovery would touch the "right" people. The right people in this case being white males. Blacks, Asians, and Women of all races were largely cut out of the New Deal unless hiring them was a necessity due to lack of able-bodied white men.

Whenever economists speak of jobs programs for everyone, not just "white male construction workers", this is what they're eluding to.

<comment><USER9> Thank you, I did not know that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems kind of like closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out (and lions have eaten the horse). Just an empty barn full of taxpayers' money that is not being lent out. A case of the fox watching the henhouse and we taxpayers seem to be the chickens.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Act>

<comment><USER7> The barn door was closed with this act until 1999 when it was repealed. How is that "closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out"?

<comment><USER11> Reinstating it now is like closing the door. The damage has already been done, the system has been raped and pillaged already. Closing the door will not fix the damage.

Closing the door is a _Paraphrase_.

Definition: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrase>

<comment><USER11> I agree with you Tome, I am not saying it is bad, just that it was allowed to happen and that is where the problem is. Now we taxpayers have to pay those who did this with our earnings after they knowingly shot the system down in flames.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> this entire article is just conclusory. why will these things happen? he doesn't give any evidence..</comment>


Surviving Jonestown - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/10/jonestown-massacre-first-person-speier-ryan-jones-222222 <comment><USER2> I still can't imagine or comprehend what kind of mental illness, evil coercion, or both, is needed for a mother to murder her own 1 year old child.

Not being an American, I first learned about Jonestown pretty recently, but I keep returning to sources about it and I simply can't comprehend it. What causes people do this? Why did _Jones_ do this? How can someone like that enjoy political support? Does anything like this still happen? Why? Where?

The author of this article takes care to point out that it was mass murder, not mass suicide. I "understand" mass murder for personal gain, or because of blind racism, or out of desperation (eg access to food), or as defense against (perceived) threats. But what would cause one to murder their own community and then themselves? What's in it for, well, anyone? I mean, American high school shootings, 9-11, or Anders Breivik's terror attack make a lot more "sense" to me than the Jonestown story.

Does anyone here, maybe someone older than me, understand this? What was the world like in that time, that something could come to this?

<comment><USER3> Understanding that question "How could this happen?" is something that will help you understand more about the world, and may change your opinion of people whom you think are crazy.

The key is that humans act on their _beliefs_. Which is to say if you believe X, then the action required for situation Y is Q. Rather than be abstract about it though lets put wrap some reality around it.

If you believe your house will be destroyed in the event of a hurricane, then the action required when it is threatened is to _evacuate_.

Conversely, if you believe your house will survive a hurricane, then the action required when it is threatened is the _shelter in place_.

Two people, each holding an opposite belief about the threat to the house, will come to two very different conclusions.

Now if you layer in a belief about evacuation, where one believes that people are killed when they try to evacuate with everyone else, and one who believes that people who evacuate survive these disasters. You can set up a perfect conflict between these two people.

Person A, thinks both their their home will survive and that evacuation will kill you.

Person B, thinks that the house will be destroyed and that evacuation will save you.

Here is the kicker, if you can put the right sets of beliefs into a person you can make them do anything you want, even when it is against their own self interest. We call it things like brain washing or propaganda or "fake news" but it is all the same stuff.

It is possible to define a set of beliefs for you where you think that killing yourself and your children is the correct (or even only) choice available to you.

What is worse, deprogramming people is super hard. They have these beliefs, they have been reinforced by some mechanism, and part of that reinforcement are a layer of beliefs that prevent alternate ideas from seeping in.

Immigration is a canonical example. Characterize immigrants as murderers, thieves, and rapists, show an imminent threat of "invaders", and convince people that the other side wants to just let these people waltz into the country without restriction.

The beliefs are all carefully constructed to interlock such that people who have adopted those beliefs will take action to insure the current ruling party is kept in power in order to keep them safe.

The Nazis used this, Stalin did too, the Chinese, and now the Republican Party have all adopted this technique of constructing a belief system around immigration and "the other" that incentivizes people to act against their self interest (or perhaps more accurately to convince them their self interest is served by acting in the way the party wants them to act.)

Jim Jones did this by convincing people that he was a prophet and in touch with God. That he had a clearer view of what was happening in the spiritual world, and could advise people how to act in order to maximize their success in the afterlife. They believed that so strongly that when he told them they needed to die to move on, they considered that a reasonable next step.

Edit: One of the more interesting aspects of Jim Jones' ministry for me was how people responded when faced with the reality that they were in a cult. There is an interview of some members from one of the documentaries where the members get angry at the _interviewer_ who is pointing out inconsistencies and risks. Rather than challenge the beliefs with the source, they lashed out at some poor reporter who was pointing things out to them. No one thought to ask these folks if they would rather feel foolish at having believed something that wasn't true, or be dead. Of course at the time they didn't realize their beliefs would get them killed exactly. In my mind that is a real tragedy, one warped leader leading all of these people to a place where their energy, and contribution served only a twisted need for loyalty and power.

<comment><USER4> I think it's more that _every_ group tends to make some other group "the other" or the out-group. The current US progressive/leftist's out-group are conservatives/Republicans.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree with your statement. Every group layers its members in a self sustaining belief system that calls on it to reject other groups and be loyal to the 'home' group. Whether it is democrats vilifying republicans, republicans vilifying democrats, white supremacists vilifying non-whites, poor vilifying the rich, the christians vilifying the muslems, Etc. It goes on and on and on.

I hope (clearly over optimistically :-) that once people can understand the mechanism by which they are manipulated they can become a bit more critical about what they choose to believe and how they come to that belief. Every time I've found myself in what seems like an irreconcilable difference of opinion, when we've been able to break that down into what we believe and why, we can see exactly why we disagree.

I find it helps me to be more empathic to different points of view. Some people find it destabilizing and threatening clearly.

<comment><USER5> That is an oversimplification to the point of absurdity. People generally think in terms of us, bystanders, or enemy. Democrats and Republicans both view Canada as a mostly neutral party.

Further, groups can shift between those states based on context. What's going on when propaganda vilifies a group is context is being assumed.

<comment><USER3> What part of 'that' is an oversimplification?

Consider the case of Edgar Welch, father of two[1]. On one fateful day in 2016, Edgar drove to Washington DC _to save children_ who were being exploited at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. Who wouldn't try to save innocent children from an abusive situation when authorities refuse to act? Anyone who is a parent with a sense of duty, that is who. And yet for Edgar, his actions which made perfect sense, _given what he believed to be true_ , turned out to be not only unwarranted but dangerous to patrons at the restaurant.

The only difference about Edgar, who up until then was just an average community member in an average community, was that he _believed_ something that wasn't actually true. Even Edgar realized that his beliefs were misplaced, once it was clear there was no way the restaurant could have been participating in the activity he believed was going on there.

Your comment talks about groups, but I was talking about individuals. And the original comment was how could individuals at Jonestown kill their own children?

My assertion, and Edgar is but one example, all of Jim Jones' congregation is another, is that if you can make an individual believe something, you can cause them to act against their own self interest, even to the point of murder. This is true even when that person is otherwise free of mental illness or emotional disorders.

I don't see the over simplification aspect. Manipulating people through there beliefs is something hypnotists do every day, whether it is to quit smoking or to cluck like a chicken at a Las Vegas show it is a well understood part of human nature.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet- ping...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet-ping-pong- pizza-shooting-fake-news-consequences.html)

<comment><USER5> > What part of that is an over simplification?

Because it's really not about people it's about aspects of people.

Let's say Sam is a Packers fan. Now Bob is a member of the Packers football team so on Sunday their part of the same in group.

But, on Election Day Sam is a Dem and Bob a Republican so the must fight.

But their both Americans who are part of the army reserve, so they are brothers in arms willing to risk their lives for each other.

But, they are part of different faiths, and ...

So, this vilification is about context. The football team you need to beat today, may need to beat some other team next week to get you into the playoffs etc etc.

<comment><USER3> Got it. We are talking about different things.

In your example with Sam and Bob, I see two people who are in different groups and can have identical (or highly coherent) belief systems.

If you want to split Sam and Bob up so that they won't be friends any more and they will hate each other, you do that by twisting their beliefs.

First one might suggest that members of Sam's faith, while in the military, were kept from the riskest parts of combat because the military. Then you convince Bob that anyone who plays football is just asking for CTE and that any friend you have is going to turn into a raging monster one of these days, and then you convince Sam, that Bob and others in his religous sect are perverting American politics to keep people like Sam from achieving similar level of success. And you convince Bob that it is Sam "and people like him" who are responsible for the cost of getting a new car or the reason jobs have left the area.

The next thing you know, Sam and Bob hate each other.

My point is that this can be done by carefully setting up what Sam and Bob believe, regardless of what groups they belong to. There are examples all around us today of families that have gone from groups of like minded people to separate camps, lifelong friends that one can no longer talk to.

This is Propaganda, this is Brain Washing, this is the corruption of a group through alternative belief systems.

And its the topic at hand, "Surviving Jonestown".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like the least I can do to respect the memories of those murdered is to, as Speier suggests, banish "drink the koolaid" from my lexicon. Used far too much in tech culture and simply isn't necessary.

<comment><USER7> I bet most people have no clue where this is coming from. It's another weird thing like "skinning the cat".

<comment><USER8> I'd always assumed it came from kool aid being some terrible cheap drink mix that needed you to hold your nose to tolerate. Only heard of Jonestown and it being the origin quite recently.

More than one way to skin a cat has more jokey roots, that it's a shame haven't survived, becoming just the bland intro we now use without the punchline.

<comment><USER9> Kool-Aid isn't that bad...

<comment><USER8> Never seen it sold anywhere so haven't ever tried it. Only ever seen it on US tv and movies. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was surprised to learn that Harvey Milk was one of Jones' strongest supporters. The article touches on this but doesn't go into it. I ran across it in a different article, which is a bit strident, but it's still interesting to read a different side of the story:

[https://home.isi.org/jim-jones-harvey-milk](https://home.isi.org/jim-jones- harvey-milk)

Milk was assassinated only 9 days after the massacre.

</comment><comment><USER11> For people wondering why people in cults do appearingly 'abnormal' things, there's science to this madness.

One is escalation of deviant behavior. Which means over long periods of time behavior slowly becomes deviant after past behaviors become normalized.

So no, people dont just join a cult on day 1 and on day 2 they kill themselves. It's a slow ramp up. It might start with singing and songs, or lectures about the after life. It might then escalate to giving everything up to the leader. Like money, possessions, etc. It then might lead to abnormal norms like dressing up and or acting out sexual fantasies that at first seemed a little strange but over time normalizes. By the end of a 3 year run you can have all kinds of horrific acts that appear completely normal to people on the inside but horrible to outsiders because we didnt come along for the ride.

I can dig up my college notes and books if anyone is interested.

</comment><comment><USER12> I understood his point to be, to reject the notion that it was really a mass suicide, but instead he argues it was a mass murder with only a minority willingly committing suicide. Its obviously an understandable viewpoint, the idea that of course you can't possibly make hundreds of people kill themselves willingly, that this would be impossible, but to me it seems more like a denial of human nature that is actually unhelpful in preventing those types of atrocities in the future. Its much more beneficial to try to understand how far the human mind can be twisted by blind faith, for even good people to do incredibly horrific things.

(Of course its proven that there was murder involved, but I still think we should recognize it as the mass suicide it was).

<comment><USER13> It isn't wishful thinking from Speier; there are a number of survivors who can attest that this is what happened. And how would many of them actually know that they were drinking poison, when there were several rehearsals beforehand that jones explained as tests of faith?

<comment><USER14> There's an audio recording of the incident from nearly start to finish[1]. If you listen to it, it's pretty clear people were aware of what was happening and only a minority were against it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peoples_Temple_Cult_Death...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peoples_Temple_Cult_Death_Tape_Q042.ogg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of my favorite talks of Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series is by the author of this article:

[https://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcast/overcoming-adversity- an...](https://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcast/overcoming-adversity-and-taking- risks/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Jonestown and the like are such tragic events. I feel like it's oddly appropriate to honor them in the same way I choose to honor the collective memory of veterans. Remebering them as a group of individuals with their own convictions rational or irrational, weak or strong, citizen or foreign. Without attempting to prescribe morals onto any of them in hubris. I honor the value of their lives spent, by blindly stumbling in a slightly less costly trajectory towards a maxima. Knowing the tools I use to give me hope in this journey—liberty and justice—were won with a terrifying cost.

</comment><comment><USER17> The true-crime podcast Casefile recently released a three-part story on Jonestown.

I've watched a few documentaries and read a few articles about Jonestown, but the Casefile story was by far the best I've come across, because it's the first that properly conveys that the event was really not a mass suicide, but rather a mass murder for the vast majority of victims.

[https://casefilepodcast.com/case-60-jonestown- part-1/](https://casefilepodcast.com/case-60-jonestown-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Just heard a very relevant Podcast called Cultish that digs into the thinking, teaching, strategies, and consequences behind a lot of these cults. The latest episode explores Jim Jones and Jamestown.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/cultish/id1440854210](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/cultish/id1440854210)</comment>


Ask Jason Fried: Do you angel invest even though 37S would not take? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed in some SEC filings from Groupon that Jason Fried is one of the investors.
Assuming that it is you, brilliant investment by the way, how do you resolve that dichotomy within yourself?
I am not trying to bash you, but am seriously curious.
You guys are famous for shunning investors, and encouraging startups to not take investments and to live within the constraints.
So, given that it is you that invested in Groupon, how do you reconcile what you say - with your financial interests? What is your rational?
I hope you don't take offense to this, but I would be interested to hear what you have to say. <comment><USER2> DHH: "Jason is a member of the board. He didn't get any money off the table at Groupon nor does he call their shots."

<https://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/22015349629128704>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those interested, this is the SEC filing I saw: [http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/00014902811000000...](http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/000149028110000002/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml)

By the way, I am assuming that you invested - although now that I read it over, I realize it could just be an advisory role where you got equity that way. But even then, you aren't a fan of giving away your own equity, so the question still applies - how do you reconcile the two?</comment>


Nuclear's next generation - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15048703 <comment><USER2> One form of _very high temperature reactor_ , the pebble bed reactor, was theorized in the 1950s and has been under development at various locations for more than a decade -- China begins commercial construction this year.

PBRs are one of several _inherently safe_ designs wherein shutoff of circulating coolant raises core temperature and natural processes serve to choke criticality.

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

<comment><USER3> The pebble bed reactor has inherently safe features concerning loss of coolant, but it is not inherently safe: There are other sever accidents not known in conventional reactors, like graphite fire (as it happened in Chernobyl, too) and water ingress into the core with subsequent explosions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another newer technology to keep an eye on: plasma gasification (<http://www.slate.com/id/2181083/>).

Although it produces paltry amounts of energy compared to nuclear facilities, it's a neat solution to the problem of waste management, capable of handling low-grade nuclear waste.

</comment><comment><USER5> The current reactor designs are safe enough, let's build them now. Debating the pros and cons of advanced designs is dumb and accepts the enviros false claim that current BWR or PWR light water reactors are "unsafe". Moreover, significant real-world safety comes from operational experience on a fleet of the same or similar designs. It would be foolish to throw away 50 years of knowledge and experience on light water reactors to start over on sodium, fluoride, pebble-bed, etc.

<comment><USER6> It's also about efficiency. Nuclear power plants regularly live beyond their designed lifespan of 30-40 years. If a new reactor can be built with 45% efficiency rather that the 33% of existing light water reactors get, that alone will justify the delay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> u.s. nuclear reactors have always been safe: if a loss of coolant failure occurs the reaction is designed to slow down rather than speed up soviet cheronobyl style.

the concern is what to do with all the junk from processing\using fuel rods and depleted uranium besides dumping it on Iraqis via munitions.

<comment> bjelkeman-again That doesn't always seem to work though: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident>

<comment><USER8> >In the aftermath of the accident, investigations focused on the amount of radiation released by the accident. According to the American Nuclear Society, using the official radiation emission figures, "The average radiation dose to people living within ten miles of the plant was eight millirem, and no more than 100 millirem to any single individual. Eight millirem is about equal to a chest X-ray, and 100 millirem is about a third of the average background level of radiation received by US residents in a year."[31][52]

Read a bit closer

<comment><USER9> IIRC the figures on TMI (not broken down into phantom per-capita exposures but to the environment) included millions of Curies released into the environment. Some credible researchers have found evidence that figure may be 10 to 100 times too small.

Not surprising; with all the money involved, the science gets 'adjusted'. The industry can afford the best PR.

<comment><USER8> I think the per-capita exposures figure was simply to give a sense of scale not to obscure the figures. Do you have a source that backs that claim?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a fan of liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR). The prevalence of Thorium is a big positive and the ability to process out existing nuclear waste is a tremendous boon.

We're not that far away from commercializing LFTR. It's a shame we can't find more research funds.

</comment><comment><USER11> I like the sodium fast reactor: low pressure, moderate temperature, sodium is dirt cheap, high burn-up of non-uranium/plutonium products ("waste"), and plutonium need never be separated from other reaction products.

The article doesn't say, but because molten salt reactors use liquid fuel, they release the radioactive xenon gas produced by uranium fission. (In fact this is sold as a benefit, since xenon absorbs neutrons better used for the chain reaction.) Xenon is a noble gas and therefore volatile, so the reactor will need strenuous containment measures. Loss of the gas seal would result in significant radioactivity release.

Helium-cooled reactors may be constrained by shortages of helium, which is rather rare and difficult to extract on Earth. You'd hope that government program managers would have worked out the logistics of this, but they tend to not see things that would get their funding cut. (Argon is plentiful but might not be a substitute because it reacts with neutrons a lot more than helium does.)

<comment><USER12> > Xenon is a noble gas and therefore volatile

This must be some definition of "volatile" I'm not familiar with.

<comment><USER11> Evaporating easily. Xenon boils at -108 deg. C. Given the chance, it would tend to rapidly escape from liquid fuel at reactor temperatures.

<comment><USER13> We're probably both thinking of "prone to explode" vs. "prone to evaporate".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like the idea, as long as it's very far away away from my house.

<comment><USER15> As the other poster said, it's better than living next to a coal burning plant. The coal burning plant would actually release more radioactive material into the environment than a nuclear power plant would.

<comment><USER16> I've heard this before, but is there any reason to think that the issue goes beyond the fact that CO2 has a higher natural level of radiation than H2O?

<comment><USER7> incomplete combustion\plenty of other stuff in the ground in it(heavy metals etc.). The smoke is not just CO2.

Plus " sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) are the primary causes of acid rain. In the US, About 2/3 of all SO2 and 1/4 of all NOx comes from electric power generation that relies on burning fossil fuels like coal." [http://www.policyalmanac.org/environment/archive/acid_rain.s...](http://www.policyalmanac.org/environment/archive/acid_rain.shtml)

and acid rain causes a number of environmental problems.

<comment> bjelkeman-again NOx also creates low level ozon when it breaks down, which has a number of nasty environmental and health side effects as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Then the pro-slavery guy wrote a letter to the editor - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/they-wanted-to-hear-their-readers-opinions-then-the-pro-slavery-guy-wrote-a-letter-to-the-editor/2020/07/17/5208bd08-bf9d-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8_story.html <comment><USER2> Paywall.</comment>


Astronomers Creep Up to the Edge of the Milky Way's Black Hole - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/astronomers-creep-up-to-the-edge-of-the-milky-ways-black-hole-20181030/ <comment><USER2> This brings to my mind Isaac Arthur's lecture "Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars" [1]. He posits that a Kardashev Scale 3 civilization might use a galactic black hole to survive 10^100 entropic years of what he calls the "Black Hole Epoch". Hearing about this possible giant blob of plasma orbiting our galactic black hole makes me wonder if he and his team can come up with plausible explanations that the plasma is actually some construct of such a civilization, like perhaps a "construction site generator" as they're building their "bunker against entropic time" amongst the black hole.

The really neat part of the lecture is towards the end, in his description of time winding down into thermodynamic equilibirum, a Boltzmann Brain fluctuating out of the equilibrium's randomness, and restarting the universe with another Big Bang. That's fascinatingly close to universe origin stories in Abrahamic religions, and echoes Hindu religious cosmological cyclicality. One aspect I didn't see touched upon is the possibility that our universe and we are simulations inside that Boltzmann Brain. And then there are the arguments that we do _not_ want Boltzmann Brains [2].

Now if only the religious adherents in all our nations duking it out against other humans for not having the "right" religion could turn their cognitive surplus (poured into their religion) outwards to helping illuminate more upon these near-metaphysical physics challenges, we might actually get somewhere. After all, our best guess at the moment is we're halfway out of time in the universe.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk)

[2] [http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/08/22/the- higg...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/08/22/the-higgs-boson- vs-boltzmann-brains/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The title would be a great sentence to test the quality of machine translation.

<comment><USER4> "Astronomen schleichen sich bis an den Rand des Schwarzen Lochs der Milchstraße"

Perfect german translation.

<comment><USER5> A decent translation, but maybe not quite idiomatic. Herantasten or annähern instead of schleichen feel more appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The strawberry seed apparent size comparison stopped me cold. That's incredibly tiny, and I'm in complete awe at this feat of humanity.

<comment><USER7> It's not the size of something that makes it visible, but its brightness. Without actually doing the calculations, I'd bet there are stars you can see with your naked eye that are similar in apparent size or even smaller. In order to see detail, you'd need a lot of magnification. But your eye or a camera are able to detect that "something" is there due to the fact that there a lot of photons coming from that direction. The article talks about them observing dips in brightness, so they were probably just looking at a single pixel, or a handful of pixels at best.

<comment><USER6> They described seeing a change in position at that scale. Brightness is one thing, but detecting an angular change like that is mind boggling.

It feels like you'd have to start compensating for things like plate tectonics and daily variation in the earths rotation due to melting glaciers to get that kind of accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Direct link to paper:

[https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/forth/aa34294-18.pdf](https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/forth/aa34294-18.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> > _Astronomers call it Sagittarius A_ * _(pronounced "A-star")._

Why do astronomers call the black hole "A Star" when they know better than anyone else that it's not a star, but a black hole?

Why don't we call it "Sagittarius A-black hole"?

<comment><USER10> The asterisk has nothing to do with indicating it is a star.

> The name Sgr A* was coined by Brown in a 1982 paper because the radio source > was "exciting", and excited states of atoms are denoted with asterisks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*)</comment></comment>


You may be powerless to stop a drone from hovering over your own yard - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/13/you-may-be-powerless-to-stop-a-drone-from-hovering-over-your-own-yard/ <comment><USER2> My yard, should I decide a drone is a bother, might just become sort of a hazard. Odd failures here and there.</comment>


Be a Man and Stand Up for Gender Equality - <AUTHOR> http://thomasbell.co.uk/2013/12/09/be-a-man-and-stand-up-for-gender-equality/ <comment><USER3> _How any company can expect to build a sustainable long-term business when not one of their 14 Partners /Advisors is female is beyond me._

This piece seems... I don't know the right word for it. It's not reverse sexism. But anyway, even if the world was completely un-sexist and genders were perfectly equal, would we not expect simply due to chance to see _some_ boards with 14 members of only one gender? So while it is conspicuous this particular board is all-male, how can we say a business cannot possibly be viable with only one gender on the board?

<comment><USER4> 14/14 company partners were male. They claimed to support diversity within their organization.

The probability that the "supportive of diversity" claim is true and that the make up of the board is all male by random chance is quite small (naively, 1/(2^14) ).

<comment><USER3> I clearly made my point extremely poorly. I am not, in any way whatsoever, making ANY POINT about the board of the company the author applied to. I am SPECIFICALLY addressing his assertion that a board must have women for the company to be successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > This is especially surprising considering that many of their partners are > ex-Accenture, a company that in my experience placed a strong emphasis on > recruiting and promoting female talent at the highest levels.

The minute someone throws out Accenture as a positive example of how to run a business is the minute they lose their own credibility. It turns out it's easy to hire whoever you want if competence is not a requirement. Otherwise, if you hire in a field where most qualified candidiates are men, your employees will be predominantly men.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ignoring your unfair generalisations about Accenture employees, I made no assertion that Accenture as a whole was a good way to run a business.

In the 3 years I worked there, there was a lot that I disagreed with, but one thing they did well was their effort to drive towards greater gender equality.

[edit typo]

<comment><USER5> That's not too surprising, as that's the kind of thing that impresses politicians and MBA's. In the real world, where delivering results is more important than checking off political boxes, tech companies have to work extremely hard just to hire the best people, so that's not a luxury they have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I agree that it would be awesome to see more women represented in companies, particularly at higher levels of management, I'm not sure this post makes sense to me.

If one of those top management executives were female, what makes them different from the "TOKEN FEMALE" on the other associate-level pages? Is it different if there are two women in C-level positions? Where do you draw the line between women being powerful in their own right vs simply TOKEN FEMALES on a team?

(Note: I'm all for hiring women, and I encourage my friends (male and female) to take up programming, and I do my best to help them get jobs in the industry. But this guy's argument just strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of feminism and what that means.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Based on my corporate experience, there is normaly at least one department that is the opposite of IT in terms of gender balance - Human Resources.

I wonder if people women in Human Resources are running campaigns to recruit more men into their departments?

<comment><USER5> Of course not. Feminists will tell you this with a straight face: it's only sexism if it disadvantages women.

That's why feminists only started caring about STEM when it became high- status. Feminists are glad to let men do all the low-status shit jobs, like garbage collection or construction or working in oil fields, as long as such work remains low-status. 20 years ago, programming was low status and women were obsessed with becoming doctors and lawyers because medicine and law were very high status. 20 years from now there will be lots of women programmers just like there are lots of women doctors and lawyers today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> By the title I expected a piece of satire.

Titling an article about sexism with 'Be a Man' probably is not the best way to go about advocating equality.

<comment><AUTHOR> One might even suggest that the title is at once playful, satirical, arresting, and a little ironic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is extremely dangerous and often gives the opposite effect. An example is situation with universities in Sweden. There was a parity for all degrees. As a result, lots of women didn't get to uni because 50% was reserved for male, even though they had higher grades. They filled a law suit and won (European Court of Human Rights).

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't tell me what to do. Tell me why I should.

<comment><USER4> There are plenty of reasons why you should care about gender diversity - <USER2> of them linked in the article/letter, if you had bothered to read it. The most obvious being: because you said you care about diversity. CompanyX claimed to support diversity and integration, but didn't make it a priority. If one can't trust the management to hold itself accountable on something so visible, why trust them about anything else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are laws against outright discrimination. The economic benefits will cause the market to sort it out eventually.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a sexist article, because it tells a company that they should hire people just because they are women, it's also racist because it remarked that the team was white as a problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> Have sex-change operation and paint your skin! Be a man!

</comment><comment><USER14> What if I started a company, and all good candidates were male, and the women weren't on par? What if no women applied at all? I don't get this whole gender thing. If statistically less women apply to a STEM degree, or tech related job, how is it the fault of "white males"? White male guilt at it's finest if you ask me.

If you actively see discrimination, do something about it. I actually work with a team that is 90% women, it just happened that way. The male applicants sucked, the women were great. My friends teams however, are only male, because they had no female applicants.

Why try to force equality? Am I missing something?

What if the person doing the hiring silently disregards all female applicants? How would you tackle that problem?

OP if you had a company would you hire a less qualified woman than a more qualified man in the name of equality?

This movement seems counter-intuitive. If the applicant is good, hire them, male or female, young or old. Our team consists of elder women, young fresh grads, interns, and working class middle aged women as well, all across the spectrum. We all mingle just fine and still shoot the shit.

Hiring GOOD people is the only thing that should matter. Throw out all this ideology and affirmative action nonsense.

<comment><USER15> Your viewpoint is predicated on an assumption: that equality is the equilibrium state of human society. In such a world where this equilibrium exists, there is no need for "ideology and affirmative action" because any _affirmative_ actions to create inequality will be erased through the passage of time as the world returns to the equilibrium of equality.

The problem with this attitude is that it is utterly unwarranted, unsubstantiated, and totally Panglossian. It is irrefutable that for generations American society took "affirmative action" to suppress women, to pigeonhole them into an impoverished gender role concerned only with housekeeping and child rearing. You don't even have to go back that far to see this "affirmative action" ([http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage- ads](http://www.boredpanda.com/vintage-ads)). Even if you believe that there is no continuing discrimination,[1] what on earth makes you believe that past discrimination will simply be erased through the history of time?

The solution to gender inequality issues is to simply hire women. Hire women and promote women. Once your organization and industry isn't perceived as male-dominated, once qualified and ambitious women don't turn away from the field to pursue others where being a woman is less likely to be a career liability,[2] the qualified applications will materialize.

One of the greatest success stories of gender equality is, in my opinion, are professional services firms, law in particular but also accounting and consulting. The legal industry went from 95%+ male in the 1950's and 1960's to almost even today, even at large corporate law firms. While tech companies are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get _any_ women in the door, law firms are under fire because "only" 1/3 of new partners each year are women. "Only" 15% of Big 4 accounting firm partners are women and its a source of constant consternation for women.[3] While any discussion of trying to get women into tech is clouded by the specter of "affirmative action" law firms, at least at the lower levels, no longer even need to take explicit steps to recruit equal numbers of women. Professional services firms are proof that when you hire women and promote women, equalized gender ratios become self-perpetuating. There are still major challenges faced by women today in the professional services industry, but these firms are operating in a whole different century than the tech sector.

[1] Which is itself a ridiculous belief in the face of studies proving that older men are, say, less likely to mentor younger women than younger men, and that employers tend to treat similar resumes with male versus female names differently.

[2] Who wants to, as a woman, invest themselves in a career in tech when there is a decent chance your boss will be this guy: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875311) ("there are differences in the way men and women think, with men more naturally drawn to STEM fields...")

[3] At what tech company are the most senior engineering roles even 15% women? Marissa Mayer estimated about 15-17% for women engineers in Silicon Valley across the board. For comparison, Big 4 accounting firms are 45-50% women across the board, with 15-20% at the partner level.

<comment><USER5> Law is a high status profession so of course feminists were interested in training more women lawyers. Now there are a lot of qualified women graduating from law school, and an overall oversupply of people with law degrees anyway, so it's easy to make gender equality a priority.

Look at the gender ratios getting CS degrees, consider how extremely competitive the hiring situation for programmers is, and then tell me it makes sense to put an emphasis on hiring women in particular when you can hardly hire anyone qualified at all.

<comment><USER15> The gender equalization in law happened through the 1980's and 1990's, at a time when salaries at large law firms were dramatically increasing due to the limited supply of graduates from which large law firms source their entry- level hires. The key difference is that law schools, being generally very progressive places, took aggressive steps to fill their classes with approximately equal numbers of men and women. And the field, being very progressive itself, embraced that trend.

It's also interesting to note that when it comes to LSAT scores, men outnumber women 2:1 in the top percentile. This is very similar to the gender gap in the top percentile of the Math SAT. Law schools tend to simply ignore that slight distinction, relying on the fact that women tend to have higher GPAs, so an index combining GPA and LSAT tends to result in roughly equal numbers of men and women. And in practice, it's a theoretical difference that has basically zero impact in the real world. Yet, people repeatedly hold up differentials in the Math SAT to justify gender gaps in STEM more extreme than the differentials in the Math SAT itself, as evidence that men are somehow more suited for STEM jobs.

<comment><USER5> And if CS programs set aside 50% of their slots for women as well, you might see similar results. There remains very little that employers can do about it though.

<comment><USER15> Law schools would not make a change like that without buy-in from the employers that allow them to justify their tuition. If tech companies bought in the same way, I think you'd quickly see a change in how schools fill their classes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Any HN readers in Calgary, Alberta? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering....I always see meetings in other cities, but we seem to be too small that it never gets mentioned.<p>Maybe there should be a facility on HN to register by city and check whether you are interested in participating in meetups? <comment><USER2> I'm in yyc :). Maybe we should organize a meetup?

<comment><USER3> One more in Calgary. We _should_ organize a meetup, all the cool stuff that's happening in San Fran all the time is making me pretty envious ;)

<comment><USER4> One more here too</comment></comment></comment>


The Configuration Complexity Curse – Don't Be a YAML Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cedriccharly.com/post/20191109-the-configuration-complexity-curse/ <comment><USER2> I've recently started working in DevOps and I am amazed by the lack of foresight. If it was me, I'd dump everything the article describes (CUE as well, which the article advertises), and use Python everywhere.

Really, we do you need all these languages, Ansible, YAML and the lot? we don't, a good scripting language like Python would have been more than enough to manage CI/CD.</comment>


How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it - <AUTHOR> http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/09/06/how-to-read-an-executable/ <comment><USER2> A nice treatise on a well-charted ocean.

Another great article along these lines for those interested in assembly and execution environments and so on .. is of course the famous muppetlabs exploration to build the smallest linux executable:

[http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm...](http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html)

<comment><USER3> Goes very well with some Assembler (GAS - GNU Assembler, ie. Linux Assembly) knowledge -- and, there's a great free ebook for that!

[http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/pgubook/Programmin...](http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/pgubook/ProgrammingGroundUp-1-0-booksize.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Too bad it's AT&T syntax, which is pretty incompatible with the majority of x86 reference material out there (including Intel's own manuals)... something like fasm/nasm would probably be much better in a *nix enviroment. This gives some of the reasons why: [http://x86asm.net/articles/what-i-dislike-about- gas/](http://x86asm.net/articles/what-i-dislike-about-gas/)

It's also an odd order for that book to defer binary/hex and data representation until far beyond other more complex/higher-level material. The fact that the code listings have a "compiler-generated" feel to it, complete with redundant instructions, suggests that this isn't a great way to learn Asm; see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8248172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8248172) for a more detailed explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've read a number of jvns articles on HN [1], and each one impresses me with how she is able to balance technical discussion with readability. I really enjoy her writing, and look forward to her next post.

I applied to Hacker School solely on the basis of reading her blogs and being impressed with the work she was doing.

[1] Favourite: [http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/16/day-11-how-does-gzip- work/](http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/16/day-11-how-does-gzip-work/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wiki [1] and OSDev [2] both have pretty solid articles if you want to know how to load an ELF into memory.

I used both when implementing ELF for my hobby kernel [3]

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

[2] [http://wiki.osdev.org/ELF_Tutorial](http://wiki.osdev.org/ELF_Tutorial)

[3] [https://github.com/lexs/rust- os/blob/master/rost/exec/elf.rs](https://github.com/lexs/rust- os/blob/master/rost/exec/elf.rs)

</comment><comment><USER7> Do you think it would be possible to describe a binary file in such a way that some git extension of sorts could be made to understand the file so that only the minimum delta would have to be saved by git?

<comment><USER8> Probably, but what for? It doesn't seem feasible to support every common binary type, and are all common binaries even understood well enough to do this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish this didn't have so many exclamation points in it! There are literally 41 (!!!) exclamation points in this short blog post! It is exhausting to read! Please consider not using so many! There should be ways to convey enthusiasm about a topic without peppering your writing with exclamation points!

<comment><USER10> We're discussing a pretty solid technical article, one deeper than the typical HN programming article, and this is a very superficial criticism. It's like you're proudly advertising that you're so disengaged with executable file formats that you can be derailed by idiosyncratic punctuation.

<comment><USER9> I'm actually very interested, which is why I bothered to comment in the first place. I had to download the HTML of the article and search and replace all exclamation points with periods to be able to read it.

<comment><USER10> That is a crippling disability you're grappling with and I am sorry I made light of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Canadian Facebook engineer kidnapped by Iranian military while in Iran - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@behdadesfahbod/if-you-read-one-thing-from-me-please-be-this-2262ec7b8af2 <comment><USER2> >I entered Iran (as I was obliged to by international law) as an Iranian citizen.

Having multiple citizenships confuses some people into thinking they will be able to pick and choose which citizenship they will be treated as. Reality is that if you are a citizen of the country you are in, they will treat you as their citizen first.

The headline is disingenuous leaving out that it the person is an Iranian citizen. Their Canadian citizenship is not relevant in Iran. I have both US and Canadian citizenship. If I got into trouble in one country, I wouldn't expect the other to be able to come to my aid. As a Canadian, I should expect to be treated as a Canadian while in Canada. As a US citizen, I expect to be treated as a US citizen while in the US. Iranian citizens should expect to be treated as Iranian citizens when in Iran. That doesn't mean Iran's treatment of their citizens is moral or just, it does mean getting another country's citizenship is no shield against your other countries of citizenship.</comment>


New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/12/wwdc-2008-new-in-mac-os-x-snow-leopard/ <comment><USER2> What happend with ZFS?

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember old Dracula movies, where they would find Dracula in his coffin then put a stake to his heart and hit it with a mallet.

Microsoft must be looking at Snow Leopard like Dracula looks at that stake when he wakes from his unholy slumber and realizes too late that his bloodsucking reign of terror is over.</comment>


Ask HN: Is hnrss.org down? - <AUTHOR> Title. <comment><USER2> Hi all — hnrss.org developer here. Sorry for the downtime. I've spun up some extra resources to better handle the load. Should be back up and working now.

</comment><comment><USER3> shot over an email to the admin contact on whois (proxy email) so hopefully they will fix it soon.

</comment><comment><USER4> For me too.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is.

</comment><comment><USER6> It is for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> yes, looks like it.</comment>


OPL - a viral copyleft style patent license - <AUTHOR> http://www.openpatents.org/

<comment><USER2> The Zombie License

1) This license safeguards the rights of the public, and as such, any member of the public has standing to bring suit in its defense.

2) Use of any technologies covered by a zombie license implies agreement to the following: all other technologies currently patented by the user are subject to license under the conditions of this patent.

3) This license is irrevocable for the life of the patent on any covered technology except by full consent of all beneficiaries (ie, by unanimous public referendum).

Anyone who loses any patent lawsuit to a holder of these patents becomes a 'Zombie' patent holder. They were using zombie technology, so all of their technology now belongs to the zombies! Anyone can now sue to defend the zombie's patents, and if they win, they turn their victim into another zombie!

It converts the whole obnoxious system into a fun self-limiting game of tag.

(edit: I know, this probably wouldn't hold water, but think how much fun it'd be if it did.)

</comment><comment><USER3> From the website: _The draft versions of the license currently published are practically unreadable. An updated and vastly simplified draft will be published within the next couple weeks._

And at the bottom: _Last Modified on April 27 2007 08:01:26 UTC_

<comment><USER4> I just sent him an email alerting him to this thread and suggesting that with all the talk now about software patents, this would be a ripe opportunity to get other people on board to jumpstart his stalled 2007 idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems that something like this might run foul of compulsory licensing.

<comment><USER6> What jurisdictions have compulsory licensing of software? To my knowledge, in the US that sort of thing is limited mainly to audio recordings.</comment></comment>


Dart to JVM bytecode compiler - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/jdart/

<comment><USER2> Nice project. Not sure how useful it is currently in the real world.

(This sort of goes off the topic, sorry)

It sort of reopens my bewilderment that Dart doesn't already do this, and a lot more. I was expecting the language to be a lot more baked than it actually is and expecting a lot of targets perhaps via an llvm translator.

I realize it is still early days for Dart but as a big fan of haxe (which is similar in the sense that it is an ECMAScript-looking language with a custom VM (neko) and the ability to compile to other languages (not just JS, but php, C++, AVM1/AVM2 (Flash) bytecode, etc), I sort of expected the mighty Google to have more to show.

haxe has a pretty good headstart, for sure, having been around for years, but OTOH until very recently it was pretty much a one man show.

</comment><comment><USER3> Surprise! Dart was actually Java all along!

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me that Dart came out of the Java->JVM tooling that Google had with GWT, but with all of the bits that weren't useful to that end taken out.

If you start with Java, strip out everything that can't be mapped reasonably well onto JS, and tidy up what's left, then you have something that can be used to build statically typed applications for the web in the manner which Google are used to.

<comment><USER5> It actually seems like Dart didn't reuse anything in GWT, other than 'lessons learned' - if it did, it would have the GWT compiler's dead code elimination, optimizations, dev mode, story of your compile, code splitting, etc.

I'm guessing it wouldn't be a good match because Dart is fundamentally closer to a dynamic language than a statically typed language

The similarities to java seem to come from conservatism in language design more than anything else.

<comment><USER6> A way to show differences is to say what steps would be involved getting Dart code to run on the JVM. As far as I can tell the only real difference is type erasure, so all you'd have to do is:

1) erase types. All method parameters become Object, all variables become Object.

2) implicitly add an interface to each class for each method type ie classes with String toString(String) get an implicit interface with one method Object toString(Object).

3) implicitly cast from Object to the method-interface type in order to call methods.

That sounds pretty slow, but also not very far from Java. I doubt it would take more than a day to make a prototype .dart to .java source converter that actually worked on JVM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's telling it generates better JVM code than Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER8> How long before the IL generator?</comment>