The Librem 5 Development Roadmap and Progress - <AUTHOR> https://puri.sm/posts/the-librem-5-development-roadmap-and-progress/ <comment><USER2> Like many, I strongly hope this succeeds. My biggest concern is that the lack of apps and app ecosystem will doom the project to either low market adoption and/or failure.

It would be fantastic if there were a way to run Android apps. Even if they need to be rebuilt for the platform, at least not requiring developers to re- write their app would be a huge start. Also getting support into things like React Native would be good. Most developers I know (including myself) are willing to build apps for different platforms, but aren't necessarily willing to make big code changes or do rewrites/ports that involve lots of effort. Whatever can be done to help make it easy for devs to get their apps running would likely be a good investment. Developers, developers, developers!

<comment><USER3> I beleive the killer app on this kind of devices is WhatsApp, as most other stuff like Facebook or Instagram can be used through the browser before native apps are provided. But WhatsApp is so omnipresent that convincing them to make an app for your platform would really help. Maybe if Ubuntu Phone managed to get a native WhatsApp client, it would have held on.

<comment><USER4> If this phone lands and has no whatsapp, I will buy one and switch definitively to Telegram.

Telegram is nice, works everywhere, the protocol is open, clean and relatively easy to implement.

I also will make the rest of the family switch to Telegram. I am sure that as long as they are able to write message to each other, they will be fine with it.

Quite frankly, the main advantage of Whatsapp over Telegram is that it is more widely adopted. But beside that, not much.

<comment><USER3> > Quite frankly, the main advantage of Whatsapp over Telegram is that it is > more widely adopted. But beside that, not much.

Thing is I (and I guess most people) don't want to do app evangelism, but just use the existing communication protocols my peers use. People in your network will have their own networks, and so on, and telling them to quit them networks or to add another app to their phone is going to annoy them.

<comment><USER4> If you read carefully (something I strongly advise you to do) you will find out that I was talking about my family: they trust my judgement and I can bring them very good reasons for what I propose.

Regarding my other contacts' networks: I certainly do not impose other people what app to use, but at the same time I have no interest in doing something (e.g.: running an app I honestly don't like) just because everybody is doing it.

In all honesty, if someone has something to tell me or I have something to tell someone, we will surely find a way to communicate. Keep in mind that, at least for now, all mobile phones can make phone calls and send text messages (at least to negotiate other means of communication).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So impressed with Purism's hard work and ethics. I'm so glad it looks like this will reach it's funding goal.

I'm very surprised that the phone will have an open GPU. I've been looking for a laptop replacement for ages that has an open CPU and GPU. While I can avoid Intel like the plague and go straight for an ARM CPU, the GPU always tends to be a closed source binary blog.

If Purism can crack this and get a full open source phone, I hope they build a lightweight laptop using the same sort of specs. This could mean avoiding the whole ME cleaner requirement for their Librem laptop range, removing the spyware [1] from all Intel chips.

1\. [https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel](https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel)

<comment><USER6> Any of the Qualcomm DragonBoards will perform considerably better than any i.MX8 chipset board AFAIK. Freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno driver in Mesa) is a lot farther along than Etnaviv for the time being. There's also v4l2-based hardware video decode in upstream kernels for (supported) Qualcomm chipsets.

If you want a non-Intel desktop, you could also look to any of the high- performance AArch64 or Power boards with PCIe slots in them, and slot Radeon in.

<comment><USER7> I would rather support a chip maker with open hardware, even if currently not the most performant, than one which does nothing and relies on a crowd of volunteers to make it work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Man, if they can make a straightforward phone with a reasonably sized screen for people with normal hands (like my beloved Motorola Atrix HD from 2012!), and do it with only upstream kernels and free drivers and infrastructure, I'm in.

I love the idea of running Arch Linux on my phone, it would vastly simplify the harsh divide between my workstation and my smartphone. There's also a distinct possibility of running OpenBSD on my phone in the future, which is where I'm increasingly going.

The thing could probably run Android applications anyway, if it really needs to. There are projects out there that let you do this on desktop Linux today.

<comment><USER8> That's a lot of hoops for them to jump through, and I wish they succeed. At what point do you say "this is at least a step forward and I'll buy their stuff even though it might not be perfect"?

<comment><USER9> I hope they succeed too. I tried to buy a laptop from them and it was a terrible experience from order to refund (and months waiting). Despite that I'm still rooting for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those interested in pledging, here's a quick link: [https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/)

We just passed the $1M mark!

<comment><USER11> Yes, please show the Ubuntu guy that he was wrong to abandon his mobile OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> GO! Super happy to see the progress in this project. I was one of the early backers (as soon as I saw the news link). Keep at it everyone. Doesn't matter what Google announces or Apple... keep at it. This is going great places. =)

<comment><USER7> Agreed! I can't wait to receive my development kit next year, and phone a few months after! I have but one regret: that I don't have more money to throw at this campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the organizations endorsing them is in need of funds also. [https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/07/a-call-to-arms- supporting...](https://matrix.org/blog/2017/07/07/a-call-to-arms-supporting- matrix/)

<comment><USER14> not for long, hopefully :)

<comment><USER15> Thank you for using liberapay by the way

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When it comes to used SoC, booting GNU/Linux on it isn't really groundbreaking. I'm much more interested in i.mx6/i.mx8m's power consumption and heat generation. Those chips are often targeted for and used in automobile industry, with bulkier power supply and good cooling, so putting them in a phone might pose some big challenges.

Nevertheless, as a guy who used to be active part of Openmoko, OpenPhoenux and Neo900 communities, I wish them luck!

<comment><USER17> What smartphone SoC has open drivers? If they can make a workable smartphone which runs on the mainline kernel, that seems like dramatic progress.

<comment><USER16> It's not hard to boot plenty of SoCs on mainline kernel, plenty of open devices use TI OMAPs, for instance, that's pretty well supported. What's hard is to provide proper GPU acceleration, support for all included hardware and power management tailored for particular device. Seems like i.mx6/8 are good with the first one (sadly, OMAP sucks there), that's nice. However, regarding the rest - you don't expect that Librem 5 will be really usable as a phone on mainline Linux on launch and some time (possibly years) after launch, do you?

GTA04 project has had (and still has) a massive aspiration to upstream all the kernel changes and drivers, but they're still not done after many years (although close), because a lot of things that actually make the mobile device usable are device specific hacks that rarely are accepted upstream. Now it boots on upstream kernel (or not, it changes from release to release), but if you really want to use it as a phone, you still have to use Goldelico kernel. Which is of course completely open, just not mainline. Earlier, with Neo Freerunner, the situation was similar, aside of the fact that amount of non- upstreamable hacks were much higher and there was no stuff like device tree back then, so nobody made any serious progress on upstreaming.

Also, booting is one thing. Getting everything in shape to be usable as a every-day device with small battery is another. The road from "booting on mainline" to "workable smartphone on mainline" isn't doable in a year or two, when you also have to design and produce the device during that time.

However, that's not a big issue at all. Mainline eventually will get better and better, and if you have active community and try to minimize the deviation from mainline, rebasing isn't _that_ hard. What can be an issue is power and thermal requirements of used chipset. I don't know about any mobile device that has used it before (but that's doesn't mean it doesn't exist), and I've already seen projects rejecting them as "not for mobile", that's why I'm eagerly waiting for more info about this SoC's performance.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the answer, I'm intrigued by what you're saying about the hardware being unsuitable for mobile, surely these are fairly standard components? The range of CPU's they're discussing use off the peg A72 Cortex cores designed by ARM, mixed with some lower power cores in various configurations, using big.Little. All mobile chips massively over-run their thermal capacity, and have to throttle after some minutes running at full power. Work on keeping within the thermal envelope, managing the array of cores and parceling out tasks, seems more to do with software than hardware, and work which has to be done anyway for Linux to be able to function in that environment, and also to be a relatively generalizable problem. That seems to be why you'd support a project like this.

Why do you need device specific hacks, and what about the hardware is inappropriate? Genuinely interested to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Awesome, and I just discovered Puri.sm now accepts Monero as payment.

I'll be placing my order in a few hours using Monero (this changed my mind from "maybe" to "definitely"), but I have a question:

In the hopefully-unlikely case that the goal isn't met, how will you refund people who paid with either Bitcoin or Monero?

<comment><USER19> Regarding refunds: I funded the Librem 5 using Bitcoin, but the transaction didn't go through in time. I contacted them via mail, gave them a Bitcoin address, and got refunded. Unlike some other vendors I have dealt with in the past, they actually understand Bitcoin. So I'm optimistic this will work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm super excited to get a _real_ linux phone. The Ubuntu phone is the only smart-phone I've had that I didn't hate. I really hope this takes off.

</comment><comment><USER21> Too bad still closed source wireless: lte/3g/gsm modem, wifi firmware, bluetooth firmware, etc. If limit the support just to LTE, it would be much easier to port an existing LTE FOSS implementations. WiFi is a different beast, but easier to implement anyway, than LTE and Co.

<comment><USER22> What are the LTE FOSS implementations available? I could not find anything that seems usable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looking forward to this very much. The only downer: $599 for a phone is a lot of money. I understand that they have to cover many expenses. However, I hope they'll also offer phones for poorer people. In the end, privacy should not be a luxury.

<comment><USER24> If you need something cheaper and sooner, get a Nexus 5X and install Copperhead OS on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Please note the puri.sm team is looking for people to join their team and assist with things like UX/PureOS/Kernel stuff. Not affiliated, I justed recently learned about Librem 5 and got all excited and saw it on their website.

</comment><comment><USER24> In this update they now consider it highly likely that the phone will get the i.mx8 CPU.

Releasing the $599 Librem 5 phone with the outdated i.mx6 CPU (quad core Cortex A9, ARMv7-A from 2011, like the Samsung Galaxy S3) would be a disaster.

</comment><comment><USER26> EU should fund this, besides complaining about Google/Apple monopolies and US companied not paying EU tax

</comment><comment><USER27> curious why not just go with Tizen as their baseline .... what else besides Android or iOS is polished enough w/an app ecosystem to have a fighting chance of survival?

I so want this project to succeed.

<comment><USER28> Tizen isn't fully open source, makes you beholden to Samsung, which has little reason to fully commit since their entire business operates on Android phones, etc.

<comment><USER27> Thanks - I was under the impression it is entirely open source - except maybe for proprietary blobs/drivers (in my mind, that's open source enough I suppose). Better Samsung than Google if you ask me... Canonical/Ubuntu tried something like this and failed miserably. I'm not sure how this is going to be different ... without some major backing down the line. Starting things and prototyping things is fine and dandy... but making this a viable competitor to the established players... that's a whole different ball game.

<comment><USER28> It depends what you call viable. Who's your market? How many do you need to sell to break even? If you're Microsoft or Amazon, you need your mobile product to take market share from Google and Apple, but if you can make a profit making a couple thousand phones for some people who want to buy them, that may be a perfectly successful business model.

In my case, I want my phone to make calls, send texts, and browse the web. It'd be nice if it had some apps, but I probably don't need more than a dozen or two. If you don't need a giant rival ecosystem as your definition of success, it's much easier to succeed on a smaller scale.

<comment><USER29> As proven by Windows Phone, WebOS, FirefoxOS, Jolla, Blackberry,....

<comment><USER17> Most of the failures sold to a general consumer market though, mobile Linux should be able to survive just like desktop Linux, catering to an enthusiastic niche. Also, mobile Linux has the advantage that a lot of apps already use open source stacks, between F-Droid and PWA's there is plenty of an app ecosystem to keep things ticking over, for an audience that doesn't mind tweaking things.

<comment><USER30> F-Droid is a steaming pile though, compared to the high caliber software in most distro's repos. Linphone, Firefox and many other apps are months or years out of date, with known, active vulnerabilities.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Braintree Payments library for iOS - <AUTHOR>

For another project, I wrote a library that talks to Braintree Payments from iOS. It sends credit card data directly to Braintree from the iPhone (or iPad). It returns a token that you can then use to charge the card. This helps tremendously with PCI compliance, because you don't have to have the credit card data on your own server.<p>I'm trying to find out if it's worth the effort to split it out and make it available for download. If you are interested, please leave your email address at http://www.pinpointpayments.com. If I get enough feedback, I'll do it. <comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I didn't know that URLs don't become links. Here is the link again for clicking: <http://www.pinpointpayments.com>

</comment><comment><USER2> CRE secure is better Esp.for integrations to various providers like Auth.net and Sage

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sorry...www.cresecure.com</comment>


I keep forgetting to use your app - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/01/i-keep-forgetting-to-use-your-app.html <comment><USER2> This is why almost everybody should be capturing email and getting in touch with folks regularly. (Of particular interest to business productivity SaaS startups: make the product design decision that you're going to send them, at the minimum, weekly "Here's how much value you're getting out of this" emails and, if they're not using it, use that scheduled opportunity to re-engage them.)

<comment><USER3> I filter 95% of such emails. I suspect people who don't use a lot of filters end up just reporting them as spam. Actually, I see quite a few showing up in my spam filter without any action on my part. Email is getting worse as a way to reach people. With ads invading the newsfeed, Facebook is likely to drop in utility as well.

<comment><USER2> _I filter 95% of such emails._

You filter 95% of such emails _sent to you_ , which is trivial but important. If you're accurately reporting your filtering behavior (it is no slight to say that people misremember things all the time), sending you email is _stupendously profitable_. It just means it (statistically speaking) costs about 20 cents to hit your inbox instead of 1 cent.

Your behavior is not normative, though. Even for very techy audiences, a lot of people actually enjoy getting email. We _can know this with certainty_ because they will open the emails, they will click on things in them, and then they will buy when you tell them to buy. Insert NDAed anecdote from Client #1, NDAed anecdote from Client #2, and NDAed anecdote from Client #3.

The lady sitting 20 feet away from me in this coworking space runs a less lucrative business than most enterprise software companies, and individual emails have earned her more than BCC has earned me in the last year (at approximately the same number of people on the email list).

The focus of my work for WPEngine this week was designing a marketing product for them and making a drip mail channel to send _eight_ emails in the month after someone uses that product. It should absolutely print money. (One penny to send an email, use your imagination as to what a $200 a month hosting account is worth.)

Hopefully, WPEngine will let me talk about it after we have good stats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think Android as an OS has a major effect here, because its Intents system codifies that 'starting point for a task' concept. If I want to carry out a particular operation on some data, all of the apps capable of handling it can inform the OS that they are available as options, and I get a menu to select which app I want to use for the task. What you want, as an app developer, is to have your users become confident enough in your app to check the "set as default" option in that app choice menu.

This is kind of the equivalent of the fight over 'file associations' in Windows.

<comment><USER5> I have a wikipedia app for IOS that I never use, because I only get to wikipedia through Google in Safari. I wish there was some way to direct the URLs to the wikipedia app, since it really is better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reputation and karma systems are very good at reminding. They normally engage the users as if the site was some sort of "game" and persuading to have a high score.

See HN, Stack Exchange sites, forum's post counts, xbox live gamerpoints, etc.

<comment><USER7> What a bizarre thing to think. I do not care about these devices other than as a way to keep interesting stuff visible.

Always thought the whole gamification thing was pointless too.

<comment><USER8> It's so pointless and irrelevant to most people that companies like Foursquare are conquering millions of users and fads like Zynga are making millions out of purple cows...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see the same effect in HN. Everytime I login, I see if the number next to my username has increased. If not, I go somewhere else. I do this every few hours somedays. It's somewhat addicting.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, the key is establishing some sort of habit. The other thing you have to watch out for in this vein is weekends. If your product is work-related or school-related, you're more likely to forget about it over a weekend, and then never come back (unless someone tries to re-engage you). Path and other friend- or interest-based social sites suffer from this problem less, because weekends may even lead to higher rather than no use.

</comment><comment><USER11> The fact that DDG is listed as a choice for search engines in Firefox is a huge boon for DDG. I _never_ would use it until I took the step to make it the default search in Firefox. It is great 80% of the time and the other 20% I just prepend g! and it dumps me into Google.

Worth the tradeoff as I'm frustrated with Google lately.</comment>


Falling in love with OpenBSD again - <AUTHOR> https://functionallyparanoid.com/2019/03/13/well-its-been-a-while-falling-in-love-with-openbsd-again/ <comment><USER2> I use OpenBSD on both my remote (VPS) and home (a tiny pcengine box with 3 NICs) servers. Naturally, they do some IPv6/IPsec/tunneling and other shenanigans with each other, and the home server is the router and firewall for probably overly complex home network.

It is an absolute joy, and often I just mess around with the system for the fun of it. One of the compelling factors is that, unlike with a modern Linux distribution, I practically always have the impression of having full reach and understanding of the whole system, mainly because of OpenBSD's impressive consistency and documentation through man-pages.

<comment><USER3> Have you tried it on a desktop yet? I've talked about my experiences a couple of times ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280736](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280736)), and I like it so much that it's now the only OS on my primary desktop and laptop.

<comment><USER4> Man, I'd love to run a BSD, but I'm so spoiled by the convenience of the AUR and immediate access to the latest packages and any packages I could ever possibly want or need, that I don't think I'd last a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the record: 16-bit OS/2 version 1.x never ran Windows programs. That only came about with 32-bit OS/2 version 2.x.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice read. It's always enjoyable setting up a new machine, regardless of the OS or platform you're using.

I've never used BSD or any of its derivatives - is the main difference between OpenBSD and FreeBSD just the focus on security?

<comment><USER7> A lot more than just security-- albeit that is one of the primary focuses of OpenBSD, encompassing everything from researching new mitigations to secure coding practices.

[https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html](https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html)

If it helps to put things into perspective, NetBSD is closest relative to OpenBSD, the latter having forked over 23 years ago. The last time FreeBSD and OpenBSD shared the same tree was at Berkeley. In fact, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD independently merged the final release from Berkeley, 4.4BSD-Lite2 in 1995.

Linux users generally don't understand what it means for each major BSD being fundamentally distinct operating systems, including separately developed kernels, drivers, userland utilities, with their own developer/user communities.

<comment><USER8> > fundamentally distinct operating systems, including separately developed > kernels, drivers, userland utilities, with their own developer/user > communities.

A lot of stuff does get ported between them though, and many people use multiple of them.

<comment><USER7> Of course there is some overlap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some genius HN person reading this please port ZFS!

<comment><USER7> That's not likely to happen for both licensing and technical reasons. CDDL is not an acceptable license. And OpenBSD also has no extant framework for loadable kernel modules, nor any desire to add one (increasing attack surface).

<comment><USER9> I understand the CDDL is not GPL-compatible, but why is it not acceptable for OpenBSD?

<comment><USER10> It's still copyleft, so including it into the base system would require licensing those parts as CDDL, so the system as a whole would no longer be BSD-licensed.

<comment><USER11> Only the files pulled in would fall under the cddl. The cddl is unlike the GPL in that it is file based copyleft. It doesn't force any other part it is combined with to be any license. Ie you could combine it with anything that is ISC or BSD licensed without issues.

<comment><USER10> What files _wouldn 't_ be pulled in in an implementation that doesn't support dynamically loaded kernel modules?

But anyway, even one file is enough. The aggregate would no longer be clean BSDL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The main thing keeping me from using OpenBSD is that TCP transfers seem to take at least twice as long (testing both small and large files over plain HTTP) as Linux. Has anyone else seen this?

<comment><USER13> Twice as long! Have you found an existing bug report? Did you remove every difference in your testing except for the OS?

<comment><USER12> Yes. I'm just wondering if anyone has actually compared side by side and can either corroberate or contradict my findings.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what you mean. Certainly many people would have noticed if OpenBSD's networking was generally half as fast as it's supposed to be. It must be something related to your specific configuration (not necessarily just software).

<comment><USER14> Actually I think very few OpenBSD people would notice if under load OpenBSD was significantly slower than Linux because very few OpenBSD people deploy in situation where they can do sustained parallel load tests.

Linux has BBR. OpenBSD doesn't have BBR. The difference between BBR and Cubic or classic TCP is immense.

<comment><USER2> That's a good point. I read the comment such as that every transfer over TCP would be twice as slow, which would be pretty absurd, but the poster probably meant high load/bandwidth situations. It would not surprise me at all if OpenBSD fared way worse, there.

<comment><USER14> It should be said that OpenBSD is a fine system, and this specific (BBR) difference would only show up if you had significantly large amounts of data to transfer in flows. I suspect normal use of OpenBSD as most people deploy it (which is not streaming data at high speed) wouldn't care.

I have nothing against OpenBSD. If the developers don't want to implement BBR right now because of more important stuff on their backlog, thats fine with me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The most interesting paragraph was that the author is thinking about porting the Kali pentesting suite to OpenBSD. That would be awesome.

<comment><USER16> That's... Gonna take some kernel work - maybe just some wifi drivers, maybe more of the network stack.

And if there is one thing that's less "open" than on Linux, its the OpenBSD kernel.

Dont get me wrong, the source is out there. But you're not gonna find anyone forking it, running patchsets (like almost any linux main-distro does) or the like. Compiling your own kernel isnt even supported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> To think... all this could have been avoided by remapping capslock to escape =)

I kid... but it's definitely changed my life.

<comment><USER18> ESC key? My fingers are trained to use ctrl-[ since it's quicker than moving a hand.

Except some keyboards have different locations for ctrl-....

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Should I run OpenBSD or Debian on my VPS, with arguments about security and (some) ease of usability?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Is there a good option for VPS hosting with OpenBSD? It receives minimal support from major providers which I'm aware. Which is unfortunate, since I personally find it to be a much nicer system to work with than the more popular operating systems.

<comment><USER20> [https://console.hetzner.cloud/](https://console.hetzner.cloud/) has OpenBSD 6.4. You must purchase a server with one of the four official Linux images first, then go server settings and from the iso images you can mount the OpenBSD install ISO and reboot. Use the server console to continue the installation.

<comment><USER21> As someone who was a heavy OVH user -- well, 100 or so dedicated servers -- and who just abandoned an attempt to migrate them to hetzner (who were slightly cheaper and offered NVME) -- let me suggest that you avoid Hetzner.

They blocked several critial IPs of mine without any warning, their support had absolutely no idea what the problem was and refused to unblock my IPs until I could convince them I'd solved the "problem" (which was an extra mac address appearing on one of my router addresses -- not an actual problem) and cost my business about 10k in the process. The email chain was... painful.

I've never had such a bad experience with a host before. YMMV of course, but I'm back on OVH and life is easy again...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> it looks much easier to de-solder the BIOS than to use the Pamona Clip... unless you are doing a dozen of those.

<comment><USER23> Why must one do this step? I didn't quite understand it.</comment></comment>


Lattice (YC W16) launches to help startups be productive through goal setting - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/12/lattice-be-productive/ <comment><USER2> At my previous company we used a crappy piece of software (Trackstar) to record our goals and accomplishments twice a year. It asked us a few questions and provided options for long form response and multiple choice. Supposedly this was used for performance bonuses and ratings. One problem I always had was that my review was based off what I could remember, which seemed like a bad way to do things. I could have possibly been negatively impacted if I did something and I couldn't remember it. I always wanted something that could keep track of my accomplishments in the background, and help set goals on the fly, then when the 6-month eval came around, it would collect all the feedback objectively and report it back to me. My hack was to periodically (about once a month or so) search my e-mail inbox for weekly updates I provided for my boss, summarize them, and keep a record in Evernote. God that was terrible.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey everyone, I'm one of the co founders of Lattice with jackaltman. Really excited to be launching publicly today. We've already been working with some awesome companies helping them set and manage their goals and we're excited to get the chance to work with even more now.

If you have any questions about the service, please hit us up!

<comment><USER4> I just tried on my iphone but after the sign-up, the UI is not behaving correctly. I was CTO / co-foubder at www.producteev.com , I really want to see what you are up to!

<comment><USER3> Hey lasryaric, sorry about that. Mobile signup is still a little weak and buggy. When you get a chance can you try going to your created account on your desktop? You should have an email from us with a link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this solving the O of OKR? Task management for Goals?

This may just be me & my past experience but there is a possibility this could suffer from the one more tool syndrome. You start off enthusiastically but over time usage decreases unless you have someone championing this heavily within the company. You'd have to watch out for that.

<comment><USER6> Great point, we're definitely aware of one more tool issue, so we have to make sure we're sufficiently valuable and lightweight to use.

It's not meant to be task management, but rather a shared repository for longer term goals with period status updates. Most companies today keep these goals in google docs and they don't get much interaction as a result, so we're hoping to address that.

<comment><USER5> I definitely see the use for it and if you're able to solve it with Lattice, that'd be something. It's been a pain point of mine in prior companies where nobody knew higher-level goals. Good luck with it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is Lattice going to be a step up from other OKR trackers like Betterworks?

</comment><comment><USER8> Is this a real pain point?

The only way this gets used is if management forces it down your throat.</comment>


Ask HN: LGBT Programmer for Startup - <AUTHOR>

Hi developers,
I'm working on a start up with the basic premise of providing closeted LGBT athletes an outlet to voice whatever fears, questions, or problems they may be having. Its goal is to provide a safe-haven while developing relationships with an "advisor" with the kicker being that it is completely anonymous, very simple, and easy to access.
I'm looking for a developer with a strong passion for LGBT issues and one who cares deeply about the problem that young kids are facing day in and day out. With the obvious impetus of the suicides, I feel it is vital to get programs like this up and running as soon as possible.
Please let me know if this is something that interests you.
Thanks! aaron <comment><USER2> I know I'm just splitting hairs on the semantics here, and so this possibly isn't helpful... but maybe it is ... but I wonder if you might better phrase that as "LGBT startup" or "LGBT positive programmer for"...

As far as I can tell, there's really no requirement for the programmer to be LGBT, just willing & happy to work on those issues.

Splitting hairs I guess, but an "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" moment for me.

Regardless, I think it sounds a noble project and I wish you luck :)!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be careful about how you promote this job offering. As other said, you may either appear discriminatory or actually be in violation of state laws (some states do not allow you to discriminate based on sexuality). If it's clear you'll only hire a LGBT programmer, you're in violation of those laws.

In addition, try to be careful of providing ammunition to people who will shout "reverse discrimination" at you. They seem to think that one instance of discrimination that favors disadvantaged groups is justification to ignore widespread discrimination.

I think what you're doing is an excellent project. But it'll be a very difficult one, due to the social constructs you're dealing with. You'll need to be extra careful to mind your p's and q's with everything else, so you can more effectively get your message across.

Best wishes and best of luck.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I didn't mean to sound discriminatory, but as you mentioned, I want someone who would be committed and passionate about the LGBT issues I am trying to tackle.

Of course a non-LGBT programmer who is sensitive about the issues and would be willing to promote said issues would be amazing to have on board.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, you can at least try to make the ad _sound_ non-discriminatory: "LGBT- sensitive Programmer" sounds a lot better, and gets the basic point across. (Someone who's not LGBT themselves but has had a friend or relatives going through some serious issues might also make for a highly motivated candidate, BTW).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your support Travis - your suggestions are appreciated. As I said before, I definitely do not want to unintentionally rule out people who are not LGBT themselves but support the issues that are affiliated with it. What I'm ideally looking for is a strong developer with an infectious passion for this issue.

As opposed to someone who would just be hired to make the site, I'd love to find a developer with staying power who would be interested in becoming a co- founder with me.

<comment><USER5> I have a background in development and an interest in applying technology to social activism of which this certainly falls under. So id be interested in talking to you about it. How should i contact you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a background in development and have recently become interested in applying technology to social activism of which this certainly falls under. So id be interested in talking to you about it. How should i contact you?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @ clojurerocks

Thanks for the interest. feel free to contact me at: email@example.com

Thanks!</comment>


Lenin Was a Mushroom - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin_was_a_mushroom <comment><AUTHOR> It is scary how many people apparently believed such a ridiculous tale - <USER2> this was just a prank.

Modern 'fake news' could be far more powerful as it uses bespoke messages to target each small audience segment etc. and far from being a prank it is a serious 'cyberweapon' being deployed by political factions and nation states.</comment>


Internet Explorer 10: "fast" and "native" has gone to other browsers - <AUTHOR> http://www.scirra.com/blog/77/internet-explorer-10-fast-and-native-has-gone-to-other-browsers

<comment><USER2> Has anyone implemented a browser inside Internet Explorer? Download some javascript file to "install" it, the javascript implements "good" javascript and rendering on top of IE's "special" javascript and rendering.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the going rate for summer developer interns at startups? - <AUTHOR>

Q: What's the going rate for summer developer interns at startups? <comment><USER2> I would guess around 10k-15k for the summer (though I personally haven't been involved in any), depending on amount of funding, etc. See e.g. <http://rethinkdb.com/jobs>

</comment><comment><USER3> No personal experience (currently applying for positions), but I know Skritter recently posted an offer of $4800 for 3 months plus housing and airfare. [http://blog.skritter.com/2010/04/summer-intern-wanted- softwa...](http://blog.skritter.com/2010/04/summer-intern-wanted- software.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Expenses paid + contract for payment if they get funded.</comment>


Announcing the New PubMed - <AUTHOR> https://becker.wustl.edu/news/announcing-the-new-pubmed/ <comment><USER2> I'm actually part of the team developing the new PubMed. Very curious and interested to know what the hacker news community thinks and feels about their experience. [https://pubmed.gov/labs](https://pubmed.gov/labs)

<comment><USER3> What's the tech stack behind this, out of curiosity?

<comment><USER2> [https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ma19/ma19_pubmed_updat...](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ma19/ma19_pubmed_update.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> PubMed is an incredibly useful resource. I've found that it is fairly common for my psychiatrist and GP to be relatively unaware of the latest studies and treatments.

Of course, reading through abstracts and papers requires a critical eye into the statistics, methodology, and funding. The Cochrane Reviews are similarly awesome.

<comment><USER5> Medicine moves fast and it's impossible to stay up to date on everything. In general I do not incorporate the latest discoveries into my daily practice unless the evidence is absurdly overwhelming, which rarely happens. Usually new therapies have marginal evidence to support them. I prefer to wait until multiple studies support a treatment before it becomes my standard of care, and by that time it's likely going to be summarized in a Cochrane Review.

Should a patient come in with a preference for a treatment they read about on PubMed (which has never occurred in my practice) then I would likely accommodate their preference unless I thought it would put them at serious harm. A patient knowing more than I do about a particular disease happens more than you'd expect, especially if they have a rare chronic disorder. This does not diminish my ego or confidence in my knowledge base.

<comment><USER6> You are a very unusual doctor. I wish there were more like you.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't seem unusual to me. I could have written the same thing myself. Most of my doctor colleagues would be similar. Maybe you live in a different part of the world where doctors jump on every latest trend/study, but I'm not sure where that would be. Most of us like to let the water settle first.

<comment><USER8> Not jumping on the latest fad is very common, and something I expect of a doctor. However, I wish more doctors I've met fit in with the latter part of the grand parent comment, though.

A friend of my family met 15 different doctors for a period lasting years because of agonizing headaches, they all sent her home thinking it was nothing unusual. She died of a brain tumor the size of a tennis ball. We often think about what would've happened if one of those 15 doctors would've shown some humility.

To be clear, I work in tech, we have more than our fair share of big egos too. I don't think this is anything particular about doctors.

<comment><USER7> 15 doctors and none ordered a scan of her brain? Well I'd say that's very unusual and the exception rather than the rule. In my experience doctors are more likely to request imaging purely to demonstrate to the patient that there's nothing visible, even if imaging isn't indicated.

<comment><USER8> Some more context; she didn't ask for 15 different opinions, she lived in the country side and her nearest hospital used relay doctors. So, it was more a case of being sent home and told to return if it didn't get any better, and when she did return, her previous doctor was long gone and had been replaced. All the next doctor had was whatever the previous doctor left them to work with in her charts. I'm not a doctor, so I don't know how much that would be in a case of a piercing headache.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Even if you don't find yourself reading biomedical research on a frequent basis, you should expose yourself to PubMed just to see how much care went into its development.

Seriously, PubMed is one of my favorite websites for its simplicity, speed and incredible usability. It has a querying system for hundreds of thousands of articles that makes sense, it saves these queries and allows you to edit them. It allows you to save articles to lists and makes them portable.

While it may be easy to just think of this as just another clever website redesign, I can tell you from personal experience that these increases in usability have a non-zero impact on research productivity. And since it's PubMed, there's a lot of important research at stake.

</comment><comment><USER10> I usually am skeptical of redesigns that look like this because it typically signals that literally hundreds of 1MB JS dependencies are to be downloaded to display simple text.

The new pubmed, much like the old pubmed, is speedy! Pages are ~800kb on first visit, subsequent pages visits avg 30kb transferred data in my very unscientific tests.

Congratulations on making a great resource greater :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Really happy to see PubMed improving over time!

One thing I'm missing is a recommendation service of articles that might be relevant for me. I used to read a lot of Machine Learning/Math papers on arXiv and I have found arXiv-sanity [0] to be extremely useful, maybe something similar would be great as a part of PubMed functionality - being able to keep track of research which is relevant to the papers I've added to my favorites.

Also, I'm slightly confused by the sort order in the search. I found four options for sorting the items while searching:

* Default order

* Pub Date

* Journal

* PMC Live Date

IIUC "Default order" is not "sort by the number of citations/citation index", but that's what I typically want when I'm trying to figure out what are the most important/influential research in the field.

[0]: [http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/](http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks a lot for warm words and useful feedback from PubMed Labs team! To make sure your feedback is heard, please use "Feedback button" found in bottom right corner of [https://pubmed.gov/labs](https://pubmed.gov/labs)

</comment><comment><USER13> Yay. Big plus for keeping search result page load sizes roughly the same.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great, pubmed and other NCBI resources are long due for a redesign.

I also wish they got a shorter url.

<comment><USER10> pubmed.gov redirects to the full URL :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Been using the labs for the better part of a year (over a year?)

Incredibly great work!</comment>


Leidos closes Lockheed merger - <AUTHOR> https://delimiter.com.au/2016/08/29/leidos-closes-lockheed-merger/ <comment><USER2> I know we strive for accuracy in headlines. This article's headline (and thus, the title of this submission) is misleading. You would be led to believe that Leidos in its entirety had been merged with all of Lockheed-Martin. The first sentence of the article has it better:

"US-based multinational defence company Leidos has announced the successful completion of its previously announced merger with Lockheed Martin's Information Systems & Global Solutions (IS&GS) business."

LM got tired, for whatever reason, of being in the corporate IT business.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a former SAIC employee (prior to the Leidos split), I thought it was interesting that this article mentioned the hiring of Gregory Dahlberg to the board. He was previously a senior VP at lockheed.

From 2003-2009 or so the CEO of SAIC was Ken Dahlberg. He's the one who took the company public and away from being an employee-owned company (which I think only 11% of the employees, including me, voted against).

Can't seem to find any relation between the two but ...that's not that common of a name, is it?

<comment><USER4> Ex-SAIC employee myself, here. Before the Leidos split, our contract was under a person who apparently was related to the Dahlberg family. Shortly before the spin-off was announced, she was pulled off; we hoped due to gross incompetence. Apparently not; our contract stayed with SAIC and I believe she went with Leidos.

It's a strange company.</comment></comment>


Brief survey on methods for attacking Tor hidden service - <AUTHOR> http://translate.wooyun.io/2015/09/19/Brief-survey-on-methods-for-attacking-Tor-hidden-service.html <comment><USER2> Torblog has a recent (Sep 2015) write up on how the great firewall detects and kills Tor connections/bridges hence the need for using Obfsproxy4 as a pluggable transport [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/learning-more-about- gfws-ac...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/learning-more-about-gfws-active- probing-system)

</comment><comment><USER3> Surprised to see a Wooyun article translated and posted to HN. In case anyone is wondering, wooyun is a Chinese security online community like Full- Disclosure, it features a CVE like vulnerability tracking system. You can find literally thousands of Chinese software/hardware/online exploits.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is the illustration really accurate for hidden services? If so, for what reason isn't the last hop encrypted too?

<comment><USER2> The title for this is confusing, they are talking about detecting and attacking regular Tor connections not internal hidden services (like a DarkMarket). That illustration showing not encrypted is the exit node to a regular clearnet site.

The methods for attacking hidden services (DNM) are the same as any other site such as exploiting misconfiguration, exploiting unpatched software or finding new ones, and looking for pieces of opsec like the Czech guy who's darkmarket used some obscure Czech php framework which was identified by viewing the CSS. Every so often a research paper comes out too that identifies some new scheme of analysis of guard nodes/pattern matching/fingerprinting ect to identify hidden service IPs as noted in this Wooyun article. [https://news.mit.edu/2015/tor- vulnerability-0729](https://news.mit.edu/2015/tor-vulnerability-0729)

Snowden docs also talked about QUANTUM which was some NSA/GCHQ scheme to try race conditions against relays to lure Tor users to their own relay farm for analysis detailed here [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/how_the_nsa_a...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/how_the_nsa_att.html)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for clarifying. Exploiting vulnerabilities in the service itself, mishandling opsec and fingerprinting traffic seem obvious.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should managed languages like C# be preferred over languages like Rust?  - <AUTHOR>

It's going to be 2014 soon; Many managed languages like Java/C# touted as the replacement to C/C++ in their niche are simply diminishing over recent trends. There is a huge surge of interest in native AOT compiled languages like Rust, C++14, Go etc. In foreseeable future, are we going to witness the rise of the other native language, or managed languages have still got some air? (In C/C++ niche of embedded, high performance, and heavy multimedia apps like game engines) <comment><USER2> Can you clarify what you mean by "managed languages"? I was under the impression that a "managed language" was one with garbage collection: Go and Rust fit into that category fairly well.

Concerning preferences, I would argue that these newer languages are preferable to last-generation languages like Java or C# because they provide _more_ management: the concurrency primitives (goroutines/channels in Go, tasks/pipes in Rust) remove the need for manual thread and lock management, it is all handled transparently by the runtime in a similar way that memory management is handled transparently by the Java and C# runtimes.

<comment><USER3> You seem to be generalizing a bit on the channels/goroutines and tasks/pipes... C# has the async/await pattern which is quite popular/powerful. I suspect recent incarnations of Java may have something similar as well (but not something I am up to speed on).

<comment><USER2> This is a different issue, I was referring more to concurrency using threads/locks vs. channels/goroutines and not to asynchronous I/O. However there is another point to be made here that helps to present the evolution of languages ;)

To contrast, in Go the async/await keywords are not even needed since asynchronous I/O is handled internally by the runtime; this parallels how the 'delete' keyword from C++ is not needed in Java or C# since the runtime handles deletion of memory. The idea is that the programmer does not even need to think about asynchronous details, it is completely transparent.

For example in Go (pretending that it has an await keyword) there is no difference between this:

        data := await socket.Read(...)

and this:

        data := socket.Read(...)

Both are asynchronous, but one of them avoids the need to be aware of the difference between synchronous and asynchronous I/O.</comment></comment></comment>


Boeing 787 Drawing Itself Over the US - <AUTHOR> http://flightaware.com/live/flight/BOE4 <comment><USER2> it should be using less fuel than if the aircraft was fully loaded with passengers right?</comment>


Ask HN: Can I use a credit card service that isn't PCI compliant? - <AUTHOR>

I've been checking out chargify, recurly, spreedly and cheddergettar - who all seem to process credit card data in their environments, with some even storing it, but none are on Visa's PCI compliant list for service providers at http://bit.ly/dbKhu . Can I send my customers credit card data to a company that isn't PCI Compliant and on the list? <comment><USER2> Short answer - They should be listed on the service providers list if you are using them in that capacity and you want to be fully compliant as well.

Longer answer (disclaimer: I'm a former PCI QSA). You can, of course, do whatever you want to with the credit card data at the risk of not being PCI compliant. Small startups are rarely at risk for a breach, but I'd personally prefer not to be in a position to deal with that liability. As it relates specifically to those companies, they need to apply to be on that list. I know that Recurly is currently working on it and Chargify is still in private beta, so I'm assuming it's something they're working on. That said, I have confidence that some of these companies will "do it right" and obtain PCI compliance/validated service provider status by the time it becomes a legitimate concern.

I've talked to both Recurly and Chargify directly. Recurly is apparently PCI Level 2 compliant and working on the external audit to reach level 1. Chargify is outsourcing storage ( [http://chargify.com/blog/adding-payment-gateways- while-maint...](http://chargify.com/blog/adding-payment-gateways-while- maintaining-data-security/) ) which addresses a lot of concerns, but I'm not sure if they've gone through the necessary compliance process otherwise. As for CheddarGettar, the only mention of PCI compliance I can find on their site is this - [http://support.cheddargetter.com/discussions/questions/39-pc...](http://support.cheddargetter.com/discussions/questions/39-pci- compliance) \- which doesn't really indicate an understanding of what is actually required to be compliant. I can't comment on Spreedly as I didn't look at their solution, but I do know one of the devs previously worked at a large PCI shop.

So a service provider like these guys can technically be PCI compliant, but not be on the service provider list if they haven't applied to be. If you use them, though, they best be on the list by the time you reach the point that the PCI assessor (they don't like to be called auditors. ;)) is knocking on your door. This isn't likely to be for a while for most startups, though.

In some of the early data I've seen in a survey I'm doing (shameless plug: [http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/payment-security- surv...](http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/payment-security-survey-for- startups/) ), most companies are implementing their own system directly to paypal or similar, but have not actually gone through the process necessary to become PCI Level 4 certified. Most feel that the benefit of keeping the payment flow on their site is more important than the relatively small risk of being compromised. Can't say I agree, but I'm more paranoid than most.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would you open yourself up to that level of liability? Full PCI compliance is a standard that will be used by businesses to determine if your product is a viable solution. If your solution breaks PCI compliance at any point, you open yourself up to big problems when (not if) something goes wrong.

Also, why reinvent the wheel? PayPal and Google Checkout are major vendors with PCI certifications who handle the entire transaction process. Why not use them to handle all the risk? You get a transaction id and collect your money through them. Never touching the sensitive financial information.

<comment><USER4> Given that he is asking about recurly, chargify, etc. I'm assuming its because he wants to do reoccurring billing, for which PayPal/Google Checkout are less than awesome solutions for.

<comment><USER3> I have not had any problems implementing/using PayPal recurring payments. What specific "less than awesome" functionality are you referring to and how are the other products better? Not challenging you, just looking for a more rounded picture.

<comment><USER2> I found their documentation absolutely horrendous. Try googling for "recurring paypal" and you get a page that links to a (stated) 682K PDF published in 2006 that in actuality is only 2 pages and includes a link to yet another 300 page PDF.

<comment><USER3> Documentation that overwhelms a new developer does not make a product less in functionality or quality. Googling code examples, explanations, and blogs of PayPal recurring payment code/functionality, I found a lot of very useful information during my own development. The functionality and product have been around a while and lots of people who want to help others adopt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Recurly claims to be PCI compliant on there web page [ <http://recurly.com/features/> ]. Its possible they are on the list under another name, I'd give there support people a shout. I'm not sure if recurly,spreedly,etc. are actually storing the data, it seems like they might be having the gateway (i.e. authorize.net) store the data, but that is pure speculation on my part.

I am interested in doing some re-occuring billing stuff my self so do post back with your experiences with which ever provider you go with. Best of luck :)

<comment><USER2> We posted our experiences of three of these here - [http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/accepting-payments- on...](http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/accepting-payments-on-the-real- time-web/)

We ultimately chose to go with recurly, but are going to look at chargify again once they stabilize a little bit. Recurly is not on the list, but in the process of doing so (I just emailed them ~10 minutes ago specifically about being a validated service provider).</comment></comment>


SQLite Release 18.104.22.168 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_8_11_1.html <comment><USER2> SQLite should be the default way someone manages information on a binary data file, as opposed to just inventing your format from scratch.

I remember on uni when we started defining our own formats, to later on learn about what goes inside a DBMS, and thinking, "Why on earth would I ever do the first thing again?" (not that there's no space for it, but it's not so big).

Also, when I've found a couple of times that a file that I thought had a proprietary binary format was a SQLite file, it was bliss. So much easier to navigate, inspect and work with that a huge XML file or a plain text one.

<comment><USER3> I think this is somewhat incomplete information, and I say this as a SQLite lover. It depends on your type of data, but both HDF5 and SQLite are more than adequate formats for data, and you should be using one of them.

I think HDF5 is actually a better format for long term data management, but I think SQLite is a easier to use in everyday life. There's also Parquet and Avro for these as well.

High-Energy physics also has the "code is the documentation" clusterfuck known as ROOT files.

<comment><USER4> This again misses the point. The point is that you should use the right tool for the job. If your application needs a particular format for whatever reason, use that format. For example, could you imagine trying to encode a video file in a sqlite database? Similarly, would you use a sqlite file for a plaintext document (like c++) or a binary executable? To give a more custom example: I was working on a project which tries to build a database of solutions to games (like Connect 4). Connect 4 has such a large search state that using a database is terrible because it doesnt meet the requirements of really fast lookups (with great caching), small size, and fast parallel writing that the solver needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Relevant change log entry:

> Miscellaneous micro-optimizations result in 22.3% more work for the same > number of CPU cycles relative to the previous release. SQLite now runs twice > as fast as version 3.8.0 and three times as fast as version 3.3.9. (Measured > using cachegrind on the speedtest1.c workload on Ubuntu 14.04 x64 with gcc > 4.8.2 and -Os. Your performance may vary.)

</comment><comment><USER6> SQLite is amazing. It is a tech that no programmer should be unfamiliar with. It takes at most a day or two of playing with it to learn all of its various quirks and tricks, is easy to bake in to any project regardless of language, and performs like mad.

<comment><USER7> Any particular resources you recommend to learn it?

<comment><USER8> sqlite.org's documentation for the C api [1] and its explanation of what kind of SQL it supports [2] are both very good.

[1] [http://sqlite.org/cintro.html](http://sqlite.org/cintro.html)

[2] [http://sqlite.org/lang.html](http://sqlite.org/lang.html)

<comment><USER9> If I may, python sqlite interface is pretty great too.

[https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/sqlite3.html#sqlite- and-...](https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/sqlite3.html#sqlite-and-python- types)

<comment><USER10> The sqlite3 module that comes with python is terrible when it comes to errors. For example, if OperationalError is raised, it could be any of the following SQLite errors:

SQLITE_ERROR, SQLITE_PERM, SQLITE_ABORT, SQLITE_BUSY, SQLITE_LOCKED, SQLITE_READONLY, SQLITE_INTERRUPT, SQLITE_IOERR, SQLITE_FULL, SQLITE_CANTOPEN, SQLITE_PROTOCOL, SQLITE_EMPTY, SQLITE_SCHEMA

How do you know which? The only thing you can do is convert the exception to a string and compare error messages. That's absurd.

How about IntegrityError? That's either SQLITE_CONSTRAINT or SQLITE_MISMATCH. Which one? Compare strings again.

If you need to use SQLite with python, apsw actually converts errors to discrete exceptions.

<comment><USER11> (I am the APSW author). The reason why the sqlite3 module (aka pysqlite) behaves the way it does is because of DBAPI (Python standard database API). That tries to make all databases look and behave the same. pysqlite could do more - eg the SQLite error code could be an attribute on the exception, but the code base is very rarely updated.

Wanting a Python wrapper for SQLite that celebrated SQLite's features, functionality and semantics rather than paper them over is why I started APSW a decade ago. It also has considerably better testing and diagnostics, and is thread safe.

[http://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/pysqlite.html](http://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/pysqlite.html)

<comment><USER12> Thank you for your work on APSW, it's a fantastic library. I'm the author of the peewee ORM[1] and I've included an APSW backend[2] for folks who want to use peewee with APSW. Being able to write extension modules in Python is such a cool feature! I also made a demo that exposes Redis as a SQLite table[3].

[1] [http://docs.peewee-orm.com/](http://docs.peewee-orm.com/)

[2] [http://docs.peewee- orm.com/en/latest/peewee/playhouse.html#a...](http://docs.peewee- orm.com/en/latest/peewee/playhouse.html#apsw)

[3] [https://github.com/coleifer/peewee/blob/master/examples/redi...](https://github.com/coleifer/peewee/blob/master/examples/redis_vtable/redis_vtab.py)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I was tinkering with [http://thredis.org](http://thredis.org) I spent a lot of time looking into SQLite internals, and it is by far the most polished, comment-rich code base that I have ever seen, it reads like a fun book. Especially if you're interested in low-lever relational db stuff - how SQL statements are processed, data is stored, B-Trees, etc. It's better than any book out there (and such books tend to be very expensive).

</comment><comment><USER12> I wrote a post a while back singing the praises of SQLite. Some of you may be interested:

[http://charlesleifer.com/blog/sqlite-small-fast-reliable- cho...](http://charlesleifer.com/blog/sqlite-small-fast-reliable-choose-any- three-/)

<comment><USER14> Great, write up convinced me to use Sqlite instead of Mysql for a simple in- house webpage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to see the same speed measurements done for mobile. A 64-bit Linux desktop isn't representative of the #1 use case for SQLite as a mobile database replacement for Core Data.

<comment><USER16> Why should it not be similar faster on mobile?

<comment><USER17> No only different instruction set, but probably drastically different cache hierarchy and branch predictors. The tool cachegrind which they are using is simulating a program's effect on the cache and branch predictor, which will likely both be dramatically smaller in embedded devices vs modern server CPUs, so the results may be very misleading to real world applications for sqite.

<comment><USER18> Also multicore memory hierarchies are very different on ARM -- e.g. atomics are much more expensive there in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> SQLite is one of the rare examples of very elaborate implemented software that is very good maintained, too.

One of the best pieces of free software around.

Where else do you find software, that was very good implemented from the beginning and is so carefully enhanced and optimized? (And not only for new "features") -- I remember no official available example.

<comment><USER20> And SQLite is also one of the most tested pieces of software in the world: [https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html](https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html)

<comment><USER21> SQLite is the ultimate blackbox. Reliability beyond compare

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We use SQLite extensively in Minuum and I couldn't be happier. It's in all our critical real-time code paths that bring up candidates while you're typing. Because we're on SQLite our predictions keep getting faster for free!

Faster predictions mean we can handle more types of errors (more missed characters, more complex typos) in the same time budget. Thanks SQLite, you guys are awesome.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The change in title hides the main point (~2x speed increase) and makes it appear as a simple bugfix release.

</comment><comment><USER23> You would think with such a performances boost they would have put it first in the change-log, but no it's hidden at the end.

One thing for sure, they never worked for AMD or Nvidia marketing department ;-)

</comment><comment><USER24> One of the great things about SQLite is its incredibly comprehensive automated test suite. That allows aggressive optimization without fear you're breaking something.

</comment><comment><USER25> I still remember when Firefox switched to using SQLite for most of its internal data. It felt like it took 3 or 4 releases to work out the concurrency and blocking issues. I remember back in the day it had lots to do with fsync.

Has most of that been worked out between SQLite and newer Linux kernels, or is that a pit waiting for other applications that go the same route?

</comment><comment><USER12> I wrote up a quick blog post describing how to build the new FTS5 search extension, which was included in the 22.214.171.124 release:

[http://charlesleifer.com/blog/building-the-sqlite- fts5-searc...](http://charlesleifer.com/blog/building-the-sqlite-fts5-search- extension/)

</comment><comment><USER26> A little off topic, but is there any benchmarking software to compare embedded databases? For instance SQLite vs H2.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anybody heard anything about SQLite4?</comment>


Suggest founders for new edition of 'Founders at work' - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER3> ++++ Brad Fitzpatrick / LiveJournal

++++ Joe Kraus / JotSpot (not Excite)

+++ Chad Hurley or Steve Chen / YouTube

+++ Reid Hoffman / LinkedIn

+++ Jason Calacanis / Weblogsinc

++ Markus Frind / PlentyOfFish

++ Kevin Rose / Digg

++ Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook

\+ Michael Arrington / TechCrunch

<comment><AUTHOR> Kraus is in the current edition. I'd have to agree with Fitzpatrick. I know your thoughts on his brilliance. Didn't think of Hurley/Chen. For Calacanis I'd also add Dave Winer. Rose, Zuckerberg are still playing out. What did Arrington do thats so interesting with TechCrunch?

<comment><USER4> I agree with Kraus even though he's in the current edition. More!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please include some people from the infrastructure world. Founders of companies like Cisco, Juniper, Qualcomm, etc. Even smaller chip companies. How did these people get started?

Here's an example of someone interesting: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bechtolsheim>

And another: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Communications>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reading Founders at Work and going through the stories I was struck by who was not in the list. Another edition is in the planning by JL. What founders would you suggest for the second edition? Mine would be ...

\- Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins (Ed Colligan) ~ Palm Computing

\- CmdrTaco ~ Slashdot

\- Larry Ellison ~ Oracle

\- Hasso Platner ~ SAP

\- David Kelly ~ IDEO

\- John Carmack ~ Id Software

\- Peter Molyneux ~ Bullfrog, Lionshead

<comment><USER4> Good suggestions. Haven't we all had enough of Molyneux, though? Plus, who out there is starting a game company? Nobody. Maybe Nolan Bushnell would be interesting, though.

I have a few suggestions of my own:

\- Jeremy Wertheimer (ITA)

\- Justin Frankel (Nullsoft)

\- Lars Rasmussen (Where2)

\- Jawed Karim (YouTube)

\- Wil Shipley (Delicious Monster)

Longshots: Bill Joy, Larry or Sergey, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Omidyar

<comment><USER6> "Plus, who out there is starting a game company?"

The target audience for "Founders at work" is not just news.YC ;)

<comment><USER4> Sure, but like I said on my blog, if even _Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin_ started Flektor instead of a game company, is there a whole lot of opportunity out there for anyone else?

<http://www.zachbaker.com/articles/2007/05/19/congrats-to-flektor>

That was also around the time last year at E3 where Warren Spector gave his advice to those who wanted to start the next big studio:

"You have a zero percent chance of success. The barrier to entry in terms of cost, quality required, access to a market... forget it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Greg Stein - compare.net (sold to MS, originally founded with Pierre O. -- he left to found eBay); Greg worked on SVN and ended up at Google. Fascinating guy. Bill Gross BradFitz Justin Frankel Mark fraunfelder -- boingboing John Hanke - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER8> Heidi Messer, LinkShare (sold to Rakuten for $425 Million in 2005)

It would be nice to see some women up there, the company took ten years to build, started in 1996 (the really early days and in NYC) was funded by ICG (remember the public internet fund that was worth more then GE in 2 years then almost bankrupt) they filed to go public, then the market went bust, then it was sold for a ton of money. She started the business with her brother.....sounds like an interesting read to me.

</comment><comment><USER9> This has been around before, there were some listed here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16901>

Personally, I find the "big, but not huge" ones the most inspirational for some reason. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the like have been covered a lot in various ways, and have also had time to let their legends grow in their own minds.

<comment><AUTHOR> _'... This has been around before ...'_

I missed this and would have searched for it if I could have :( The ones I want are the side players as well There's lots of interesting going on in the pre PC, PC era, Web 1 & Web 2 era that have yet to be told.

\- PC ~ Phil Kahn, borland

\- Web 1 ~ realmedia

\- Web 2 ~ moo, last.fm, zoomer, photobucket

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sean Adams - founder of Slim Devices. He seems like a great example of bootstrapping and initiative. Web startups are one thing, but starting a company that builds neat consumer electronics hardware, builds a great community, and then gets acquired by Logitech - that would be an excellent case study.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm mostly interested in hearing from hardware and finance guys. However, the first obvious interview would be:

\- Larry & Sergey

\- Astro Teller @ Body Media

\- Matt Flannery @ Kiva

\- Ross Freeman, Bernie Vonderschmitt, and Jim Barnett @ Xilinx

<comment><USER12> I'm clearly out of the loop. I've never heard of any of those except Larry and Sergey. They definitely aren't the "first obvious" choices for me. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Richard Barton of Zillow Jack Dangermond of ESRI

Also would like to see a gaming founder - Carmack is a fine candidate & -Jason Rubin & Andy Gavin formerly of Naughty Dog & currently with/founded Flektor

<comment><USER6> Yep, Carmack would be great; on the other hand, you can learn pretty much _everything_ you need to know about how he started id Software with his friends by reading the great book "Masters of Doom" (I strongly recommend it).

George Broussard and the Duke Nukem team would be great, too (the brilliant guy who wrote the then-ubercool 3D game engine was still a kid at the time!)

By the way: web startups are great but they aren't the only ones. "Founders at work" is a great, great resource but it would have been even greater if it focused a little less on web stuff.

A very brilliant guy is Matt Dillon. Not the actor... well, he certainly is brilliant too ;) The software developer: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Dillon_(computer_scientist)>

He started a few startups but he is mostly known as a BSD kernel developer wizard. He started the very innovative DragonflyBSD project (a fork of FreeBSD with impressive goals).

Chuck Moore (inventor of Forth and computer visionary) started/was part of a few startups, too. Lately, he has been with IntellaSys creating an impressive, radically-different microprocessor ("SEAforth").

The story of Bill Joy (BSD, TCP/IP hacker and co-founder of Sun Microsystems) would be cool, too.

The Lisp Machine guys would be great as well (though there already is some info available of the net).

And why not founders in fields not related at all with computers? The founders of Bose, Hobie Cat, etc.

EDIT: yes, there is a lot of superlatives :)

<comment><AUTHOR> _'... George Broussard ...'_

and the making of Duke Nukem Forever ~ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Reddits, of course.

</comment><comment><USER15> There will obviously be companies that appeal to certain people and companies that don't. Why not have different themed editions of the book....one that is hardware focused, one infrastructure, one software platforms (OSes, languages, frameworks), etc.

As well, add some from notable companies that grew up large enough to be recognizable but failed. Perhaps we could learn something from the seeds of their destruction...

</comment><comment><USER16> Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank would be great. He started a microfinance bank and recently won a Nobel Peace prize for his work! That's not something many startups can claim. Possibly Iqbal Quadir of Grameen Phone too.

Also some European startups such as skype, last.fm, moo etc

<comment><USER17> You really think an interview with Yunus would be helpful? He's just a loan shark with good PR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> please include Markus Frind from PlentyOfFish. His story is both fascinating, inspiring and so not the norm. Also.. it may be better if you dont include YC companies, since most of their stories are already so well publicized.

</comment><comment><USER19> Jellyfish.com - Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire FeedDemon - Nick Bradbury

<comment><AUTHOR> _'... Nick Bradbury ...'_

I'd read about Nick Bradbury. Been doing desktop based web stuff since '97. He's also the startup anti-pattern as a one man business (to my knowledge) & multi skilled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I suggest my partner and me. Just give us a little while...

</comment><comment><USER20> maybe the topics should be categorize into a few subtopics like web, gaming, OS, gadgets (the creators of PS, Nintendo, Xbox) and so forth...

</comment><comment><USER21> JJ Allaire

</comment><comment><USER22> Ben Nolan ~ Groupswiki.com</comment>


Details Leaked on CIAs "Aeris" Implant for Debian RHEL CentOS Solaris and FreeBSD - <AUTHOR> https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/Aeris-UsersGuide/page-1/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6pwyqa/details_leake...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6pwyqa/details_leaked_on_cias_aeris_implant_for_debian/)</comment>


Show HN: A set of more desktop/mobile/touchscreen friendly web UI components - <AUTHOR> http://az.ht/ui/build/curr/window.html
http://az.ht/ui/build/curr/datatable.html
http://az.ht/ui/build/curr/tabs.html
http://az.ht/ui/build/curr/layout.html
http://az.ht/ui/build/curr/accordion.html
Github:
https://github.com/elgs/azui
I have been working on these web ui components in the past few months. Now they seem to start working. I was not a front end developer. The reason I was determined to write these components is that I couldn't find anything similar with consistent behavior on desktop, tablets and phones. Now I decided to open source it. I'm hoping to get some feedback. I'm trying my best to make consistent behavior across devices and OS's, but my devices are limited, so please let me know if anything is broken on your devices. Thank you! <comment><USER2> This a very nice starting point for web components. The window component appears to function fairly smoothly. May I suggest filtering examples on the data-table and a kitchen-sink example which shows multiple components together?

Great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I have added the data table filter to the TODO, and I am working on the docs, examples and the kitchen sink. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> window components are cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


The domain name htt.ps is for sale - <AUTHOR> https://htt.ps/ <comment><USER2> And?

<comment><AUTHOR> `htt.ps` if bought could potentially be weaponized for phishing since it resembles [https://](https://)

<comment><USER3> Please note that 'domain hacks' in that sentence does not refer to phishing. [0]

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

<comment><AUTHOR> You could do something like this:

`[https://htt.ps/accounts.google.com/`](https://htt.ps/accounts.google.com/`)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


On Post-Modernist Philosophy of Science (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/Postmod.htm <comment><USER2> > She: I've heard that the main thing is to avoid relativism. But I'm a > physicist, and that presents a real difficulty. Without relativity there'd > be no possibility of making measurements and we'd each be prisoners, to all > eternity, in some single point of view. In my discipline, we need the > relativity of frames of reference in order even to begin work. I have a > special need for relativity because I work on events close to the Big Bang. > You don't need relativity, too?

I think it's safe to say that, with this paragraph, Bruno Latour failed the Ideological Turing Test: this conflation of philosophical relativism with the physical theory of relativity is not something that would ever be uttered by someone who knew what the latter is.

It gets worse from there. Please, anyone who's tempted to write a dialogue with a fictional person holding an opposing viewpoint: talk to one first! Find out what their arguments really are! And, if possible, learn their views well enough that your summary would seem accurate to one of them.

<comment><USER3> > Please, anyone who's tempted to write a dialogue with a fictional person > holding an opposing viewpoint: talk to one first! Find out what their > arguments really are! And, if possible, learn their views well enough that > your summary would seem accurate to one of them.

Amen. It might also prevent the deliberately insulting language that Latour adopted. Clearly, he holds the scientific camp in contempt. An actual dialog might have demonstrated to him that there was more there than ignorance and mistaken ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The discussion near the end of Philip Scranton was the most interesting and coherent part of the article for me, while earlier Dutch is mostly just incredulous about the words used by Latour and Derrida.

I think he makes a good point about a mutual misunderstanding:

> The history of science as presented in science texts, especially older ones, > is rightly unsatisfactory to sociologists. In the interests of providing > students with a heuristic framework (frequently a historical approach is the > best way to explain a complex concept) and a sense of historical > orientation, the accounts were streamlined to the point where they presented > a highly linear view of science devoid of false starts, blind alleys, and > personality clashes. The reason textbooks do it perhaps a tad better than > they used to, by the way, is partly due to the insights of sociologists.

> Sociologists, on the other hand, need to realize that the way _they_ present > the history of science can seem just as distorted. However honorable their > intent, their language _seems_ at times to deny the existence of objective > knowledge.

<comment><USER5> The language used in sociology _does_ deny the existence of objective knowledge, for excellent reasons that sociologists are happy to explain. It's a way to manage a massive problem.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardif...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/harrycollins/sociology- of-science.html)

We might know objectively that matter is made of atoms, and sociologists know that too; but Dalton, Boyle and Lavoisier didn't know it. It's easy to tell a story about what they did and why they did it, and the story will end with everyone finding out that matter is made of atoms. But, in order for the beginning of that story to be an objective explanation of what people did, it has to make sense whether or not matter turns out to be made of atoms.

Causality runs forwards in time. Therefore, atoms were discovered as a result of the actions of people who didn't know about atoms, and atoms did not directly affect the actions that led to their discovery.

If atoms caused the discovery of atoms, it would have happened ten billion years ago, not two hundred.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link to the Collins article; I found it very interesting.

I have some questions about your argument that the atoms didn't cause their discovery, but I don't think I have time to formulate them clearly right now, so I'll just stop with thanking you for the link. :-)

<comment><USER5> Here is an exercise: draft your account of how atoms caused the discovery of atoms, then imagine how I would rewrite it as an account of how the luminiferous aether caused the Michelson-Morley experiment.

My account is obviously bullshit, because the luminiferous aether doesn't exist. So, if your story is not bullshit, there must be a specific causal link in my story that doesn't have an analog in yours. Find it.

<comment><USER7> This seems suspicious to me, like you're playing a game with words that I'm not able to precisely identify.

Isn't this conflating objective reality (which we can only theorize about) with objective knowledge about reality (which can improve over time but never be perfect)?

The theory of the luminiferous aether "caused" the Michelson-Morley experiment, the outcome of which was inconsistent with the luminiferous aether actually existing. The theory of atoms "caused" many experiments, the outcome of which was consistent with atoms actually existing.

What causes theories to exist? Conjecture and criticism motivated by logical and empirical problems. The problems are "caused" by objective reality, of which atoms are one part (at a certain level of explanation, anyway).

An account of the development of scientific knowledge should explain the development of these problems, the conjectured solutions, and criticism made to them, and why the current explanations are the best available in light of this history. At no point do we need to claim that the current explanations are the best possible, but they are still objective knowledge.

<comment><USER5> > The theory of ...

This is starting to sound like history or sociology. The next step comes when you notice that the "the theory of" keys on your typewriter are getting excessively worn, and adopt a convention that any reference to "atoms" actually means "the atomic theory of matter".

There's a convention in scientific reasoning, that I'm not allowed to say, "Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", although in fact he did. This is a safety measure: if we forbid people from saying that, we don't lose much, but we avoid some common ways of fooling ourselves.

Sociologists are coming from the other side. They are allowed to say, "because Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", but they can't say "... because spacetime is curved." The readers know that spacetime is curved, and it's tempting for them to forget they are not the people whose actions they want to explain, and those people acted as if spacetime were flat. Perhaps they noticed things that were inconsistent with spacetime being flat. They never directly noticed that spacetime was curved: if it were possible to notice that directly, no one would ever have believed otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having met with some of the "Science and Technology Studies" students and floored by the ignorance of basic technical facts by some of the people they quoted to be correct, I believe this postmodernist trend arose out of post- cold war technological superiority.

With Science and Technology no longer needed to fight against a powerful enemy, it was easy to devalue it. However times are changing.

A society can only ignore science and facts in favor of meaningless word salad as long as their security does not depends on it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'll go ahead and confess that I haven't read the whole article, but I think it will still be valuable to relay that as a former philosophy grad student (though not a philosopher of science), my first response was "who the fuck is Andrew Pickering?"

Don't think that the initial quote is the norm in philosophy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Strangely, Pickering's Wikipedia photo instantly reminded me of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Here is the latter drinking a bottle of pepper sauce: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfAk- guplA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfAk-guplA).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, this is old newspaper. The Science Wars were a product of the post-'60s worldview, in which good-natives-versus-wicked-colonisers was more or less the overarching theme and rationality was suspect; they quickly died the death in the revised, post-9/11 master narrative of Enlightenment-versus-superstitious- darkness, which wasn't fertile ground for even modest and non-radical skepticism about The Science. A classic document of this is the "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?" paper, in which Bruno Latour scrambles to get with the just-modified program: note the 2003/4 date. [http://www.bruno- latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I...](http://www.bruno- latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf) Of course we'll have to see how things develop in future, now that the post-2001 frame of reference is already fading in people's minds.

</comment><comment><USER11> > _In a century that produced Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Slobo > Milosevic we still see philosophers and sociologists seeking the roots of > evil in externals like family violence, poverty, television, even > circumcision and lack of breast-feeding (and no, I am not making those > up!)._

Whereas the correct answer is what? Some disturbed individuals like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc are the cause? Or was it "philosophy" that perverted them -- because Hitler sure as hell didn't read much philosophy.

And what about the millions of victims of atrocities from the "civilized" colonial powers not mentioned in this list, because they're third world so nobody cares, and b) they kill the nice argument about "pure evil" leaders motivated by philosophy. Those crimes were motivated by the almighty buck.

> _Calling twentieth-century philosophy superficial gives it too much dignity; > vacuous is the closest term._

Yeah, man, you dismissed it in a sentence. How intellectual. And coincidentally, how anglo-saxon, the very culture that never understood continental philosophy to begin with, and deals mainly in scientism and crude empiricist platitudes.

<comment><USER3> > Or was it "philosophy" that perverted them -- because Hitler sure as hell > didn't read much philosophy.

Unfortunately, he read enough Nietzche to become dangerous. (Or perhaps he was dangerous anyway, and read enough Nietzche to provide a smoke screen...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Jacques Derrida is the Picasso of bullshit artistry.

<comment><USER13> Could be -- I know some so-called "post-modern" philosophers to be meaningful, but I know very little about Derrida.

Still, where professor Dutch starts sounding like a crackpot is when he strawmans Latour and Derrida into a crusade against the purity of Scientific Objectivity. No deconstructionist I know of has ever picketed a chemical lab; "green activists" have done that -- and to throw christian young-earth creationism and Velikovsky on the lap of mr. Derrida, well, that just sounds like asking someone whether they have stopped beating their wife already.

I do wonder if the rise of this scientistic reactionaryism (not the self- satisfied belief in science, but the need to go out and write lengthy rants on subjects they know nothing about) has to do with the stagnation of fundamental physics since the 1970s. I mean -- professor Dutch sounds like he was promises a priesthood and then denied access to God.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also see, Dawkins review of Alan Sokal's book,

[http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html](http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Counterpoint: [http://retractionwatch.com/](http://retractionwatch.com/)

(Edit: now -- this, from the very bottom of the article, is disturbing:

"If you don't understand why science has a valid claim to objective knowledge, and why undermining the belief in objective reality is dangerous not just to science but to society at large, don't disturb those of us who do.")

<comment><USER15> There is a valid argument that the postmodernists bring up that the author of this article (and science in general) seems to be ignoring. This is certainly obfuscated by the postmodernist tendency to misuse terminology all over the place, so it's best to use a specific example to illustrate it.

Recently, as I'm sure everyone here knows, the LHC found the Higgs boson. Imagine an exchange between EP, an ecstatic physicist, and SP, a skeptical postmodernist.

EP: We did it, we found the Higgs boson!

SP: Why should I care?

EP: Well, knowing that the Higgs boson means that we finally know that the Standard Model is correct.

SP: That's cool, I guess. So you saw the Higgs boson with your eyes?

EP: No, that's impossible.

SP: How do you know it exists?

EP: Well, there's this cool thing in the LHC called ATLAS. We get beams of protons to collide in the middle of it, and the resulting products set off little signals inside the detector. By processing the results of these signals, we can figure out what byproducts must have been involved...

SP: How can you find that out?

EP: _Embarks on particle physics that goes over SP 's head_

SP: This is the Standard Model you've talked about?

EP: Uh, yes...

SP: So, what you're telling me is that you've just verified the Standard Model by assuming that it was true in the first place?

EP: ...

SP: _Walks away in smug satisfaction_

What the postmodernist gets right in the argument is that our evaluation of the validity of scientific tools to make observation is based on a model of how science works, and that, without care, you risk creating a circular argument that boils down to proving models correct because you assumed them. What they get wrong is the assumption that this circular argument is unavoidable, and that thus the entire edifice of science is built on shaky ground in the first place (ultimately being simplified down to "there is no such thing as objective reality"). Ironically, what the Sokal exposed is that the postmodernists were _just as guilty_ of the crime they accused scientists of committing: they didn't criticize that which would have proved them correct.

The message for scientists should be that you should always strive to make sure that the tools are working properly. If there were a serious bug in the code used in ATLAS, do you think that the scientists on the project would have been equally diligent in finding and fixing that bug if it made a Higgs boson appear where it didn't actually occur than if it hid the appearance of the Higgs boson?

<comment><USER16> I don't think this circularity exists or plays any substantial role. Skeptics and some philosophers seem to have a hard time understanding how dreadfully difficult it is to come up with theory of _anything_ that is analytically insightful and makes even remotely correct predictions.

I would be fine if someone came up with a theory of, say, electromagnetism based on assuming the existence of the flying spaghetti monster or, to stick to the topic, based on assuming that our reality is mostly constructed by culture. The only thing I ask for is that those claims actually play a role in the theory, rather than being a mere addition, _and_ that you can you can actually use the theory to build a transistor radio.

<comment><USER17> > I would be fine if someone came up with a theory of, say, electromagnetism > based on assuming the existence of the flying spaghetti monster or, to stick > to the topic, based on assuming that our reality is mostly constructed by > culture. The only thing I ask for is that those claims actually play a role > in the theory, rather than being a mere addition, and that you can you can > actually use the theory to build a transistor radio.

I cannot upvote this more. It seems all too easy to criticize scientific methods as being baseless or assuming some odd construction about the universe or the context or whatever it's embedded in, but it's so easy to overlook the fact that there are only so many (read: extremely few) ways one can construct a theory with the same predictive power as that of physics which has the same or less number of free variables. Thank you for putting into words something I've tried so hard to verbalize to some of my friends who please themselves with criticizing positivism/post-positivism as being _woefully naive_ (relative to, say, constructivism), yet benefit infinitely from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From Wikipedia on the Science Wars:

>> "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives."

</comment><comment><USER19> maybe it's a formatting issue in my browser, but it was less than clear when it was the author talking, versus when he was quoting something. i had to bail. am i not giving the paper a fair shake?

</comment><comment><USER20> I was about to say that this guy is about 15-20 years late to the party with the polemic, but noticed from the footer that this essay is in fact 16 years old. Maybe someone could add a (2000) to the title?

For more background on the period this essay came out of: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars)

<comment><USER21> The weird thing here is that if everything is social construct, then science as social construct is just as true as it would be as objective reality. Then you can just pick science as your favorite construct and call it a day.

But for some reason "social constructionist" seem to be often incredibly biased. Some things are "false" because they are constructs, but some things are "true" because they are constructs. And some things are just objectively horrible, while others are constructed as horrible.

Examples: rape culture is social construct, but mental distress from rape is suddenly not. Nationalism is "false" social construct, but Marxism is "true" social construct.

<comment><USER20> I think you're conflating quite a few different people there. I mean, there probably are some people who simultaneously hold all those views, but most don't. For example many people doing social studies of science _do_ find science interesting, which is partly why they spend so much time studying people who follow that methodology— they just don't think it's a methodology that is independent of the human culture that it arose from, and are particularly interested in how its social practices developed (even if the scientists themselves don't like to see what they do as "social practices"). Bruno Latour goes in this category, as something of a 'science-o-philic' social constructionist (although he's also a "soft" constructionist, because he views both humans and non-human entities, like lab apparatus and materials, as jointly doing the construction, vs. it being a purely cultural phenomenon). And generally (most) social constructionists and (most) Marxists don't see eye-to-eye, precisely because most Marxists do think there is a scientific, objective method (historical materialism) for analyzing social relations, history, economies, etc., and orthodox Marxists even tend to believe objective factors ultimately determine culture rather than the reverse.

<comment><USER21> The spesific dude/dudette who invented the "nationalism is modern social construct and pretty false" is in my understanding quite left leaning. People who say this stuff out loud in real life (all three of them) are very left leaning. Being completely opposed to nationalism makes sense in very few instances, and comitern sympathies are one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Article with such a title doesn't have a mention of transhumanism. I'm sorry I don't have time for this.</comment>


American Dreams: Did William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' Blueprint Our Reality? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/05/american-dreams-did-william-gibson-s-neuromancer-blueprint-our-reality.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Lots of things to take issue with in this piece (among other things, the author seems to imply that Gibson coined the term "dub music") but this bit raises an interesting point about the ways that canonical near future books like Neuromancer and Snowcrash actually shape the near future:

"Thirty years after the novel's publication, it's difficult to tell whether Gibson foresaw the future or whether the future, designed by technologists who idolized Gibson's novels, self-consciously imitated his novel."</comment>