Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research - <AUTHOR> https://www.ldeming.com/longevityfaq <comment><USER3> I'm a 51 year old interested amateur.

While I'm hopeful bio/chemistry/genetic research will help enhance life quality/longevity my focus has been largely lifestyle to go along with a few supplements.

Sleep: minimum of 7 hours Fitness: strength & movement, yoga/stretching, low impact long duration activity to protect joints Mental Fitness: intellectual challenges such as reading long-form and learning to code Mindfulness: managing stress/anxiety Engagement: with family/friends Environment: trying to maximise time in healthy environments and limiting my time in unhealthy environments Hydration: lots of water, no juices/sofa, rarely any alcohol Nutrition: Intermittent fasting(18/6 5 days a week), ketogenic diet, no processed sugars

Supplements used:

Resveratrol Ubiquinol NAD Thiacin Fish Oil Ginkgo

Before I hit 50, I made the shift away from trying to maximise performance and shift focus towards durability/longevity.

I have an outlier score( to the good side) for telomere length, so I'm biased towards believing it helps, but all I can do is all I can do and make the most of every day and remember to have fun along the way.

<comment><USER4> Does fasting and depriving your brain of nutrients like calcium, magnesium etc. impair your cognitive abilities?

<comment><USER3> I've been on a disciplined ketogenic diet for 3 years now.

I had put on weight due to a few persistent training injuries.

I lost 22kg fairly quickly combined with a return to durability/longevity focused fitness.

Anecdotally, I actually feel my cognitive ability has improved. I feel sharper and able to focus better/longer and have been published far more after than prior.

However, I have to admit that I need to stay quite well hydrated or else I start feeling slower/foggier, I reckon it could be both diet and age related.

I feel like I am fastest/sharpest in the morning prior to a late lunch when my eating window opens.

I do eat breakfast on weekends and have the occasional cheat meal approx once per month.

Just my anecdotal experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to get involved in longevity - first as a side project, maybe later full-time. What would be the best way to support the cause as a software engineer or data scientist?

<comment><AUTHOR> Laura's website also has a "How Can I Help?" page:

[https://www.ldeming.com/how-to-help](https://www.ldeming.com/how-to-help)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In 1897, philosopher Paul Janet came up with the model that current moments of time in our lives might be perceived by their "fraction of life lived thus far". This would seem to undermine the value of longevity somewhat:

according to this visualization of the idea: [https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/](https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/)

<comment> GuB-42 I don't like this argument, it has a singularly at age zero.

The visualisation sidesteps the problem by starting at year one. You can also add arbitrary constants or other tweaks, but then the idea lose its elegance and you can make it say anything you want.

<comment><USER7> My recalled experiences approaching age zero closely resemble an asymptote. I can accept that the subjective time between 0.0 seconds (when is time zero, anyway?) and 0.1 seconds was infinitely longer than the last 40 years. Recall of things since I was five only gets moderately difficult, while recall of experiences from one year old or earlier is almost completely inaccessible.

One could say that's because I lacked the experience to interpret and store my sensations at the time, and that those were gradually gained, but to my view that's not a refutation but actually reenforcement of the argument. I'm still learning higher level abstractions every day; the tools to more efficiently store sensation are gathered as new sensations are gathered.

When I was 14, every day at work was radically different than the last. At 44, they're pretty much the same. When I was 14, 8 hours was like forever. These days, if you asked me at 9PM, there might be a 2-3 second delay for me to remember if I worked at all that day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> List of companies working on the biology of aging: [http://agingbiotech.info/companies/](http://agingbiotech.info/companies/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> HN discussion from three years ago, although I think this page has been updated since then: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098176](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098176)

</comment><comment><USER9> Food intake is regulated primarily by dietary protein and carbohydrate • Low- protein, high-carbohydrate diets are associated with the longest lifespans • Energy reduction from high-protein diets or dietary dilution does not extend life

[https://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(14)...](https://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131\(14\)00065-5?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1550413114000655%3Fshowall%3Dtrue)

<comment> 0-_-0 ...in mice, which evolved to eat mainly carbohydrates, while humans evolved to eat whatever they could

<comment><USER10> what's that rule about research that most research should come with the disclaimer "in mice"?

<comment><USER11> You're probably thinking of the twitter account @justsaysinmice, [https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice](https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice).

For the uninitiated and otherwise unaware, many studies regarding illnesses, disease, nutrition, exercise, medicine, etc. perform clinical trials with mice. Resultant publications are picked up by news outlets who headline the results, without the caveat that the results were only found in mice. Mice are, notably, not humans and the results don't (in fact, rarely ever) carry over 1:1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Veritasium has a good, relatively recent video on this topic: [https://youtu.be/QRt7LjqJ45k](https://youtu.be/QRt7LjqJ45k)

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been trying some of the David Sinclair NMN + resveratrol stuff for a couple of months. I think I can safely state there has been no noticeable effect in my case. There's a guy on the internet been trying it for 6 months with seemingly some positive effects [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWx77ARQ9lo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWx77ARQ9lo) And it seems to do stuff in mice.

[https://khn.org/news/a-fountain-of-youth-pill-sure-if- youre-...](https://khn.org/news/a-fountain-of-youth-pill-sure-if-youre-a- mouse/)

<comment><USER14> Mouse models are just that. Models. A lot of the results in mice don't carry over to humans. A positive result in mice is only weakly indicative of potential efficacy in humans. [1,2] Pop-sci articles seldom acknowledge this or draw attention to this.

Re reservatol, the jury is really out on that one too. [3,4]

[1] [https://theconversation.com/of-mice-and-men-why-animal- trial...](https://theconversation.com/of-mice-and-men-why-animal-trial- results-dont-always-translate-to-humans-73354)

[2] [https://www.nature.com/news/chilly-lab-mice-skew-cancer- stud...](https://www.nature.com/news/chilly-lab-mice-skew-cancer- studies-1.14190)

[3] [https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2019/10/29/david- sincl...](https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2019/10/29/david-sinclair/)

[4] [https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/diet-rich-resveratrol- of...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/diet-rich-resveratrol-offers- health-boost-201405157153)

<comment><USER13> Yeah it's a bit hard to tell either way - works or does nothing much. The enthusiasts like Sinclair take DNA methylation tests which seem to indicate some effect but whether that translates to longer life I dunno. I've been too tight to try those as they tend to run $300 per test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I watched a documentary on Fred Beckey and then Valley Uprising. For a group that took a lot of risk, many of them seem to live or have lived till the age of 75. Fred Beckey himself lived till the age of 94. His entire lifestyle is a list of things to not to live long except for the exercise.

</comment><comment><USER16> Actual substantial longevity - beyond quality of life enhancements - <USER2> something I greatly fear. It would change everything.

Imagine life with no kids and the joy they bring, a stagnation in all societal structures, no turnover of ideas (loosely quoting "agendas don't die; people die").

I'm sure such a civilization would be very stable, but won't have any extreme sports.

<comment> lachlan-sneff Do you not want to live longer?

<comment><USER17> "Science advances one funeral at a time." \- Max Planck

"Death is very likely the best single invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." \- Steve Jobs

I know my life is accreting old biases and obstacles. Today and for years to come (I hope) I have more to do, but some day I will become an agent of stagnation instead of advancement.

Nobody wants to die. But in the big picture, the alternative is worse.

<comment><USER18> For the vast majority of our history, there had been little to no technological changes.

Only difference is that in the last few centuries, there had been technological and scientific changes.

What changes? it's certainly isn't that old men die faster so that we embrace newer ideas faster. The old guards probably lived longer on average thanks to medicine.

<comment><USER17> Progress (technological or otherwise) is exponential by nature, because it builds on itself. What has changed is that its pace has outstripped our capacity to integrate it. So our age of peak contribution trends lower, towards the younger generation, which has less to unlearn.

As I grow older, I can see how my thinking is affected by my past. Someone with an unencumbered perspective will do the new thing, when I cannot.

<comment><USER19> It's an economic problem. Right now, there's this torrent of new minds to come up with new ideas thanks to their lack of preconceptions, so there's no effort put towards alternatives.

There's a lot of possibilities that will open up as our tech advances. Say, wiping all memories of your field so you can learn it again with a fresh mind. Spawning short-lived digital clones of your mind with the mental 'temperature' turned up, in whatever way that's possible- maybe just dose them up with synthetic lsd in different doses- and observe the results. Lots of ways to get novel ideas without having to rely on wastefully growing billions of brains (and the attached bodies!) before throwing them, and most of the information in them, away to rot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You can find another FAQ here for more related reading [https://nintil.com/longevity](https://nintil.com/longevity)

</comment><comment><USER21> I remember reading recently that Peter Thiel gets blood transfusions from children (parabiosis). Is that accurate?

<comment><USER13> >Mr Thiel said: "I want to publicly tell you that I'm not a vampire. On the record, I am not a vampire."

>When questioned further on the matter, he denied that he has ever injected himself with a "young person's blood,"

[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/peter-thiel-vampire-donald-trump-life-extension-blood-transfusion- ambrosia-palantir-a8614061.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow. This is awesome. Thank you Laura for taking time and writing this.

</comment><comment><USER23> So the tl;dr from what I've found so far is that:

* What you eat

* When you eat

* How much you eat

* Exercise

Are by far the simplest, cheapest, and most well documented way to extend life by quite a lot. We have lots of evidence to back calorie restriction. We know that eating more earlier in the day vs later means your insulin levels can recover better (or something?). We know eating certain types of fats is bad for you, and eating certain types of other things are good for you. Exercise, or at least the right kind of exercise (seems like there are open questions here, like how much is actually important) is healthy.

Then there are a number of pills you can take. When it comes to the pills we have a lot less evidence. From what I've seen there are probably a dozen or so pills, each one with bits and pieces of science surrounding them, that will _maybe_ have some impact on mortality or aging. Some of the research does seem quite compelling - niacin, for example, seems to be pretty well researched and is actually prescribed at times. Niacin is also one of the pills you'll see come up a lot if you start looking into anti-aging. Others like resveratrol (which, actually, appears to be old news - people have moved on, it seems, to more bioavailable substances) have a lot less research, though they're promising.

If you're willing to spend 100-200 dollars a month or so it seems that you can get most or all of these. I don't think _any_ research has been done on what taking _all_ of these will do to you, but there is research on how the chemicals behave and I suppose from there people seem to draw conclusions on interactions.

Interestingly, from what I've read a lot of the popular "anti aging" trends like anti-oxidants are, more or less, very much debunked. My understanding is that while anti-oxidants absolutely do what their name implies in a lab setting, most of them tend to not do a damn thing in humans with regards to oxidation. So who knows what is or isn't going to work.

From my layman understanding, if you're ~20 years old you can basically just not fuck up super hard and wait another decade and we'll know a lot more. If you're 30, definitely start taking health seriously but maybe don't worry so much about downing 50 supplements that only have a bit of backing research. If you're 40 and above, and your goal is life extension... you might have to take a gamble.

If you're interested, I found this channel quite interesting - I appreciated the guy always citing studies (and he explicitly calls out why he thinks the study is or is not high quality).

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpcvPcHJVOkO9Qp79BOagTg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpcvPcHJVOkO9Qp79BOagTg)

This FAQ definitely seems to be a good 'one stop shop' for learning the state of things, without being prescriptive.

I'm not a doctor. I just got interested in the last few weeks about this stuff. None of this is without risk - that much is obvious. Only just the other day I was reading a post by someone who ended up in the hospital with liver failure that very possibly could have been tied to their supplementation. If you start taking pills that you don't understand you seem _very_ likely to fuck things up - some pills require that you _take other pills also_ , for example lots of nootropics will fuck you up if you don't get enough choline in your diet. All of this is to say, there's cool and promising stuff here, but do your own research, and if you're very young and healthy don't stress about this stuff yet - the first step is always diet and exercise.

<comment><USER24> _Eat well, live well, still die._

I agree with everything you've written there, apart from the idea that diet & exercise will extend your life by quite a lot, and the idea that you'll have to gamble with interventions now if you're in your 40s. There's simply no behaviour or treatment today that will significantly extend the maximum human lifespan; unfortunately doing so will require years of scientific and technological innovation. Even caloric restriction looks monumentally feeble as an intervention, especially weighed against the effort involved.

As you say, one big question is how to do a wait calculation for your own personal timeline – at some point (we hope) the interventions will get more efficacious and have fewer adverse effects. The skill (luck?) will be judging when the benefits outweigh the risks for your personal circumstances, as your body ages and your risk profile increases. But at this point in history, there's no evidence that we're anywhere near a longevity escape velocity scenario, and your couple of years extra life from present day efforts should be enjoyed on its own terms, not as some sort of key to unlocking immortality.

I think that last part is leaned on heavily by this industry to oversell things to people; it amounts to little more than religious faith at this point in history. They are selling what they have to hand, but when we try to judge those interventions objectively, they're just not that effective (including diet & exercise).

They are ahead of the beauty-led anti-aging industry in that they are at least doing science, so there is hope for the future.

<comment><USER23> > apart from the idea that diet & exercise will extend your life by quite a > lot

But there's quite a lot of research on this?

> and the idea that you'll have to gamble with interventions now if you're in > your 40s

You don't _have to_. Feel free not to. But if your goal is life extension based on research, you only have what's available today, and around your 40s is, again from my layman reading, when your body starts to really age hard.

> There's simply no behaviour or treatment today that will significantly > extend the maximum human lifespan

If you're saying "living past 125" isn't possible even if you start now, _sure_ , but longevity is more about feeling 40 when you're 60, avoiding potential issues like heart attacks and alzheimers, etc. It is _not_ about living forever as you seem to be saying, and maybe that's a larger misconception. Living longer, sure, but mostly it's about living better.

I haven't seen a single person, anywhere, in everything I've read, saying "I'm trying to live forever". They're all saying "I don't want dimentia, I don't want a heart attack, I want to walk around and travel and live life well at 70 and 80".

And as for life extension, there's actually plenty of research on things you can do to extend your life. Again, not past 125, but past 70 - diet, exercise, niacin, etc are all pretty well established.

> but when we try to judge those interventions objectively, they're just not > that effective (including diet & exercise).

This doesn't seem to actually be the case. I'm surprised anyone would say that intervention treatments for something like avoiding heart disease aren't effective.

<comment><USER24> _But there's quite a lot of research on this?_

Yes, the numerous studies and meta-analyses I've seen suggest an effect of between 1–10 years of healthy lifespan added. That's certainly not nothing, but considering that life expectancy at birth is around 80 years in developed countries, you're talking about something that represents 1/8 of that context.

 _around your 40s is [...] when your body really starts to age hard_

I guess from a technical standpoint, you're really ageing from birth. You certainly start to see the Gompertz curve start to bite in your 40s though, as the net metabolic damage starts to compound.

 _Living longer, sure, but mostly it's about living better_

I've never really understood this argument. Avoiding the diseases of ageing will ultimately lengthen your life. Avoiding them all indefinitely would lengthen your life almost indefinitely (there is still a non-zero risk of dying without ageing of course).

Look, death and disease are scary. They're existential threats. Focusing on diet and exercise is great fun, has a host of incidental benefits, and returns the locus of control to yourself; however it cannot do all that much to really deflect the asteroid of ageing in the long run. I just want people to be aware of what the magnitude of the effects actually are, and not get sucked into the hype machine. I suppose sometimes it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive...I certainly hope that the state of the art advances fast enough to save us all, and that's basically based on nothing. Supplements like Niacin are just a flat-out bust: [https://www.cochrane.org/CD009744/VASC_niacin- people-or-with...](https://www.cochrane.org/CD009744/VASC_niacin-people-or- without-established-cardiovascular-disease)

In fact, it's highly improbable that any one oral drug or supplement will significantly alter the core pathology of ageing (and therefore reduce the risk of all age-related disease in one go). That's because the human body is a highly complex, tightly-coupled system that is not designed to be reverse- engineered or modified, and because the soma and the germ line split so long ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If people were dying in troves of a disease (...) every effort would be put on saving them, right? How come some deaths are considered "fine", but others aren't?

No. Just No.

Let longevity come. Let immortality come. Let us live forever, sail the heavens, and travel to every world, every star, every galaxy, everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone don't want longevity for humans? I think death is a beautiful thing and for a lot of us including myself life has been really tough at times. The fact that there is an equalizer in death makes life comforting at times.

<comment><USER27> I think people who feel this way should be perfectly free to, but not everyone does, and they should be free not to die as per their preference.

I think of it as, if my loved one (or me) were in the hospital with a fatal disease, but there was a cure, I would want the cure. I can't really see myself saying "Yeah, but death is so beautiful..."

I see aging the same way, as another fatal disease and I'd cure it if I could. I don't hope for an indefinite period of old age, but an indefinite period of good health, like 20-30s.

<comment><USER28> I don't know, I think one of the kindest things an older generation does is die off and let the younger generations take the reigns.

<comment><USER27> I don't feel that way at all. I don't need my parents to die to do my own thing. They can keep and continue to grow their stuff and I can build mine. Indeed, I'd be much happier in this case, I don't want to take their reins, I want to live in a world with them and share in life and experiences together, while having my own reins to my own wagon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I want to outlive all the bastards, fix every problem they've ever created, and live well past their loathesome names passing from memory.

</comment><comment><USER30> I stopped reading after seeing the cancer/hearth disease chart. It reinforces the belief that most deaths are caused by cancer, while actually it's hearth disease.

So if you make a chart, please make it accurate.

Therefore I couldn't trust the rest, since it might all be "drawn from the wrist".

<comment><USER31> If you unify all cancers into one category, then cancer is the top cause. If you split them up into the different types, then heart disease is bigger than any single of them. So you are wrong.

[https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the- top-10-...](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the- top-10-causes-of-death)

Shows heart disease as #1 with 3 million deaths but separates the cancer types.

[https://www.who.int/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/cancer](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer)

Says there were 9.6 million deaths caused by cancer, so more than 3 times the heart disease amount.

<comment><USER32> The second link says:

"Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and is responsible for an estimated 9.6 million deaths in 2018. Globally, about 1 in 6 deaths is due to cancer."

> So you are wrong.

Please be more careful in making this statement. The evidence you present should allow the reader to make their own decision.

<comment><USER31> > "Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally

Huh missed that, thanks for pointing it out!

I guess that this statement compares combined cancer types with the combined cardiovascular diseases [1]. Then, yes, cancer is #2. But the cardiovascular diseases can't really be summarized by "heart disease" because they include stuff like stroke as well.

So I wouldn't really say that OP is right.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate)

PS: Also note that in a sibling comment I already stated that I got the death count of heart disease wrong.

<comment><USER30> > So I wouldn't really say that OP is right.

If you look at improving your health, I am right.

Most people think you should prevent getting cancer (as I did before). But actually, you should put more emphasis on preventing hearth and artery disease, since it is the cause of more deaths! (I hope this last part is cleared out).

Plus, it is also more clear on how to prevent that, than how to prevent cancer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


People Are Finally Talking About The Thing Nobody Wants To Talk About - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/06/16/414724767/people-are-finally-talking-about-the-thing-nobody-wants-to-talk-about

<comment><USER2> @TheBiv: not even you wanted to at least write about it? :)

please add a more self-explanatory headline, it's an important health topic yet with a headline written like this it appears like clickbait</comment>


Tesla worker who criticized coronavirus safety measures is terminated - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/18/tesla-worker-who-criticized-coronavirus-safety-measures-receives-termination-notice/ <comment><USER2> And from the HN Tesla fanclub there was.... silence.

What did you expect?

<comment><USER3> If you fail to respond to voicemails and emails from your employer which request a response than I expect you will be fired as is happening here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That worker would rather have Tesla pay for him indefinitely while he doesn't come to work.</comment>


No one can agree on how to make tea - <AUTHOR> http://jseliger.com/2011/01/03/no-one-can-agree-on-how-to-make-tea/ <comment><USER2> I don't know if the article is really about making tea (likely not) but in our family everyone agrees that there is only one true way to make tea - that's how my grandma did it, that's how my mom did it and that is how my wife does it - 100% reproducible taste case!

Time for Tea!

</comment><comment><USER3> Something about the typography on your site just makes my eyes glaze over. Line-spacing, maybe? I think that's it. Too much line-height, not enough space between paragraphs.

Try:

      .entry p {
    	color: black;
    	line-height: 140%;
    	margin-bottom: 15px;
      }</comment>


Blippy Redux? Mine Launches A Service For Sharing Your Purchases With Friends - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/10/blippy-redux-mine-launches-a-service-for-sharing-your-purchases-with-friends/

<comment><USER2> great article!</comment>


What Is A Trust Seal Actually Worth? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zonealarm.com/2011/01/what-is-a-trust-seal-actually-worth.html <comment><USER2> I'm working on a start-up related to this. Are there any good ways on Hacker News to announce you are looking for a 3rd person to join the founding team? I'm pretty sure in this little thread is not the best place to ask......</comment>


A Male Birth Control Gel Is Getting Closer to Reality - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/male-birth-control-moves-closer-as-u-s-tests-hormone-skin-gel <comment><USER2> > The gel is a mix of progestin and testosterone,

This will end very badly

<comment><USER3> This might be immature to say but if you use this without questioning it heavily...you deserve every ounce of what happens to you.</comment></comment>


Changing the status-quo of interview process... - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vikreyta.com/2012/04/changing-status-quo-of-interview.html

<comment><USER2> THIS ... is the beginning of an awesome company.</comment>


Uber doesn't want drivers to sue again, so it pushes them to arbitration - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/uber-doesnt-want-drivers-to-sue-again-so-it-pushes-them-to-arbitration/#p3 <comment><USER2> I wonder what did people expect.

Uber managed to sidestep the regulations, but can't live off injected money forever.

The race to the bottom has just begun.</comment>


Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-icons/ <comment><USER2> Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had:

\- Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless

\- Good contrast

\- Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they're important on touch- enabled systems but that's no reason to use them anywhere else.

\- Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus

\- And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use.

The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate...

I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you _need_ to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!

<comment><USER3> "Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent."

Agreed. I strongly dislike the Windows _operating system_ but I miss very much the Windows _user interface_ which was very well designed, consistent, and optimized for real work.

One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide- ranging keyboard shortcuts. Not just key shortcuts for menu items, but keystrokes that allowed you to move around dialog boxes, resize windows, etc. OSX is largely terrible in this regard with even many common menu items without shortcuts ...

<comment><USER4> Shoutout to Shortcat for providing something like "knowledge-free keyboard shortcuts everywhere" on macOS. You hit a search key-chord (I use SHIFT-CMD- SPACE) and it pops up a search modal making all UI elements keyboard selectable. Usually the thing you want is 1 or 2 characters followed by Return.

It honestly reminds me of the experience of navigating Windows menus with Alt- and progressive keyboard shortcut learning, but flexible enough to handle things like Electron applications that don't even have a Menu bar or settable shortcuts.

Does anyone else use this or something similar?

[https://shortcatapp.com/](https://shortcatapp.com/)

<comment><USER5> Jetbrains' IDEA has the "Search everywhere" feature that...well...searches everywhere - menus, commands, project files, etc. I'd love to have that for every app in the OS.

<comment><USER6> Actually, that would be really, really awesome once you get used to Jetbrains' way of working. It's so unusual to be able to search for all the configuration, functionality, code and files in the same place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like older user interfaces treated me like an adult.

Whatever I did on Solaris [1] or even early OS X [2] felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around.

I don't know what changed, I use both Linux (Gnome 3) and macOS Mojave daily but they both lack that polished "workstation" feel. Maybe it's all in my head or I'm just getting old :/

[1] [http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png](http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png)

[2] [https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/picture-2-png.57621...](https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/picture-2-png.576210/)

<comment><USER8> Our overall computing environment acquired a distinct patronizing/infantilizing feel to it in the last decade. I don't think it's only visual -- or even visual at all, not sure.

<comment><USER9> We've gone from "the process has performed an illegal operation" and "file not found" to "Oops!" and "we looked everywhere, but..."

<comment><USER10> Again, pretend you're a normie and imagine how you'd react when you are told that your computer has performed an _illegal_ operation.

That's the sort of phrasing you _don 't_ want to inflict on everyday users.

<comment><USER11> > Again, pretend you're a normie and

And right here is why modern tech is so condescending.

<comment><USER10> Okay, then how about "pretend you're a human" as opposed to the lizard people who design and write computer software. Spin it however you like. You still have to make the distinction between techies and "the rest of us". Systems have been designed that do not make this distinction and assume the user will be able to figure everything out, the most notorious of which is Unix -- when unadorned with Apple treacle, arguably one of the most user-hostile systems in common use. Normies perceive Unix as being more arrogant than the systems which "condescend" to them. It seems to say "Oh, you don't belong to the super-secret cabal of users who know these arcane commands? Fuck you, then!"

<comment><USER12> > Systems have been designed that ... assume the user will be able to figure > everything out, [such as] Unix -- ... arguably one of the most user-hostile > systems in common use.

Um, you do know that Unix used to come with _user manuals_? Like, oh I dunno, the _vast_ majority of software in the 1980s and early 1990s? The designers of Unix and comparable systems were perfectly aware that command-line incantations cannot be figured out simply by sitting at the system and playing with it; this is very much _not_ what it was designed for!

If discoverability by novice users is a priority, then that is an argument for menu-driven, interactive interfaces and UIs - which could well be built on top of something like UNIX. But documentation is always going to be important.

<comment><USER13> Unix manuals are reference manuals, not training manuals. To learn something from them, first you already need to have a very good idea of what you're looking for.

The kind of documentation that Unix comes with is of little use to people who already have some specific training in computing disciplines.

<comment><USER14> I believe the parent poster is talking about the paperback books that used to come with your operating system. Not manpages.

I learned the command line from a book that came in a Redhat boxed set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a fashion maxim that you should look at designer magazines from 15 years ago. 15 years is about half a fashion cycle so you see the goods in their least flattering light.

Today that would roughly correspond to looking at Windows Mobile CE interfaces or OSX Panther/Safari 1.0. Anything older and it starts coming back into fashion.

The rise of windows 95 AESTHETIC a couple of years ago and now this seems to confirm a trend. Certainly so, if you thrown in some art projects like Windows '93, recent fashion and music trends around vaporwave and reinterest in PC-9800 emulation.

Love it.

<comment><USER16> >There's a fashion maxim that you should look at designer magazines from 15 years ago.

Everyone is copying the typefaces and color schemes from the magazines which came in the 70's.

>The rise of windows 95 AESTHETIC

Most of the kids with the AESTHETIC meme didn't even use Windows 98 or be even aware of computers. I remember w9x not as a fashion trend, but as a shitty os with a nightmare to manage in order to not crashing while intalling a driver. Installing games took ages, and viruses were a real thing.

Also, everything was shareware. Libre software and Linux/BSD were not known outside academics except at very late 90's.

If they knew and be alive into that, they woudn't be so fake nostalgical.

<comment><USER17> I was alive into all this, and I find it very nostalgic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seeing only the icons is barely half the truth. There should also be a rendering of the noise those boxes made during operation. With every movement of the mouse and each key press the hard disk made a sound as if it were being eaten by the cookie monster. And of course the disk access indicator flashed like mad all the time. Contemporary hardware seldom reaches that level of entertainment.

<comment><USER19> I remember that noise. I blame Microsoft more than the hardware. From 1984 to about 1994, Macintoshes were my main computer, and they didn't make noise just for moving the mouse or opening a menu. Later, I ran Ubuntu on a computer that used to run Windows XP. The noise and latency that Windows had, just for opening a menu or folder, were replaced by silence and instant action. (Just to be clear, of course all three had to spin the hard drive when I did something major, like opening a file or program. But Windows is the only one where all interactions were erratic.)

<comment><USER12> And in fact, you _still_ get that noise and activity light on Windows 10 and a spinning-rust HD! On a system that wouldn't even manage to _use_ the RAM completely while running on a sensible Linux install, let alone filling RAM up or swapping to disk.

I mean, swapping used to be a fact of life in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even on Linux - RAM was just too cramped back then. But then we got machines with lots and lots of RAM even at the low end, and Linux became snappy and quiet-- while Windows is still as bad as ever.

<comment><USER20> This — _constant_ swapping — is what drove me to Linux. Though, the laptop I am typing this on is still using 16/32 GiB of RAM, mostly due to the "modern" web. (But that's not any operating system's fault.)

RAM is, I feel, one of the more precious commodities on a machine, still. I have spinning rust in my machines (more space/$), and I've not regretted it, or really had a need for the speed an SSD could bring. (If anything, I think I'd do a hybrid install, with a small SSD and a large HDD.) But I've never once regretted upgrading RAM on a machine, and I definitely miss it on my work MBP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While I don't agree with the article's notion about icons, I think it's true that 1990s UIs, especially Windows and Mac, were particularly productive OSes because they applied not just common UI idioms but standard interactions: Buttons, menus, windows, drag and drop -- everything was largely consistent between each app.

With the web, we had a lot of consistency for a while simply because browsers didn't allow much customization. Initially, all links were underlined, and form buttons had to look exactly like the browser presented them. But then CSS happened and all bets were off. Underlining is largely gone as a UI idiom. It's no longer evident if something is a link or button, whether you can right click and do "open in new tab" (often not possible if the link is not a URL but a JavaScript function), and so on. A "native" app like Slack is all over the place in terms of UI consistency, compared the strictness of the old IBM CUA standard and others. One may be productive within a single app, but not all of the idioms translate to other apps.

I think we're in a transitional phase where we're halfway between old-style GUIs and something more fluid that approximates real life to a greater degree. Consider the "UI" of a kitchen appliance or the packaging of a new iPhone, or a TV remote control, or just a plain old door. Everyday objects vary wildly in what "idiom" is provided to the user. Some doors have a handle, some have a knob, some have a bar you push. We have the same kind of annoying lack of standards and consistency in the real world, though it's usually evident that you can turn a know and push down on a handle.

One can imagine a future where UIs are gesture-based, for example. Think of the 3D UI from Spielberg's Minority Report. Some of these UIs may _need_ to offer completely new way of interacting with objects (grab and make a fist to copy, open your hand wide to paste, or something) that will be difficult to standardize, much like the real world.

<comment><USER22> FYI, these idioms you talk about are called "signifiers", which are signs indicating what you can do.

<comment><USER23> There's a book that talks about these things called The Design of Everyday Things. I've only read parts of it myself but a friend of mine read the whole book and said it was good. From the parts I've read I agree. The author has some given some talks and presentations relating to UX as well that can be found on YouTube.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyd...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/840.The_Design_of_Everyday_Things)

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Don+Norman](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Don+Norman)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love the early Windows design, especially the Windows 2000 look. Other than the well designed icons, I find it to be much more intuitive and consistent than modern Windows GUIs and Metro. Part of the reason why I use the classic style on my Windows 7 machine (the other part is better performance). I like it so much I implemented it in ReactJS [https://github.com/Gikoskos/react- win32dialog/](https://github.com/Gikoskos/react-win32dialog/)

Moreover, if you guys haven't read it yet you should definitely check out Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, which talks about the reasoning behind some of the design choices that went down in earlier Windows desktops.

<comment><USER25> I can relate. What are your plans for when W7 support is ended?

<comment><USER24> No plans yet but I guess I'd have to adapt. Do you know of any ways to get that look on 8.1 or 10 natively? At least without having to install a third- party theming app.

<comment><USER25> I think this is the best you can do [https://www.howtogeek.com/133405/how-to- get-classic-style-th...](https://www.howtogeek.com/133405/how-to-get-classic- style-themes-back-on-windows-8/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You might want to consider adding "image-rendering: pixelated" to your CSS; on a high-dpi monitor, these render with bilinear interpolation, which I think doesn't do justice to the crispness of these icons.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, though with this sort of pixel art you really want either Lanczos, or some palette-based scaling like hq#x. That way you will preserve the "crisp", high-frequency content in the original image as much as possible while not introducing artifacts like a "blocky" appearance (instead, the result is smooth but crisp, like a watercolor painting).

(In fact, I wish modern desktop environments did this automatically on HiDPI screens while keeping the original pixel art as their source-- especially for its improved usability on lower-res displays, which are still widely used, both on desktop and mobile. Instead we tend to get SVG, which while extremely crisp on high-res displays is a mess for the original 16x16 or 32x32 use case.)

<comment><USER27> What is the problem with 'blocky' appearance? All of those filters produce icons in their own aesthetic. If the point is to preserve their pixellation when why bother with filters?

<comment><USER12> > If the point is to preserve their pixellation

The "point" of pixel art-- what makes it so convenient for graphicians, even amateur ones-- is not the blocky appearance (what you call "pixelated" \- but in fact these icons did _not_ appear "blocky" on the CRT screens that were in common use at the time!), but to set a _uniform_ constraint on fine detail (and sometimes color depth) within the image, and then to maximize quality while staying _within_ that constraint. It is perfectly consistent to want a means of rendering these images that preserves whatever level of detail was in the original while not introducing blocky artifacts.

<comment><USER27> The "not blocky CRT" argument doesn't really apply to personal computer CRT monitors, as even when they maxed out at 640x480 or 800x600 the display was still pretty crisp.

I can kind of see this argument if you're talking about playing nintendo on mom's old dog-eared TV with the UHF adapter... but frankly I prefer to see pixel art in its original unmolested, pixellated form

edit- on that note I remember very clearly that 320x240 games had a blocky appearance in the 640x480 era. That was one of the biggest reasons to get a 3D card!

<comment><USER28> I remember playing Master of Orion 2 on my computer at the time (mid 90s) and thinking:

1\. it's amazing this game actually runs at 640x480

2\. there's no point in having resolutions any higher than that, as you can't see the individual pixels at that size anyway (I had a 14" CRT, viewable area probably around 13").

At least in the early to mid 90s you definitely still had "CRT fuzz" on computer monitors.

<comment><USER12> I _think_ the typical CRT fuzz is actually quite close to the optimum smoothing that could be achieved with a simple, analog system, such as was common in the 1980s and early 1990s - in that it should closely approximate a Gaussian blur! But lanczos (or hq#x) is crisper than that, of course.

(And yes, 320x240 did use 2x nearest neighbor interpolation _on later video cards /monitors_ that could only display higher resolutions natively. But I assume that back in the early 1980s, you would actually get a "native" 320x240 screen, just like on a home computer or console.)

<comment><USER17> On any CRT screen, you'd just get 320x240 as native resolution, the "interpolation" basically done by the phosphorus of the screen. This was the norm well into 90s, and not everybody was on an LCD monitor in 00s, either.

I remember that many games (myself included) resisted LCDs for a long time even beyond that, precisely because they could only do one resolution well. If you played old games, this wasn't satisfactory because those were often hardcoded in the resolutions they support - typically 320x200 or 640x480. And if you played new games, you'd often have to dial the resolution down to get it running reasonably fast.

<comment><USER28> I think the point was that it was the _video card_ that didn't support 320x240 natively, so it NNed to 640x480.

<comment><USER17> Any VGA card (which you needed to get 640x480) would also support 320x240.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> By the criteria outlined in the article I would have thought the Windows 95 icons would be the ideal - they're essentially the same but without the "flashy" gradients and other depth indications.

Side note: gave me some joy to read the comments and find that the ZIP file with the icons in was infected with a virus. Now _that 's_ the kind of retro I can associate with Windows 98.

<comment><USER30> Later in the thread they determined the virus detection was a false positive.

</comment></comment><comment> amiga-workbench Windows 2000 was just about the peak of desktop interfaces from a usability and efficiency standpoint, its really only missing out on window snapping and workspaces (which is kinda a crutch for bad window management like on OSX)

</comment><comment><USER31> I miss redhat's bluecurve icons. [https://www.deviantart.com/redrope/art/Bluecurve-Complete- Ic...](https://www.deviantart.com/redrope/art/Bluecurve-Complete- Icons-1831078)

<comment><USER32> Yeah, these are excellent. Very BeOS feeling.

<comment><USER33> Oh man, I miss BeOS. It was one of the two OS's I'd bought back in the day. The other was OpenBSD 3 iirc I have the CD around here somewhere, too.

<comment><USER34> I loved the BeOS icons. Spent a lot of time forcing Windows NT 4 to look like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> From the article:

> Rather than some designer's flashy vision of the future, Windows 98 icons > made the operating system feel like a place to get real work done. They had > hard edges, soft colors and easy-to-recognize symbols.

The change is deliberate and reflects a social shift. In the W98 days computers were primarily seen as work devices, and in particular Windows wanted to distinguish itself from the more playful feeling Mac (which itself chose a more playful feel to address the fear most people felt about their computers. Apple tried to repeat the Mac playful feeling with the iMac and early OS X feel, and while it helped a bit in the consumer market it reinforced that feeling that they weren't for actual work.

And though it feels like it, this relationship hasn't changed! The (often forced) playful feeling of modern UIs comes from the phone and the phone was able to succeed there -- even need it -- because 1> people were already comfortable with a non-professional connection to the web, mail, messaging et al and 2> it was a "phone", not a "computer". This didn't worry Nokia or Microsoft at first because they had "professional" devices, and probably we forget the days of carrying a work and personal phone for phone calling. But then since the work phones were so crappy they were able to capture the mindshare.

I think it's gone the wrong way: because phones are worth so much, much less effort goes into designing "work" apps, and the designers all start mobile -> web -> desktop.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think nostalgia plays a part for sure, but there's also substance about the old UIs.

Looking at Win98 icons reminds me of my days in high school when I would just tinker around Windows for fun, changing icons of shortcuts, make good ol' personal homepages in HTML and Javascript (mostly alert boxes), and play Starcraft 1 and Diablo 2. The icons and the Win98 UI give me pleasant feelings, mostly coming from those experiences.

On the substance side -- this isn't exactly about Windows, but in the last couple of years I've tried a variety of Linux distros and DEs. Specifically, I've tried CentOS 7 KDE, Antergos Gnome 3, and Manjaro 18 KDE, all on laptops. There's no doubt that both Antergos and Manjaro bring with them very modern DEs (regardless of Gnome or KDE). But for some reasons, I felt the most productive on the CentOS 7 KDE, even though it looks the most primitive. Before I had the Manjaro laptop, I thought it was a KDE vs Gnome difference (KDE being more similar to Windows, vs Gnome being more similar to macOS, and I generally prefer Windows), but I think it actually does come down to the UI design. CentOS 7's KDE looks very dated, but everything is very functional and took little customization to feel productive in. The difference is similar to Win98/2000 vs Win7/8/10.

</comment><comment><USER37> I also think the aesthetic of classic Mac OS, like versions 8 and 9, as well as BeOS had great design that made it easy to know what widgets were what and how to interact with them.

<comment><USER38> Yes! The "Platinum" aesthetic in classic Mac OS was great. Simple aesthetic, easy to follow for custom UI elements.

Not all of the interface shown in these screenshots uses Platinum -- in particular, Quicktime Player did its own thing, and a handful of control panels used an older look-and-feel based on Mac OS 7 -- but it should be pretty apparent what the standard was.

[https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90](https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I was so disappointed with Visual Studio 2018 when somebody decided to remove all the colors from the icons. This made users guess the icon only by its outline. The icon color design of windows 98, 2000 and xp were great, i miss it so much.

<comment><USER40> I was in a senior position at Microsoft back at the time early versions of Office, Windows 95 and 98 were being developed. In fact a number of groups including the Visual Interface Design group reported to me. That's the group that designed the general visual appearance and also icons in the UI for both Office and Windows. (They were not designing the actual user interaction, just the visual appearance.)

At that time the visual designers were strongly urging that all icons be greyscale because they said color was "distracting". I overruled them and insisted the icons have color because it was better for overall usability.

Now the whole industry seems to have come under the influence of the visual designers favoring visual appearance over usability. Much less attention seems to being given to real overall usability.

<comment><USER41> What's most infuriating about Office icons is how they change complete look and feel of the launcher icons for the various programs so often, even the color scheme...

And then they ripped the text labels out of the Windows taskbar, as if we are supposed to remember what the icon for Word and Outlook looks like today.

<comment><USER42> Yes, even the darn color scheme. What color was outlook? Look for the yellow icon, no the blue, wait not Word... you can't even see the embossed O?

I honestly don't know how the most loathed form of support, phone support, can even do it these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Amazingly, moricons.dll is still included with Windows 10. This contains icons from Windows 3.0.

(it should be called "moreicons.dll", but this was from when filenames had to be 8 + 3 characters long)

<comment><USER32> I felt so cool in Grade 5 when I found that file. I had discovered that EXEs could contain icons, and then found some 3rd party program that loaded one from a DLL, so I went opening random DLLs until I saw that filename. What a rush! Where were all those programs? I found out many, but some were still a mystery.

This was part of whatever that Win3.1 thing was that would scan your disk for programs it recognized and add them to Program Manager, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Windows ME/2000 icons were even better.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/sl/8/8e/Win2000.png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/sl/8/8e/Win2000.png)

</comment><comment><USER45> I think windows 95/98 interface was great. I don't want ads when I click on the start button. All they needed was to add a search bar and call it a day instead all these ads or apps you don't want.

</comment><comment><USER46> In analyses like these, one thing often gets lost: interfaces are a product of their specific time, not just of a linear evolutionary process confined to the type of product being discussed. No product exists in a timeless state, yet retrospectives such as this one attempt to judge products as though they are this thing that's frozen outside of the space-time-culture continuum.

So, for these "productive interfaces" let's keep in mind the goal Microsoft had at the time, which was to get people and businesses to buy Windows machines in bulk for serious, office-centric work. The abilities of the new, less complicated graphical UI had to be rendered in a way that made it feel just as serious as the more complicated text-based interfaces ... or paper binders, even.

Moving forward to things like OS X or iOS, the goals of the encompassing products clearly are different. In these cases the interfaces are attempting to permeate the non-work lives of people otherwise not forced to "work" with computers, in ways they would enjoy using outside of a work context. The goal was to NOT feel like work.

Why is this contextual distinction important? Let's assume people come to HN to learn. I certainly do. It's a great place to learn about technology, science, and about building products and companies. From that perspective, it's worthwhile that we develop some rigor in how we reason about designs and the way they were packaged into a sellable entity. When we judge products historically, statements of an absolute qualitative nature like this one are just fine ... but they are often the equivalent of latching on to one article about a single mouse study, never looking at previous work, not checking the references, ignoring available meta-analyses and so on. All the stuff that is rightfully frowned upon when it comes to scientific research. Clearly product quality is tremendously more subjective than science, but throwing all objective perspectives out of the window is a trend that won't guide our discussions to the kinds of product insights the HN audience would benefit from the most.

</comment><comment><USER47> Funny how the icon of a floppy disk which was used to represent saving is slowly being phased out because the new generations have never even handled a floppy, so they don't remember how crucial it was to put files on floppy before storing them somewhere safe (or handing them over to a colleague/friend). I even had a floppy organizer in my desk drawer with fresh labels and sharpies, and peeling off old labels was actually satisfying back then.

<comment><USER48> Well, the complete concept of "saving" becomes less and less relevant. With apps and websites there often is no explicit need to save. Just edit the document and all changes are immediately synced up to persistent (cloud) storage.

<comment><USER49> Not just explicit saving, but the whole concept of documents and especially files is disappearing under our noses. Somewhat disconcertingly nobody seems particularly worried that our whole model of computing is shifting away from file-oriented systems. Remember that DOS stands for Disk Operating System, managing files was arguably one of the main functions of it. Now days our data is locked up inside "services" and "apps", not in user-accessible files.

<comment><USER48> And a key feature of Windows 95 was the explorer with your home directory where you could doubleclick on files and the appropriate application would open, so users won't have to think about the application, but the file first.

However abstracting away from a pure file based view also has benefits, like history or having different views on the document (i.e. to share a read only version)

The main question is: How well will those things serve as lock-in in future, GDPR does a first step there by enforcing that there is a way to extract the data (not that the export format neccisarily is is really usable ...)

<comment><USER17> Windows was document-centric in other respects, too. For example, the standard UX guidelines defined three types of apps: dialog, single-document interface, and multi-document interface. Most apps were actually expected to be of the last two varieties, and the guidelines covered a lot of points on how it was all supposed to look. And when it came to implementation, frameworks like MFC were designed around that concept as well, with the ability to automatically handle things like multiple views into the same document.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> No accounting for taste, but to me those icons are rather unsightly. From a utilitarian point of view, they might be good, but for art (at the time) I would have looked at NeXT icons.

</comment><comment><USER51> I hate the frequently excessive usage of icons in modern UIs. In icon-heavy UIs, the meaning/functionality of an icon isn't very clear and labels only show up when you hover a mouse over the icon (you're usually out of luck if you're on mobile).

</comment><comment><USER52> I prefer the Windows 95 icons, e.g. [http://windows95tips.com/post/35587792563](http://windows95tips.com/post/35587792563)

<comment><USER53> Oh Windows 95... the last MS OS to feel completely uniform in aesthetic design.

And that teal... gets me every time. I used to think it was hideously ugly, but these days there's an understated elegance to it that just can't be denied.

<comment><USER52> [My comment was really a thinly-veiled excuse to link to windows95tips.com. I don't actually have any aesthetic preferences between the icons/design of different versions of Windows.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Wow, this entire thread is so weird to read! I find these icons really bad compared to what exists on Windows 10 for example, and yet everyone seems to agree that 98's icons are better! I mean, seeing the icons in the illustration, I have no idea what 3 out of the 6 do. In the image at the bottom of the article it's even worse

I'm pretty sure it's just nostalgia, I have no idea why everyone here seems to think they're objectively better

<comment><USER55> I don't miss at all those playful icons while using one of the worst windows ever. I hated that mix of Tahoma and MSSansSerif too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> BeOS is peak UI design for me. I'm actually working with Haiku OS sometimes to feel this vibe.

<comment><USER57> I 100% agree. The BeOS icon set remains my personal favorite to this day. When I run Linux I usually load them up first thing.

[https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos](https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/beos)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I miss Windows 2000.

3.11 and earlier were utter garbage. I was on an Amiga, and so thankfully avoided those steaming piles.

95, 98, and ME were brutal operating systems, crashing all the time, corrupting data, and generally making life hell. There was an NT 3.51 mod that would give it the win95 interface, but there were too many software compatibility issues. Amiga was dead, so I switched to Red Hat.

Then came Windows 2000. A nice, clean interface. Speedy operating system. Real memory protection. Most things were in sane places. It got out of your way and let you get real work done.

When XP came out, I didn't really see the point. It had graphics that looked like a candy bar and slowed things down enormously. Thankfully, you could disable it. I'm still not sure what they actually improved in that operating system to make actual, real work easier to perform, but whatever they did, it took twice the memory to do it, and required a beefier processor.

Then came Vista, which was unbearably slow. I upgraded to XP during this time because my software wouldn't run on 2000 anymore.

Windows 7: A New Hope. It was still slow, but it turned out to be not an unbearable upgrade, although I still stuck to XP for as long as I could.

Windows 8: Bigger. Slower. Unfathomable. I stuck to 7 through gritted teeth.

Now we're at Windows 10. Schizoid is the best word I can use to describe it. Horrible UI half in the Vista world, half in the mobile world, Duplication everywhere, no clear path for getting things done, constant updates at inconvenient times (you can't seem to get even a month of uptime with this OS).

I've since switched to Ubuntu, and run my Windows software in Wine.

<comment><USER59> I remember Windows 2000 feeling like the height of Windows UI. Changed the gray color theme to a oh so slightly brownish gray which just seemed classy. That oh so subtle drop shadow on your mouse and other UI elements. Retaining all of the psuedo-3D box rendering for windows, buttons, borders, etc. Helpful and consistent signifiers revealing UI functionality at a glance.

Then the new-wave of UI designers decided all of this was 'ugly' and needed to be cleaned up. Maybe the new stuff is 'prettier' (subjective) but we clearly took many steps backward with regard to usability.

When Win 3.1 and especially 95 were developed, a lot of focus and testing was done on usability because it was expected that a lot of people wouldn't know how to use a GUI. Concepts of 'this is a button, you move the mouse pointer over it and you can click it' would be novel to a lot of users. All the signifiers had to be on point and consistent.

All of that has gone out the window. I blame 1) Mac OS X, because it was pretty it made classic Windows UI look ancient and obsolete and 2) smart phones with UIs so opaque that apps often include little tutorials showing you how to use the UI, basically giving up on trying to be intuitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I found the original Mac, or the DR GEM icons (e.g. on Atari ST) even more utilitarian (could one call them 'brutalist' ?) and may I say 'pleasant'.

In that vein, sometimes I wish for a desktop that is grayscale except for exceptional highlights (e.g., photos, warnings, ...). I remember that it was a real pleasure to use the Atari SM124 B&W CRT monitor.

</comment><comment> black-tea Most of these were from Windows 95. They got some slight cosmetic improvements in 98 and then again for 2000 if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER61> The big change was in Windows 9x the icons were 16-color, unless you had a 16-bit color display (even 256 color graphics cards used 16 color icons because of palette swapping between applications).

[https://imgur.com/GpS5Dln](https://imgur.com/GpS5Dln)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Interesting to see how much current design has affected my gut reaction. At first my mind immediately went to "there's no way this is the case..."

But looking at Win98 icons and UI... I really do miss that interface. Contrast and buttons actually being buttons... etc

I think (despite my use of Win10 and MacOS for various reasons) that's why I have a love of Linux UIs... many of them hearken back to those days.

The Linux DEs I tend to gravitate to are the ones that are most like classic Windows UI

</comment><comment><USER63> There has been a shift towards UI that gets out of the way and becomes second nature to us. Admittedly that dream hasn't yet fully been realized, but we are on that path. Removing clutter, HDD led light, noiseless computers all imo try to integrate computers ever more fully into our lives and make it as seamless as an integration as possible. One day we may have UI that feels so natural that we might just think of a computer as one of our organs.

</comment><comment><USER64> The designers were a very well coordinated integrated group (if there was more than one of them) and they took design imperatives of a restricted palette and fixed pixel sizes to heart.

If you asked the same group to design this now in a world of high dpi high gamut screens they might not get the same constraints out in their design brief.

Google's work on flat responsive was in some ways running against the tide. Skuomorphic was hardly ancient when the Google reaction happened

</comment><comment><USER65> The fact that the article has nearly no content besides "these are cool" and the comments on it say the download has a virus in it makes me very dubious.

</comment><comment><USER66> The icons are nice, but I've never known what 90% of them were supposed to represent. Still can only guess at many of them.

I do like the depth though

</comment><comment><USER67> The Windows 98 interface was actually not bad. There only issue I had was that to stop the computer you click on Start. :-)

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm sure we will go full circle back to that style soon enough, but with higher resolution and expanded color palette.

<comment><USER69> I think the small palette is a big part of the charm. It's limited enough to give the whole set a coherent look, but large enough to illustrate any kind of object.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I collected 131,788 icons from that era as 32x32 PNG files, and made a simple search program for them. Does anyone have good ideas for using this dataset?

[https://iconpush.github.io](https://iconpush.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER71> I tried very hard using bash scripting and some recursive archive extraction stuff to get all the icons out... but I couldnt get all the names, and I got a lot of false positives. Id be interested to know how the author did this.

</comment><comment> the-great-assyr No they are not. Simply no! Wanna some really good and useful icons? Go get them at KDE. Those... Things sucks. Big. Time. Is that some hipster phoney nostalgia article of some sort? Please...

</comment><comment><USER16> Ok, follow your tip. Look those nice w9x icons? do the same with your fonts.

[https://contrastrebellion.com/](https://contrastrebellion.com/)

</comment><comment><USER72> Who was the designer? What's the license/copyright situation?

<comment><USER73> That's what I came here to ask. I'd be pleasantly surprised if MS decide to allow redistribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Classic Shell helps bring us back to this design. [http://www.classicshell.net/](http://www.classicshell.net/)

</comment><comment><USER75> I wish there was a comparison with Windows 95 icons.

</comment><comment><USER76> I wish we could get a modern spin on this style

</comment><comment><USER77> great from the same site, possibly nsfw [https://alexmeub.com/projects/celery- man/](https://alexmeub.com/projects/celery-man/)

</comment><comment><USER16> They irony is that the icons are the opposite to the font colors. Please:

[https://contrastrebellion.com/](https://contrastrebellion.com/)

</comment><comment><USER78> Sorry, as a Mac user then and now, they still look as cheesy as they did back then to me.

Not that Windows looks nice these days either.

</comment><comment><USER79> Totally agree with you

</comment><comment><USER80> You should've linked to the https version of the page so the dozens of icons load faster (because of http2 multiplexing)

[https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/](https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/)

</comment><comment><USER81> Meh. They look very dated to me.

<comment><USER82> Age does not stop something from being great.

The Matrix is 20 years old this year, it is dated, it is still awesome.

<comment><USER83> The matrix is a simulation of the past (the late 90s) - which is a great film idea because it means even the presence of deep CRT monitors doesn't date the movie - unlike (say) in "Alien", where they do (imo).

<comment><USER84> I don't know, the whole aesthetic of the _Alien_ universe is so coherent and well thought out that they don't really stand out to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> While they may have been good for the time, it's pretty hard to distinguish a lot of these while looking at my smartphone, especially when I'm not wearing glasses.

<comment><USER86> Back then people had 640x480 screens.</comment></comment>


LIMBO Game for iPhone and iPad - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/limbo-game/id656951157?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> It says "Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 6.0 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5." but it didin't work on my iPhone 4.

<comment><USER2> at the top in the description: says 4s is required.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, but when I'm buying an app I look for the minimum requiriments where it's supposed to be and it's like that:

"Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 6.0 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5."

It's a bit misleading don't you think?

<comment><USER2> completely misleading. I would have thought this would be set in the metadata for the app correctly. Android devices actually prevent you from purchasing and installing on incompatible hardware (I have an Android not an iPhone, my wife has an iPhone 4).

I was quite excited when I saw that Limbo was on iOS but disappointed with the high minimum requirements.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: Come join HN discord chat, get to know likeminded people, make friends - <AUTHOR> Hey, everyone!
I love hanging out here on HN, so many awesome, smart, and creative people to talk to. But over the years, I haven't made a single personal connection, there's no one in this community that I know by name.
There aren't a lot of likeminded people where I live (and I have trouble making real life friends because of health and social anxiety reasons), but I think it would be pretty cool to get to know someone online.
I've been playing a lot of DnD (and doing some improv) over discord recently, and that really helped me to meet some awesome people, talking on discord really encourages people to get to know each other and make more personal connections.
I think it would be cool to have such community for HN users, a nice place to talk about startups, coding, tech, side projects, scifi, etc, make friends, share experience and advice, stuff like that. This works extremely well for DnD and Improv, it should probably work well for HN too.
If you're interested in this, I've just created a discord server:
https://discord.gg/akEzukp
Come join it, let's hang out! <comment><USER2> That's a cool idea. Just yesterday I posted a thread about finding Discord/Slack groups and it didn't even occur to me that I can start one.

However, my impression is still that these groups quickly degenerate into a mix of silence and occasional self-promotion. Any thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> To avoid self promotion, there just has to be good moderation, clear rules, and perhaps a #show-hn channel.

The silence will depend on how many people will join and how interested they are.

Some DnD groups become extremely active and take off, others eventually become silent and stop playing. As far as I can tell, the only way to know is to try and see if this works or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just mentioning The Coding Den which has over 9k users, might be interesting as well :) [https://discord.gg/code](https://discord.gg/code)

(Not trying to promote btw, it's not my server)</comment>


Economists Think Congress Could Create an Economic Disaster This Summer - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/economists-think-congress-could-create-an-economic-disaster-this-summer/ <comment><USER2> FTA consensus on unemployment in December is around 10% which is pretty staggering. Right now it is 11% so not a lot of recovery on the horizon according to them</comment>


Discreetly look for better jobs while you work - <AUTHOR> http://careerswitch.me/?referrer=yc

<comment><USER2> What are the criteria for approving an "approved hiring manager"? Exactly who does the approving? I work in a small pond, networks overlap, discretion is vital.

<comment><USER3> Totally valid concerns. We understand that privacy and discreetness is of upmost important. Here is how we handle it so far

Privacy: 1] Your identity is not disclosed. High level information enough to make a decision to connect further is disclosed. Eg Your job title (we will make it generic if its easily linked to a person. Eg: VP of product @company could be rewritten as product leader @company), work experience, aspirations, timing, location preference etc.

2] No one from your current companies can see your profile.

3] Non-recruiters/hiring managers cannot browse other profiles.

4] Hiring managers/recruiters would be able to email you (they don't see your email though). Once there is enough mutual interest, we disclose other personal information after your consent.

Regarding selection of recruiters/hiring managers: 1] They should have jobs that match career aspirations of candidates.

2] We approve them personally, after we feel that they are real recruiters and not fishing for information.

3] We will ban recruiters/hiring managers who spam or try to game the system. Its in their interest to be good citizens and act professionally.

The current system in real world is based on trust. eg: when you start applying while you are working , you are still sending resume and emails to other recruiters and managers and there is an implicit understanding that this information is confidential.

We are however adding extra constraints to ensure discreetness in the process, so that candidates can always be in 'searching for better fit' mode.

Hope that helps. Happy to hear any other concerns or ideas you have in mind.</comment></comment>


Show HN: TrellUp, automated Trello Board reports - <AUTHOR> http://trellup.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi - TrellUp's creator here.

Big fan of Trello & use it as my primary Project Management tool. What I didn't like about it was the notifications & the fact that clients have to have an account as well, and then want to get into your boards and start rearranging things.

Sometimes that's handy, but sometimes I prefer they just get a weekly report of what's going on. So I created TrellUp so I don't have to spend my Friday afternoons writing and sending out something the computer is perfectly capable of.

Please let me know your thoughts - we're still in our infancy & open to ideas on how to improve.</comment>


Good to Gone: Disappearing "Great" Companies? - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/11/07/good_to_gone_di.html <comment><USER2> Since when was a stock price any indicator of how good or great a company was?</comment>


I have finally run the entire London Underground - <AUTHOR> http://harrystuberunners.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/i-have-finally-run-entire-london.html

<comment><USER2> That's a very confusing title. None of this was run underground.

The title of the blog is confusing as well, "Harry's Tube Runners". There was no running on a train, there was no running on train tracks.

It would be more accurate to say that he ran from tube station to tube station.

<comment><USER3> Okay, thanks for pointing that out. I've never been to London, or even on a subway train for that matter. Wasn't sure if there are walkable paths alongside the tracks or something (seems dangerous).

So did he run from station to station above ground following the tracks, or is it too difficult to follow the tracks (buildings, obstacles, etc)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it was overground as you can't literally run underground (on the tracks) as you'd kill yourself on the wires.

Therefore, I ran from station to station - worked out the routes before each run and ran with my iPhone and Google Maps and ran to each station on each Underground line. The distance is greatly lengthened because I couldn't run on the tracks but I still visited every station - some as many as 6 times as they appear on 6 different lines.

I had a picture outside of every single one and then went on my way to the next station. I ran over moterways, over footbridges, canals, fields, commuter packed pavements, marsh land, cobbled streets and got lost an awful lot.

<comment><USER4> "I ran over moterways, over footbridges, canals, fields, commuter packed pavements, marsh land, cobbled streets and got lost an awful lot."

Lol...brilliant, and truly inspiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Inspiring story and noble cause. I just wish there was a bit more basic info for this. An photo gallery, a logo of the charity, a Twitter account to follow, i'd even like to donate to the cause, but can't see how :-( I want to engage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me help you out..

The charity's website is www.hhho.co.uk - here you can find out all about Harry's campaign.

The charity JustGiving link is www.justgiving.com/steven-whyley

There was never a dedicated twitter account set up (there should have been), I did it all through my personal Twitter account.

I need to get some pictures uploaded to the blog - I didn't get round to it. I just had them on my Twitter and Facebook.

But I have made a video - hopefully this should give you an idea of what it was all about - <http://youtu.be/a_mb6pXyrfA>

Thanks for your kind comments...

<comment><USER5> Thanks for this, i just donated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Thanks so much, it's really appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great read, confusing at first because of the dialect but I kind of liked trying to figure out what you were talking about. I didn't notice a link to donate until going back and actually hunting for it, maybe you should make it a little more prominent.

</comment><comment><USER7> Kudos to this guy, that's a seriously large undertaking to get involved with and serious amount of pain to put yourself through.

</comment><comment><USER8> My 24hr hack (mostly complete) to track your tube runs, either overground or underground, <http://tuberun.com>

example run: <http://tuberun.com/runs/1-mon-jancewicz>

</comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome. Thanks for posting - what a great story.

</comment><comment><USER10> An inspiring story. I couldn't even run for a bus.

<comment><USER11> It's never late to start with something like this for example: (c25k program) <http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_3/181.shtml>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The title is misleading. I thought this guy had been running every station or something (i.e. managing). I would have been much more interested in a story about how running the tube changed his life than something about him running around London.

<comment><USER13> Seconded. "Ran the entire length" would have been more accurate. I was expecting to see the London Underground equivalent of the chap who keeps the UK's tea kettles going after the East Enders programme ends on TV.</comment></comment>


Whats up with my local geek community.Need to vent - <AUTHOR>

I am building a web based business.I need to find website developer so I go to a local geek meeting.I politely give out my card and asked 4 different people to call me the next day.Not one call.I washed, smelled good and dressed ok for the venue.What did I miss?And I use the word geek in the best way as there was a room of very talented people <comment><USER2> You should have found "one" who was interested (hot to work on your project) while you were there, and "closed the deal" right there.

Separate the wheat from the chaff, and ABC (always be closing)!

If you thought to get their e-mail (in my opinion, the best way to "initially" communicate with most coders) pop them an e-mail and see if they are still interested. Not everyone is a phone person.

</comment><comment><USER3> What did they have to gain from contacting you? There needed to be a compelling reason from their perspective to get back with you.</comment>


Raspberry Pi Bare Metal Programming with Rust - <AUTHOR> https://blog.thiago.me/raspberry-pi-bare-metal-programming-with-rust/ <comment><USER2> As a long time C programmer this is not very convincing. A C program to do the same requires far less voodoo. All you need to do is take the address of the GPIO register then toggle the bit. No name mangling. No error handlers to override. Don't get me wrong I know rust does have some compelling features. It does seem odd to me that so many of what would be compiler options in C are hard coded.

<comment><USER3> Point by point:

> All you need to do is take the address of the GPIO register then toggle the > bit.

Yes, and that is unsafe. Rust makes you put that in an unsafe block, to encourage you to build safe interfaces. This is a good thing.

> No name mangling.

The alternative to name mangling is not having a module system, with all the fun name conflict issues that come with it. Rust made the right decision here.

> No error handlers to override.

C has no concept of a panic handler because what would be panics in C are undefined behavior. Undefined behavior is bad for safety and understandability of the code. Having to declare an error handler is a small price to pay.

> It does seem odd to me that so many of what would be compiler options in C > are hard coded.

Because Rust is safe by default. That's one of its most important features. Being more like C in the ways you mention would mean compromising that principle.

<comment><USER4> After having played around with Rust a bit and seeing it used in some non- trivial applications I've grown to like it a lot, despite being an initial skeptic. However it's aggravating that in every post about Rust which raises valid criticisms about the language (in this case having to do with the ease with which C allows you to do low level programming), those associated with the Rust project leap to its defense and suggest that Rust's decisions are right for every situation.

Just because Rust can't easily do things that C can doesn't make it a bad language, but it does mean that, shockingly, there are somethings that Rust isn't as well positioned for as other languages are.

Similarly, there are things that C is bad at. Both at the high level and the low level. At the low level it hides too much of the CPU's features so for some very low level programming you need to drop to assembly. At the high level it has obvious deficiencies, many of which Rust addresses, but for interfacing with the actual hardware it is tough to beat C in terms of convenience.

<comment><USER3> Of those three issues, I see not sectioning off unsafe code as the only real defensible choice when comparing C to Rust. Whether you should have to type "unsafe" is a legitimate tradeoff; if all your code is unsafe, the unsafe keyword adds noise.

Undefined behavior and the lack of namespacing don't fall into this category, though. C would be a better language all around if it required that null pointer dereference trap to an error handler (at least on hardware with an MMU or MPU). It would also be a better language if it had a module system.

Not every engineering decision is a tradeoff. Sometimes certain decisions are just better all around. I think that modules and error handlers fall into this category.

<comment><USER5> > Not every engineering decision is a tradeoff.

Scratch the "not". For example, if I have a small-enough code-base, a module- system, is not worth it, unless it has zero cost. Or if the module system doesn't fit my needs, it will often be easier to create what I need if I don't have to work around what is there. Same with error handlers.

 _Every_ engineering decision is a tradeoff, though you may be in a space where the tradeoffs obviously point in one direction.

<comment><USER3> A module system is always worth it because every program needs to use library functions. Even if you think you don't, LLVM will generate calls to library functions for ordinary code; for example, if you move structures around on the stack, LLVM might just decide to call memcpy(), even if you didn't ever import string.h. (Checking your code after the fact to verify there are no library calls doesn't get around this because a new version of the compiler might add a library call where there wasn't one before.) Now you want some mechanism to isolate your code's names from the library's names. That's a module system.

<comment><USER6> Does bare metal Rust also use memcpy() or other library functions? If so, how are those linked into the final binary?

<comment><USER7> Yes, LLVM will assume three or four functions exist regardless. The rlibc crate provides a Rust implementation of them, so you just add it and you're done. [https://github.com/alexcrichton/rlibc](https://github.com/alexcrichton/rlibc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a C programmer who fiddles with low level stuff I wonder why people get exciting about such trivial thing.

Don't get me wrong. Rust is an interesting language. The thing described in this post is well within its capability, i.e. IMO there isn't really anything that worths bragging about. Such trivial thing neither demonstrates the real potential of Rust, nor answers important questions from real world engineering perspective.

I'm all for having better tool to write low level stuff. I have dabbled with Rust and the experience was eye-opening. I think Rust still have a lot to catch up though.

<comment><USER9> Has hello world ever been exciting, it is only really a building point. You can't do anything intersting until you know the basics, of building and flashing the board.

The question is what does Rust have to offer as your embedded program grows.

<comment><USER8> > Has hello world ever been exciting

The HN upvote says otherwise. :-)

But I guess had there been an HN-equivalent in assembly age people would get excited about C, too.

> The question is what does Rust have to offer as your embedded program grows.

Exactly.

We are aware of the good, bad and ugly bits of C. The industry has built extensive tooling around it. Rust has a long way to go. I certainly wish to see more pioneering projects from Rust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have the perfect project for this! Generate a signal using the GPIO ports to drive a mirror and camera in a synchronized fashion.

Does anyone know if the RPi GPIOs can be driven at around 80KHz? I've seen reports that this is possible, but that the USB or video driver tends to lock the CPU for long times, messing with timings - but hopefully running on bare metal would take care of that.

<comment><USER2> You could do this with much less than an RPi. I would recommend using an AVR or better yet a 555 timer if all you need is an 80KHz signal. Let me know if you want help with this I'm looking for projects like this or something much more complicated.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't recommend an AVR. That is outdated technology. Even Atmel mostly makes ARM microcontrollers now (and they are much nicer than their AVR ones).

<comment><USER12> horses for courses. If you want a small microcontroller that has a very simple IO model then avr is great, and if you use something like an attiny they're cheap as ... chips.

<comment><USER13> At small scale the price difference is pretty meaningless or even non- existent. For example right now the cheapest AVR at quantity of 10 costs $0.837, while cheapest ARM is $0.714.

(prices checked from digikey)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is Rust the future? As a C++ (hobby), Java (full time) developer, should I invest my time in Rust?

<comment><USER15> Rust, Go, Java, Scala, Clojure, Javascript... (leaving out quite a few other choices for brevity). They say choice is a good thing but too much choice is actually really annoying and fragments the community across a very large number of ecosystems.

<comment><USER14> I can't stand JS and Go syntax, I tried a few times... This is the worst thing that happened to humanity after in XXI century. I feel more comfortable with Prolog than with JS.

<comment><USER15> In a way Go is a step backwards from C towards Pascal. Since a number of people that had extensive C experience and were in fact present at the birth of the C language made that decision I figure they are doing it for a good reason.

I can read Go easily enough, I haven't done any major writing in it (yet), other than some minor work on Hugo trying to help to nail down/replicate a bug. It was easy enough that I think I'd pick it up quite fast, the syntax feels 'weird' to me but that's most likely just unfamiliarity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Outside of C, are there any other languages or platforms that can do this? I'd like something modern, but I haven't liked what I've seen with Rust personally.

<comment><USER17> Still alive: Ada, SPARK, ATS, FreePascal, D

Controversial: Go (if someone ports the runtime to bare metal), embedded JVMs, embedded, Swift (depending how Apple drives it), .NET Native (if C# gets missing features from System C#)

Faded away: Algol, PL/I, CPL, Mesa, Modula-2, Modula-2+, Modula-3, Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Component Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Forth, Sing#, System C#

<comment><USER18> I think he was asking which languages could actually be used to do this today, without writing a new cross-compiler first.

<comment><USER16> That's exactly right. I didn't know that D would be an appropriate language for things like this - I'll have to check it out.

<comment><USER17> Check some of the videos here

[http://wiki.dlang.org/Videos](http://wiki.dlang.org/Videos)

Namely "Tiny, Ubiquitous Machines Powered by D" and "x86 Bare Metal and Custom Runtime Programming".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember reading a couple months ago that bare metal using Rust was in a bad state. If I recall correctly the outputs were prohibitively large, among other issues.

Has that changed?

<comment><USER7> The real reason that Rust isn't necessarily wonderful for bare metal is that a lot of the things you need to do aren't stable yet.

Binary size isn't a problem, though. A lot of the threads talking about sizes aren't doing all the stuff you need to get truly small binaries. That's because, as this stuff is on nightly, it has much worse (or no) docs, so it's easy to miss things.

I'm working on a little kernel, the one linked in the first line of the post, and it's great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you want to play around with the code in this post that requires nightly, multirust makes it much more pleasant to use nightly and / or stable rust.

[https://github.com/brson/multirust](https://github.com/brson/multirust)

</comment><comment><USER21> Very cool! Rust has been impressing me alot these past few months.

</comment><comment><USER22> Very nice. A few more months and that should be stable.

</comment><comment><USER23> Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Lightspeed Summer Fellowship - <AUTHOR>

Earn up to $45,000 this summer to build your startup at Lightspeed!
Are you an aspiring entrepreneur looking for more than an internship this summer? How about getting quality time with some of the investors behind companies like Nest, Snapchat, TaskRabbit and GrubHub? Follow in the footsteps of the founders of Pinterest, Pulse and Lark.  Lightspeed Venture Partners' is now accepting applications for its Summer Fellowship Program.
What exactly is Lightspeed's Fellowship Program?  Think of it like a scholarship - we provide resources, mentorship and guidance so you can spend your summer experiencing what it is like to build a company. Now in its 7th year, the program's alumni include over 150 fellows, including Ben Silbermann of Pinterest, and a number of successful founders of companies.
Each selected team will receive $5,000 per team and $10,000 per team member, mentoring from Lightspeed's partners, space at Lightspeed's office in Menlo Park, CA and additional resources to help you make connections and get started. Fellows are under no obligation to Lightspeed and we receive no equity as part of the program.
See a short video about the program here: http://bit.ly/VXOsN4
Applications are due March 22, 2013.  For more information about the program, past participants and the application check out: http://lsvp.com/summer-fellowships/ <comment><USER2> In today's world when we are already challenging the usefulness of a college degree, I think its a bit dated way of thinking saying that one member has to be a student.

No bad thoughts for the fellowship itself, its a noble cause. But I think it will be better if you remove the college going restriction.

A person who decided to quit his daily job, working on something full-time is also a student, "a student of life".

Why do we need to have a college registration to prove anything to anyone in this world.

Sorry for the harsh words but I feel a little anger when a college education or degree becomes a road block in anything I wish to do.

PS: I completed my education though (not very proud of my education itself, but few projects I did while there which I would have done anyway.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I did this program a couple years ago, and it was an incredible experience. It was amazing getting to meet the partners at Lightspeed.

Also, getting to work in the Lightspeed office was pretty awesome. It's a fantastic opportunity if you're interested in trying out what it's like to start a company, not to mention getting the no-strings-attached money.

I highly recommend applying.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love that kparikh, wittman1984, and pmichailidis show up every year or so to submit and comment on the Lightspeed announcement and then disappear. I understand what they're doing it and I guess it's fine. I just find it very funny.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a pretty good program. I went through this back in the summer of 2009 and there were no strings attached. The Lightspeed partners were fun to work with, and we got to meet a lot of other super smart founders.

</comment><comment><USER6> Participated in 2012. Great program, super entrepreneur friendly. You run your own show and Lighstspeed does whatever they can to open doors for you and mentor you along the way.

</comment><comment><USER7> Participated in 2010, Raised that same summer, exited 2012...awesome program!!!

</comment><comment><USER8> awesome program. genuinely altruistic, maturely hands-off, and exciting program. very fortunate to have been part of it.</comment>


Ask HN: Does FB technical interview accept Ruby? - <AUTHOR> So, I went to the second phase of the facebook recruitment process but lately I've been mostly coding ruby, javascript and playing with functional programming.
Even though I did code a lot of C/C++ in college, I don't really feel that much confident with it.
Is it ok to use Ruby? Some problems expect me to be in a typed language or some sort of stuff, does facebook take that into account?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I conducted hundreds of interviews at Facebook, and we always tell the candidate to use whatever language is most comfortable. I've seen all the major languages plus all manner of oddball ones. One candidate did everything in ocaml, and walked me through why it worked (and why it was 20X smaller than an equivalent python program).

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! This is definitely going to be fun :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What about scala and python?

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes.</comment>