Layer Brings A Scalable Communications Platform To Any Mobile Or Web App - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/layer-brings-a-scalable-communications-platform-to-any-mobile-or-web-app/

<comment><USER2> I was recently working on an iOS app where I needed a 1-to-1 chat feature. I was surprised that there wasn't an established market leader in this space considering how many apps use such a feature. When I saw this post I immediately thought "yep, that is a gap I'd seen in the market".

Some existing platforms included Scringo, Lobi SDK, QuickBlox. None seemed polished or customisable enough for my purposes. See more here: [http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-existing-APIs-for- impleme...](http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-existing-APIs-for-implementing- Chat-in-an-iOS-and-Android-application)

I ended up using an open-source iOS chat UI control ([https://github.com/jessesquires/MessagesTableViewController](https://github.com/jessesquires/MessagesTableViewController)) and Firebase (here is a sample project of a real-time iOS chat app: [https://github.com/firebase/firechat- ios](https://github.com/firebase/firechat-ios)). It was _incredibly_ easy to setup a real-time chat app and provides me with full UI customisation and a flexible and scalable data backend.

Send and receive code:

        // Setup.
        self.firebase = [[Firebase alloc] initWithUrl:kFirechatNS];

        // Listen for messages (real-time).
        [self.firebase observeEventType:FEventTypeChildAdded withBlock:^(FDataSnapshot *snapshot) {
            // Add the chat message to the array.
            [self.chat addObject:snapshot.value];
            // Reload the table view so the new message will show up.
            [self.tableView reloadData];
        }];

        // Send message.
        [[self.firebase childByAutoId] setValue:@{@"name" : self.name, @"text": aTextField.text}];

_Thoughts on Layer_

If Layer was around when I was looking I would have tried it out, however I am happy with Firebase as my backend now. The API looks insanely easy to use though.

Media sharing features would be difficult to implement using what I described above so Layer would be advantageous here.

Great branding.

Also Layer, please make your iOS framework available on CocoaPods.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything you saw on the presentation will be available with very few lines of code. By using Layer SDK you will get messages sync cross devices, delivery notifications, delivery dismissal when a message has been opened (if using multiple devices), offline messaging thats syncs when you come back online. All you'll have to do is to define a search query for your UITableViewController and style your UITableViewCell and you are done, we'll take care of everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Their tagline is: "The open communications layer for the Internet".

I'm curious, what's open about it?

<comment><USER4> The Layer UI kit will be open-source from day one. The SDK and protocol will be opened up soon after.

Like mentioned in our presentation today - we are on a mission to make communications better for everyone, and we firmly believe that open is a better option. A bit more about Layer: [https://layer.com/introducing- layer](https://layer.com/introducing-layer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ron Palmeri has a knack for picking great teams and ideas. The concept of an infrastructure that can later become the standard of communication is great with huge potentials.

Internet was built to be the standard of communication and I feel Layer takes that spirit a level higher to application infrastructure.

I wasn't able to figure out if there is a strong security play, especially in the current zeitgeist. They touched on doctor nurse communication so perhaps security is an adoption.

<comment><USER6> thanks! security and privacy are huge aspects of what Layer is doing. given the team's background we will invest heavily to ensure that the core infrastructure and client side SDK are locked down. my guess is we'll have more people on that aspect alone than most developers can afford to deploy on the full stack.

<comment><USER7> is voice(instead of text) message available fro the current API?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great. Is there an open source version? This is great of quick prototyping, but eventually I would like to have full control over the stack.

</comment><comment><USER8> Soooo, does anybody else immediately think about Diaspora here?

How does Layer compare to, say, e-mail on the one hand, and Diaspora on the other?

</comment><comment><USER9> Worried about cost lock in. Can you comment please?

<comment><USER4> At Layer we will always offer a free tier for low volume products, and only charge once an app gets meaningful traction.

We are here to help apps built on top of Layer win.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the reply. Good to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This all sounds like someone replying to them-self.

Edit: 15 comments besides mine, and 15 employees listed on the site. /conspiracy

</comment><comment><USER11> Just watched the presentation at TC disrupt. We need a open communication framework so bad. I hope these guys succeed with their mission

<comment><USER12> Hey, if you are around soma you can swing by:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks promising, excited to see how it develops and can't wait to try playing with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can signup for beta access on [http://layer.com](http://layer.com).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great job guys, really looking forward to see it in action.

</comment><comment><USER15> Will there be a JavaScript API for the Web?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it is in the roadmap. Let's nail mobile first ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> a much need communication platform...i'm definitely rooting for these guys!

</comment><comment><USER17> Great domain name ;)

</comment><comment><USER18> Hi</comment>


China Is Hunting for Foreign Buyers for Its Sovereign Debt - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/china-is-hunting-for-foreign-buyers-for-its-sovereign-debt#gs.ZQU1vFGV <comment><USER2> Can someone explain to me why an investor would want to invest in a foreign debt and currency from a country that has capital controls and a history of undervaluing its currency?

<comment><USER3> Interesting line re: this from last year's moviee Crazy Rich Asians:

"There is a Hokkien phrase, 'Gar gee nang.' It means, our own kind of people. And you're not our own kind."

"Because I'm not rich? 'Cause I didn't go to a British boarding school, or I wasn't born into a wealthy family?"

"You're a foreigner. American. And all Americans think about is their own happiness.

"Don't you want Nick to be happy?"

"It's an illusion. We understand how to build things that last. Something you know nothing about."

Funny thing is that I feel like it is indeed rare for cultures-countries to think about building things that last. But the US is actually one of the few countries that does---whereas China can't float this level of debt at attractive rates because it is NOT long term focused. It keeps doing insane, credibility-destroying things. Yet always talks about how it is a long term actor.

<comment><USER4> Way to get cultural insights into China from a Hollywood movie bro

<comment><USER5> To be fair, it's a Hollywood movie based on a book written by a Chinese author based on his childhood in Singapore. So not entirely without legitimate cultural insight.

<comment><USER4> It's written for the western audience. And I think you just made my point for me. At best it reflects the rich Chinese people's attitude - since when is HN rampant with small sample generalizations?

<comment><USER5> > since when is HN rampant with small sample generalizations?

Since always. I can't count the number of generalizations I've seen which begin with "in my experience," for which the poster's experience likely includes a sample of one at least, or half a dozen at most.

And to be perfectly fair, it seems to happen a lot when China or Japan come up.

<comment><USER4> >And to be perfectly fair, it seems to happen a lot when China or Japan come up.

Right, I wonder why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if China is seeing any impediments due to people being loathe to invest in a country where personal freedoms are very restricted and millions of their citizens are swept up in re-education camps. I would be hesitant from a personal standpoint but most larger wealth funds are probably not so restricted. By the same token neither are most manufacturers.

<comment><USER7> Not only can you not move money out of China if you have some invested there, you can't even leave! => The US government is warning Americans that if they visit China they may not be able to return home [https://www.businessinsider.com/us-china-travel- advisory-201...](https://www.businessinsider.com/us-china-travel- advisory-2019-1?r=UK&IR=T)

<comment><USER8> > The new China travel advisory is a level two advisory which urges increased > caution.

> Other countries or regions with a level two advisory include Algeria, Burma, > Antarctica, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom.

Sounds not particularly serious. Also lol at Antarctica

<comment><USER9> Any travel advisory is pretty serious since it implies a risk, that itself will cause diplomatic issues due to tourism loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> China's leaders have historically shied away from this policy, so as to protect itself from the whims of foreign investors, and maintain maximum control over its economy. This reversal may point to a crisis beneath the surface, as it's probably not their preferred path...

<comment><USER2> If the debt is in yuan and under chinese law, foreign investors don't have much say on their economy.

<comment><USER11> if they stop buying once they start, they certainly do

<comment><USER12> Like they did...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What would the risk analysis look like for sovereign debt?

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but there are probably an untold number of factors when analyzing risk on sovereign debt. Probably amongst the forefront would be history of payment on bonds, currency stability, GDP, tax collection, and government stability.

For instance, I wouldnt buy an Argentine bond - they've failed to make bond payments to such an extent they had a warship seized as collateral in a foreign port. Likewise, Greece has had trouble making payments. GDP is poor, and tax evasion rates are high. To boot, because Greece is on the Euro, it cant even devalue its currency to lessen its debt burden.

<comment><USER15> This is why there are different rates for bonds, if you only want the safe ones the return will be small as well.

<comment><USER14> Of course, this is not in question. It is very typical that bond yields are inversely correlated with risk. Higher the rating, lower yield. Lower rating, higher yield, but increased risk of default.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Americans care more about social needs than deficits - <AUTHOR> https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/revealed-americans-care-more-about-social-needs-deficits/ <comment><USER2> It's nice to see there is still hope for America.</comment>


Change from Hacker News to Microsoft news - <AUTHOR>

There have been at least a half dozen Microsoft articles today. Seriously Gates, knock it off please. <comment><USER2> There's nothing wrong with a wave of Microsoft stories on their big day, and it's nice to see MS getting their act together. If there are duplicates, or fluff, we'll penalize them. But the stories you're complaining about are, unless I'm missing something, reasonable front page material. As dragonwriter pointed out, HN sees the same thing on Google's and Apple's big announcement days. Or YC demo days for that matter.

Your post, though, really should have been—at best—an email to email@example.com. "Seriously Gates, knock it off please" is pretty lame, as was that title.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its BUILD. Lots of MS announcements on the kinds of things HN is interested in.

Around I/O you'll probably see lots of Google stuff. That's just the way it goes. Composition of news of interest to the HN crowd isn't consistent day to day, and sometimes there are clumps of stuff relating to a particular actor.</comment>


Scott Aaronson on Walter Lewin - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091

<comment><USER2> This behavior is the direct result of the political correctness and prudishness reigning in the US, that make sometimes people in this country behave in the most bizarre way. I suppose that if this professor commited mass murder, his courses would probably still be there, because absolutely anyone would immediately understand that publishing a man's _work_ does usually not endorsing his private behavior (as long as the work itself has no relation to his behavior).

Same reason why we still play Chopin's waltzes or read Celine's novels, eventhough both were pathologicaly antisemitics.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great post. However at the very end I wondered if such an esteemed professor should mention Soviet Union the way he did it. It was a big and diverse country.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite recurring payments service? - <AUTHOR>

I'm implementing a subscription-based website. What are your experiences with subscription payment processing services? I'm aware of recur.ly and Stripe, and I'd love to hear about your experiences with those services as well as any others.
I'm in this for the long haul, but I also have a need to stop bleeding money and start accepting money, so I'm looking for that magic combination of "do everything for me now" combined with lots of flexibility to change things down the road. Price isn't a huge factor at this point, within reason--every week of delay costs me more than the likely price differences--but I'd like the flexibility to optimize my costs downward in the future. I'm in the US, but a significant percentage of my existing users (and thus, my potential customer-base) are international.
From what I've seen of Stripe and recur.ly, it looks like recur.ly will do more for me in terms of getting started quickly and taking care of necessities like dunning and invoice emails. On the other hand, Stripe gets rave reviews here on HN and I really liked its straightforward approach and developer documentation.
I don't want to restrict the conversation to just Stripe and recur.ly, or just my specific needs, either. So, HN--what recurring payment services have you used, and what have their strengths and weaknesses been?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I don't like outsourcing subscription logic at all. It's not difficult to do yourself, yet expensive to outsource. It also ties you very tightly to a company which can raise prices on you at any time (as Recurly has in the past, without grandfathering). The switching cost when that happens is huge.

I store customer billing info at SpreedlyCore, which also provides a provider- agnostic API for making charges/refunds against the stored credit cards. Right now my processors of choice are PayPal Pro and an "interchange-plus"-priced merchant account with Authorize.net as the gateway.

With SpreedlyCore, I can change payment providers overnight (to Stripe or Dwolla or whoever becomes flavor-of-the-month) without changing any code or having customers re-enter payment details. There's also no vendor lock-in to SC -- they'll hand off the stored billing info to you if you want to leave.

I'm also in the US, and most of my customer base is also international.

<comment><USER3> Recurly did grandfather their early customers (we were one). For the most part, I'm a fan of Recurly and it helped improve our renewal rates. However, the major outage they experienced earlier this year (including substantial data loss) was a real blow.

Yes, it's possible to build. But if building is delaying you from doing it immediately, then buy -- it's worth it.

<comment><USER2> I was a Recurly beta user. 2010 I think. Just after I finished integrating them and pushing it live on a 50k user site, they upped the pricing (and changed pricing models entirely) with no grandfathering. There was some big hooplah on their blog over that which led to some kind of special offer for existing users, but it still wasn't the same as when we signed up. You were probably in during a later price change.

I wasn't cool with having the company I was about to entrust my income -- putting food on my table -- changing the rules on a whim like that, so I had to roll everything back and do billing myself. I'll never trust 'em again.

<comment><USER4> Genuine question, as I want to learn from this (as I run similar service). If you were to launch one such critical service, what would you do differently to assure your customers that you really care & won't screw them behind their back? Definitive answer is: first of all don't screw your customers. But how do you make sure you convey, you won't?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case anybody runs across this in the future... after evaluating Spreedly, Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, Segpay, Dwolla, and FeeFighters, I decided to go with Recurly + Feefighters.

Recurly has a focus on recurring payments that I like and a strong emphasis on reducing failed charges that the others lacked (or didn't document well enough). Their API seems reasonable and modern, and it looks like I can scale from a "get it up right now" hosted payment page to a more-custom solution in the future.

Fees look like they might be a bit high--$69/month, plus 1.25% + 10¢ per transaction, PLUS merchant account fees--but having somebody else do a good job of handling my dunning and invoicing emails well should be worth the cost.

Recurly will set you up with a merchant account (or so it seems) but I'm going to augment that with a FeeFighters search. FeeFighters provides competitive bids from merchant accounts provider. They're paid by the provider, so it won't cost me anything to give them a shot and compare what they find to what Recurly offers.

My second choice was Spreedly, for its abstraction over multiple services, which would give me more flexibility in the future. Unfortunately, their service came across as a bit immature and I had trouble finding webhook information I was looking for in their documentation. Also, they didn't look like they had the sophisticated dunning that Recurly offers, which was Recurly's main draw for me.</comment>


Ask HN: How many *playable* combinations of piano keys are there? - <AUTHOR> Given a span of 15 notes for one hand; and two hands I make it out to be less than 49 billion but the exact number eludes me (fingering constraints, duplicate notes between the two hands when they overlap).
The 49 billion is 3003 (15 choose 5) * 73 (the number of positions you could do that in) squared.
Anybody good at math with a more accurate number? <comment><USER2> Some overlap gets reduced by always assuming that the "lowest" finger is choosen to a specific key and seeing how many combinations can be reached from there upwards.

Also allowing for not all fingers of a hand being used. Since one finger is set, we only look what the remaining 4 can reach:

14 choose 4 + 14 choose 3 + 14 choose 2 + 14 + 1 = 1471

this works for 74 positions for the lowest finger. For the top 14 positions we have to allow all fingers of the hand to be inside the 14, so here we have to add 14 choose 5 = 2002

so 1471 * 74 + (1471 + 2002) = 112327 should be accurate for one hand (or + 1 if we consider the "no fingers of this hand used at all"). That squared is 12.6 billion, but of course there's overlap in there too between the hands. Don't have a clever idea for that one right now that's not just enumerating scenarios...

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah clever, totally missed that not all have to be used, thank you for this! I think you meant 12 billion?

<comment><USER2> yes, edited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Might also note that when the hand is stretched to its full range you can't necessarily hit all possible combinations of notes within the range. (That is, the index finger can't reach everything between the middle of the range and the thumb's full extent.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is the complex bit that I can't get a handle (pun intended) on, the degree to which the geometry of the hand constrains the problem.

<comment><USER3> It's also dependent on the hand. I can just barely reach a full octave. I know others who can easily do an octave plus a fifth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You mean as a chord? It depends on the particular pianist's finger geometry, but also, the span of notes depends on the bottom note -- sometimes you can't reach that black or white key, and note that the black keys aren't exactly in the middle of the white keys, so the distance changes. The span from B to D flat is easier than that from C to E flat.

Also, one finger can press multiple keys. For example, this is necessary to play three FGDF/FGDG chords in Chopin Op. 10 No. 12.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought of that one but could not imagine any composer actually used it. Ugh, there goes my lowest bound.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Chopin sometimes requires the thumb to play two notes, e.g. Prelude in C minor, bars 2, 6 & 10.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's close enough.

</comment><comment><USER6> 49.1 billion.</comment>


Show HN: TrackMyGas, Android app to track gas consumption - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=thecodex.trackmygas <comment><AUTHOR> Hi anyone who is reading this. This was my first try at developing for Android. I know this is a very simple app, but I'm really proud of having accomplished it.

I've developed it to scratch a personal itch -- I was doing this manually in spreadsheets, so I'm a user of it myself.

Any feedback is very welcome! Thanks.</comment>


Manoj Bhargava, richest Indian in US commits 90% earnings to charity - <AUTHOR> http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-04-10/news/31318781_1_charity-work-manoj-bhargava-rs-5k-crore

<comment><USER2> Harsh and cynical comments in this thread.

I'm waiting to hear how much you've committed to give away once you've made your first million (never mind billion).

<comment><USER3> Do you think Manoj's first million went to charity, or invested in his businesses and self?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article actually says he says he will give 90 pct of his money away. This is not the same as having done so.

</comment><comment><USER5> hm, a little bit about the charity part : [http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/02/08/manoj- bh...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/02/08/manoj-bhargava-the- mystery-monk-making-billions-with-5-hour-energy/3/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Respect.

</comment><comment><USER7> He is giving the money to his own charity.

With this guys track record, I wouldn't chalk this up to anything more than a clever tax-avoidance strategy.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/02/08/manoj- bh...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/02/08/manoj-bhargava-the- mystery-monk-making-billions-with-5-hour-energy/3/)

 _Bhargava claims to have given away $1 billion in 2009, with a letter to FORBES from his attorney, David Lieberman of the Michigan firm Seyburn Kahn, to back him up. Tax returns of Bhargava's U.S. charity, the Rural India Supporting Trust, suggest a different narrative. Virtually the entire donation was in the form of a 45% stake in the privately held Living Essentials. Only a few million dollars was in cash.

Rural India then sold that 45% stake to Nevada 5, a private for-profit company. In exchange, Rural India got a note worth $623.6 million. Bhargava's accountant Paul Edwards of Plante Moran says his client is not a beneficial owner in Nevada 5—but another one of his associates says it is a vehicle for Bhargava's philanthropy and affiliated with Innovation Ventures, the parent company of Living Essentials.

This kind of deal raises questions, says Roger Colinvaux, professor at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law and an expert on tax and philanthropy. "If it were a private foundation, it would be prohibited from selling to a company related to a major donor."

Rural India itself appears not to be giving much away. It lists total grants paid out in 2010 of just $4 million off a total asset base that by the end of that year had been stepped up to just over $1 billion. Bhargava can get away with this because he set up Rural India as something called a supporting organization, or a group that financially supports other charities. Unlike a traditional private foundation, a supporting organization has no mandated 5% minimum outlay, pays no excise taxes on investment income and has fewer self- dealing restrictions. Bhargava is not doing anything illegal here, just exploiting a loophole in the tax code many other big philanthropists have used as well._

<comment><USER8> This is nothing new.

Looking at BMGF (bill gates foundation) annual reports for 2010. Total assets: $37b. Grants: $2b (barely over 5% minimum mandated by law)

[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annualreport/Pages/annual- rep...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annualreport/Pages/annual-reports.aspx)

<comment><USER9> The BMGF operates through endowment, which a lot of organizations do. Basically, they don't expect many regular small donations (like a lot of smaller charities do), they expect just a couple of very big ones. Because the donations don't come every year, they need to last. So they invest the money, and use the interest for operation costs and grants. This way, they can give that $2b a year[1], in perpetuity. Another big donation means that they only give out slightly more per year, but that the donation will basically last forever.

There may be a better model, but this is a well respected method for making a big charitable gift last.

[1] more in years when the economy does well. E.g., in 2009 they gave slightly over $3B.

<comment><USER7> Giving $2b/yr in perpetuity is definitely not the mission of the Gates Foundation. They have set it up to run out of money within X years (10 IIRC) of Bill and Melinda's death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this tech or startup related?

<comment><USER11> Submissions need not be tech or startup related -- <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER12> _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity._

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic._

Seems off-topic to me.

<comment><USER13> Seems on-topic to me. See how subjective life is?

It concerns someone who is a founder, personal wealth and its relation to society. That's pretty interesting to a group of people.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Tibetans and Uyghurs not accepted': Apple supplier probes hiring discrimination - <AUTHOR> https://www.inkstonenews.com/tech/foxconn-distances-itself-discriminatory-recruitment-agency/article/3001119 <comment><USER2> They claim that it was an "unauthorized recruitment agency", but searching for the text from the image turns up plenty of results from 2015, such as [http://www.sohu.com/a/27959735_233585](http://www.sohu.com/a/27959735_233585) with exactly the same wording. So if it's unauthorized, then it's been going on for quite a while without anyone complaining.

My best guess for why it's included with the job requirements (rather than quietly filtering out people with non-Han names) is that they want to signal to workers that they won't be working together with minority peoples.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I have a bunch of Han relatives over there and they worry about travel into non-Han areas of China.

<comment><USER4> I think that's because of some rumours saying that they are barbarous/unreasonable.

And if you combine that with the rule of "Play safe", you get a bunch of externally-acquired stereotypers.

The thing make it even worse is that, in China, you don't meet normal Tibetans and Uyghurs every day. Many Han people get their first impression of Tibetans/Uyghurs from the those fake ones who trying to sell scam medicine and food.

The government did almost nothing to those fakers. What they could do? Confiscate them could result some distorted news and even more rumours. And if the administration got unlucky and confiscated the real deal, then that will be really really bad for them.

BTW, the company can be sued for such discrimination. But it's FoxConn, the Sweatshop of IT industry, maybe it just simply too unworthy to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And now they stop doing so openly, but very likely continue the same practice.

</comment><comment><USER6> By "Apple supplier" they surely mean "Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and the rest of the world supplier"?

</comment><comment><USER7> This is unlikely because employers think factory labor is unsuitable for Tibetans or Uyghurs, but instead due to how the nation they're situated in thinks of them.

<comment><USER8> Do you know why they think they're unsuitable?

<comment><USER9> He meant they're rejected by their ethnicity, regardless of their suitability.

<comment><USER8> Right, but what's the opinion of their ethnicity I wonder.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your favourite music stream (aka internet radio) for coding? - <AUTHOR> SomaFm's Groove Salad? Secret Agent? Deep Space?
What else? <comment><USER2> Israeli Goa trance: [http://digital.100fm.co.il/#trance](http://digital.100fm.co.il/#trance)</comment>


Microsoft Plots the End of Visual Basic - <AUTHOR> https://www.thurrott.com/dev/232268/microsoft-plots-the-end-of-visual-basic <comment><USER2> Microsoft should open-source Visual Basic. I'm sure a community would quickly form and take care of keeping it up-to-date.

<comment><USER3> There's actually an open-source VB.NET compiler and runtime available already. The Mono project is sponsored by Microsoft.

[https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about- mono/languages/visua...](https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about- mono/languages/visualbasic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's time to move to Gambas [http://gambas.sourceforge.net](http://gambas.sourceforge.net)

<comment><USER5> I'd rather move to Lazarus ([https://www.lazarus- ide.org/](https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)).</comment></comment>


DNA is held together by hydrophobic forces - <AUTHOR> https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-were-wrong-about-dna-it-is-actually-held-together-by-hydrophobic-forces/ <comment><USER3> Extensive studies on the thermodynamics of DNA helix formation have long shown that there's a very important contribution for base stacking [1]. This isn't news. What is new in this study is that they explore how hydrophobic interactions could play a role in DNA binding interactions with proteins by varying the solvent hydrophobicity. The title and linked article are quite misleading, the paper itself is making very different claims [2].

[1] [https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/36/suppl_2/W163/2505801](https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/36/suppl_2/W163/2505801)

[2] [https://www.pnas.org/content/116/35/17169](https://www.pnas.org/content/116/35/17169)

<comment><USER4> Every pop sci article about a new journal article in some publication is always the same; personal question: doesn't it get frustrating needing to give an addenda of all the misleading commentary?

Pop science publications literally do more harm than good by miscommunicating the actually novel aspect of a particular discovery, irrespective of superficial intent (popularizing science topics). Oh wait, why do they even exist to begin with? Assumption: to soak up all the advertising dollars go around.

How unproductive can an industry really be? The cost alone in wasted human- hours time analyzing and post-processing to discern what is real and what is hype and nonsense must be huge.

<comment><USER5> Pop-science journalism is still neat to observe!

The thing's that, as far as I can tell, economic/political journalism seems to be at least as corrupted (intellectually; not talking about moral corruption), where explanations of complex phenomena are grossly oversimplified beyond recognition. Despite knowing that, it's hard to make a precise study of that sort of corruption because the actual underlying truth is unclear.

By contrast, it seems reasonable to read pop-science journalism and then compare it to a corresponding scientific story. We can then try to understand the nature of media twisting, then apply that understanding to helping us interpret journalism covering economics/politics, where the underlying truth isn't as easily otherwise-determined.

In short, it's neat to see pop-science journalism in action as it helps to put other sorts of journalism into perspective.

\---

Separately, I'd note the expression that " _There 's no such thing as bad publicity._".

While science-journalism may not be particularly successful in informing the public about science, it might have a positive effect on public-relations with the scientific community, helping the community to feel more connected to the scientific establishment.

I mean, it seems to work in, say, sports, where local communities will cheer on competitors from their community despite not having any real direct attachment to the competitors' efforts. It's my understanding that this sort of emotional connection helps to keep professional sports well-funded, driving public interest in their activities.

Then ditto for stuff like the expensive Apollo missions to put someone on Luna, which I've heard that Americans took to be a national victory (and perhaps others found it to be a human victory).

In short, science journalism might help drive public support for the sciences, even if it fails to convey actual science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This coverage is incredibly disingenuous. It's been known for a long time that base stacking is the dominant force in keeping a double helix together.

Literally the first sentence of the abstract is "Hydrophobic base stacking is a major contributor to DNA double-helix stability."

<comment><USER7> So this sentence is uncontroversial? Somehow I never came across this idea in my genetics PhD.

> The main stabilizer of the DNA double helix is not the base-pair hydrogen > bonds but coin-pile stacking of base pairs, whose hydrophobic cohesion, > requiring abundant water, indirectly makes the DNA interior dry so that > hydrogen bonds can exert full recognition power.

<comment><USER3> That statement is uncontroversial, though keep in mind it's also not completely rejecting the importance of H-bonds. A GC basepair is still more stable than an AT basepair due to 3 H-bonds on the GC and only 2 for the AT. However, to compute DNA helix stability you must take into account the stacking of basepairs. Modern melting point calculators have correction terms that take stacking between different pairs of base pairs (AT stacking on a GC, AT stacking on a TA, etc.). They also take into account salt concentration, which is absolutely critical to maintaining helix stability. This is because the salt coordinates with the phosphate backbone, stabilizing the helix.

Key rule of thumb for pretty much any biological structure: it's the entropy not the enthalpy that dominates. Entropy in this context is the stacking of base pairs, enthalpy is formation of electrostatic or similar bonds (like an H-bond between DNA bases). Essentially every biological molecule is "greasier" than water, so it likes to hide that "grease" from the water much the same way oil likes to form droplets with itself in water because doing so reduces the "order" and therefore the boosts the total entropy of the solution.

Why you ask? It's complicated but my general understanding is that water that is interacting with "grease" has to adopt a fair amount of structure. By reducing the number of water molecules contacting your "grease" you reduce the amount of structure the water has, which means the total system is more disordered even as the grease itself adopts a higher degree of structure.

This is all a little handwavy, it's been a while since thermo, but it's a decent overall framework for general understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> research of scientific calibre avoids reporting salient facts such as pure water at STP is clear and colourless liquid.

      The authors state their contribution as, "specific longitudinal unstacking in a hydrophobic environment,
     has to our best knowledge never been reported before."

reporting such is akin to reporting oil is immiscible with water.

have a look here:

"Water and counterions are crucial to screen the electrostatic repulsion among charged phosphates and also favor the apolar stacking of bases. Accordingly, the large impact of solvent modification on the properties of DNA is not surprising. For example, a subtle change in the neutralizing cation can lead to a dramatic conformational change(8, 9) or even to a complete alteration in the sequence-stability rules of the duplex.(10) "

[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jp503816r](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jp503816r)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1904262/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1904262/)

these articles predate the submission and stand firmly on exploitation of solvent effects upon DNA helix stability.

50+years of Biochemistry have produced many DNA manipulation techniques wholly dependent, on solvent selection.

</comment><comment><USER9> As other's have pointed out, yes, bases align like two parallel stack of plates. This is for two reasons. One is that the aromatic rings of bases are mostly carbon and thus not polar like water. Meaning they're hydrophobic. Duh. But also the rings stack because of the "pi stacking" which is A Thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> I thought I learned this in HS biology 25 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious if this changes how we think about how EM waves affect dna? My understanding before was that we defined ionizing radiation as radiation that could break that hydrogen bond.

<comment><USER12> Your understanding before wasn't quite right. The ionizing in ionizing radiation is the key, its about knocking off an electron to form an ion. So that's something like a UV photon exciting an electron and breaking a covalent chemical bond. Hydrogen bonds are weaker electrostatic interactions between molecules where the charge is distributed in two molecules such that they have a weak + and - charge arrangement. So pure water for example, the hydrogens from one molecule have a bit more + and the oxygen has a bit more - <USER2> each molecule. If you think about how that works with a bunch of magnets fixed on a peg board they all try and match up their N and S if you move one they all wobble around to find a new arrangement to minimise the energy across the board. Thats hydrogen bonding all the H and O between different molecules try and match their charges. In DNA there are either 2 or 3 of those kinds of bonds to match up. Covalent bonds are more like how the magnets are fixed on the peg board. So if you split a magnet off its way more chaos right? That magnet will fly off and stick to another one and all bets are off on how everything else will interact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Read this as "DNS is held together by hydrophobic forces" and still thought "yeah, that makes sense actually"

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if this changes anything with respect to how we manipulate DNA or the conditions by which DNA is, can be preserved.

<comment><USER15> Looking forward to learn about healing retrovirus infections.</comment></comment>


The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-joyce-scholar.html <comment><USER3> Sounds like a good cautionary example for 'real artists ship'. If he had just declared his Joyce edition complete at some point, even if he felt it was radically incomplete, it would have likely superseded Gabler and the major errors which he hated so much, and he could've improved subsequent editions or others could've taken it on after he disappeared. But the perfect was the enemy of better, Gabler won by default, and now he's spent decades on something else entirely. Odds aren't good he'll finish _that_ either.

</comment><comment><USER4> I enjoyed this casual detail in the article:

> she and a colleague were dedicating a book to him, a 31,802-page tome called > "The Manual for the Advanced Study of James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake'"

Academic studies of the Wake leaves Ulysses scholarship for dead :)

<comment><USER5> I was skeptical, but apparently this is real, although calling it a "book" seems like a stretch, as it comes in 122 volumes. (Volume 1, "The Romanian Lexicon of Finnegans Wake", 455 pages.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have never read ulysses, and didn't realize this was an issue. So what is actually recommended for the non-academic reader now?

<comment><USER7> It honestly doesn't really matter - the differences between different editions are subtle and of interest mostly to scholars. If you can find an edition with good annotations go with that one; otherwise just pick up the one with your favourite cover - I've always been partial to the Penguin one myself.

<comment><USER8> > It honestly doesn't really matter - the differences between different > editions are subtle and of interest mostly to scholars. If you can find an > edition with good annotations go with that one; otherwise just pick up the > one with your favourite cover - I've always been partial to the Penguin one > myself.

Without disputing what you say, I am curious: do you speak as a scholar who knows this to be true, or a casual reader who assumes it to be true, or from some other basis?

<comment><USER7> Fair enough - can I say somewhere between the two? I don't feel comfortable calling myself a true "Joyce scholar", but I did my undergraduate degree in literature where one of my classes was a full semester seminar on Ulysses; its publication history - and the various editors who've had a crack at the text - were discussed.

That aside, I'm an avid casual Joyce fan - I've read the book several times outside of that class, both before and after.

Those qualifications aren't exactly impressive, but I think they're enough for me to entreat the prospective Ulysses reader - tolle lege! Pick it up and read!

<comment><USER8> > Fair enough - can I say somewhere between the two?

Yes, absolutely. I didn't mean it as a challenge, just (as another eternally on the verge of reading Ulysses) was curious how definitively I could take your recommendation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have never claimed that I was on a quest to perfect Ulysses, or to edit a "definitive Ulysses," or to concoct any "perfect edition".

New York Times Magazine author Jack Hitt simply made that up, as he seems to have done with several other things attributed to me by him. Or maybe he has an uncredited source that inspired him to romanticize my mundane drudgery as a tropical textologist and translator.

The term I prefer is "authoritative," which is not a claim of "error-free input," something Hans Walter Gabler wrote that had attained in his 1984 "Ulysses : A Critical and Synoptic Edition."

In 1986 the claim of non-erroneousness was repeated twice in a gushing review of Gabler written by Geert Lernout in the _Revue Belge de Philologie_, which ends with these words : << It seems that Joyce finally got the error-free text he waited for in vain during his life-time. >>

One nice symmetry of Then and Now is that Lernout became the first academic in Europe to assail me as having weird ideas about Joyce. Gabler's work is, we are told twice, "error-free," and Kidd, we are assured, is an eccentric crank who "has a whole series of pet theories . . ."

1986, 2018, Nothing new under the sun, Gabler-Kidd-wise and Kidd-Gabler-wise. Lernout literally declares, "Kidd is the kind of person who . . ." It does not get more ad hominem than that.

I would be interested to learn if anyone can find online any pre-2018 claim that I sought to produce the impossible "perfect edition" of any book. That false claim seems to have appeared first on the web on June 12, 2018. The online version of Jack Hitt's New York Times Magazine profile of me is called "The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar," but the paper publication with a cover date of June 17 is titled "In Search of the Perfect Ulysses."

What is stranger or more eccentric than I myself supposedly am, is a journalist of such high intelligence as Jack Hitt attributing to me beliefs that he does not sustain by a single quotation from my published work, whether it be Joycean or Jungian, or a even poem out of my youth.

Come to think of it, Jack Hitt's beautifully written essay fails to give the title of any of my works. Those curious about what Hitt skimmed over without dipping his beak into the salt green sea, may consult an old CV of mine by Googling this phrase, enclosing it within quotation marks : "Curriculum Vitae of John Kidd"

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like he tried to build an academic career on pathological grammar Nazism. The size of a dot? Come on, that's at most a minor typographical error.

A text the size of "Ulysses" cannot, by definition, ever be "perfect". There will always be an opportunity for a vacuous hack to assemble a "catastrophic" collection of minor mistakes that allegedly compromise the edition. This is usually much easier than actually producing a new edition, by orders of magnitude so, and this is why we hate grammar Nazis: they derail the conversation and in the end contribute nothing of substance.

I know it's probably harsh, but every field has these guys, they should not be celebrated but marginalized. I find his ouster from academia not surprising. Kidd is obviously very competent but he chose to invest his vast knowledge and intellect into an ego match instead of contributing and expanding his field.

<comment><USER11> There seems to be an important difference between everyday "Grammar nazism" and an effort to generate an accurate proof copy of a -- maybe THE - <USER2> English language modernist novel.....Textual criticism, in general, is very important for the transmission of culture, and a different kind of thing than people who go around feeling superior because they still use "whom" in the "right" place.

<comment><USER10> Of course, it was a metaphor that fit nicely. That is to say, academia has vacuous researchers that are to science what grammarians are to casual online discussions.</comment></comment></comment>


IBM to join OpenJDK - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/ibm_to_join_openjdk <comment><USER2> What's the _enterprise-level feature differentiation_ he's referring to? Surely the point of Java having a reference implementation is that any JAR will run on any JVM?

<comment><USER3> monitoring, perhaps interesting memory reclamation issues, GC tweaking, yadda yadda. there are lots of features that have absolutely nothing to do with formal language semantics.

<comment><USER4> Exactly: Diagnosability and serviceability features (especially when deeply integrated with the underlying OS), code generation algorithms optimized for specific hardware, GC algorithms tuned to specific memory hierarchies, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting. It seems as if Apache Harmony is the jilted party in that IBM will stop putting their efforts there, and concentrate on OpenJDK.

<comment><USER6> Maybe they didn't want to potentially get hit by a Oracle lawsuit like Google did.

<comment><USER7> Hitting IBM with a patent lawsuit is like hitting Mike Tyson with a boxing glove.

<comment><USER8> or trying to steal his tiger...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why your alarm clock sucks (this applies to other products too) - <AUTHOR> http://feeds.feedburner.com/DovetailSoftwareBlogs Seth Godin talks about how for 20 cents alarm clocks could set themselves but the industry is too busy to even consider things like this.  This applies to software too and I'm ashamed to say applies to my industry too.

<comment><USER2> I think you meant to link to this awesome article: [http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/blogs/main/archive/2007/10...](http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/blogs/main/archive/2007/10/22/Product- Comes-from-Process.aspx)</comment>


Ask HN: What's your work computer exit strategy? - <AUTHOR> Friend of mine was recently let go from our place of employment and that got me thinking. Should I have an exit strategy for leaving my work computer?
I don't mean like destroying, taking, or anything of illegal nature but I mean removing secure things like access to my password manager, browser profile, etc.
Granted a lot of this should be 100% secured 100% of the time but after 4 years I get tired of entering some passwords over and over and over.
So leads me to wonder if this should be some sort of emergency switch like an IFTTT trigger or something that triggers the deletion of certain things on certain devices should I trigger the emergency switch.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Here's the most important thing to remember:

       DO NOT USE YOUR WORK EMAIL
       FOR PERSONAL COMMUNICATION

You will lose access to that email on the day you are "let go".

edit: same thing for a work phone number.

<comment><USER3> Also, if you want to keep in touch with people, make sure they have some way to contact you - not that much of an issue in the social networks age, but in places I've worked at, workers leaving would email most everyone with their contact info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > So leads me to wonder if this should be some sort of emergency switch like > an IFTTT trigger or something that triggers the deletion of certain things > on certain devices should I trigger the emergency switch.

Wouldn't take much for that to be misunderstood and for you to get a nice friendly visit from the cops. YOU might know that it only deleted "your" stuff. But your employer might not.

I agree with everyone else in this thread: Stop leaving stuff on work computers. Period. You use a password manager, log it out every single day. You want access to files? Install e.g. DropBox but log in every single day, etc (or use your phone as a USB storage device).

<comment><AUTHOR> > Wouldn't take much for that to be misunderstood and for you to get a nice > friendly visit from the cops.

That's a very good point, I hadn't considered if there's a suspicion of what was done and what for (since I was only considering personal privacy)

Okay so what about a personal device like a laptop or desktop you own?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I believe that question almost needs it's own thread

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well-designed cloud services will have a way for you to "de-authenticate" devices. For some of these you may need to be on a real computer not just a phone/tablet.

For some of the synced cloud storage options you may be better off moving all of the files out of that provider's control from another computer so that the removal will have time to propagate back to the PC in question - not all of them offer remote wipe capabilities.

In LastPass, go into your vault in a browser, then Settings. There are areas for both Mobile Devices and Trusted Computers, from which you can disable/delete each entry.

In Dropbox, go into your Account settings, then Security and you can see and manage a list of all devices and applications you've linked with your account. Note that you can ONLY do remote wipe of your Dropbox files if you have Dropbox Pro or Business, but you could presumably sign up for just 1 month of Pro.

If you're using 1Password, the Dropbox cleanup should take care of that since it stores passwords in a folder structure under your Dropbox account.

Google has something similar, particularly if you're using 2-factor authentication. I'm not sure about remote wipe.

Box.com has something similar, go into your account settings and look for the Security tab at the top, but there doesn't seem to be any remote wipe capability.

For bookmarks, I didn't see anything along these lines in the XMarks documentation or my control panel, but I've submitted a ticket to ask them about it.

That's just a starting point, details will obviously depend on what specific services you use.

</comment><comment><USER6> Minimize things you can't bear to lose or reveal, both electronic, and physical things in your drawers etc. As for physical, I can walk out the door with a small plastic grocery bag (which I actually keep in my desk), and if I couldn't have what I'd put in the bag I wouldn't think twice about it.

I have a few pictures I've uploaded from my camera. They can have them. Same for a few O'Reilly ebooks.

I have a few Firefox bookmarks, and browsing history. They can have them.

I have the LastPass plugin installed, but I don't have it set to stay logged in. I'm always logged out of LastPass, and if I need to get to a site with a LastPass password, I log in, do the thing, and log out.

The only hole that I've pondered is that I'm always logged in to pinboard. I suppose the solution there is to change my pinboard password the evening after being let go, if I remember to do it.

</comment><comment><USER7> You should operate under the assumption you could lose your computer at any point, for a variety of reasons. It's far more likely you'll drop it, spill something, lose it, or have it stolen.

I keep everything important elsewhere. Code is in source control. Documentation is alongside code or on the wiki. Personal email and work email are in separate Google Apps accounts. There's nothing I care about residing solely on my laptop.

For security against theft, I use FileVault.

If work wanted me out right now, I'd turn off my computer and walk away. Without my password they can't decrypt anything on the drive, everything the company cares about is elsewhere, as is everything I care about.

Ignore this advice at your peril. I know countless friends who have _freaked_ when their laptops were stolen in SF. I just get a replacement and set everything back up.

</comment><comment><USER8> Your company may differ, but many have a policy that states ANYTHING you do on a company owned machine is considered open for scrutiny. Some places have a semblance of privacy - meaning they're not going to read your Gmail or mess with your Facebook profile. Upon termination, you surrender any right you have to the data on your machine. So to echo the sentiment of others. Don't use your work machine for private data. This can be difficult, as it's easy to take your laptop on vacation to "do a little work"... and then wind up wanting to check your facebook. For that, I'd suggest logging out when you're done. Don't allow Chrome to remember passwords.

</comment><comment><USER9> Happened to me a few days back. I quit, but was asked to leave pronto.

1\. I've been using a password manager I purchased. That was the first thing I uninstalled.

2\. Unlink DropBox. Delete the DropBox folder.

3\. 4-years is a pretty long time. If I ended up using my work laptop for personal stuff (for instance a friend asks me to review their resume, scanned docs, pictures, rental applications etc.), I create a folder called personal that I can delete. Usually this would be under my DropBox folder anyway.

If I get walked out (i.e. I don't have access to my computer), I wouldn't know what to do. Ideally you would expect IT to wipe the hard disk and re-image the whole disk. I'm not sure it happens as often as it should.

</comment><comment><USER10> I use LastPass as my password manager. You can set it so that you need to enter your (one) password when you turn on the browser. Tell your sites not to remember your login -- the LastPass browser plugin will remember it for you. That way if you're no longer employed, no one without the LastPass password can get into your personal e-mail. You could, of course, have the browser remember logins for work sites, as there's nothing secret there.

I would also suggest separating your cloud storage. If you have a private Dropbox account, for example, use one of the other services (e.g. OneDrive) for storing work documents. There should be as little mixing as possible.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nothing on my work laptop is sacred, work stuff is kept in the cloud or bitbucket/github, personal stuff is on dropbox. I would lose how I've set my dev environment up, but that's about it. I'd just wipe/reinstall.

<comment><USER12> This is the best answer. Keep personal stuff on your personal system. Don't do anything personal on a work-owned system (or if you do, do it in incognito- mode or something).

Most times, if you're let go, they won't give you the opportunity to wipe your system anyway, they'll just lock you out.

Plus, you know, you don't want to be accused of destroying company property.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why would you use your work computer for anything but work? I treat it like someone else's property. You can also assume your employer is keylogging and watching your network traffic.

</comment><comment><USER14> A bootable USB pendrive with a live Linux distribution is perfectly suitable for nuking hard drives as fast and conveniently as possible and making sure nobody "inherits" your viruses and badly installed software.

Removing data should actually consist of reloading the last backup on your next computer, at worst launching your regular backup scripts one last time; if you need to improvise an ad-hoc exodus on short notice forgetting something is unavoidable.

</comment><comment><USER15> Honestly, I don't install or save anything on work computers that isn't related to work.</comment>


Show HN: Issuepost – Submit GitHub Issues from your Mac, effortlessly - <AUTHOR> http://issuepostapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, I'm Mark. From my experience using GitHub Issues as a main bug tracker and project management system, entering new issues was an ordeal when repeated throughout the day. Opening up a new browser window and everything broke my workflow and introduced unnecessary hassle.

So I decided to build a Mac app to do that. This app allows you to submit new GitHub issues effortlessly. Hit a shortcut key, enter the issue repo, details, and label it, and submit, and that's it. Doesn't break your workflow. Effortless to use. And keyboard navigation is fully supported.

—

This is my first Mac app, and I designed and developed this from start to finish, focusing on ease of use. It incorporates some elements of psychology, making the app effortless and reliable, and to make it easy to unobtrusively build this app into your standard workflow. (I'll write something about the psychology aspect soon.)

From a 'philosophical' standpoint, if you're using GitHub Issues as a main issue tracker, the fundamental action is the entering of new issues, which this app streamlines, increasing your ability to use the issue tracker. I think we should all be identifying the problems in the fundamental actions in systems and tools to be able to use those systems more effectively.

I sincerely hope that using app is a good experience for you. I'd love your feedback on the design, functionality, or anything else. Reply here or email me at firstname.lastname@example.com. Thanks so much!

</comment><comment><USER2> Downloaded it and immediately showed it to my team. Good stuff. Fast and gets out of the way.

Would be nice to be able to favorite a repo. Or at least autofill the last repo posted to. We have a ton of different repos and even remembering the names sometimes is a challenge. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool app Mark, quite handy. Have you thought about making a browser extension version? It would be a quick way to get on more platforms and you can still build in the business model.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have the majority of devs upgraded to 10.8? I thought most of us still stays with 10.7 :(.</comment>


Age of AI Conference 2018 – Day 1 Highlights - <AUTHOR> https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/02/age-ai-conference-2018-day-1.html <comment><USER2> Good speakers and content!</comment>


The Kotlin Language: 1.0 Beta Is Here - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2015/11/the-kotlin-language-1-0-beta-is-here/ <comment><USER2> I've been using Kotlin on Android for about six months, and can't recommend it highly enough. If you're stuck in the Java ecosystem, Kotlin will make your life much better.

I also recommend it for people coming from the world of dynamic typing (Ruby, Javascript, Python, etc.). If you can appreciate the guarantees of a static type system -- and I submit that anyone who has worked on a project of more than a few KLOC can -- give Kotlin a try. It's much less verbose than Java, and gives you the tools and constructs to program in much the same style as you would in a dynamic language, but with extremely good compile-time correctness checks. It may not be Haskell, but it's pragmatic, practical and productive.

The tooling is also world class, as you might expect from a language developed by JetBrains. I recommend using Kotlin with IntelliJ -- the intellisense is guaranteed to boost your productivity.

Seamless Java interop has been a huge priority for the developers, so the ecosystem is also quite good. Its biggest weakness (for my use case anyway) is the lack of a good, modern web framework. Hopefully now that Kotlin is more stable a native library ecosystem will emerge that plays to Kotlin's strengths more than Java's.

<comment><USER3> How does it affect built time and the feedback cycle?

<comment><USER4> Build times are supposed to be comparable to Java.

<comment><USER5> Build times are used to be slower, but I think recent Kotlin compilers have "daemon" mode to speed things up.

I personally use Kotlin on a daily basis for Android development and build time is comparable to the one of Java. May I also recommend Anvil framework ([https://github.com/zserge/anvil](https://github.com/zserge/anvil))? It brings declarative layouts and data bindings, which works best with the immutable data types of Kotlin (much like React does in the web).

<comment><USER2> I also highly recommend Anvil. Anvil + Kotlin makes Android development feel sane and at times even joyous! I should write a blog about my experiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using Kotlin for a little while, as the backend language for the side project/maybe-startup I'm working on. I went with it because of my troubling tendency to write Scala code I can't read three weeks later, and in that I think Kotlin's a big success: the Java interop is good (still some weirdness around DI frameworks and non-nullable types, which is unavoidable if you're using something like Jersey with HK2), the language itself has _most_ of the niceties I want, and I find that the tooling is really pretty good in general. And the Kotlin community, in my experience, has been really good (aside from...sigh...yet another Slack chat to be in), unlike the continuing and perpetual disaster of Scala whenever certain members of the This Should Be Haskell mafia are allowed near anyone who's just asking a question.

I miss things from Scala once in a while, but they're usually me being way too cute with my code anyway--good for tiny personal things, not for something I'm hoping I'm looking at three years from now, not just three weeks from now.

<comment><USER7> That's helpful. I have this side Scala project, a long-lived daemon[1], that I've been meaning to rewrite in something else, as I've grown disenchanted with it. (Bruce Eckel and Paul Phillips contributed to that. [2]) But every alternative I could think of was not so appealing. I'll check this out.

[1] [https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise](https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10163446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10163446)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried Kotlin in one small project, which used Java API and I can recommend it. There are a lot of handy features there.

There were quite a bit of breaking changes, but, of course, it's expected from unreleased language. It wasn't hard to fix things.

For me Kotlin is in sweet spot between verbose Java and complex powerful Scala. From a practical point of view, I would prefer it to both. Any competent Java programmer will catch Kotlin fast enough, and it has almost anything I would want from a "improved Java" language.

</comment><comment><USER9> Kotlin seems to fill a niche comparable to TypeScript: a language that doesn't try to break new ground, but picks a bunch of tried-and-true ideas to fix severe problems in the underlying platform. Like TypeScript, I hope that it ends up being the right language, with the right compromises, at the right time.

<comment><USER10> Yup. It helps that Kotlin is also a smallish language. You can pick it up in a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is it better than Ceylon 1.2? Ceylon compiles to JVM bytecode, JavaScript, Dart, and will to LLVM in the future. As a language, it's a great superset of Java.

I posted [0] about the great new Ceylon 1.2 (which is backed by Red Hat), and nobody seemed to care, but there's so much hype about Kotlin - I don't get it!

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10474126)

<comment><USER12> _Don 't know Ceylon or Kotlin except superficial poking around the websites._

So, let me ask you, how is Ceylon better than Kotlin? I'd like to see a good write-up (separate blog post) that compares and contrasts the two. What are use cases where one language would be significantly better than the other?

(Edit) Wow! Did not expect such a dearth of samples (for both languages) on Rosetta Code.

[http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Ceylon](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Ceylon)

[http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Kotlin](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Kotlin)

and only one overlap:

[http://rosetta.alhur.es/compare/Ceylon/Kotlin/#](http://rosetta.alhur.es/compare/Ceylon/Kotlin/#)

<comment><USER6> Given that a _strength_ of Kotlin is that you can dumb-port Java straight to it without even thinking about it, I'm not really surprised it doesn't have much presence on Rosetta Code. It's not the right audience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looking at the syntax briefly it seems very similar to Scala. Is there any major differences between Scala and Kotlin?

<comment><USER14> Can't do much FP in Kotlin. Unless your definition of FP is programming with lambdas.

<comment><USER15> Which is mostly what used to be, 10 years ago. Closures, map, fold, etc. Before Haskell and Clojure like immutability and extra trimmings became fashionable...

In 1995 or even 2000 era LISP discussions you rarely if ever see those other concerns about FP that hipster functional programmers bring forward today.

(I guess it's also something that was helped by Moore's Law style speed development slowing down and the advancements in multicores...)

<comment><USER16> Quite right, back on those days FP was Smalltalk (yes really), Scheme, Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Caml Light (no OCaml yet), Standard ML and Miranda (no Haskell yet).

Which like you mention is where I point those hipsters to.

Then again, all new generations think they know best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've used both Kotlin and Scala a bit and for some very specific message passing/protocol tricks, Scala was able to let me do what I wanted more than Kotlin. That was maybe 6-12 months ago, so I'm not sure if that has changed.

That said, there is something pretty cool about Kotlin that I like. Congrats on 1.0 Beta.

</comment><comment> bink-lynch I looked around and found a nice writeup on Kotlin:

[https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-kotlin-is-my-next- program...](https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-kotlin-is-my-next-programming- language-c25c001e26e3)

</comment><comment><USER18> are non-exhaustive pattern matches in kotlin warnings, errors, or neither?

looks like from the docs:

"If `when` is used as an expression, the `else` branch is mandatory, unless the compiler can prove that all possible cases are covered with branch conditions."

So it is an error, I assume?

<comment><USER2> With the caveat that I haven't tried it myself:

> What about pattern matching? This is where the word "sealed" above comes in > handy; we can do an exhaustive pattern match without an else/otherwise > branch

from [https://medium.com/@octskyward/kotlin- fp-3bf63a17d64a#.8dbwa...](https://medium.com/@octskyward/kotlin- fp-3bf63a17d64a#.8dbwaz4yi)

<comment><USER12> This looks to be single value matching only and no compile time exhaustion checks. This looks like really nice (i.e. sugary) alternative to switch but not quite pattern matching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would be sweet if it already had a CoreCLR backend.

Portable code between WP and Android without JNI pain.

<comment><USER19> They have taken steps to separate (most) of the frontend and the backend and will be resuming work on the JS side after 1.0. While I haven't dug into the internals very much, it seems with the concept of "platform types" (i.e. implicitly nullable) and not having anything too JVM-specific, CLR support might be an approachable project for the community. I recommend the community take it and keep it up to date with pre-releases of Kotlin. With ScalaCLR IIRC, when Typesafe decided to stop supporting it it basically withered as new Scala features were rapidly developed.

It also has a better chance than ScalaCLR due to how small the runtime is. But, like Swift with ObjC, since the runtime is so small so many of the libraries are going to targer the JVM and reference JVM libs which may make the cross-VM ecosystem non-existent (doesn't mean it still won't have good CLR uses of course).

<comment><USER20> Right now developing a new backend for Kotlin is much harder than necessary because the compiler doesn't have any IR and any desugaring passes - in other words, each backend has to work directly with the full AST (annotated with types etc., but still using all language constructs).

We plan to rework this post-1.0, after which building a new backend will be much more feasible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> it would be great if playframework also had kotlin support. The problem here is that kotlin has no sbt support.

<comment><USER22> Is Play any good these days? Tried it when it was new, was an utter mess. Found a couple of bugs within the first hour or so...

<comment><USER14> I know that Play 2 is happily used in production all over the place. I'm guessing it's a lot better than when you used it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anybody used it compiled to JavaScript? What's your experience? How does it compare to TypeScript?

</comment><comment><USER24> How easy is it to write Kotlin code for Hadoop mappers and reducers?

</comment><comment><USER25> Comparison with Ceylon ?

<comment><USER26> Here's a preso:

[https://speakerdeck.com/evacchi/kotlin-and-ceylon-modern- pro...](https://speakerdeck.com/evacchi/kotlin-and-ceylon-modern-programming- languages-for-a-modern-jvm)

I can't say I've used Ceylon much but I think Kotlin's syntax is much nicer and it's much easier to approach than Scala.

<comment><USER27> I'd imagine having Jetbrains behind Kotlin means much better tooling, which is likely to be more important for a lot of people than language features like ADTs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm disappointed with the people who are down-voting this comment, as it's, in my opinion, informative and provides a reasonable summation of the differences between Kotlin and Scala.

I'd ask people who disagree to put their disagreement into words.

<comment><USER29> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493049) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>