I'm Moving To San Francisco, I Need A Job - <AUTHOR> http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-05.html Of note for HN: "I am interested in working for a funded startup that has about 5-20 employees and is growing or would like to grow." <comment><USER2> This is why having a well-known online presence is important.

<comment><USER3> But, will his online presence hurt him or help him in this case? Zed is obviously intelligent, but his tendency to not "play nice" with others might not fit with too many grow mode startups who don't want drama, and just want to get the best stuff out the door as fast as possible. Though, maybe a little Zed drama will help get _better_ stuff out the door. It's a tough call. I wish him the best of luck and can't wait to see what happens with the lucky company that he fits into.

<comment><USER2> I think in the absolute, it will absolutely help him. It might detract _some_ companies from hiring him, but I think his contributions in software and publications opened him up to a magnitude of potential employers, even if some of them might not want that sort of exposure.

Let's say he didn't post or publish anything, would you say he'd be better off? I'm positive he won't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's hard to put email and blog posts into human context. What seems abrasive in text only mediums, may not even seem remotely abrasive in real life where we can see body language, facial expressions, etc. Even text as straight forward as "Fuck you! I quit" may just be a joke directed at folks that get it. But outsiders read it and immediately think, "wow, that guy is not nice" when in actuality he's just goofing-off with others that 'get it'. Long story short, I'd have to meet the guy several times and hang out with him in person before I could pass any sort of judgment and I think other smart HR/mgrs would agree. He would not be immediately ruled-out because his online comments seem offensive.

</comment><comment><USER5> I dunno, Zed, maybe you should just look for a job as a "lone ranger". Whenever I read one of your rants, I'd chuckle and say, "Gee, I'm glad he's not talking about me." I wonder how other programmers would feel working with you, never quite sure when they'd be fodder for one of your rants.

<comment><USER6> Personally, I would have no problems working with him. I expect people to call me out when I do stupid things, and I expect people to tell me what they think.

I don't think Zed is much more abrasive than Linus, for example.

<comment><USER7> Also, has he been abrasive to people who were being nice to him?

<comment><USER8> The entire Ruby community, at one point. Why do you think he switched to Python?

<comment><USER9> obviously because the entire Ruby community hated him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand Netflix has one of the most generous severance package policies in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER11> Woah, buried in there was this claim:

 _Well, in a perfect world I'd just work on Lamson but the days of companies actually paying people to work on open source are pretty much over._

Have I missed something? I thought that, at least, most of the kernel and gcc devs were employed by companies to work on those projects. Is he right, and something has fundamentally changed?

<comment><USER12> That's very wrong... you could argue that most of the kernel maintainers are employed by companies to work on the kernel, but not all the code gets written by them, and some companies do not employ people to work full-time on the kernel, otherwise do you think the Intel driver would be in the current state?

And of course Lamson is not GCC or the kernel. Those are very special cases, look at the GNOME or KDE project... or Django for you web guys, who gets paid to work on Django? not even JKM

<comment><USER13> Hmm it doesn't _really_ count but JBoss is open source and has paid developers. jQuery UI is maintained by a consulting group. Firefox's core developers are paid. I'm pretty sure there are paid contributors on Hadoop and Lucene.

And lets not forget Rails....

<comment><USER14> Perhaps less well known are open-source reporting companies like Actuate (sponsors/main developers of the top-level Eclipse BIRT project), Pentaho, JasperSoft. Not sure about revenue models for others, but Actuate sells support for their open-source tools and offers proprietary add-ons for those that need to scale their deployments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Curious that a person with such an abrasive online persona wants a job as a team leader or 'technology evangelist'.

<comment><USER16> IMO that online persona is perfect for a technology evangelist. Make noise, rake muck, profit.

<comment><USER5> x% of others would agree. (100-x)% would probably be put off. Solve for x.

<comment><USER17> The Marmite equation.

<comment><USER18> The Marmite equation?

<comment><USER19> When considering the Marmite yeast extract product, in the UK _x_ is somewhat above 50. In the US, _x_ is well below 50. Similar values of _x_ probably apply to Vegemite between Australia and the US.

<comment><USER20> I still didn't get it, until I read this: _This distinctive taste is reflected in the British company's marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it."_ (from Marmite wikipedia page)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Quick question to my fellow Rubyists who happen to do Rails: would you really resent working with Zed? I've enjoyed Zed the few times I've met him in person and find the prospect of working with him to be a desirable thing.

<comment><USER22> I've said it before on HN, but I met Zed at RubyFringe and thought he was very polite and professional. I wouldn't resent working with him at all.

<comment><USER21> I had the same experience at RubyFringe with Zed. Stand up dude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Of note for HN: "I am interested in working for a funded startup that has about 5-20 employees and is growing or would like to grow."

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't mean to be negative about a fellow human (especially one in the tech industry) but Zed comes across in that 'advert' as thinking he'd be doing a company a favour by working for them. I don't know him, or his work, but in my experience touting for general jobs by making out you're better than them rarely works. It'd be ok with a company you know but in a general blog post? It's a big 'no' from me.

Good luck to Zed though, I'm sure someone will snap him up just because of his online status and it's certainly a different way to find a job!

</comment><comment><USER24> Zed is a really smart guy, I had the pleasure of going to his free hackers union group here in NYC.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm looking forward to having him out this way. I'm sure he will pop up in the community from time to time. Would love to see him speak.</comment>


Show HN: "React" in 50 lines of vanilla JS - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/dosyago-coder-0/3cf108f6e8637692eea705b6a450834e <comment><AUTHOR> For references, I'm taking implementing the "MyComponent" example from the "Broken Promise of Web Components"[1] article, in minimal JS.

One thing it's meant to show you don't need to "transpile" from a DSL to do this stuff.

Simplifying the way I build web apps means a great deal to me.

[1] [https://dmitriid.com/blog/2017/03/the-broken-promise-of- web-...](https://dmitriid.com/blog/2017/03/the-broken-promise-of-web- components/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This doesn't seem to update when "data" is updated. Without that, it's not even a little bit like React...

<comment><AUTHOR> No isn't the data binding the Flux part of React, not React itself? I think so... but anyway don't you think this code is good?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Reddit alternative – decentralized social news site, no censorship - <AUTHOR> http://get-frisbee.com/ <comment><USER2> Let's look at what happened to Voat.

After people claimed Reddit was censoring users by banning /r/fatpeoplehate, the more unsavory users flocked to Voat, a blatant Reddit clone.

As you would expect, said unsavory people posted unsavory content. Said unsavory content, while free and uncensored, was not _legal_ , and that causes problems: [http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3avyem/voat_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3avyem/voat_finally_caves_the_first_bannings_of/)

Said issues caused their PayPal account to become frozen: [http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3augr0/drama...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3augr0/drama_over_voats_paypal_account_getting/)

No, "decentralized" does not magically make you immune to law and punishment.

<comment><USER3> Diss Voat.co as much as you want, but so far Voat.co is actually a pretty huge success: [http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/voat.co](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/voat.co)

<comment><USER4> I don't think minimaxir was "dissing" voat.co, just stating facts. As for voat's success, I can't see how it can ever hope to supersede reddit - or even come close to competing with reddit - given that it _is_ indeed a blatant clone. There's no real redeeming qualities of voat that are not already present on Reddit.

<comment><USER5> I personally am not using voat yet, but think that the fact that ModLogs are totally public and open instead of being hidden away and largely controlled by a couple of cabals of users is a huge plus.

I don't see voat as being a long term viable thing though, since it's just one kid in college and the recent surge of users was largely driven by an exodus from reddit over banning politically incorrect speech.

<comment><USER6> Harassing people and subreddits whose moderators encouraged and supported harassment go well beyond just "politically incorrect".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't want to be That Guy, but I really don't think the UI is very intuitive. A lot of things really bug me about it. It's hard to peruse a list of posts and scan headlines, unlike on Hacker News or reddit. You compose comments with a serif font, and then the comment is posted with a sans-serif font. It appears as if all URLs are just frizbee.co/#SomethingGoesHere, regardless of what it is. This makes me lost a lot because I'll click the logo in the upper-left corner because I want to go back to the homepage, but it doesn't work. It also means that I have no idea what a link is before I click on it. When I see reddit.com/u/takua108, I know that it's takua108's user page. When I see reddit.com/r/dota2, I know that it's the Dota 2 subreddit. When I see [https://frizbee.co/#ICameHereFromHackerNews558b70ef40cdf](https://frizbee.co/#ICameHereFromHackerNews558b70ef40cdf), I have no idea what the hell to think. Plus, there's no comment permalinks, and it looks like every link is using javascript or something, because I can't even hover over the link to see where it leads!

I like a lot of the ideas behind this, but I feel like the execution is very, very poor.

<comment><USER8> Its even worse than that. Navigation is just totally broken. For example I clicked your link then on that page I clicked Our Manifesto. The URL changed to [https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5](https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5) but the page content did not change! This seems to happen all over.

Totally dont need to re-engineer hyperlinks. They are hyperlinks!

(logo in the left hand corner does change the url to [https://frizbee.co/#HotPosts](https://frizbee.co/#HotPosts) but as you and I said it just doesnt work)

<comment><AUTHOR> These glitches have since been fixed.

<comment><USER9> Performance is awful on my i7.

You should use less js. I should not be able to watch things being indented and layouts being modified as the page loads.

<comment><USER10> Yup can't even browse with JS turned off unlike HN/reddit.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the other hand, Tumblr requires JavaScript... and the sites you listed require it for voting and commenting.

<comment><USER8> I find it funny you reply to this and not my comment above... what does reinventing hyperlinks get you other than screwing up user experience????

Because Tumblr does it too???

What is the positive???

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No censorship as in no moderation?

No thanks.

No censorship as in no punishing the stalking and threatening of others?

Also no thanks.

I want free speech where people are free with their speech, not unrestrained speech (specifically) where people feel free to hurt others.

<comment><USER11> Translation: I want free speech except I want people I don't like to not have it.

<comment><USER12> > I want free speech except I want people I don't like to not have it.

No, actually, koko very loosely defined _actual_ free speech. In a nutshell free speech means that you can say whatever you please so long as you don't venture into what the American courts call "fighting words" (words/images designed to cause harm to another person or words/images that inspire others to cause harm to another person).

Example:

Let's say that I am prejudiced toward piglets (those damn curly tails!). I can express my extreme disdain for the swines to my heart's content. I can talk to people who share my bacon-related woes in the open.

However, I can't encourage people to go and harass or do harm to the hogs. I can't dox Babe and let everyone know the specific pen of residence: that would be encouraging others to harm, harass or make breakfast out of the pig.

*May not actually apply to pigs.

<comment><USER13> That isn't how "fighting words" is defined.

<comment><USER12> > ... and the insulting or "fighting words" those that by their very utterance > inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. — > Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942

Uh, _yes_ it is. If you're going to take the time to tell me that I'm wrong, you might actually also take the time to _correct_ me. Not only was your statement incorrect but it added absolutely nothing to the discussion.

<comment><USER13> Uh, no, fighting words means something that's _immediate_ , as in _you 're literally right in front of them insulting them and they punch you in the nose._

It can't be done over the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a bit of a stretch to call this "decentralised" when it still relies on software running on a "master" server (your bot.)

Second, if it is indeed fully anonymous, won't it just become a haven for trolls?

<comment><AUTHOR> Even though many playlist servers run on the frizbee.co server, some are community-owned.

Feel free to host a decentralized server here: [https://github.com/Frizbeeco/Frizbee/blob/master/documentati...](https://github.com/Frizbeeco/Frizbee/blob/master/documentation.md)

You can also block users for spam.

<comment><USER14> Okay right, but it's not _decentralised_ -- if it was, I would be able to run a completely stand-alone server, or join an arbitrary network of servers completely unrelated to yours just by punching in the IP address of another member server.

If I _must_ have anything to do with you, it's not decentralised. Distributed, maybe. But _not_ decentralised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like the idea, but I don't think the UI design is really all that great.

For example the upvote button is massive, and I couldn't easily find the comment button at all.

Basically, it made me scared to even look at the site... like, "where am I?"

<comment><USER16> Also.. contrast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm confused how the licensing of users' content is intended to work.

The site states that you own your content[1] but then on its manifesto page[2] states that all information is in the public domain. The license itself[3] is not particularly clear.

Putting information into the public domain does provide for maximum freedom in terms of how the information can be used, but that's because the copyright owner renounces their rights.

[1]: [https://frizbee.co/#WhatMakesFrizbeeDifferent558b273db212a](https://frizbee.co/#WhatMakesFrizbeeDifferent558b273db212a)

[2]: [https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5](https://frizbee.co/#OurManifesto5589a552786d5)

[3]: [https://frizbee.co/#LegalLicense5589af95a67c3](https://frizbee.co/#LegalLicense5589af95a67c3)

<comment><USER8> "you own the copyright to your content... all the content on Frizbee is in the public domain... you can use and redistribute [user content] in any way, completely free of charge."

Yeah, really really strange. That makes _no sense._ The whole thing in general seems to confuse copyright with responsibility of content. Of course I could have got the gist wrong because it was very confusing and contradicted itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone clarify what is decentralized about this? I clicked around a few threads on the site and they all appear to be hosted at frizbee.co.

<comment><USER14> It's not decentralised. You have the ability to run a node. Your node communicates exclusively with frizbee's servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It looks like you're off to a good start. There's design cleanup to do, for sure. Ya, there are buts that people can clear cookies and vote again - welcome to the world of building social news software.

There will be two key moments with this: 1\. Will people stick around after this is off the front page of HN?

2\. When people decide to game your site, how well do you handle voting rings? The reddit founders have mentioned that nearly half of their code catches voting rings; that's not trivial to do. And of course, it may be premature optimization, but it is something to consider that anyone with a few minutes of time to build a bot could completely destroy your site.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't "handling vote rings" be a form of "censorship"?

<comment><USER20> You have a right to say what you want, you don't have a right to manipulate the ranking of the content.

<comment><USER8> I don't see the difference. If you want to be free of censorship that also means free of moderation. Every community needs moderation if only for spam for a reason. That's why this doesn't make sense, there will have to be some choices at moderating the content thus choosing what is displayed or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The top post as I write this: "Delete your cookie and upvote forever".

</comment><comment><USER14> The original Frizee submission from 32 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9593729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9593729)

</comment><comment><USER22> "We're the only decentralized democratic social aggregator website"

I feel like this is not true.

<comment><USER23> how can a website be decentralized...

<comment><USER24> Maybe if you spread it across 500 AWS instances

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If people are interested in P2P decentralized discussion systems, check out [http://getaether.net](http://getaether.net) made by @nehbit . Beautiful UX, wasn't released yesterday either.

</comment><comment><USER8> Grey text is hard to read - needs contrast overall. Finding links and controls by random clicking and trial and error also isn't pleasant. mystery meat navigation.

</comment><comment><USER26> Apparently you can clear your cookie and up vote again. I can see the spambot coming already.

</comment><comment><USER14> Also, the "view counts" on the website are pure BS -- the comment view counts don't grow at the same rate the thread view count does, for example. The thread view-count grows at almost a clockwork rate, etc.

I know, I know, Reddit pulled similar stunts in its early days but it still feels a bit dodgy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

It's not a stunt, and you are purely speculating. The reason for the view count for the comments being different is very easy to explain: a comment may not have been posted at the same time as a post, and therefore has a different number of views.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I honestly hope one of these takes off. I don't want to ever go there, I don't take amusement in other people's suffering. But seeing so much outrage on reddit from assholes bitching that they can't be racist/bigoted/loathsome on a private forum screaming about freedom of speech which belies their own ignorance makes me long for the days of gopher. I find it repugnant, and I'm glad to live in a country where I'm free to say anything, but hate speech is prosecuted.

<comment><USER28> "I'm glad to live in a country where I'm free to say anything, but hate speech is prosecuted."

I'm going to be optimistic for the future of humanity, and assume that was a (masterful) troll.

<comment><USER29> That's a very common sentiment in eg England.

Americans tend not to realise that their free speech laws are sometimes seen as extreme in Europe.

It's not surprising they used a throwaway, they already got downvoted.

(It wasn't me.)

<comment><USER30> The Westboro Baptist Church make an easily graspable example of this. In the US the consensus (if any) seems to be "vile, but within their rights". But they're banned from entering the UK or Canada, because we draw that line differently.

<comment><USER28> Well yes, where 'differently' means 'hypocritically'.

For example, you prevent anti-jihad activists like Robert Spencer from entering the UK to speak, but you're perfectly prepared to allow pro-jihad activists to live in the UK and preach hatred of Jews, women, and non-Muslims in general.

This is the problem with limits on freedom of speech - they allow people doing the limiting to ban speech they don't like, for no other reason that they don't like it.

<comment><USER27> That's a problem with politicians. Don't confuse the two.

<comment><USER28> Sorry, I don't understand. It looks (to an outsider) like politicians are selectively enforcing nebulous 'hate speech' laws to silence people they don't like. How is that not a built-in feature of hate speech laws?

<comment><USER29> I don't quite understand your complaint. You say the UK doesn't have freedom of speech; you demonstrate that by giving an example of people who do have freedom of speech; you then mention people who are banned from entering the UK, but those people are banned because there is a risk of violence; you then say that that rule is not applied to violent Islamists who live in the country.

Of course it isn't! They live here, border controls are entirely the wrong tool to use for citizens.

Those border controls are used to prevent many Islamists from coming to the country.

And violent Islamists are dealt with using other laws.

A better example of uneven freedom of speech laws might have been the protections that Jews and Christians had (under racial discrimination laws and blasphemy laws) that were not extended to Muslims.

<comment><USER28> "but those people are banned because there is a risk of violence"

No, they're banned because their speech is so unpopular amongst a small but violent group of the population, that the Govt. would rather they weren't allowed to speak there.

That's a freedom of speech issue, not a border control issue.

If the Govt. were functioning properly, it would uphold its duty to protect unpopular speech by preventing (or at least attempting to prevent) violence directed at them. Instead, they just close their doors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't know, is censorship the problem with Reddit?

</comment><comment><USER32> How does login/registration work? Once I changed the moniker, added a password, how do I then log in?

<comment><AUTHOR> You login using the same menu you used for adding a passphrase- you enter your passphrase form another computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm starting to think the sufficiently complicated Lisp quote applies to USENET.

</comment><comment><USER34> quite slow

</comment><comment><USER35> If you're a bad enough person that _Reddit_ will ban you or your favorite subreddits, by all means get the fuck out! =)

</comment><comment><USER36> Ummm no. You're late to the game. Also, you're not established. If anyone has a claim to this, it's Voat. (Despite their difficulties)

<comment><USER37> Who runs voat? How do I know it isn't run by Russian spies? or US spies?

<comment><USER36> Probably both.. and what prevents either of those from running this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Haters gonna hate, but eventually something like this will win. It's too obvious an idea and hard drives are getting too cheap.</comment>


Joined Twitter. Followed 1,000 people. Got suspended. Doing better now - <AUTHOR>

Not having used Twitter before, I thought I'd give it a try to promote a new app that I've been working on called Lysterr.  A colleague said that I should look into one of those automated bots to get more followers.  I thought about it and figured that a similar result could be had by spending a few hours following people manually.  So, this is how I spend my entire Friday night.  Things were great and I quickly had 40, then 50 then 60 followers.  I went to sleep that night having followed over 1,000 and felt sort of weird about the whole experience.  I mean, I just followed anyone and everyone who showed up under suggestions.  The next morning, in addition to my inbox being blown up, I saw a message from Twitter saying that my account had been suspended.  This seemed odd since while setting up the Twitter account, the service prompted me to follow as many people as possible.  I get it though.  I was clearly overdoing it.  So, I clicked off their check boxes saying that I would be good from now on and was back in business within the hour.  I'm definitely going to respect their terms and conditions moving forward.  Besides, I spent my entire Saturday unfollowing the 'interesting' and somewhat questionable accounts I had followed the night before.   Now all is well and I feel like I can move on with life as a responsible Tweeter.
Thanks Twitter and sorry that I started off so aggressively.
If you are curious about our app and what we do, check us out at www.lysterr.com or follow us on Twitter @LysterrApp <comment><USER2> wonder what the limit is? with out getting suspended.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. My guess would be somewhere between 850-980 after setting up a new account. I topped out around 1100 or so before getting suspended.</comment></comment>


Groundbreaking blood test can detect cancer years before symptoms appear - <AUTHOR> https://jpost.com/health-science/groundbreaking-blood-test-can-detect-cancer-years-before-symptoms-appear-636443/ <comment><USER2> Is this what Theranos was trying to do before they got busted?</comment>


NASA's future manned spaceflight forecast: Bleak - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/45039

<comment><USER2> With any luck this means that there will be more room for the development of a commercial space industry and the success of companies like SpaceX.</comment>


For Less Than $400k You Can Now Get Uruguay Tax Residency - <AUTHOR> https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-international/for-less-than-400-000-you-can-now-get-tax-residency-in-uruguay <comment><USER2> Seems like a smart move to move there.

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

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

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Uruguay)

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

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

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

High speed ferry from Montevideo to Buenos Aires:

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

Except if you are afraid of rays from space, because in the middle of:

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

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought you could also do that in puerto rico

How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich

[https://www.gq.com/story/how-puerto-rico-became-tax-haven- fo...](https://www.gq.com/story/how-puerto-rico-became-tax-haven-for-super- rich)</comment>


Art and Politics: The Work of John Heartfield - <AUTHOR> http://spartacus-educational.com/spartacus-blogURL66.htm <comment><USER2> An additional article from a while ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6967889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6967889).</comment>


Lime's Loss to Top $300M in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/limes-loss-to-top-300-million-in-2019 <comment><USER2> That's nothing compared to their losses when cities start suing them for littering and causing accidents.

In some places the city has started gathering abandoned bikes for destruction. I wonder if you can buy these from the city and build something with the motor and the battery...

<comment><USER3> Last week I saw a lime scooter through the window of a Sherwin-Williams store around 10pm. They had an emergency team fixing it at 10:45pm. It won't take long before their use of "public" land will cause a huge legal issue.</comment></comment>


Americans losing faith in what Trump says about the coronavirus: Reuters/Ipsos - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/americans-losing-faith-in-what-trump-says-about-the-coronavirus-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKCN22A3CK <comment><USER2> If extrapolated literally, 6.6 million US citizens think it's not a terrible idea to inject bleach to fight coronavirus.

Explains the more than doubling of poison control center calls after those reckless comments..

<comment><USER3> No one was saying to inject bleach. And Trump was probably just crudely restating some experimental treatment he had heard about in one of his many briefings. Speculative disinfectant treatments have been mentioned.

It's a very minor issue and clearly grasping for a smear by the President's opponents.

Anyone who tried to drink bleach because of Trump's offhand comments that in no way endorsed doing so is beyond help or hope.

<comment><USER4> Maybe it was an offhand remark, maybe it was sarcasm, etc. But that misses the point.

If you are the most powerful and widely-heard person in the United States, _you don 't get to improvise your press briefings or give dubious advice "as a joke"_. People often defend him with "well we've all said something stupid", or "maybe he just didn't think it all the way through". But he isn't you or me. He is _the leader of the free world_. He carries _enormous responsibility_ , and he's demonstrated time and again that he can't be bothered to give a _flying fart_ about it.

<comment><USER5> Gosh, I don't want to get into another argument on another site about Trump, but here goes...

People like the man because he improvises his press conferences. They like him because he speaks off the cuff. Why, because it makes them like him. It makes them trust him (believe it or not). They don't trust the responsibility of leading them to someone who is slickly packaged by political consultants. Like that or not, that's democracy. So the question is who can the American people trust? Who DID they trust? (apologies for the all caps, not sure how to do italics). The answer is they trusted Donald Trump. Why? Because he speaks off the cuff. For some reason that's assuring to people. So if a few dozen people drink bleach due to misinterpreting a press conference, but the majority of a 350 some million person country are reassured by his making comments off the cuff, then what serves the greater good?

<comment><USER6> The majority, of course, aren't reassured by these antics and this is why he's wildly unpopular including in the poll linked above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fact that 47% after all these lies and misinformation still doesn't get it hurts my brain

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't honestly believe how many smart, empathetic and otherwise responsible people continue to defend the man.

<comment><USER9> It's because he's so open about what does and thinks. He doesn't act like a typical politician and hide it.

He'll say things like "We are in Iraq for the oil".

Everyone _knew_ that, but no president would admit it.

He's also incredibly self-centered, and he acts only in order to get re- elected, and/or praised. But that means he does what the people want, rather than what is best.

There are a lot of people who believe a politician should represent the will of the voters, rather than act in the best way they know.

Obviously you can argue which is better course of action, but at least you can understand why people vote for him.

Also: You would do well to ignore what he says, and pay attention only to what he does. He says everything and anything, just to gauge reactions. His actions are then based on what reaction he got. (Remember he's very self centered and wants praise.)

I've found that people who _really_ hate him pay way too much attention to what he says, thinking that what he says has some bearing on what he's actually going to do.

<comment><USER10> The frustrating part is not that he says whatever he wants with no regard to truth or keeping promises. It's that people keep believing his words, and defending them, with no acknowledgment that he's doing so!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How is this news?

</comment><comment><USER12> Put me in the bucket of Americans who lost faith in the American people.

Absolutely unconscionable.

</comment><comment><USER13> "And 98% of Americans said they would not try to inject themselves with bleach or other disinfectants if they got the coronavirus, including 98% of Democrats and 98% of Republicans. That is a near-unanimous rejection of an idea that Trump floated at a time of widespread anxiety about the virus."

Why is that 2% haven't been eliminated by evolution.

<comment><USER14> One problem with polling is that people answer contrary to their own actual beliefs. They didn't hear the question right, or they misspoke and are too embarrassed to correct it, or they're trolling the pollster.

<comment><USER15> Yeah it's like the false positives that plague attempts to measure rates of covid19. If you ask about briefs vs boxers the errors cancel. Run with scissors yay or nay, it doesn't.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Moving from Education to Startup? - <AUTHOR>

A friend suggested I post here for help after lurking here for awhile.
I'm losing my job as a high school English teacher and am interested in going into the startup world, particularly because I think it's where I can truly be useful and my work habits would be appreciated more. I have no idea where to start though with rebuilding my résumé; I've only been teaching for two years, but teaching and coaching is about the only experience I have beyond the sales positions I had in college years ago.
I was hoping to get some advice about how to reformat my résumé to appeal to startup positions. I'm very limited in CS (some Unix and Ruby/Rails) and would be more useful in a marketing or management position, or so I think. Would appreciate any help. Thanks, HN! <comment><USER2> #1 startups like people who like getting down and dirty

#2 build upon your strengths

#3 improve your weaknesses

It's actually Ruby on Rails thats hot right now and what most startups are looking for right now. I'd say take some time to learn that, maybe make some simple application for practice.

Secondly, use your strengths! English? I'm assuming copywriting is something that won't com to hard to you? OWN that space! Research marketing and user interaction for websites. Then go to some startups' websites and see how you can improve their text/site layout/whatever. Show it to your friend and get some opinins. Then let the startup know your thoughts. In-person is best but email just may work. In all this, remember that your strenght(and thus, the differentiating factor) is copywriting and the fact you know English well enough to teach it.

You are gonna have to build a portfolio, or resume as you put it, before anyone will take you seriously...figure out how to get those first initial clients

Good luck!</comment>


Cormac McCarthy on how to write a science paper - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02918-5 <comment><USER2> For many years I had imposter syndrome because I couldn't read papers.

It took a lot of work to extract any information from a paper; I had to spend hours reading it. I was always impressed at folks who could just glance at a single figure, without referring to the methods, and could glean what the paper was trying to say.

However, after working through enough papers and replicating the results of the authors, I came to learn a number of things- 1) papers are just written badly and it's not beacuse the authors are smart. It's beacuse the authors are bad writers. 2) most papers- in bio, I'd say about 90%- contain invalidating errors which mean that the figures and conclusions are worthless. It takes skilled readers to uncover methodological flaws (or infer them, as often not all the details are included).

After working in bio for a while, it was nice to be in ML because - at least it seemed- I could replicate most papers by downloading the github repo, training on my local GPU for a few days, and then using the trained model to make the same predictions as the papers. Then I realized- in most cases, what was being claimed was far more than what the trained model was actually capable of doing.

Now I stick to well-trod engineering literature that most people consider boring. In nearly all cases I can read the lit, repro the work, and get results that make sense (much of my work is ensuring that published benchmarks are reproducible).

The advice here is golden.

<comment><USER3> To first affirm what you're saying, this [1] is Einstein's revolutionary paper on relativity. While people without a mathematical background may have some difficulty following the technical components, what is said is plain enough that a capable high school graduate ought be able to, at least in general, follow the logic and ideas. Indeed even for Einstein it wasn't that far removed from high school. It was published when he was 26, and working as an assistant examiner in a patent office - having been unable to find any university that would take him on.

Perhaps you're saying as much, in between the lines, but I think there is a specific reason that modern scientific work has degraded in the way that it has. Most of it is rubbish, and the authors know that its rubbish. They don't want to publish rubbish, but finding new _real and meaningful_ science is something _incredibly_ difficult, yet they're expected to constantly publish - or perish. And so their motivation is not to inform society and help push scientific progress forward by a meaningful and relevant new discovery, but simply to publish something that can hit enough checkboxes to get published and keep moving on forward with.

And so in this regard grandiloquent language, excessive jargon/vernacular, and an obfuscation of the fundamental points under the guise of intelligence works as a phenomenal tool. As the countless hoaxes (such as the Sokal affair) have shown so long as you talk the talk and say something that is desired to be heard, you can get published even when what you submit is literally intentional nonsense. Sokal's hoax paper's [3] title was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.".

Sokal hypothesized he could get a paper that is literally nonsensical published in a leading journal if " (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." The paper lead with: "There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma...". Yeah, he's already 99% published there.

[1] - [https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

[3] - [https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_si...](https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html)

<comment><USER2> we are in violent agreement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am editing a paper now where I am removing a lot of non-jargon statements and replacing them with jargon. The reviewers were not pleased.

As other commenters have noted, plain english is imprecise. When communicating with other scientists in the field it is often necessary to use language that conveys an exact meaning within their pre-existing body of knowledge.

If the audience is people without this knowledge, the precise meanings are useless and can be ignored and rigorous quantifcations are often unimportant. However, this is frustrating to scientists who are then left wondering which of n different definitions of some property/parameter you are using and how this influences results. This is critical knowledge when internalizing and applying new information.

I am also adding in many "over-elaborations" because the reviewer had questions that a simple adjective or two would have answered. A paper absolutely ~is~ a dialog with potential questions, and nothing illustrates this more than peer review.

The two audiences require different papers, and peer reviewers tend to fall only into one of them.

<comment><USER5> My parent's have been a subscriber to Nature for a while. They accomplish this goal (communication to different audiances) very effectively.

In the early pages, there's a brief summary taking up about a quarter of the page.

Later, A 1-3 page article. Often the issue will contain multiple papers on the same subject, this article is a simple-english aggregation of those subjects.

The research papers themselves are published later on.

For example, Nature published two recent papers on the determination of the Thorium nucleus's excited state. The papers themselves would have meant very little without a physics degree or some serious determination, but the accompanying article explains all aspects of the papers well. It explains the context (why are these papers significant), how the two papers relate to each other and the broader implications.

Having read the article, it's then much easier to comprehend the contents of the paper. Not easy, but easier.

Nature's not cheap (£198 a year), and it comes weekly which may be faster than most people can read it, but as a means of communicating the absolute cutting edge of all sciences I commend it.

<comment><USER2> Be aware though, Nature and Science both emphasize rapid publishing on "hot" topics and many of the papers are just wrong. The work is accessible, but misleading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks pretty good mostly, but I'd emphasize more that the most important thing is to be understood. When it comes to a difficult mathematical concept, this is actually really really hard. If you can nail that, then worry about stylistic stuff, but you probably didn't nail it.

With that in mind, this advice is really problematic:

> Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don't use > the same word repeatedly — it's boring.

Boring is better than incorrect! I love when authors clearly define a term and use it over and over, because I know exactly what they mean every time. Jargon may be necessary to communicate precisely (but define your jargon, avoid assuming it's familiar). E.g. mathematically, there is a difference between a ball and a sphere. And if your L2 ball becomes an L2 balloon in the middle of a proof, readers will be very confused.

Also, this is just dead wrong:

> Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences. Mathematics is not the > same as English, and we shouldn't pretend it is.

I can see this being useful advice when a proof is full of dense lines of inequalities, but the reasoning is still incorrect. Mathematical notation is nothing more nor less than shorthand for English (or any other language). The following is fine for example: If f(x) >= 1, then either x = 0 or x \in [1,2]. So is this: Noting that x < 5, Pr[f(y) + x >= 3] <= 0.1. Perfectly grammatical.

<comment><USER7> Mathematical notation is not a shorthand for human language. It is a rigorous grammar with properties that make it possible to express very unambiguous qualities of a system.

<comment><USER8> Mathematical notation can be spoken out loud. Hence, you can include it in a sentence without breaking the flow of that sentence.

For the more complicated equations, it becomes harder to unambiguously pronounce them, and the ideas are more separate anyway. Hence we need to break them out.

Moreover, I disagree that mathematical notation is a rigorous grammar. Notation is used to be consise, to represent ideas so we can work on them. Precision is only added to resolve ambiguities that are hard to resolve based on the surrounding text.

One can make notation fully unambiguous, but that often comes at the cost of consiseness, and thus clarity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of my PhD classes was a paper reading seminar that spanned most of the history of modern molecular biology, from 1959 to the present. It was starkly apparent how much worse the writing quality became around the mid-1980s and beyond. Compare the classic ["genetic code" paper by Francis Crick]([https://moscow.sci- hub.tw/1024/2cfa4b970e4a1fd816ee18afa95aa...](https://moscow.sci- hub.tw/1024/2cfa4b970e4a1fd816ee18afa95aae98/crick1961.pdf)) with most modern papers

More science authors should read writing advice like this.

<comment><USER10> That sounds intriguing, although it strikes me that you might have been observing a survivorship bias.

Older papers that are considered notable today would probably be well-written compared to a random paper published last year, even if there weren't any group-level differences.

To be fair, given that the papers-published-per-scientist-per-year metric has been increasing (somewhat unhealthily, so it seems), I wouldn't be surprised if there has been at least some decrease in writing quality, simply to due to less time spent editing and polishing.

<comment><USER9> It's definitely possible, but I think there's still a palpable difference today. As an example, this work from 1989 on how telomeres work was awarded a Nobel in 2016. It's not unreadable, but it has a completely different (and I would say worse) style compared to the Crick paper I linked earlier: [https://moscow.sci- hub.tw/1036/810d9cdd2ea2e1a07d887dc432061...](https://moscow.sci- hub.tw/1036/810d9cdd2ea2e1a07d887dc432061543/greider1989.pdf)

It's also interesting how formats have evolved. Older journals like Nature and Science used to have a "letters" section--essentially letters to the editor. They were brief (200-300 words) and started with "Dear sirs", like an actual letter. Today, a "letter" in the same journals is essentially a whole (short, 2-3 page) paper, like this one: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1578-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1578-4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm happy Cormac does this work. I'm even happier that he pointed out a few rules to break. This time invested to improve science writing by one of our greatest living writers is a friendly/magnanimous gesture from a discipline that is on the rocks. I'm not sure if Cormac teaches out of necessity or the goodness of his heart, but count me even more despondent if he needs the salary despite his commercial and critical success.

Nothing can single-handedly fix scientific (or technical, or academic) writing. Reading your own writing like a stranger is harder than reading your own code like a stranger. Aside from a few polymaths, the best technical/science writing takes careful, understanding partnerships.

That said, I think the bigger problem for science writing is how miserably disconnected pop-press coverage is from what is morally justifiable given the research design and results. Some of this is the fault of the scientists (and their reviewers), who don't always appear to see the limitations of their own results. More often, it seems to be about poorly-paid writers churning out clickbait from journal articles.

Unless (or until) we see fit to ensure our scientists (and inventors, and developers, and economists, ...) are polymaths capable of communicating their work lucidly, I think there's a lot of forsaken social value.

If it's worth giving a grant to study or build something, it's worth bolting a communication budget onto (not into) the grant to make sure the work is understood.

<comment><USER12> > Unless (or until) we see fit to ensure our scientists (and inventors, and > developers, and economists, ...) are polymaths

Well, are we going to (a) increase barriers to entry to the scientific professions until most scientists are also poets and warrior sages, or (b) punish bad paper writers with mandatory writing camps (that set back their scientific agendas), or (c) ???

Science papers are mostly made to be read by scientists.

<comment><USER11> You forgot to quote the part where I didn't advocate for harsh authoritarian barriers or punishments for non-poet scientists:

> ... capable of communicating their work lucidly, I think there's a lot of > forsaken social value.

<comment><USER12> Which leaves us option (a): bar bad communicators from the scientific profession.

<comment><USER11> Is there any defensible reason you're determined to create an authoritarian fetish out of my assertion that scientific research worth funding in the first place is worth bundling with a communications budget to ensure it is appropriately understood?

You're tilting at windmills, here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a slightly more lofty version, see Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'[1], and in particular its six rules:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

[1]: [https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...](https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit)

<comment><USER14> [https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Science is often hard to read. Most people assume that its difficulties are born out of necessity, out of the extreme complexity of scientific concepts, data and analysis. We argue here that complexity of thought need not lead to impenetrability of expression; we demonstrate a number of rhetorical principles that can produce clarity in communication without oversimplifying scientific issues. The results are substantive, not merely cosmetic: Improving the quality of writing actually improves the quality of thought._

From "The Science of Scientific Writing", 1990; there is a related video, [Judy Swan, Scientific Writing: Beyond Tips and Tricks]([https://youtu.be/jLPCdDp_LE0](https://youtu.be/jLPCdDp_LE0))

</comment><comment><USER16> I write little academic papers for a living as a professor. I think this is good advice on how to write like cormac mccarthy. More important is to pick an academic writer whose journal articles you love and copy them. One of my favorites is Paul Krugman. He's not in my field but apparently he's good enough that people want to read him. He uses lots of semicolons and punctuation. I understand where this advice is coming from, though. Lots of academics are truly horrible writers and believe complication itself makes their writing erudite.

<comment><USER17> TIL > erudite

educated, cultured, cultivated, learned, literate

In case you wondered like I did :-)

<comment><USER18> I first learned this word (and many others) from EverQuest, back in the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice article.

>> Minimize ... transition words — such as 'however' or 'thus' — so that the reader can focus on the main message <<

However, I'm not sure about this advice :) I remember reading a study that appropriate use of transition words is helpful in signposting how the coming sentence relates to the previous one, thereby reducing effort for the reader. What do other's think?

<comment><USER20> This was also the point that stood out to me as most wrong. If you have two sentences, the meaning changes completely depending on whether the second starts with "However" vs. "Thus". It does not seem like good writing practice to me to elimate them and leave force the reader to infer.

More generally, words like "however", "thus", "although", "therefore", "indeed", and "notwithstanding" are crucial for helping the reader follow the thread of the argument.

<comment><USER21> This stood out to me reading the notes from Knuth's _Mathematical Writing_ seminar, linked elsewhere on this comment page. An example from page 21:

> He recently spent four hours looking through the collected works of Lagrange > trying to find the source of "Lagrange's inequality," but he was > unsuccessful. Considering the benefit to future authors and readers, he's > not too unhappy with the new law.

The second sentence contrasts with the first, and with the rest of the paragraph, which I have omitted here. I had to read it twice to grasp its meaning. A "however" or a "nonetheless" is a nice hint to the lazy reader.

<comment><USER20> Agreed, though I don't think it's a matter of laziness. Language is ambiguous (garden path sentences, etc). Redundancy is necessary to ensure clarity, assuming your goal is to be clear, rather than to entertain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Know your primary audience. Allow for other audiences, but know who you are writing to. The audience for a science paper may be other researchers in your field, researchers in associated fields, or other fields, other scientists, or a more general audience. Audiences for hackers might be other hackers, programmers, computer scientists, users, investors, salespeople, technicians, translators, etc.

Pick one main audience, and a very few related audiences, and write so that any of them can understand without confusion or distraction. The red herring for an IPO does not benefit from leet-speak, nor does the FAQ for an online service benefit from legal disclaimers.

</comment><comment><USER23>
      • Don't slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of
      thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are
      turning pages or clicking on links. Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly
      technical language. And don't use the same word repeatedly — it's boring.

      • Don't over-elaborate. Only use an adjective if it's relevant. Your paper is
      not a dialogue with the readers' potential questions, so don't go overboard
      anticipating them. Don't say the same thing in three different ways in any
      single section. Don't say both 'elucidate' and 'elaborate'. Just choose one,
      or you risk that your readers will give up.

"Don't use the same word repeatedly" and "don't say the same thing in three different ways in any single section" are contradictory.

In particular the first bit of advice is not good advice, to my bitter, bitter experience. I used to do this in my papers: I would vary the terminology I used to refer to the same concept throughout a paper, to make the text more interesting. This was criticised very strongly and caused untold confusion among reviewers, and the confusion caused my work to be rejected with very strongly negative comments. And that's not just papers- I kept having to re-do the reports on the progress of my research required by my university, because the internal examiners wer so confused by the way I was writing.

Then I had a single session with a woman from the unversity's center for academic English and that was one of the first things she said to me: "use the same term to refer to the same concept, throughout the text". It was like a lightbulb went off and the next set of comments I got for my work was overwhelmingly positive (with respect to my technical writing anyway). It was just This One Simple Trick, right? But it made a world of difference.

And here's a more general bit of advice: if you ever enjoyed literature, or indulged in writing your own, woe is you, o damned soul. Do not even consider trying to write a technical paper as if it was literature. You will be damned for ever to the eternal flames of damned damnation. Really- don't do it. Literary writing is evocative, it creates fleeting impressions and conjures emotions. Done right, no two readers will get the same impression from the same literary text. But the same is death for technical writing. Technical writing is precise and unambiguous. Everyone who reads it must understand it and they must all understand the same thing. Don't mix the two kinds of writing up or you'll make a mess. Like I have.

</comment><comment><USER24> > And don't worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about > every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every > statement. Just enjoy writing.

Trying to defend against bad reading is impossible and trying to do so in original article is useless.

Bad reading is huge problem for social media and internet forums. Bad readers are likely to be the first to comment article in the internet forums and comment sections. They destroy discussion.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is step 1 "Be as depressing as possible?". Full respect to McCarthy but damn his books are hard work.

<comment><USER26> Yes they're dark but that just makes the glimpses of light shine brighter.

<comment><USER25> I think I really struggled with The Road because it really touched on every primal insecurity in a parent - being unable to provide enough food or warmth, unable to protect them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is some of the best writing advice I've read: straightforward and incredibly digestible. All while totally vindicating me for hating so many of the arbitrary style games I had to learn in school :)

</comment><comment><USER28> « And don't use the same word repeatedly — it's boring. »

This is dangerous advice, and not just because (as others have noted) it can add ambiguity.

Finding alternatives to the simplest word for a concept will often narrow the audience. For a simple example, if I decide I've written "Venus" too many times and substitute "the second planet", I'm unnecessarily making it more difficult for people who don't happen to know the order of the planets.

<comment><USER29> Their guidance might sound clear, but in fact "Venus" is not the kind of repeated word they are talking about, because there's no unambiguous substitute for it.

If you're referring to Venus, then please ignore that advice and say "Venus" every time, don't annoy your readers by calling it the second planet, Aphrodite, the planet of love, the evening star, and etc etc ...

That is an example of the many severe issues with the advice in this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn't be too narrowly tied to a region."

Avoiding the elephant in the room that is how it's becoming mandatory to write in English for scientific communication. Won't anyone think about how this presents a risk of stagnation for scientific thought? (Starting with native English speakers, who never really _have_ to learn another language...)

<comment><USER31> There are some sayings that translate meaning well. For example, the Japanese idiom "Even monkeys fall from trees" (i.e., even experts can make a mistake). With context, it works with any audience who know monkeys live in trees. That's a wide audience.

<comment><USER30> Well, sure, but my concern is _specifically_ about concepts that translate _poorly_ (and for which, therefore, speaking multiple languages is interesting...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This lecture contains the best advice I've come across for academic writing: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM)

</comment><comment><USER33> Would be great if he presented a paper rewritten according to his advice.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wish there was some acknowledgement of the inevitable tension between readability and thoroughness. Sometimes it is actually more important to be thorough at the expense of readability.

</comment><comment><USER35> > _Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a > paragraph._

I agree with this. Newspaper style. But NeurIPS format will eat you alive if you follow this advice.

</comment><comment><USER36> This echoes much of the theme of Strunk & White "Elements of Style": write concisely and directly.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is so good, great advice for making scientific or technical papers more readable</comment>


Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530132.400-video-games-beat-interviews-to-recruit-the-very-best.html?utm_content=bufferab5af&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#.VQr6gRDF8nS <comment><USER2> Patrick gave an interview to The New Scientist when we announced last week. We're a little worried about Starfighter Fatigue and are definitely trying not to get too much onto the front page (Erin's diligently writing the game details post, which we want to be the next thing people see from us).

In the meantime though, if any of you have questions, we're watching and will answer.

<comment><USER3> What Thomas said. In particular, while we're really glad that many HNers like Starfighter, we were members of this community far before we were co-founders. We're keenly aware that a) HN is a community, not a marketing channel and b) the community frowns on saying the same thing over and over.

I'm CEO of a company and am pot committed to spending the next several years of my life repeating close variations of the same three things to anyone who will listen. ("How is that different from the last eight years, Patrick?" Answer: Previously I only had two things!) We would prefer people exercise their discretion in posting them to HN, to avoid boring anyone here.

<comment><USER4> > HN is a community, not a marketing channel

I wish the YC people saw it like that.

<comment><USER5> dang, "reply" is not available for your reply to A07bei3s - I suggest it should, and not to start that conversation (agree it should be done separately), but in case someone would like to reply to you.

<comment><USER6> HN pro tip: try clicking the post's timestamp (not sure if this still works).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome. I'll definitely become an avid player, right after I contribute meaningfully to several open source projects, have an active GitHub profile, while keeping my Stack Overflow reputation high, and having a fleshed out CodeCombat profile, and of course making sure my LinkedIn page is up to snuff.

I hope when I get this awesome job my employer doesn't mind me keeping all my profiles updated on company hours!

<comment><USER8> Seriously, this might be relevant to fresh out of college grads with no industry experience. But I have nothing to prove and see this kind of stuff as a waste of time. Why waste my efforts on contrived competitions when I can put them into projects that actually interest me.

<comment><USER9> "Why waste my efforts on contrived competitions when I can put them into projects that actually interest me."

How do we know it's contrived and competitive? Keep in mind that we're discussing a "game" that's not even released yet.

<comment><USER10> A game is by definition contrived, no?

<comment><USER9> Why the tautology then? ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Such a cool idea, and I enjoyed Microcorruption, but ended up getting stuck in the second or third level and couldn't even figure out the right questions to ask to get help. (I stepped into the irc channel at some point and asked some simple question, but got an answer that I couldn't even parse. So I realized I was out of my league and needed to learn more basics first.)

My one concern is about something that was mentioned during the announcement a little while back. The post mentioned something like "employers will be able to see exactly what you did when you had to create a REST service" (or something like that). Maybe I'm just learning this concept, maybe I'm only playing around! Will I have to have one "play" account, and one "real" account? If I knew that I'd be judged by not only _whether_ I complete a level, but _every single thing I tried_.... Yeah, no thanks.

<comment><USER12> I'm with you. There's no way I'd play a game where my every move was fair game for employers to scrutinize. That's too much stress and it would suck the fun out of everything. The thought of a game like that irritates me to no end.

This is one reason I pay for a private github. I hate that if I'm learning a new technology, have "too many" commits on something simple, or am generally messing around it looks "bad" to employers.

<comment><USER13> I'd argue that if an employer cares about public repo commits to personal repositories, one is probably better off not working for them (at least from my perspective of an ideal employer). If an employer thinks all their developers are infallible and instantly experts in everything they're learning, that sounds like a pretty awful culture. I know I've made silly/trivial commits to my github and it has yet to hurt my employability. I'd much rather work for a company that knows its employees aren't perfect and development can be a trial/error process at times (these kind of places do exist and I live and work in the Mid Western US).

I do agree somewhat about game scrutinization, since it's active process by an employer verses employers passively looking at your github profile.

<comment><USER14> > I'd argue that if an employer cares about...

I see this argument a lot and it does have some merit, but it ignores the fact there might be an idiot hiring manager standing between you and the job you want. Just because a company might hire a few bad apples doesn't mean they aren't worth working for, for pretty much the same reason a person can still be worth hiring, even if they make a lot of commits for something simple, etc.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps, but how many hiring managers are able to scrutinize commits in that great of detail? I'd figure anyone that could, would be in a more technical role and likely a developer/developer manager versus HR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Am I the only one that doesn't entirely enjoy gamification of everything? What's wrong with just writing software?

<comment><USER16> The last I heard "gamification" was simply adding achievements onto things, such as getting work done, which I agree is awful.

This doesn't sound like that though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of the "Hopeful Parents" Far Side comic.

[http://farside.wikia.com/wiki/File:Hopeful_parents.jpg](http://farside.wikia.com/wiki/File:Hopeful_parents.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER18> My first thought when I saw this posted was "huh...kinda like The Last Starfighter".

And sure enough, they named their company Starfighter. Xur and the Ko-dan armada don't stand a chance.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am lulzing a bit that the top Google result for Starfighter starts "Official website for Starfighter, an erotic sci-fi m/m webcomic" Kind of like when Django Unchained came out and it got a lot harder to debug one of my projects...

<comment><USER2> You figured us out; the other problem domain besides security in Starfighter is sci-fi porn.

<comment><USER20> Well some porn sites have started to advertise their own jobs on their front pages so there is a market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like the idea, although personally I wouldn't be excited about being "interviewed" like this. I am supportive of its existence however because it has definite upsides (i'm sure there are more, just enumerating a few):

1) eliminates some cultural/gender/language/fashion/appearance/disability biases

2) its not subjective

3) no difference between local and out-of-town candidates

I'm glad that the toolbox for candidate search is expanding. I hope one day employers might be able to ask candidates which form of "interview" they prefer to have so that candidates can best demonstrate what they excel at in a way that is most suitable to them.

<comment><USER2> The biggest misconception we've managed to foster about what we're doing is that Starfighter is a form of interview. It isn't. At all. A better way to think about it is that it's a sort of Venn intersection between "Github resume", "Coursera course", "Dwarf Fortress", and "recruiting firm".

Our crusade against the tech job interview is roughly analogous to Google's "organizing all of the world's information". It's a mission statement, but it isn't a description of our first offering.

That said: the technology we're working on ports beautifully to actual interview processes (it came from a successful process I built at Matasano). We're also very happy to talk to companies building hiring processes and evangelize and help. Companies with smart, modern hiring processes are especially fertile ground for what we're doing, so we'd like to help more of them come into being!

<comment><USER22> Will Starfighter be focusing mostly on security? That seems to be most of the examples that I find, and it's not a field I'm terribly interested in. I love the idea though, and would like to see it applied to other areas.

<comment><USER2> Security is the through-line of the game; it gives us structure, incentives, little dopamine hits, and makes it so that the systems we're building reward exploration. But the game is not _about_ security; it's about programming and interacting with complex systems.

If you're a software developer with no security domain expertise, one benefit of goofing around with Starfighter is that you'll come out knowing a lot more about software security. But it's not a tool for getting people security jobs.

It'll make a little more sense when Erin posts the game details.

<comment><USER20> Yes please, post the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would this be a good way to teach my son technical skills? He's 6 years old, homeschooled and is interested in technology. He's already figured out how to bipass the parental controls on his Kindle. We're trying to figure out how to stimulate that desire when you can't read well yet.

<comment><USER3> Geek to geek and parent to parent: honestly, no. Can I recommend Besiege? It doesn't require literacy. It has the same sort of freeform expressiveness you're allowed to do in Minecraft. "Syntax" errors are inherently fun rather than demotivating. There's fun, rewarding visual feedback for success.

It doesn't teach programming qua programming, but it is almost perfect for a gateway drug into engineering. (You get to build catapults! And airplanes! And catapults _which fire airplanes_!)

<comment><USER2> Teenagers, though: I wish I had excellent CTFs when I was growing up.

<comment><USER24> As a teenager: yes. I am working through microcorruption right now and loving it. Starfighter is vey exciting. Thank you

<comment><USER2> \o/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Having worked on an applicant testing and tracking system in the past, it was a decent business case to operate because a single company has a job type with 100's of openings and high attrition so it helped screen people. In that case it is self-serving and you know if someone is applying twice (SS Number or other identifier) to try and ace the test.

If Starfighter is open, there are people out there that will try to game the system ("game the game" doesn't sound right.) If someone wants to be a level 50 app_coder, they could have a pre-made sequence to follow to do that. Much like in a MMORPG where you have helpers level up a character or a "mule" for hand-me-downs.

Interviewing candidates last year showed no hesitation on their part to share info with each other or their recruiters. How will Starfighter prevent player "cheating" or knowing the route to leveling? How will content be updated or dynamic?

This is a promising thing for software geeks in general, can't wait to try it out. I started playing Microcorruption and if this is similar to that, it will be fun.

<comment><USER26> This is my major concern, but they've said that it's easier to learn the skills than cheat. I'm don't know how, but it's something they're obviously concerned about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Of 12224 players, just 182 passed the hardest level. The firm will get in > touch with these elite players and help place them with one of their > clients, who pay Starfighter a fee.

As player #181 out of those #182, I'm excited :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Here is an example of one of their games: [https://microcorruption.com/login](https://microcorruption.com/login) Love the Cy Yombinator part haha

<comment><USER29> I've played a few rounds of this and love it. As far as I've gotten, it's been refreshing to work on a machine where everything is "all there". Too often there are black boxes that contain too much magic, or just too many layers of abstraction to efficiently reason about something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Because IT worker shortage, right? (Now with more flaming hoops!!)

<comment><USER3> Companies which are satisfied with their ability to hire and employees who are satisfied with their ability to find jobs don't have to even care we exist, though they're certainly welcome to play our games.

Sadly, many companies are dissatisfied with their ability to hire and many qualified engineers are dissatisfied with their ability to secure desirable jobs. In economics, they call this a market failure. In CS, a search problem. In business, "a shedload of money available for the taking."

In Starfighter, I guess we categorize that as "the mid-boss."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Great idea. I loved Microcorruption. But please please don't call it video game! Average person reading this would think this is some sort of World Of Warcraft type game and stuff like that but this is more of a programming competition.

</comment><comment><USER32> While the efforts of Matasano to make wargaming cool and hip again certainly is commendable, I think HR drones of the world also appreciate a game of "pretend to be sociable teamplayer/brogrammer".

Too often hackers don't get the job because of being overqualified and prima- donna, rather than lack of technical skill - a game teaching/testing the art of office politics could be applicable to wider market [outside of infosec].

tl;dr: Perhaps less of [http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/](http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/) and more of EVE online.

<comment><USER2> Those employers aren't going to be our clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I know this article is referring to a different kind of gaming, but back in the day, I used to give potential candidates a NES controller and Tetris when they were in the waiting room before the interview... You can tell a lot about how a person deals with time constraints, pressure and approaches problem solving by watching somebody play tetris for 4 minutes. Not that Tetris would be the only input into the decision, but it was a thing.

<comment><USER34> I've learned to be cautious whenever anybody says "You can tell a lot about a person by..."

You probably can't. You can probably justify a lot of preconceptions about a person. But unless you've done statistical studies that demonstrate high correlation between what you're testing, what you think you're observing, and what you're actually looking for, then no - no you can't tell a lot.

Young male candidate, lets a big stack build up on one side, then clears the lot down with a couple of well-placed four-long blocks down the edge. Shows an easy confidence, clearly worth considering for the role.

Female candidate, lets a big stack build up on one side, what is she doing? Does she even know how this game works? Then she drops a four-long down the side and clears some rows. Huh - lucky break.

"Not that Tetris would be the only input into the decision, but it was a thing."

Hmm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> My sci-fi scale projection/evolution of this concept: because the things we do at work aren't intrinsically unenjoyable to begin with, but the way we think about them has the potential to make them feel that way—slow fusion of games that resemble work and work itself produces games that do work, and the distinction between the two is forgotten, a relic from a cruder era.

Seems possible since the activity in games (for all the examples I can think of) has a pretty strong relation to 'work' activities to begin with: puzzle solving, mastering agility-dependent procedures, military stuff, social finesse, exploring etc. —though typically it's more 'primordial work' (exploring, hunting/gathering), which makes sense since atm we'd be putt off by something that resembled contemporary jobs too much. Dislike of one's work is not pervasive in human cultures/history.

<comment><USER36> >My sci-fi scale projection/evolution of this concept: because the things we do at work aren't intrinsically unenjoyable to begin with, but the way we think about them has the potential to make them feel that way—slow fusion of games that resemble work and work itself produces games that do work, and the distinction between the two is forgotten, a relic from a cruder era.

There was an episode of Black Mirror that hinted at this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm not very familiar with this style of programming puzzle, but I wonder how this is less arbitrary than whiteboard coding topcoder or kaggle. I know people who were hired based on all of these, but the latter two are different from Starfighter in that they exist for their own reasons (competition for its own sake, and getting answers to data science questions) with providing a signal to employers being a side effect. I wonder if the selection bias in a system set up for the purpose of employment will be better or worse.

</comment><comment><USER38> This only works assuming you can't hack the game itself, publicize the solution, or pay someone to do it for you.

<comment><USER3> We're probably one of the few games where exploiting a security vulnerability in the game gets you Achievement Unlocked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder whether the name has something to do with the movie "The last Starfighter": [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/)</comment>


The Art of Snaring Dragons (1975) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://harveycohen.net/papers/TheArtOfSnaringDragons-MIT-AI-Memo338.pdf <comment><USER2> This seems to be an OCR'd and updated version of the original memo [1]. I checked, some of the prose is different, and it gives me the impression of having some OCR or copyediting errors in it. For instance, see the weird dispersal of quotation marks in the vicinity of _dragon theme_ in the phrase "a bevy of whimsical characters aligned with the Dragon theme" in the second paragraph on page 2. For that reason I am thinking if I do read this I'll read the original.

[1] [https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6239](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6239)

<comment><USER3> Thanks you! The copy errors are worse than that. Further in nearly all the primes and subscripts were lost! But the paper seems really interesting. I'm kind of ashamed to say I was never any good at mechanics problems.</comment></comment>


Simple UI – A simple UI framework for building simple web projects - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fengyuanchen/simpleui <comment><USER2> Nice. Its simply bit still a little unique, exactly as the title promises. A little heads up: [http://imgur.com/YUF4xIh](http://imgur.com/YUF4xIh) (latest Chrome on Mac)</comment>


New FreeBSD Code of Conduct - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/msg00965.html <comment><USER2> They chose a LLVM-based code, which does a pretty good job of setting solid standards of behavior and a basis for sustained cooperation, while avoiding the pointless wordiness and off-topic asides of other widespread CoC's such as the Golang one, or even the previous code from FreeBSD itself. A solid choice in an often contentious space.

<comment><USER3> It does look pretty good, even for a misanthrope such as myself.

The Go one, on the other hand, is atrocious. Hint from a fat person: If your CoC mentions "body size", your CoC sucks.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand. What is wrong with disallowing discrimination based on weight?

<comment><USER3> What's wrong is that the people that wrote this are trying to stir up trouble, without care for the damage done to the community.

I'm fat. Know how many times this has mattered in an Open Source project? Zero. How many times I've been discriminated against at a conference? Zero. How many times I've had a patch rejected on that account? Zero.

It's bullshit.

So yes, I agree that no one should ever discriminate in Open Source based on weight. But also, no one should ever discriminate based on eyebrow length. (Mine are a bit weird.) Shall we write that in, too? How about people who tie their shoes with granny knots? How about people with red hair? And on, and on, and on.

None of this has any place in a CoC. And all such are slow acid eating away at the foundations of good will and civil behavior. Fuck that.

<comment> torb-xyz Even if you don't experience discrimination based on body size, enough people do that it's become a subject and there are dedicated activists working to end discrimination based on size.

Additionally however, I don't understand how including it can be harmful? At the very worst it's a rule that never get's utilised because nobody ended up getting discriminated because of their body. There seem to be only potential upside and no potential downside.

AFAIK there doesn't exist a consistent systemic discrimination of people based on eyebrow length, but if it did, yes, why not write it in?

People in CS tend tot think you can just use universal abstractions to solve human problems the same way you can with programming (giant base class problem non-withstanding). I used to believe this too. Why call out specifics when a general description will do? But what I've learned is that we have to specifically call out any discrimination that is likely to occur. Yes, this is more complicated and certainly less elegant than a simple "treat everybody well" statement, but the world has very clearly demonstrated that this kind of blanket statements simply don't work. People always think that group X or Y is an exception and that it's acceptable to treat them poorly, and thus you have to specifically call out all the groups that you should actually treat well.

<comment><USER3> In short, the problem is that it's divisive as well as pointless. If I tell you to follow one of the world's "golden rules" (e.g., _Treat others as you would wish to be treated._ ), you will tend to remember that we are all walking through the world carrying our unique burdens, and will perhaps remember that when dealing with your fellow man.

If I provide a list of specific categories, you will tend to think not of the unity of humanity, but of a specific set of historic problems, and tend to rank those you're talking to in terms of those sets. As we're seeing in contemporary culture, this generally makes things worse, not better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This LLVM CoC is a breath of fresh air compared to the longer and more negative-toned Contributor Covenant.

<comment><USER6> Totally. The Contributor Covenant is ideological and always makes me less inclined to contribute to a project.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand why you feel the Contributor Covenant[1] is ideological, or why the FreeBSD one isn't. The only major thing that distinguish them to me is that in some way the Contributor Covenant looks better structured (clear sections, etc) at the expense of looking a bit "dry" (it looks like a LICENSE file), whereas the FreeBSD is a bit more messy / informal (more like a README).

[1] [https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of- con...](https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of- conduct/code_of_conduct.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _We strive to be a community that welcomes and supports people of all backgrounds and identities. This includes, but is not limited to [...] and mental and physical ability._

The other items in that list are not at all surprising, and I agree that they belong there, but _mental ability_? That seems like it would be ripe for abuse...

<comment><USER9> I read that charitably as you ought to be able to contribute to the level of your ability without people calling others stupid or retarded. Also some intellectual issues wouldn't preclude useful contributions example dyslexia, autism spectrum.

I do not read it as you can't critique ideas because the person is a protected class.

If it's ripe for abuse we ought to discuss particular real or hypothetical cases.

<comment><USER8> I think stupid ideas need to be shot down, but such phrasing just invites complaints from those seeking to weaponise them for their own benefit.

As the saying goes, "If your mind is too open, your brain will fall out."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just read all of them and the LLVM seems the best of the 3. It gets to the point.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone else find it telling that there wasn't a "none of the above" option in that vote?

</comment><comment><USER12> I am getting a SSL_ERROR_BAD_MAC_READ when I try to connect with the latest LTS Firefox and ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR when using the latest Chrome. Does anyone here have an alternate link that does work?

<comment><USER13> It's something relatively local to you. The certificate is fine, the server speaks TLS 1.3, and it works fine in latest Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any ideas why they changed?

<comment><AUTHOR> The previous code of conduct was not popular; it says so in TFA.

I have been one of those people disaffected by the previous code of conduct, the "virtual hugs" and "no commenting on lifestyle choices such as eating habits" rubbed me very much the wrong way.

The new one is much more prescriptive on behaviours that are encouraged, much like the hackernews guidelines.

<comment><USER13> > I have been one of those people disaffected by the previous code of conduct, > the "virtual hugs" and "no commenting on lifestyle choices such as eating > habits" rubbed me very much the wrong way.

Please don't be disingenuous about the old CoC. You can dislike it or disagree with it, but you're taking that example way out of context[1]:

> Harassment includes but is not limited to:

> ∗ Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g., textual > descriptions like "∗hug∗" or "∗backrub∗") _without consent or after a > request to stop_.

It's a problem when people don't want you to be doing it, and you do it to them anyway. Much like it would be a problem in the real world.

[1]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200108075747/https://www.freeb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200108075747/https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code- of-conduct.html)

<comment><USER9> When someone actually touches you it infringes on your rights in a way that reading the text _hug_ cannot not to mention the natural concern for your physical safety.

In the mostly imaginary world of serial virtual huggers it seems reasonable that conduct would fall under say sexual harassment or be fixed by blocking people.

It's actually nothing like real world touching at all.

<comment><USER15> This is a weird hill to die on. Continuing to send "=hug=" messages to someone who has told you that doing so makes them uncomfortable is very creepy behavior. It'd be grounds for discipline most places I've worked.

I understand not wanting a CoC that spells this out, because we're all adults and shouldn't need to be told not to send creepy messages to team members. But I can't understand defending the behavior on the merits.

<comment><USER16> I think a more charitable reading of the GP might be to assume they were talking about needing consent from everyone on the list before including a mail sig containing "\--hugs, <person>". I've seen a bunch of that sort of sig on various tech lists over the years.

Still not something you'd expect to see in a workplace, but most FOSS devel lists haven't historically even attempted to replicate the kind of environment you'd expect in a workplace and I'm not sure that drawing the parallel is useful.

FWIW I'm not trying to say the GP was right whichever reading we go with (and if we assume your reading then it's definitely pretty creepy), I just wanted to point out that a more charitable reading exists.

<comment><USER9> Thank you for being reasonable. Both the post I replied to and text quoted therein

>> ∗ Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g., textual descriptions like "∗hug∗" or "∗backrub∗") without consent or after a request to stop.

> Much like it would be a problem in the real world.

Operate on an nonsensical category of "simulated physical contact" and the assumption that typing hug is somehow similar in nature to hugging someone. Saying hi and saying the word hug fall into the same category. Written speech. When its transgressive we might better term it harassment or sexual harassment depending on the nature of the transgression. I don't support harassment sexual or otherwise. I shouldn't have to disclaim this because I'm making a critical statement about a code of conduct. Everyone who disagrees isn't a bigot.

Logically a code of conduct could successfully say no to harassment or sexual behavior including unwanted serial huge emoters without specifically calling out virtual hugs. In fact including language that simultaneously

\- doesn't forbid any additional creepy behavior not already covered by language forbidding sexual harassment AND \- opens the community up to ridicule is a net negative.

I especially find it concerning that one can't point out how ridiculous it is to ban virtual hugs without people trying to lump you in with the creeps

> But I can't understand defending the behavior on the merits.

Where does that come from?

If you consult my statement.

> In the mostly imaginary world of serial virtual huggers it seems reasonable > that conduct would fall under say sexual harassment or be fixed by blocking > people.

Wherein do you find the defense of harassment?

<comment><USER7> > I especially find it concerning that one can't point out how ridiculous it > is to ban virtual hugs without people trying to lump you in with the creeps

That's a strawman, the CoC does not ban virtual hugs.

It merely gives an _example_ of behaviours that happen _without consent_ or _after a request to stop_. The example is good IMO because it is the kind of little things that might look harmless to the person doing it but might be annoying to the one receiving it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are FreeBSD survey results public? I searched quickly but did not find the information.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh thank goodness.

</comment><comment><USER18> > [...] Harassment and other exclusionary behavior aren't acceptable

\-- LLVM COC

Bold coming from a project that associates with Outreachy, an organization that intentionally and explicitly discriminates people based on their sex, nationality and ethnicity [0].

An important contributor left LLVM a few years ago because of that association, and I totally agree with him. [1]

I would like a clause that says: The project will not discriminate people based on their {sex, ethnicity, etc.} or spend resources in iniciatives that discriminate people based on their {sex, ethnicity, etc}.

[0] [https://www.outreachy.org/apply/eligibility/](https://www.outreachy.org/apply/eligibility/) [1] [https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2018-May/122928.ht...](https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2018-May/122928.html)

<comment><USER13> > I would like a clause that says: The project will not discriminate people > based on their {sex, ethnicity, etc.}

It's already in there[1]: "Be welcoming. We strive to be a community that welcomes and supports people of all backgrounds and identities. This includes, but is not limited to members of any race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, colour, immigration status, social and economic class, educational level, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, size, family status, political belief, religion or lack thereof, and mental and physical ability."

> or spend resources in iniciatives that discriminate people based on their > {sex, ethnicity, etc}.

The FreeBSD _project_ doesn't have any money or resources to spend, so this is kind of moot.

[1]: [https://github.com/freebsd/core.10-public- docs/blob/master/C...](https://github.com/freebsd/core.10-public- docs/blob/master/CoC/llvm-based.md)

<comment><USER19> A better formulation would be:

"We simply do not care about your race, gender, culture, sex, nationality, ethnicity ... So don't talk about it on our mailing list. We instead care about making great software."</comment></comment></comment>


My verdict on the Scala language - <AUTHOR> http://creativekarma.com/ee.php/weblog/comments/my_verdict_on_the_scala_language/ <comment><USER2> The verdict that idiomatic Scala is unreadable is questionable. One could say the same about most any language, save Python.

I wouldn't let this piece color your perceptions of Scala. It's evolved a ton since early 2008, and it's too deep a language to fully appreciate in a few hours of experimenting.

</comment><comment><USER3> From Jan 2008.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this article is very outdated. With regard to the documentation concern, Odersky's Scala book has been out for a while, and I have been skimming it. It seems very thorough and easy to read, full of good examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Another issue that might change, but probably won't change enough, is mixing Scala and Java. While it certainly can be done, it's not easy except in the (admittedly important) case of Scala calling Java."

Has this situation improved at all since the language was written?

<comment><USER6> I find mixing Scala and Java trivial and my Java is weak. I really don't understand the authors problems.

Edit: Maven does a good job of building mixed Java/Scala systems.

<comment><USER7> Same; I don't know much Java, but I was able to write an Android / Scala app this weekend without any major problems. (OK, my computer won't recognize my phone and I can't install the app. But it works in the emulator.)

(Scala was probably the easiest language I have ever learned. No new concepts or syntax, just Java with some FP stuff and traits. Basically, everything Java was meant to be and should have been.

But it's really an imperative / OO language with the ability to do FP -- the standard library is not set up for pure FP like Haskell's. For that reason, I continue to prefer Haskell... but if Java compat is necessary, it's a great language.)</comment></comment></comment>


A guide to GitHub Actions using Node.js for Git workflow automation - <AUTHOR> https://datree.io/blog/git-workflow-automation-github-actions-node-js/ <comment><USER2> The Node script tips are great</comment>