Why self abuse feels okay (even though it isn't) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@somejournaler/why-self-abuse-feels-okay-even-though-it-isn-t-b88160839b88 <comment><USER2> I think there's some very good content here, but using "self-abuse" instead of "negative self-talk" (the more standard therapy term) is an unhelpful distraction in my reading.</comment>


Power, minimal detectable effect, and bucket size estimation in A/B tests - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/2016/power-minimal-detectable-effect-and-bucket-size-estimation-in-ab-tests <comment><USER2> What is you approach for dealing with non-binary metrics that aren't normal? I've run into many cases where something like "Average Tweets Liked" tends to be heavily skewed right (extreme values and a LOT of zeros / ones). The nature of these distributions throws off the bucket size calculation. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER3> They briefly touched on the ability to trigger experiments. You can pretty easily do zero-suppression by simply looking at users who already regularly "like" tweets, and more generally by crafting a clever enough trigger you can move the distribution to be closer to normal. Basically you end up sampling a more uniform (sub)population that your experiment can at least quantify results about. If you want to focus on getting people who don't "like" tweets to start doing so, you just invert the trigger and look at that population independently. And then you have fun looking at (anti)correlations between the response of the two populations.

In general it's really hard to work with non-gaussian statistics when no realistic model for the data is available, particularly when trying to apply asymptotic techniques like these. In practice it's usually easier to just try to craft a test statistic that behaves in a more friendly way, and that's where experimentalists have to be clever :)</comment></comment>


How many people will buy your iPhone app today? Probably none. - <AUTHOR> http://bustedloop.com/blog/2009/6/30/how-many-people-will-buy-your-iphone-app-today-probably-none.html

<comment><USER2> Confused. Looking at those charts makes me think that there is so much category-to-category variation that it defies logic to make such sweeping general statements.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hard to know for sure... it's all conjecture and hypothesis at this point... If you have specific objections to the data, I'd love to hear them... You are right that the generalization doesn't apply specifically to all categories.. but it does seem to apply in general and provides a great starting point for further discussion and analysis, IMO.</comment></comment>


Neurotic Neurons: An Interactive Explanation [video] - <AUTHOR> http://ncase.me/neurons/ <comment><USER2> This is an incredible display of technology and a beautifully crafted presentation. The interactive bits aren't just for show; they reinforce what the author is trying to convey. It's easy to do this incorrectly. For example, see most video games where the gameplay exists merely to be fun rather than existing as a storytelling tool. For an example of games done right see The Stanley Parable. There the gameplay is used to convey the story directly; it's a mechanic of the message the author is trying to convey, rather than something to keep the player busy while they trudge through the story.

I would, however, complain about the usage of the mythological Hebbian learning. We know very little about the mammalian brain. In particular, we really have no clue how neurons function nor how they learn. There are also a wide range of neurons, each with different behaviours. The concept of Hebbian learning is really more of a higher level behaviour of mammalian brains. At a conceptual level, yes we associate ideas that occur together, so Hebbian learning is a useful theory in terms of psychology. Psychology is primarily what this presentation is about. But the author presents things in terms of neurons, where Hebbian learning likely isn't the learning function, and even if it was we have no definitive model and research to back that up.

Honestly, that's a nitpick. The meat of the video is about psychology, not neurons, and the oversimplification is helpful in creating those interactions that help communicate the author's message to the viewer. They work really well in that regard. I'm just personally bothered by the reinforcement of the myth that we understand how neurons work, and that some simple model like Hebbian learning bares any resemblance to the real mechanics.

<comment><USER3> I have to disagree with your nitpick. The presentation basically depicts spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP). STDP has been shown to occur in many brain regions and species, including mammals. It may not be the only learning rule that the brain uses, it's clearly an important and widely used one.

[http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Spike- timing_dependent_p...](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Spike- timing_dependent_plasticity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the best videos I've ever watch, I wish the educational system was this simple.

</comment><comment><USER5> awesome, but is it over after the connection is totally killed? doesn't go anywhere from there, would really like to see where this goes next, cheers

</comment><comment><USER6> Warning: Auto-starting video with sound.

(Seriously, why do people do this? One perfect way to make me close your story and never look at it is to startle me with sound before I specifically asked for it.)

<comment><USER7> I would urge you to give it another try. The whole point of it is that is it an "Interactive video," and IMO is a really, really cool way to present information.</comment></comment>


How to fix Google - <AUTHOR> http://m4th.com/Articles/Article.php?Article-Title=How-to-fix-Google <comment><AUTHOR> While the article uses Google as its subject, the idea can be extended to almost any company. Not since J.K. Rockefeller has any prominent person or company truly practiced the art of vertical integration. Microsoft, for instance, has been unsuccessfully playing catch up with Google. The whole "Windows Live Mail", "MSN Soapbox", "Live Spaces" are nothing but microsoft's ill attempt at taking Google's crown. Instead of entering another market, a company should vertically innovate in services it already provides.

I believe that a lot of startups try to be everything to everybody; and in the process, lose focus. Finding a niche and sticking to it regardless of growth is better than entering markets that do not complement the company's core business. - Jawad Shuaib</comment>


Ask HN: What hosting do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I use nearlyfreespeech.net and while I like their cleanliness and honesty and low cost, I find the lack of Django/Zope etc and perpetual php safe mode to be annoying.<p>Could you recommend low cost hosts who are honest and will let me run what I want? <comment><USER2> I use rackspace cloud. ~11$/month. Run as many websites as I can fit with virtual hosts.

<comment><USER3> I think of it as $11/ip; this enables me to do some interesting crawling and not get stopped by throttle limits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dedicated hosting @ Softlayer. Sad to see they are "merging" with The Planet.</comment>


Tiling by Squares - <AUTHOR> http://www.squaring.net/sq/tws.html <comment><USER2> I like the topic but could not stand the background.</comment>


Our car-free future will be blocked by Comcast tactics - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@transitapp/our-car-free-future-will-be-blocked-by-comcast-tactics-926c8ee2ea70 <comment><USER2> Confusing title. Closed, non-public apis might have been a better title. I thought it was because we'd have expensive data or have to pay extra for access to these services.</comment>


Startup Accelerator for Bootstrappers - <AUTHOR> https://tinyseedfund.com/?__s=kbwbvcjmse8aqqhgbteg <comment><USER2> Thanks - but duplicate. Dunno how that happened :)</comment>


USPTO Shutting Down Bulk Data Services - <AUTHOR> https://bulkdata.uspto.gov/ <comment><USER2> Certain services are marked for termination. Others don't seem to be.</comment>


Google hacked account - <AUTHOR> Despite Google boasting of hiring the best engineers. Their system give us mortals hope that our applications are not so bad after all. Let me explain the pain I am going through to recover my hacked gmail account. First, there is no way to talk to someone, their responses are canned, and to top it off, they send you to a link to submit a password request.
So far not a problem, but the email you get back after sending the password reset request contains a link to a page that allows you to cancel the request (not sure the genius who had this idea). Now that the email is hacked, the hacker can read the emails and click to cancel the recovery process. And the vicious cycle continues.
What to do? <comment><USER2> Try posting to Hacker News in the hope someone with some authority deigns to intervene. It helps if you a high-profile blogger or known industry luminary.

The prospects for the rest of us are fairly bleak.

<comment><USER3> > The prospects for the rest of us are fairly bleak

Mostly because if changing ownership of a Gmail account were as simple as "Post to Hacker News and complain," it'd be an obvious and exploitable security gap.

<comment><USER4> That idea, if extended, could be rather entertaining.

"White House Gov Account Hacked, Please Help"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If they are automatically clicking these links you may be able to spoof an E-mail that looks similar to the password reset request but have the cancel link actually log them out.

Going to this URL logs you out on Gmail: [https://accounts.google.com/Logout?service=mail&continue=htt...](https://accounts.google.com/Logout?service=mail&continue=https://mail.google.com/mail&hl=en)

This might not work, but it's probably worth a try.

<comment><USER6> It did work for me a when I clicked from here on HN!

<comment><USER7> Yes, and this can be done in a CSRF attack on a web page like superlogout.com (don't go there if you don't want to be logged out of 20+ websites).

<comment><USER8> This is nice :) Certainly helpful when using a public machine. Heck .. make that the homepage on browser-launch on public machines and guest accounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If your account is part of Google Apps for Education, or some other managed Google Apps account, you should contact your Google Apps admin. If it's just a normal Google account, I'm not sure there's much more that you can do.

Email is the most sought after account. All the password reset requests to your Bank, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are delivered to your email account. So when someone steals your email account, they've stolen all the others too. Go change those accounts to use your new email (if you can).

<comment><AUTHOR> you are absolutely right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree that Google's help services are lacking. I never got my account back years ago. But this sounds fishy to me.

It's equally likely that you are trying to _hack_ someone else's account as trying to recover your own. There's nothing wrong with the password reset process.

However, isn't there a process for when you suspect your account has been compromised? Have you even tried that? Are you even sure that your account has been compromised, or you just can't remember your password?

I like that us hackers are happy to help, and happy to commiserate with the failings of big corporations, but I think it's worthwhile to be a bit sceptical.

Edit: I'll add that the claim that the reset requests are going to the original account and being cancelled is fishy. We have verification in this thread that this in fact does _not_ happen, and presumably the OP can't access the account to make a truthful counter claim.

</comment><comment><USER11> You had two step verification, or not?

I'm hoping you'll say no, because my feeling of security comes from the fact I've enabled TSV.

<comment><USER12> "You had two step verification, or not?"

Upvoted you but...

A company offers a free service. "Your aunt" does know know or understand the need for "two step verification" nor do almost certainly a large percentage of people using gmail.

This idea that companies resolve themselves of all responsibility to provide reasonable customer support for a free product with such wide adoption is ridiculous. _Google derives benefit from the relationship_ regardless of the fact that the service is free.

<comment><USER13> >"Your aunt" does know know or understand the need for "two step verification"

I wonder more and more if we need to make it mandatory in some form, but maybe more formal. Like you can use your phone, but also here is a plastic, officially-sealed set of codes we'll mail to you at a verified address just in case.

<comment><USER14> >>> officially-sealed set of codes we'll mail to you at a verified address just in case.

And then people would start crying ... "google now wants to know your home address .... "

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > So far not a problem, but the email you get back after sending the password > reset request contains a link to a page that allows you to cancel the > request (not sure the genius who had this idea)

Did you set the recovery email the same as the main email? Cause I only get password reset to the recovery email.

If you used the same address for recovery email, then it defeats the whole purpose

<comment><AUTHOR> no i set another email. but still both emails will get the link.

<comment><USER16> Is the person that hacked the account just sitting there waiting for emails to come in and hopefully can click the "Cancel Request" before you can reset the password?

<comment> mark-r If you make a habit of hacking Gmail accounts, it's probably not hard to make a bot that does it for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Would be interested in knowing how they bypassed 2 factor authentication, assuming you had that enabled.

Unfortunately, it's a tough situation since for all Google or we know you could be the hacker trying to get into the account and hard for them to verify who you are, since if the hacker was able to steal person's phone to bypass 2 factor authentication, they may also have access to a copy of your drivers license or ID to send to google in an attempt to verify they are you.

While far from ideal, assuming you don't have a close friend to contact google for you via their google apps admin account, you could create a new trial google admin account and then contact google through that mentioning your situation of your other account. While they will still have to find a way to verify who you are at least you'll reach a real person.

<comment><AUTHOR> My mistake was that I didn't enable 2 factor authentication. I contacted them and offered to supply a copy of my password and driver license, they said the only way is to go through the dysfunctional online method to recover the password.

I did create another account, they still send the link to cancel the request to the original account!!!

<comment><USER18> If you didn't enable 2FA, how on earth is Google or anyone for that matter able to verify it's you that owns the email address? Anyone at any time could claim they were hacked, and it's not like they require a drivers license ID when you register.

Honestly I'm not sure what Google can do here that (a) doesn't require them to now individually support users ($$$) or (b) doesn't open them up to thousands of erroneous claims.

<comment><USER19> I would prefer a system where I can pay $100 to Google to get a competent human to look at the case versus now where I can hope I have a friend of a friend to make enough noise to get someone's attention.

<comment><USER18> I think we all would, but the OP knew this when he registered! This is not a new revelation about Google support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The issue is that you're not Google's client. Maybe buy something from them (a large amount of ads), then try to get support?

<comment><USER21> Remember: We're not Google's clients, we're Google's products

<comment><USER22> Please stop repeating this intellectually lazy and false meme. Or go to reddit; platitudes that don't require critical thinking tend to do better there.

<comment><USER23> What is false or lazy about this? The service is free; Google makes money selling ads to users. Is this in dispute?

Pointing out that Google has little incentive to support it's users in a post about getting little support from Google seems very on-topic (but perhaps unoriginal) to me.

<comment><USER24> A loss of a user represents a loss of income for Google in both cases. The reason they have little incentive is because they don't get much per user, but that has nothing to do with where the money comes from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Someone hacked and deleted my gmail account back in 2008. And I wasn't able to create another with same name. It was like my life that time coz I had all my personal backups as mails in that one. Since then I keep a copy in my harddrive as well even when I have cloud account.

</comment><comment><USER26> Unfortunately (because their services are quite good) google has no support staff. This is well known, and you should take it into account when using the services they offer.

It is not difficult to do without them.

Asking for help on HN or Reddit works sometimes, but if your business (or personal life for that matter) relies on their services you should really work towards being able to do without them.

<comment><USER27> Genuinely asking: is there a paid email provider roughly on par with Google's offerings in terms of usability and uptime? I'd consider switching.

<comment><USER28> If you need all the features of Gmail or Inbox, probably not. If you can get by with what IMAP has to offer, FastMail has been very solid for me. I pay about $50 a year for a single account, which can support lots (unlimited?) domains and addresses (both sending and receiving). The web UI is nice, and the iOS app is pretty good, too. They also blog a lot about what they are doing on the technical side, and seem really invested in the future of IMAP and open source. They have a serious focus on speed. Spam filtering I would say is like a B-, there are some really obvious things that seem to get through no matter how much I train it. Support staff has been helpful when I've needed it, though.

edit: just remembered they have a referral system, should you be interested: [http://www.fastmail.com/?STKI=13352501](http://www.fastmail.com/?STKI=13352501)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the suggestion, I like what they're offering. I hadn't considered spam, probably because gmail is so good at it that I haven't thought about spam in years. Anyway, seems worth a shot.

<comment><USER29> I have heard it said that putting MailRoute in front of your Fastmail account, clears up the spam problem to the same degree that Google does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This actually happened to me a few years back and, eventually, they were very helpful.

The key for me was providing sufficient proof that the account really was mine and really had been hacked. I gave them as much information as I could remember/check:

* some contact names

* some tag names

* some recent thread subjects/recipients

* name of the person who first invited me to GMail back in the day

* details of any labs settings, theme etc

* mailing list subscriptions

I wish I could remember the email address I used to get in touch with them but, as I said, this was years ago now. I definitely found it somewhere publicly available, albeit buried somewhat.

HTH

</comment><comment><USER31> Hm, I'd try timing the request so that it's the middle of the night wherever the thief lives. Try once assuming that he lives in America, once assuming Eastern Europe.

<comment><USER32> This may not be the quickest result, but the basic idea of just trying & trying & trying... until you eventually beat the hacker sounds almost like a game.

<comment><USER33> What if the hacker tells google that OP's other non-hacked email "has been hacked" and to please unlink it from the hacked account? :D

<comment><USER34> Game over :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I guess is all about: how can you prove you're not the hacker?

<comment><USER36> Location of past IPs used to access GMail

Knowledge about items on the inbox/address book

Location of devices used to access the account

Knowledge of past passwords

Not sending password reset emails to secondary emails that have just been added

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The right way for these companies to restore your account would be several of the contacts you've added long ago to verify that it is indeed you, in some way a machine can use, such as you signing in with your OLD credentials (which are kept around), filling out a form with their contact details (which were in the addressbook on the service and to which you have sent at least a few emails long ago) and them forwarding you the generated keys to your email by some method they choose to reach you -- only by collecting 4 or 5 of these keys could anyone unlock the account. Presumably you choose the people to whom you've reached out another way and explained how to tell you the code to activate your email.

This is like an alternative to two-factor communication. It can only be defeated by someone actually hacking your account and then convincing 3-4 of your close friends to send him the keys to your account when you start the dispute.

I'm a big fan of using information obtained easily and casually in the course of doing something productive (like often emailing someone) for good purposes.

PS: I have disclosed it publicly on this date so no patenting! :-)

</comment><comment><USER38> Google provides some great services, but support is lacking.

I suggest, for the future: 1) use two factor authorization 2) use a separate email service because email is so important that you need the best support, etc. that you can get (I use Fastmail) 3) periodically download your Google data so if you ever need to set up a new Google account, you have some of your old context

I do still use GMail, but as a backup email.

I am going to start teaching free Internet security and privacy classes at my local library so I have been thinking a lot about these issues. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. provide really nice services, but it is important to consider privacy issues and have a plan for using these "free" services.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's a free service. You get what you pay for.

<comment><USER40> I think it's more accurate to say that you don't get what you don't pay for. Did the folks who bought Worldcom stock get what they paid for? Enron? Bre-X?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> If they're going to have cancel password change requests they also have to have cancel change of alternative email requests. That's the first thing a hacker changes.

Additionally, you have to track every change with a timestamp so that you can invalid everything that came AFTER the change you just reset. That will prevent a hacker from being able to screw with the account because the original email address will also be able to cancel future changes, no matter how many times the perpetrator did it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Google sends the recovery information related emails on the recovery email address. So they won't be going to the account that is not accessible to you (I prefer to say that instead of hacked). And the link to cancel the request is indeed a good idea, because if someone else submits a password reset request, then you must be able to cancel it because you did not initiate it. Otherwise, you will end up losing your account to the real initiator of the request.

</comment><comment><USER43> Adding to discussion: once I tried changing a corworker's gmail password just for fun (he was right beside me and doubted that I could) by just providing few ordinary information I knew about him (e-mail lists we were both subscribed to, e-mail from our boss, other coworkers, etc). Well, I was able to change his password to a completely new one. Very concerning, not sure if it still remains that easy.

</comment><comment><USER44> A while back, I was chatting with someone on gTalk who I had pissed off in a forum. The next time I tried to sign in, my password has changed. I had to do the reset.. when I signed back in, no signs of foreign IP access was there.

My best guess: malware on the forum OR they exploited a vuln on Gmail.com similar to how hotmail.com & yahoo.com used to be very very vulnerable..

</comment><comment><USER45> You can try here. [https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/gmail](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/gmail)

</comment><comment><USER46> I would see if you can upgrade your gmail to a paid account and then contact their support. Free accounts get very little attention but paid accounts will get you to a real person eventually.

<comment><USER47> Great - but that only works if you have access to the account. Otherwise I could take over any account by simply paying? I guess Google is smarter than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I guess you just need to be faster than the person who hacked your account. Just before the cancel link is clicked you gotta make your move.

Yeah, and the cancel request was a total stroke of genius!

<comment><USER49> I imagine that Google would allow the "cancel request" to override recent password alterations to avoid accounts being taken over simply because the cracker moved faster than the owner once it was realised the Google account was cracked/accessed.

It may not be enough to run a password update before they act on the email. It also may not be physically possible if they have a script watching for such emails from Google and cancelling the request immediately, you'd then need to set up a faster method and/or receive the email before they did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm assuming you've tried this: [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/50270?hl=en&ref_topic...](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/50270?hl=en&ref_topic=3406179).

On the other hand, it is a free service. If you'd have the business subscription, they do have a helpdesk you can contact by phone: [https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/support/](https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/support/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Tried that, It will send me a link to the original hacked email with a link to cancel the request !!!!

</comment></comment><comment> black-perl And, the loop continues. Can't they reset your gmail account. Yes they can ! Ask them explaining the problem.

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</comment><comment><USER52> if you get your account back i would look at setting up 2-Step Verification [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/180744?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/180744?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER45> Have you tried the forums? If so, could you point me to the post, please?

</comment><comment><USER53> You can also receive a pin code via sms on your phone...

<comment><AUTHOR> The hacker has modified that number too

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Hacker != Guy who phished your password

<comment><USER55> Hi I'm a secret agent of sleepy town

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> For next time: pay for google apps.

</comment><comment><USER45> Did you post on the gmail forums?

<comment><USER57> I'm a little baffled at the idea that the forums would be able to resolve this sort of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> MY AIM IS ALL INDIA RANK 1st in IIT JEE AND IChallange 95%MARKS IN BIHAR BOARD EXAMINTION IN 2016

</comment><comment><USER59> edge case - scheduled for sprint # 5642

</comment><comment><USER55> Cool

</comment><comment><USER60> > _What to do?_

The first step would be to edit the title of your submission to begin with "Ask HN: hacked Google account, what to do?", since you're asking a question.

"Google hacked account" means, to an English speaker, that Google perpetrated hacking against some account somewhere (subject-verb-object, right?) E.g. Google people gained access to your bank account. I.e. your current submission title is clickbait.

<comment><USER61> Your nitpicking isn't helping anyone.

<comment><USER62> Nitpicking? I had no idea what this submission was even about. I thought maybe Google, the company, was hacked by outsiders. That was my best guess. Or even "Google hacked" could imply "Hacked by Google", I don't even know.

The current title is ambiguous at best; just plain misleading/sensational at worse - especially now reading that this is really about just one person losing access to their Gmail.

_____

EDIT: In case the title does get changed, the original title that I'm looking at right now is _" Google hacked account"_. This is what I woke up to this morning --- [http://i.imgur.com/vWJ41ck.png](http://i.imgur.com/vWJ41ck.png)

<comment><USER61> It's just so not important.. from the content of the guys submission it strikes me that English may not be his first language.. he's here asking for help with a problem and the top response he gets is some ass berating him over the wording of his title.

But oh right, you woke up this morning and the sky was falling, all because you had to take an extra 30 seconds to actually read the fucking post

<comment><USER63> It didn't really sound like kazinator was berating in their reply. It actually sounded rather helpful. Please be more mindful when replying to people here. Less tendency to jump to vitriol would be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I WANT TO CHAIRMAN OF GOOGLE

</comment><comment><USER64> Hello,

I believe i can help.

<comment><USER65> Now that's just cruel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> they went full microsoft

<comment><USER67> Strangly hotmail does a better job here...</comment></comment>


Mass Surveillance at Public Gatherings Is Why We Need Oversight Policies - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/mass-surveillance-public-gatherings-why-we-need-oversight-policies <comment><USER2> I don't think oversight policies are nearly enough. The intrusion into your privacy is scary enough, even without marrying it to state-sanctioned violence. And automated license plate reading is quite possible with consumer electronics, which means that the only reason why things aren't getting tracked is that it's not profitable to track it yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> One word: rental cars.

Out-of-state buyers already practice this.</comment>


CTO vs. VP of Engineering - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/cto-vs-vp-of-engineering <comment><USER2> Usual half-explanation. The CTO works on behalf of the startup's investors, working towards efficiency, calculating performance metrics and revenue/expense figures and whatever else the guys providing the money need to see. This is an executive role.

The VP Engineering is essentially a management role, coordinating the company's product team(s) and ensuring they implement the CEO's vision. Ideally, the VP Engineering should be inspiring to his/her subordinates, but this is not strictly required so long as employees are producing.

</comment><comment><USER3> The video to go along with the slides. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAHItZ1cSNM></comment>


OpenWrt BarrierBreaker 14.07 - <AUTHOR> https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=242292#p242292

<comment><USER2> Can anybody explain what's actually going on with the repositories? It seems that [http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/](http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/) was practically not updated since 2012. I see on the web Entware being mentioned and I see now OpenWrt announces [https://github.com/openwrt/packages](https://github.com/openwrt/packages) which are, as far as I understood, the sources, not the binaries.

Anybody has a good story about what's actually going on?

</comment><comment><USER3> This was released July 31st. 2 months ago.

<comment><USER4> 14.07/ 29-Sep-2014 09:39 -

14.07-rc1/ 13-Jul-2014 14:46 -

14.07-rc2/ 31-Jul-2014 11:30 -

14.07-rc3/ 13-Aug-2014 08:25

[http://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_breaker/](http://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_breaker/)</comment></comment>


Ask YC : startups from India - <AUTHOR>

are there any startups from India at yc or any website dedicated to tracking them? <comment><USER2> Quite a few websites covering India-based startups:

<http://www.pluggd.in>

<http://startups.in>

<http://www.indianweb2.com>

<http://www.startupdunia.com></comment>


Discover Apps Socially - <AUTHOR> http://www.zappka.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

Checkout the Google Playstore, you will find over a million apps and most of them can make a huge difference in your life. Now let's come to the other question about how do you get to the apps that are useful? The ones you see on high on the list are usually promoted up there, they may be good but you can't say there isn't anything better. If people are adding thousands of apps everyday then obviously they are improving the experience. There could be an app with lesser bugs than a popular one, or a free substitute to a paid one, but how do you discover them? A little research on human behavior tells us that we don't trust anything new until it has been used by someone we trust, and the same goes with technology and us. We follow experts on Youtube, twitter, Facebook, Mashable, Tumblr, Pinterest to source information or content on various topics. Zappka is one stop, exclusively for apps. With Zappka, anyone can create an appstore for others to follow. You can follow experts from any field and see the apps they use/recommend. It's an app that lets you find great apps, curated by intelligent human instinct. App bloggers and critics can organize their content on a platform specially customized for them. They can get serious traction, and build a reputation by recommending new and interesting apps on their appstores. The can also monetize their content as Zappka will share the revenue earned, per download from the store. The app opens the door for a new app career that ensures quality content and apps for everyone. Now if, you need an app for a purpose, you just need to find the right appstore. Check the reviews and content by real experts and make an informed decision with Zappka!

Best

Zappka Team</comment>


Alan Kay on Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-did-Alan-Kay-mean-by-Lisp-is-the-greatest-single-programming-language-ever-designed/answer/Alan-Kay-11?share=1 <comment><USER2> Actually, I am missing the simplicity of Lisp and Smalltalk in todays languages. From what I remember, they both have a fairly simple but universal syntax, which can be written for Lisp as

      ([operator] [argument1] [argument2] [argumentN])

and for Smalltalk as

      [object] [message]

So far I haven't seen anything like that for languages with the C-like syntax. Don't get me wrong. For example I love Go, but sometimes I miss the beauty of Lisp and Smalltalk.

<comment><USER3> Lisp, Scheme, and Racket and related languages have many distinct syntax forms, just like other languages. The syntax forms appear visually similar due to the use of parentheses, but the forms themselves are distinct.

For example, here are some of the distinct syntax forms in Racket (Scheme):

        (+ 3 4)                  # Procedure call
        (lambda (x) (+ x x))     # Lambda expression
                                 # See also case-lambda
        (let ((x 23) (y 42))     # Variable binding
             (+ x y))            # And also:
                                 # let*, letrec, letrec*, let-values,
                                 # let*-values, let-syntax, letrec-syntax, local
        (set! x 4)               # Assignment (mutating)
        (define x 23)            # Defined value
        (define (f x)            # Defined procedure
                (+ x 42))
        (quote a)                # Quotation
        (#%datum . 10)           # Quotation (keywords prohibited)

        # Conditionals
        (if (> 2 3) 'yes 'no)
        (cond ((> 3 2) 'greater)
              ((< 3 2) 'less))
        (and a b)
        (or a b)
        (cond ('(1 2 3) => cadr) # Test clause
              (else #f))         # Else clause

        # Guarded evaluation
        (when (positive? -5)
          (display "hi"))
        (unless (positive? 5)
          (display "hi"))

        # Dispatch
        (case (+ 7 5)
          [(1 2 3) 'small]
          [(10 11 12) 'big])

        # Sequencing
        (define x 0)
        (begin (set! x 5)
               (+ x 1))
        # See also: begin0, begin-for-syntax

        # Iterations and Comprehensions
        # for, for/and, for/or, for/vector, for/hash, for/hasheq ...

        # Modules and imports
        (module id module-path form ...)
        (require ...)
        (provide ...)

As you can see, although the language consistently uses parentheses, it has similar syntax structure to other languages: assignments, definitions, functions, switch/case, etc. Some of the syntax forms above have multiple variations, as well.

See: [https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/syntax.html](https://docs.racket- lang.org/reference/syntax.html)

<comment><USER4> I think your examples underscore the GP's point.

Every single one of your examples is an S-Expression where the first element of the list is an operator/function followed by N arguments, from an abstract context-less view, anyway.

In lisp there are atoms, lists, and expressions. They have uniform expression but not uniform meaning.

<comment><USER3> The notation uses S-expressions, that's true, but the point that I was trying to make is that you can't understand anything about the meaning of those S-expressions without parsing them in a context-aware way.

It's not as if there is just one form `(<op> <arg1> ... <argN>)` where the expression means invoking `op` with some arguments.

A human or machine interpreting the code needs to be aware of these forms and the meaning/semantics of each one. Consider the following S-exps:

        (if a b)
        (set! a b)
        (define a b)

They're all three-term S-expressions, but you can't understand their meaning without contextually interpreting the first term. There is a second layer of contextual syntax. Similarly:

        ((lambda (x y) (list y x)) 1 2)

Consider the term `(x y)` in that expression. Without context, it looks like a call to the procedure `x` with `y` as input. With context, it's a list of argument names for the lambda function.

In languages like C# and Java there is just one meaning of:

        f(a, b);

You know this is actually a procedure invocation with some arguments.

There are trade offs to each approach. I'm not saying that one is better, just that there's more to Scheme syntax than S-exps. Concatenative languages like Forth and Factor have even less syntax than Scheme.

<comment><USER5> Strictly, this isn't true. In f(a, b), if f is while, it is not a procedure call. Or if it is a declaration.

Then, of course, there is the specifics of the call. Is it single dispatch? Where is it dispatched? Etc.

Which isn't really to argue against the point. Yes, you need context. Pretty much always. Having gotten used to lisp, I find it much easier to understand. I realize familiarity helps, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> that this has an unbalanced paren has me laughing a lot more than it probably should

</comment><comment><USER7> Posting Alan's reply as a comment below for posterity, since Quora appears to forbid archive.org from making a copy.

\---

First, let me clear up a few misconceptions from the previous answers. One of them said "Try writing an operating system with Lisp", as though this would be somehow harder. In fact, one of the nicest operating systems ever done was on "The Lisp Machines" (in Zeta-Lisp), the hardware and software following the lead of "The Parc Machines" and Smalltalk (and we in turn had been very influenced by the Lisp model of programming and implementation. (And these operating systems in both Smalltalk and Lisp were both better and easier to write than the standard ones of today.)

Another interesting answer assumed that "the test of time" is somehow a cosmic optimization. But as every biologist knows, Darwinian processes "find fits" to an environment, and if the environment is lacking, then the fits will be lacking. Similarly, if most computer people lack understanding and knowledge, then what they will select will also be lacking. There is abundant evidence today that this is just what has happened.

But neither of these has anything to do with my praise of Lisp (and I did explain what I meant in more detail in "[The Early History of Smalltalk]([http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/)"](http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/\)")).

To start with an analogy, let's notice that a person who has learned calculus fluently can in many areas out-think the greatest geniuses in history. Scientists after Newton were _qualitatively_ more able than before, etc. My slogan for this is "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points" (you can use "context" or "perspective" etc.). A poor one might subtract 80 IQ points! (See above). A new more powerful one makes some thinking possible that was too difficult before.

One of our many problems with thinking is "cognitive load": the number of things we can pay attention to at once. The cliche is 7±2, but for many things it is even less. We make progress by making those few things be more powerful.

This is one of the reasons mathematicians like compact notation. The downside is the extra layers of abstraction and new cryptic things to learn — this is the practice part of violin playing — but once you can do this, what you can think about at once has been vastly magnified. There were 20 Maxwell's Equations in their original form (in terms of partial differentials and cartesian coordinates). Today the four equations we can think about all at once are primarily due to their reformulation by Heaviside to emphasize what is really important about them (and what is likely to be problematic — e.g. the electric and magnetic fields should probably be symmetric with respect to movement, etc).

Modern science is about experiencing phenomena and devising models whose relationships with the phenomena can be "negotiated". The "negotiation" is necessary because what's inside our heads, and our representations systems etc have no necessary connection to "[what's out there?]([http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2003001_human_cond.pdf)"](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2003001_human_cond.pdf\)").

Taking this point of view, we can see there can be a "bridge science" and "bridge scientists" because engineers build bridges and these furnish phenomena for scientists to make models of.

Similarly, there can be a "computer science" and "computer scientists" because engineers build hardware and software and these furnish phenomena for scientists to make models of. (In fact, this was a large part of what was meant by "computer science" in the early 60s — and it was an aspiration — still is — not an accomplished fact).

The story behind Lisp is fun (you can read John McCarthy's account in the first History of Programming Languages). One of the motivations was that he wanted something like "Mathematical Physics" — he called it a "Mathematical Theory of Computation". Another was that he needed a very general kind of language to make a user interface AI — called "The Advice Taker" — that he had thought up in the late 50s.

He could program — most programs were then in machine code, Fortran existed, and there was a language that had linked lists.

John made something that could do what any programming language could do (relatively easy), but did it in such a way so that it could express the _essence_ of what it was about (this was the math part or the meta part or the modern Maxwell's Equations part, however you might like to think of it). He partly did this — he says — to show that this way to do things was "neater than a Turing Machine".

Another observation about this is that the "slope" from the simplest machine structures to the highest level language was the steepest ever — meaning that the journey from recognizable hardware to cosmic expression is a rocket jump!

As is often the case — especially in engineering — a great scientific model is often superior to what exists, and can lead to much better artifacts. This was certainly true here. Steve Russell (later famous for being the main inventor and programmer of "SpaceWar") looked at what John had done, and said: "That's a program. If I coded it up we'd have a running version". As John remarked: "He did, and we did"!

The result was "unlimited programming in an eyeful" (the bottom half of page 13 in the Lisp 1.5 manual). The key was not so much "Lisp" but the kinds of thinking that this kind of representational approach allowed and opened up regarding all kinds of programming language schemes.

A fun thing about it this is that once you've grokked it, you can think right away of better programming languages than Lisp, and you can think right away of better ways to write the meta descriptions than John did. This is the "POV = 80 IQ points" part.

But this is like saying that once you've seen Newton, it becomes possible to do electrodynamics and relativity. The biggest feat in science was Newton's!

This is why "Lisp is the greatest!"

<comment><USER8> _And these operating systems in both Smalltalk and Lisp were both better and easier to write than the standard ones of today._

Look, I love Lisp as much as the next hacker, but is Alan Kay for real? Where's the Lisp equivalent to this C code?

[https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/tree/master/blinker0...](https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/tree/master/blinker01)

More importantly, where's the accompanying toolchain? Seriously, I really want to know because I'd love, Love, LOVE to play around with it.

<comment><USER9> For example, [https://github.com/tonyg/pi- nothing/blob/master/kernel.nothi...](https://github.com/tonyg/pi- nothing/blob/master/kernel.nothing#L203-L221) does something similar to that blinker. It might not be quite what you're after, because it's only superficially a lisp; more an S-expression veneer over something C-like. Toolchain is the rest of the repo. Currently written in Racket. (BTW this is feasibility-study-level stuff, not production stuff. It's messy as hell because I haven't done even the most rudimentary tidying-up of it for public view. Caveat lector.)

But hardware access - replacing C - is the really easy part. The real power of a lisp/Smalltalk OS is getting away from the hardware in one "rocket jump", as Alan put it. Once you can start using integrated high-level language constructs spanning the whole of the abstraction tower from hardware through user interface, that's when it starts to get fun. The really good stuff is the new abstractions you can unlock. Smalltalk is a far better Unix than Unix, from that point of view.

<comment><USER10> The way things stand now, the only required piece of application software that a new personal computer needs in order to be viable is a web browser. But once you have that, and the system of your machine is sufficiently compelling, it would work for a great many people.

This is why I think someone is going to build something like an actual top to bottom Lisp/Smalltalk/Whatever machine sooner than we think.

If Smalltalk machines existed, I would buy one today.

<comment><USER11> Well, wouldn't that just be a JavaScript machine implemented in Smalltalk?

<comment><USER10> All I meant by bringing up the web browser is that for a personal computer to be usable in reality by a lot of people they'll need a web browser. But just that user application alone gets them really far: email, office productivity, etc. It's a good first application to have in any system.

Therefore we could have all kinds of exotic, bespoke personal computers again, except that unlike the 80s and 90s we now have fairly standardized formats across systems. This gives us the freedom to make whatever kinds of architectures and OSes we want. In this case, that could even include a machine whose board is designed from the ground up to run Lisp or Smalltalk or something we evolve out of those as its operating system.

The web browser that would come with such a default system would be written in one of those languages. Yes, I know making a web browser is an enormous undertaking, but at least some totally new personal computing system wouldn't have to then also implement office productivity etc.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. I think the best way would be to use Linux as the kernel, maybe with Wayland for display, and Chromium/Firefox in a sandbox, and then the custom OS system running alongside this. Emacs with the Elisp window manager is an example.

<comment><USER10> I don't think we're on the same page here. You don't need Linux for the kernel. Insofar as there's a kernel, it's the programming environment itself (like Smalltalk) or a set of primitive programs written in that environment (like Lisp).

For graphics you don't need X or Wayland or any of that stuff. BitBlt was able to handle graphics in Smalltalk, because the hardware of the Alto (via microcode) was setup to allow Smalltalk to handle all graphics. If you truly wanted something optimized, something like Nile/Gezira and DSLs written in the environment could work too.

The whole point is that such a system would need to be redesigned and rebuilt from the hardware level on up. A difficult task, to be sure, but the reward is invaluable: the ability to reason about the entire system through the system itself.

<comment><USER11> Oh. For me it's just pointless drudgery to remake everything like that. I want a new fully coherent and portable system using an existing kernel and graphics layer for bootstrapping. I mean, Emacs or Squeak are already almost there as far as I'm concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> it is the man himself :), and ofcourse, this p.o.v is worth 80 IQ points. this insight is

'One of our many problems with thinking is "cognitive load": the number of things we can pay attention to at once. The cliche is 7±2, but for many things it is even less. We make progress by making those few things be more powerful.'

just beautiful

<comment><USER13> It's probably more literally true than he intended. And 7 isn't really a cliche; it's not an opinion but a thoroughly proven, universal limitation of human working memory.

Before the advent of cheap writing instruments, and especially cheap printing, we used poetry to almost effortlessly recall and communicate large working sets of data, privately or in discourse. With poetry and similar mnemonic devices people memorized volumes of information. A student or scholar in ancient Greece would have literally memorized all the classics. Someone like Cicero would write a speech of 5,000 to 10,000 words and then, a few days later, deliver it nearly verbatim from memory. The dominate form of mass communication was through open speeches, and this is why most of the great speeches came from the ancient world. But it was limited; recalling and sharing was easy, but memorizing was still laborious, notwithstanding the fact that ancient scholars' memorization faculties seem like super powers to modern humans.

With the advent of cheap writing and printing, we were able to archive, recall, and disseminate magnitudes more information at a more rapid pace. And while slower to recall, speed of creation and dissemination, and sheer volume more than made up for that limitation. Moreover, mass communication proved far more efficient in written form.

Today computers are killing writing just as writing killed poetry. But it's not really computers, per se. With writing it was the system of creating and using written works (alphabets, printing presses, libraries) that actually realized the efficiency gain. In Alan Kay's view, Lisp is what made the promise of computers realizable, capable of supplanting the dominant form of "thinking" and of opening up new frontiers. Computers are like papyrus; it's learning how to use them that matters, and Lisp was that great leap. It's one thing to laboriously write a program using machine code; it's something else entirely to do this using an elegant, higher-order programming language. Indeed, once you use that higher-order language you can't go back; it changes how you think about programming, including how you structure programs written in machine code. Like with poetry and writing the utilitarian leap in productivity is forgotten because it becomes so effortless and seemingly obvious; instead all you see are the limitations and faults.

<comment><USER14> The 7±2 was thoroughly proven for sequences of numbers, letters, words, etc. by George Miller and followers. Much has been done since, and this shows that for many things we can handle fewer chunks. That "7±2" is still used for the larger idea of "cognitive load" makes it a cliche and a metaphor.

So it is just as true as I intended. We live in a world of unsupported opinion. I'm 77 and from a world in which one was supposed to have considerable support for an opinion before voicing it. I realize that this is out of step these days, and especially with web fora.

<comment><USER13> To my mind a cliche refers to an archaic metaphor. Archaic because it out- lives the discarded conceptual framework it describes, and therefore no longer communicates anything of substance. Worse, such cliches often perpetuates err in conceptualizing an issue.

Qualitatively and quantitatively, working memory capacity strongly reflects limitations of so-called executive attention and, more generally, executive function. See, e.g. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2852635/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2852635/) ("Based on the finding that WMC and EF tasks shared substantial common variance, we argue that the current data provide evidence for reciprocal validity for both of those constructs. Reciprocal validity can be defined as a particularly strong form of construct validity, such that two constructs that are strongly empirically related to one another lend support to the theoretical reality of each other.").

AFAIU, the 7±2 quantity is still both valid in its original context and in communicating something substantive about more complex phenomena. Of course, depending on how you "chunk" a "concept" the number quickly becomes meaningless, but that's a game of semantics. The more sophisticated definitions of chunking that one would use to invalidate 7±2 necessarily invoke broader, more speculative models, given that so much about cognition is still unknown. I can't see how one could fairly use such models to invalidate the 7±2 rule, which remains literally and meaningfully true for "chunks" as originally defined. 7±2 communicates something both qualitatively and quantitatively true about something very specific--words, letters, numbers, etc--and about larger phenomena in cognition--constraints on higher-order cognitive processes are reflected by a phenomenon which has a fixed absolute limit, 7±2, in relation to these easily identifiable and measurable inputs-- words, letter, etc.

In other words, referring to 7±2 is saying something both concrete and meaningful. Moreover, the conceptual model it invokes is still the dominant framework, if only because the rule circumscribes what it purports to describe, even in common usage. Nobody mistakes a heuristic for determining the length of a phone number (a derivative "rule" which is far more susceptible to the monicker, cliche) with a limit on our innate capacity for conceptualizing Relativity. Examples which invalidate the rule actually muddy the waters by drawing in more incomplete and uncertain premises, exemplifying what the 7±2 rule gets right about how best to communicate something of substance about such a complex and incomplete field of study. Of course, there are limitations to what you can extrapolate from 7±2, but that would be understood.

That's why I think it unfair to disparage application of the "7±2" phenomenon as cliche. Whatever one's specific definition of cliche, I think it's fair to say that labeling such usage "cliche" is to disparage it. I think such disparagement is unfair. It's rare for a simplified anchor to a complex field to retain such validity and power. But ultimately I guess my point rests on what might be an idiosyncratic definition of cliche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A similar recent answer on Smalltalk: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15518746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15518746).

<comment><USER2> Well, there are surprisingly few CS graduates who actually understand Object Oriented Programming as Alan Kay designed it for Smalltalk, which in turn lowers the probabilty that any of them will build a qualitatively better language.

I mean there are a lot of other skills a programmer needs to have than to understand what OOP is, but sometimes I think it would be better if more young students would learn Smalltalk to understand what OOP is about and why the simple existence of classes doesn't make a language an OO language...

<comment><USER16> OOP was taught to me using Smalltalk (VisualWorks actually). It was a PL class, so it didn't go deep, including also Lisp, Prolog, and SML.

I wonder, though, how my OOP thinking would differ if my first exposure was through BETA or Eiffel.

<comment><USER17> It could be different, but might not be. Exposure to different languages can later broaden your horizon. I started with programming with a programmable calculator, then BASIC, Assembler, Pascal, Modula 2, ... which then typically leads with Wirth moving into OO with Clascal, Oberon, Object Pascal, ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like how Alan Kay still ends up using nested parentheses when discussing Lisp:

> (These operating systems in both Smalltalk and Lisp were both better (claim) > and easier to write (simpler to demonstrate) than the standard ones of > today.)

</comment><comment><USER19> I disagree with the "single ... language" right off the bat before any deeper considerations.

Lisp is a great collection of design patterns for making languages.

 _> The key was not so much "Lisp" but the kinds of thinking that this kind of representational approach allowed and opened up regarding all kinds of programming language schemes.

> A fun thing about it this is that once you've grokked it, you can think > right away of better programming languages than Lisp, and you can think > right away of better ways to write the meta descriptions than John did._

Once you've grokked it, those programming languages are more advanced dialects of Lisp.

Or else, you didn't really grok it.

<comment><USER20> > _Or else, you didn 't really grok it._

Only if you believe that the only good thing one should grok is the data/code parity part.

For me Smalltalk is even better and more concise than Lisp is.

<comment><USER19> It seems like it wouldn't be hard to make a Smalltalk-like sub-language inside a Lisp dialect like Common Lisp or Racket. It could be programmed using S-exps, or custom read syntax to make it look like actual Smalltalk.

<comment><USER21> Might be interesting as an academic exercise but doesn't seem like a terribly useful thing to actually do. I like both languages but using Smalltalk syntax in Lisp isn't something I'd want. Besides, Lisp has (IMO) nice optional keyword parameter syntax which fits better in the Lisp world than the Smalltalk message/block syntax ever would.

<comment><USER19> You and I might not want a Smalltalk syntax in Lisp, but someone who favors Smalltalk (like user coldtea to whom I was responding, who finds that Smalltalk is "better and more concise") might want that.

<comment><USER21> Fair enough. I was reacting more to what I interpreted as you advocating the approach as opposed to just trying to offer a solution based on coldtea's comment. (I likely had a visceral reaction because I've actually implemented a toy Lisp in Smalltalk and it wasn't something I'd want to do much more than play with)

<comment><USER10> Have you looked at Ian Piumarta's work with COLAs? Curiously it's a mix of a Smalltalkish higher level object language with a lower-level lisp like language. I never quite understood how they worked together, but maybe you can understand the papers over at vpri.org better than I.

<comment><USER21> I'm somewhat familiar with Ian's COLA work but am much more familiar with the Smalltalk related portions of the project since I'm currently working with some of those pieces of it. As I understand it, the original intention was to prototype the system in a Smalltalk image and eventually re-target the work to his COLA architecture via OMeta (which the higher-level stuff was written in so retargeting would be done via OMeta parsers and not require many (any?) higher level changes) I _think_ they got some of the lower level things running that way (i.e. I think I recall seeing a demo of at least part of the Nile/Gezira work running as 'native' code but could be remembering it wrong) but due to time/money constraints I don't think they ever got completely there with it as their final demonstration artifact (FRANK) was Smalltalk image- based (plus a couple of plugins for performance). Take this explanation with a grain of salt as I admit to being a bit fuzzy as to how far they got with Ian's lower-level work...

What they were trying to do was demonstrate that they could build the entire system from highest level languages (i.e. the OMeta-based languages they wrote the system in) down to machine code (i.e. what the COLA stuff generated and runtime it provided which would replace the Smalltalk environment) in 20kloc _and_ preserve linkages (i.e. chain-of-meaning) from the top to the bottom. While they may not have technically achieved everything they set out to, I'm sold that they were successful in proving the concept and that they could have gotten there (i.e. the parts they did deliver were impressive) at that order of magnitude in terms of lines of code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Operating system written in lisp: [https://github.com/timonoko/Nokolisp_On_Nokia_phone](https://github.com/timonoko/Nokolisp_On_Nokia_phone)

</comment><comment><USER23> There seem to be two big camps that preach a "learn this weird new programming paradigm because it'll help you see things from a new perspective and will make you a better engineer" message: the lispy languages, and the ML-like languages. Both of these languages categories give you functional programming as well as metaprogramming, which is great. Having tried both, I've found that the ML-derived languages tend to have a stronger type system that's more rigorously enforced at compile time. I personally find this much more valuable in practice than some of the dynamic magic that you can do with lisp.

There are some notable exceptions, of course, but part of this is just inherent to the design of lisp, and I think it's easy to end up with a type safety system that feels more like it's bolted on than part of the language.

<comment><USER24> There are also plenty of Lisp programmers that think that it's a real tool to solve real problems, not just an educational oddity. There are a bunch of Lisps out there, and plenty of them are by no means toys. My laptop's initial RAM disk and init system are Scheme programs.

<comment><USER25> And it's not a Lisp per se, but WebAssembly's text format uses s-expressions[0]. It's likely that the "oddity" of Lisps will seem less odd as adoption increases if they stick with that.

[0][https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/WebAssembly/Understanding_the_text_format)

<comment><USER26> gcc's IR, "GIMPLE", is also commonly printed in s-expression form.

<comment><USER27> As is LLVM's. I think JVM's might be too, but not 100% sure.

Haskell is also pretty much just a lisp with a whole lot of sugar added on.

<comment><USER28> How is Haskell a Lisp?

To me, a Lisp pretty necessarily needs to treat the structure of its code as mutable data, which seems kind of incompatible?

<comment><USER29> The evaluation model of both is quite similar though (reduction), and you can see it in the similarities between Core Haskell and Core Scheme.

AFAIK, there are very few truly built in types in Haskell. Most everything can be built out of data constructors and functions. That idea of many things being in language user space is pretty Lisp-y IMO.

<comment><USER17> The evaluation model is different. Lisp is using strict evaluation and Haskell is using lazy evaluation.

Haskell is statically typed, Lisp is not.

Lisp uses s-expressions for writing programs, Haskell does not.

Generally Haskell and Lisp are very different languages: in syntax, semantics and pragmatics (how the language is used).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "I am the Alan Kay in question"

Hah. Not everyone can be that cool.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's funny, he can't even balance his parens in the first para.

</comment><comment><USER32> Citizen Kaine is often called 'the best movie ever made'. If you watch it, it is arguable whether it is even minimally entertaining. I would say it is one of the most influential movies created along with Kurosawa movies. If I'm stuck on a plane I would rather watch the latest Transformers or sit in silence (given only those three options).

Lisp is arguably the most influential programming language, that doesn't mean it is objectively 'the best'.

<comment><USER33> You would rather watch Transformers then Citizen Kaine? Wat?

<comment><USER34> Attention spans are different now.

<comment><USER35> Whose and where?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm always blown away by how crisply is Alan Kay able to put complex thoughts into words. I feel that the level of clarity I can achieve on the scale of a sentence or two he can achieve on the scale of several paragraphs.

<comment><USER37> Counterpoint:

The words he says are nice, and his depth of knowledge is profound, but he hasn't actually provided any evidence making the case that lisp is better and/or in what scenarios it is better.

That this sort of rhetoric is the way almost all programmers and language designers try to find truth and communicate ideas is probably why we ended up all programming in javascript. We have no rigor, we are like Freud era psychology with flowering and impressive sounding prose but no real data. And while psychology still has a long way to go, we have even further.

<comment><USER38> Like Steve Jobs he is amongst the group of people who could say anything anyway they like and some people will find a way to glorify it by a factor of a million.

If you remove their name from the things they have said or written, at least many of them seem fairly average sensible statements, like something you would read here from a random member.

I'd be interested to see a "blind test" for these things. I bet the bias would show.

As in, display something from Alan Kay but post it on a random internet forum as JoeSchmo11, and you will have lots of people disagreeing with it and tearing it apart without hesitation.

But oh look if Steve Jobs or Alan Kay or Elon Musk's name is attached to it suddenly becomes a unique gem of knowledge to be cherished by the humanity for the rest of time and surely the fault lies with anyone not agreeing with it right? Because after all they could not possibly be more right than those authority figures?

I'm not making a judgement about this, neither am I surprised by it. Just saying that you should ask yourself exactly how much of your own brain power and judgement do you use to judge the quality of an idea and how much of your conclusion is conveniently borrowed from your image of the author?

It reminds me of when Elon Musk talked about the probability of our universe being a simulation.

I'm not saying he is right or wrong, just using that as an example. But if JoeSchmo11 said exactly the same thing people would just dismiss it.

But when Elon Musk says it all the newspapers go mad and write stories about it.

Again I'm not saying it shouldn't be like this, reputation matters, I get it.

But my point is that the fact that this happens to the degree that it does is in some ways a sad admission that we are incapable of evaluating thoughts and ideas independently of their originators and on their own merits. Instead we borrow from the past credibility and the authority of the people they are attached to.

<comment><USER39> What is the sad admission here? That not everyone establishes 100% of their belief system from first principles, and instead adopts some of it empirically based on other reasoners' beliefs? I don't consider that a bug.

If I don't know anything about X, and the Alan Kay of X comes and tells me something about X, it's pretty likely to be true. If equally-ignorant-as-me- person tells me something about X, it's not as likely to be true. That's the meaning of knowledge and ignorance.

None of this precludes thinking for yourself about anything. It's just the thing you do in addition to thinking for yourself about it, if you want to have true beliefs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is really well written and seems to agree with the traditional FP lore. I'm curious what led Alan Kay then to OOP in Smalltalk.

<comment><USER37> Whatever Alan Kay thinks OOP is, it isn't what we think it is.

<comment><USER41> just fyi, Alan Kay coined the phrase Object Oriented Programming. So your statement, while true, should probably say what we call object oreinted programming should have a different name.

<comment><USER42> He did popularly _name_ what others (Nygaard and Dahl) invented, and for which they won ACM Turing Awards.

To quote Alan Kay:- "I don't think I invented 'Object-oriented' but more or less 'noticed' what was really powerful about just making everything from complete computers communicating with non-command messages. This was all chronicled in the HOPL II chapter I wrote 'The Early History of Smalltalk'."

<comment><USER43> Simula can't be praised too highly, and it was a huge influence. But if you take the care to check, you will find out that what I termed "Object Oriented" was quite different from Simula in (what I thought were) important ways. And if you are looking for the earliest inventions of ideas like these, there are several that predate Simula (take a look at that HOPL II chapter mentioned above)

<comment><USER42> I certainly don't want to underemphasise the huge contribution of Smalltalk.

Nevertheless, consider a couple of modern widely-used languages. C++ in terms of object-orientation, is based on Simula, and Java's object model is entirely based on Simula.

I argue that it was Nygaard and Dahl who first introduced those language's key concepts (objects, classes, sub-classing and virtual functions) in a coherent and programmable form. This is why Nygaard's Turing Award page states "Kristen Nygaard is internationally acknowledged as the co-inventor with Ole-Johan Dahl of object-oriented programming and the programming language SIMULA", and why I stated in my parent response that you named the term others invented, notwithstanding that today's common use isn't necessarily consistent with your coining of the term.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why did hangouts(Google talk) not take off as it should've? - <AUTHOR> I'm more of a old school web user (started much before the smartphone revolution).  And back in the day, I remember this nifty app called - google talk for the desktop, which was leagues ahead in terms of speed and ease of use compared to other apps (ex: yahoo chat). I used it for a long time, and even in the smartphone era, I stuck with it for some time even after it became hangouts. I might still prefer to use it, but most of my friends have moved onto whatsapp or skype for group messaging / one-one messaging.  I feel Google had this incredible opportunity, but failed to cash in on it leading to other clones like WA, FB messenger claiming the top spots.<p>Any particular reason why google neglected the hangouts app ? <comment><USER2> I snarkily want to say "because Google has no idea what it's doing with messaging", but that's probably being too strong. It's a solid question to ask, that it needs to be asked I think points to the conundrum of messaging from the perspective of a consumer regarding Google products.

I'll say this much, the constant moving around of platforms and products around messaging, and the eventual announcement that Hangouts would be killing off SMS support for anyone who wasn't a Google Fi subscribe or a user of a Google Voice number is what finally pushed me to drop Android and buy an iPhone.</comment>


Users don't want rich - <AUTHOR> http://neilmiddleton.com/2009/09/30/users-dont-want-rich/ <comment><USER2> I think the subtle point here is that users don't want bloated applications but 1) They will vocally advocate for additional features that meet their specific needs 2) They will buy upgrades (particularly of boxed software) based primarily on new/additional features

<comment><USER3> The nice thing is that this problem of desktop applications hasn't actually translated directly to the web. On the web, doing one thing well is much more valued on than on the desktop.

I suspect that this is because more users understand and feel comfortable with the web than feel comfortable with the non-browser desktop.

<comment><USER4> I think the key aspect is that adoption of web software is easy, and most web software (e.g. gmail, google maps, flickr, twitter) is free, or at least has a reasonably useful no-cost usage tier. This may contribute to users feeling they are less locked in to a single application, more able to switch to a competitor if need be, and more able to use additional software to provide additional functionality (e.g. twitpic + twitter).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author appears to conflate feature-bloat with "rich" web UI platforms. This doesn't have to be the case.

When I'm making something using Flash, AJAX, scripted SVG, or <canvas>, I like to think in terms of which UI elements can be simplified or eliminated by having a more expressive interface.

For example, AJAXified controls can eliminate the need for a "save" button in some forms, drag-and-drop can simplify moving and reordering operations, scripted SVG can bring sanity to working with tree-structured data, AJAX polling or Comet streaming can eliminate UI actions like page reload or manually checking for updates, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> I bet most of the MS Word _features_ could be replaced by a single scriptable extension feature.

It's a little more complicated than to just keep it simple. Spamming a bunch of simple features is bad, but more complicated (high quality non trivial) features is almost never bad. So basically anything that most people can't script themselves, like a face detection feature or something like that, would be a great feature to implement, whereas something like linking Entourage with iCal (which is horribly implemented in Entourage) is a shitty feature. A bunch of these simple things which offer little value and must be customized for individual uses anyways may as well be implemented as _extensions_ instead of features.

<comment><USER7> MS Word already has a comprehensive scripting extension system, it's called Visual Basic for Applications. It's been in there since at least Office 2000. It gives you programmatic access to nearly everything in the application you're scripting.

<comment><USER6> Ok I didn't know that. So to rephrase my comment: I bet most of those features in MS word can be replaced by it's scripting system.

<comment><USER8> Most Word users don't know scripting and have no desire to learn scripting. Or they would be using LaTeX.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but the community can develop the extensions for various purposes instead of Microsoft developing everything. That's what I meant. Obviously most word users don't know scripting and don't care to learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Users do not generally want less. It is not unusual in Corporations to actually compare features before a buying decision and there is always a strong perception that the software has more value if it has more features. It also ensures that your competition always stays a few months behind you.

B U T, users want simpler interfaces and quick ways to find something. So KISS the UI, but complexify the rest may be one good proposition.

If you consider library API's as a UI for coders here is an example from jQuery:

       $().css(data);

NOT

      $().getCss(data);
      $().setCss(data);

More complexity in the library, less complexity in the API's UI.

</comment><comment><USER10> Good article though it's worth appreciating that leaving things out is not just about adding less it's about knowing more.

You need to know which tools your users _actually want_ to use. You need to know which order they use them in and when to present them. You need to understand what people are doing with your app and how to strip everything out except what they want next.

Focussing on a minimal set of features lets you focus on a minimal set of customers. Instead of half-serving two ill-defined groups with a chimera application you service one well defined group with an application of clear value. Saying "no" to the ill-defined group isn't always easy though.

</comment><comment><USER11> Neil's point is basically "KISS", which is excellent advice. I wish he had also talked about the other half of the statement, though: figuring out what users DO want. In my experience, the tricky part is not keeping it simple, it's _knowing what to build_. Really effective advice on how to determine what people really want...now that's something I would love to read.

<comment><USER9> To determine really what people want you need to be the proto USER, you need to understand the needs in solving a problem and what the outcome should be.

Great software ideas that stood the test of time were mostly developed by someone that wanted to solve his own problem first.

I would start with Knuth and TeX. He wanted to solve his own typesetting problems. I will leave it for others to add more examples (Lotus? AutoCad? HTML?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Spolsky said it best: the average user will only use 5% of the features in your do-all app, but each user will use a _different_ 5%.

Twitter doesn't count because they didn't solve an existing problem, they invented something new that everyone found useful. Apple doesn't count because they target the small niche that does things the Apple way. They don't try to appeal to everyone, unless they are manufacturing appeal like Twitter.

The web doesn't count because it's easy and cheap to try out new web apps and to use many of them at once. You don't have to shell out for one vendor to solve all your problems. It's just too bad that web apps can't really talk to each other.

You have to give Microsoft credit for embracing diversity. They try to solve everyone's problem and they pay the price in complexity. Perhaps a more connected web or a more responsive open source ecosystem can replace the MS mega-app, perhaps not. There is a lot of dirty work out there that nobody else wants to do.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's easy to get caught up in adding features with the belief that adding X or Y feature will help you get a little bit more market share. When in reality, you should be focusing on doing something simple, but doing it really well.

Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice) puts it best: "[as people are given more and more options they] become overloaded…. Choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize."

</comment><comment><USER14> I found that especially on enterprise software, being web-based limits the amount of damage a mediocre programmer can do. Of course there are myriad ways of messing up the web experience, but native apps have all the OS resources at their disposal to make your life miserable. And when the OS is Windows, well...

</comment><comment><USER15> There's something to be said for a simple Google-esque user interface, but I can't think of any time when a user has contaced me and said something like:

"I think the software you've written is perfect - it doesn't need any more changes and it does absolutely everything I want it to do".

</comment><comment><USER16> Less is more, get it done and out the door.....

</comment><comment><USER17> " Assuming you're not one of the 10% of people who "power-use" Word"

Where did that statistic come from? Word is essential for students and most of its features, especially the word count, the thesaurus, the referencing for the footnotes, the formatting of paragraphs, the spell checker, I can't actually think of anything that I do not need and even if I did not, word loads quickly, its interface is somewhat simple and kind of intuitive, so why should I care about some hidden feature which I do not use.

Doctors use word, dentists, lawyers most certainly, every office in the country uses word, every school, really only my grandma does not need word!

<comment><USER16> I think the author was actually emphasizing the point you made about "why should I care about some hidden feature which I do not use". The 10% of power users he was referring to are the ones who use far more than the features you stated. Those features you stated are actually general features which most people use, but these are just a small subset of the vast feature set that is available for users within Word. Most users don't even know these "extra" features exist, let alone what they do and how to use them.</comment></comment>


Are you a software engineer looking to fight climate change? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kwhanalytics.com/jobs/

<comment><AUTHOR> Interested in solar energy data?</comment>


General Public Busybody Theory - <AUTHOR> http://mikelevins.livejournal.com/7934.html <comment><USER2> _first of all, the majority of people are inclined to be busybodies._

this is one of the major roots of all problems anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> >In general, I mean. Not everyone seems to have this impulse to boss people around, but it does seem to be very common, and it seems like a majority of people have it to some degree, some more than others.

Then the problem appears to be related to the problem of carseats: [http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_levitt_on_child_car...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats.html)

What else can we unify with this?

<comment><USER4> I do not know if you can put homophobia in the same pot as the carseats. There's no harm to children involved in homosexuality. The mechanisms for inciting legislations seem different.

<comment><USER5> While rationale people know that there is no harm to children involved in homosexuality, the unfounded association of homosexuals and pedophiles along with fear of homosexuality can often be found in the rhetoric for legislation and policy decisions (like not allowing teachers who are homosexual).

<comment><USER4> > (like not allowing teachers who are homosexual)

Do you really have those kinds of laws? I heard that homosexuals weren't allowed in the military in the US, and that seemed bad enough. How backwards can it get?

<comment><USER5> It may not be a matter a law but of policy (legal or not), as I said.

Some interesting links: <http://www.google.com/search?q=teacher+fired+for+being+gay>

<http://www.abanet.org/irr/hr/yared.html>

Kind of old: [http://www.aclu.org/lgbt-rights_hiv-aids/gay-teacher- wrongfu...](http://www.aclu.org/lgbt-rights_hiv-aids/gay-teacher-wrongfully- fired-aclu-charges)

So, to answer your question: it can get pretty backwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember reading that one reason homophobia is so difficult to address is because it may be rooted in misogyny (e.g. they hate women and because of that they hate men who act feminine, like women).

</comment><comment><USER7> _Personally, I'm male and, sexually speaking, I like women._

I'm glad we established that.

<comment><USER8> I think this statement is far more ingenious than you are giving it credit for. I think that you could interpret this to say "I like women sexually, but not socially or mentally".

Now, I'm certainly not saying that this reflects his feelings, but that phrase certainly made me chuckle the first time I read it.</comment></comment>


Defense Distributed's New 3D Printed High Capacity Gun Magazine 'Cuomo' - <AUTHOR> http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/defense-distributed-unveils-new-3d-printed-gun-magazine-cuomo-video.php <comment><USER2> Does the slippery slope argument hold any water here? With the legal framework and technical implementation in place for regulation of 3D printing, what's to stop a situation analogous to Internet piracy...?

<comment><USER3> Piracy illustrates the fact that it's not possible to regulate 3D printing, but even if it were possible, it would be 100% wrong.

I don't know how it ever became generally accepted that every possible object and action must be regulated by the nanny state. Pretty soon that idea will be dead forever.

<comment><USER4> > I don't know how it ever became generally accepted that every possible > object and action must be regulated by the nanny state.

Strawman. That's not generally accepted, not even seriously _suggested_ by anyone except strawmen-builders.

The generally accepted idea is that it's the job of _any_ state to regulate actions that cause serious harm to people.

Disagreements abound about what actions exactly count as causing harm, and what form the regulations should take; specifically how far they should go in _preventing_ such actions instead of just punishing them.

<comment><USER5> " it's the job of any state to regulate actions that cause serious harm to people."

Shooting someone is already a crime and always has been.

Posessing a magazine with more than 7 rounds is not an action at all, and does not harm anyone.

The reason the parent used the word "nanny state" is because he's describing laws that prohibit things for which there is no victim.

Possessing a magazine does not cause harm to anyone. There are already laws against causing harm to people.

<comment><USER4> >Shooting someone is already a crime and always has been.

However, punishing people who do it does not make those they shot come back to life. Preventing harm is generally much more desirable than punishing those who cause it afterwards. And no, punishment does not do much to prevent mass shootings. Not having a large magazine IS it least somewhat effective to limit the damage one person can do.

Now the question is what preventive regulations are effective and whether their side effects are accceptable. I do have to wonder what exactly are the unacceptable side effects of disallowing large magazines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And this is how 3D printing becomes regulated out of existence.

<comment><USER7> I think once 3D printing gets good, there will be a lot of things more "legally interesting" than guns to cause regulatory issues.

<comment><USER8> You don't need 3D printing to make usable firearms parts.

Example: <http://aresarmor.com/>

Go head and read some of the info on this company, which is selling parts that are unfinished components of an AR-15 rifle. Essentially, they sell you an _almost_ complete lower receiver (the part the ATF considers to be the "gun"), and you use some supplied jigs and a drill press to finish the job. Presto: untraceable, unserialized rifle unencumbered by federal rules on firearms regulated by interstate commerce.

Remember prohibition? They used to sell "grape juice concentrate" that could be mixed with water, stored in a jug for an appropriate period of time, and presto: wine.

All you need is a reasonably substantial proportion of the population willing to conspire with each other to avoid/subvert/ignore the law and you've got status quo. IMHO, restricting access to firearms will have a measurable, but ultimately negligible effect on death by firearms in the US.

<comment><USER7> The one part of a firearms system which can't be relatively easily made by an individual in a decentralized way is primer (it's super sensitive and also toxic chemicals). Propellant/powder is also difficult to make cheaply and well.

It's not really an issue as long as some firearms (and thus some ammunition) is relatively unregulated; you could easily have a world where only single- shot hunting weapons are available, then use the ammunition from those (either intact or by disassembling and reloading) for other weapons.

Still, I aspire to owning an ammunition company; I wish ATK were for sale.

<comment><USER9> You say that everything but primer could be relatively easily made by an individual in a decentralized way. Do you mean a skilled machinist with excellent tools? I would have imagined that making a reliable reusable weapon required a number of small parts with rigid tolerances. Is that not the case?

<comment><USER10> The barrel is probably the only part that has "rigid tolerances". The AK is famous for a stamped receiver with minimal machining.

<http://ultimak.com/AKReceiverID.htm>

<comment><USER7> While barrels benefit from quality (and even things like titanium firing pins, $200 special wooden grips, $3000 optics, etc.), I am confident I could show a minimally literate 8th grader how to make a serviceable open-bolt fully automatic weapon (say a 9mm SMG I guess) with a random high school machine shop in 3 days, capable of firing <4 MOA, >900fps muzzle velocity, >95% reliability with Wolf 9mm ammunition for 500 rounds.

Basically the same thing was done in WW2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FWIW "High Capacity Magazine" is a loaded term. The AR system was issued with 30 round magazines so, these are normal capacity. But calling them "high capacity" is what people who want to ban them do to pretend like there's something unusual about them.

For anyone whose wondered why "gun nuts" want these "high capacity" magazines, the answer is very simple: Loading a mag is often a pain in the butt. It's a lot more fun to go to the range with a bunch of loaded magazines, shoot for several hours and then go home, rather than be loading magazines every 5 minutes. It's that simple. (Though of course there are cases where people have needed the higher capacity, like the recent news story about the shop-keeper who defended his store and customers with a pistol with 17 rounds.)

"Assault Weapon" is another made up term to make guns sound scary. Most people seem to think there are people running around with full auto machine guns out there.

In the 1990s the ban on "assault weapons" prohibited cosmetic and safety items, not anything that made guns more lethal. (EG: flash suppressor lets you not get blinded when shooting at night, "grenade launchers" are just tubes on WWII era weapons, grenades themselves long being made illegal, but the media loves to talk about the police discovering "grenade launchers", pistol grips and collapsable butt stocks are just ergonomics, the former promoting better form.)

Lately the popular term is "assault rifle" which have been effectively banned since 1934, and their manufacture totally banned since the mid 1980s. Plus if we're strictly speaking that term only applies to a particular rifle produced in germany in WWII.

The reason for this dishonest use of political terms is really easy: There's effectively no difference between an AK-47 and a hunting rifle, except that the AK has been demonized.

Previously demonized weapons: The "sawed off shotgun" which was a modification made by italian shop owners who wanted to be able to defend themselves against the mafia shaking them down, but didn't want to penetrate the wall and hit innocent bystanders. Thus shortening the barrel, which produces a wider spread and less collatoral damage. The mafia couldn't have that, so they got their politicans to demonize and then ban them. Racist gun control.

The "saturday night special" was nothing special at all, just the more popular firearm for poor black people living in dangerous areas to defend themselves. They couldn't afford more expensive firearms and they had a real need to defend themselves from the criminal elements, but we couldn't have that, could we? It's not a coincidence that the ghettos have become overrun with violence since the "saturday night special" was criminalized.

I could go on, the entire gun control political movement is based on misrepresentation (eg: "glocks are all plastic and undetectable by airport scanners!" which has never been true) and the ignorance of the general public.

Guns kill people like spoons make people fat. It's non-sensical, and proof positive that politicians don't have your best interests at heart when they say "oh, little girl, you should just get raped, rather than defend yourself with a pistol", which is what they're doing here.

<comment><USER11> That analogy is ridiculous. It's more like having a tub of ice cream and a spoon available at all times. It doesn't make you fat, but if you're depressed or vulnerable, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to take a bite.

<comment> __--__ Your analogy is also ridiculous. You're suggesting that taking a bite of ice cream and shooting somebody are morally equivalent.

<comment><USER4> no, the person he replied to suggested that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great. Even easier access to guns is just what America needs.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/1...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html)

<comment><USER5> Compare that number to the 1,500,000 times a year, according to the DoJ, that guns are used defensively by intended victims to stop violent crime. Constantly talking about how many people have been killed while ignoring how many have been saved is profoundly dishonest.

The rate of violent crime in the USA is around 640 per 100,000 while in the UK it is closer to 2,500 per 100k.

Clearly banning guns doesn't lower violent crime. In fact, in the UK, after they banned guns, violent gun crime skyrocketed.... because the criminals knew that their victims were disarmed.

<comment><USER13> Do you have a cite for that 1.5MM/year?

The best numbers I could find from DOJ are from 2000, and suggest it's around 100,000.

[https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:419E8WPZxdkJ:...](https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:419E8WPZxdkJ:home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/Crime_and_Justice_gundefense_2000.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESioVHArQ0x6EMy1Ey4s6iuI3bTm6sgM6bxwjdSPX1BEh2BLNIw59H5_H8Cduf4MsotZ-X7-32FxTqU9gHbMWymRBsi_T4ShmiqfuFkPJRQMK1f4hb5yVErz2fJD_bUGpZkp_UuV&sig=AHIEtbSyrvICxjDop3P-omDg5h-pRj-I0w)</comment></comment></comment>