Math is an insurance policy - <AUTHOR> https://bartoszmilewski.com/2020/02/24/math-is-your-insurance-policy/ <comment><USER3> To paraphrase what's said about fusion energy: Haskell is the language of the future and always will be.

I love Haskell, but there's really not a single shred of evidence that programming's moving towards high-level abstractions like category theory. The reality is that 99% of working developers are not implementing complex algorithms or pushing the frontier of computational possibility. The vast majority are delivering wet. messy business logic under tight constraints, ambiguously defined criteria, and rapidly changing organizational requirements.

By far more important than writing the purest or most elegant code, are "soft skills" or the ability to efficiently and effectively work within the broader organization. Can you effectively communicate to non-technical people, do you write good documentation, can you work with a team, can you accurately estimate and deliver on schedules, do you prioritize effectively, are you rigorously focused on delivering business value, do you understand the broader corporate strategy.

At the end of the day, senior management doesn't care whether the codebase is written in the purest, most abstracted Haskell or EnterpriseAbstractFactoryJava. They care about meeting the organizational objectives on time, on budget and with minimal risk. The way to achieve that is to hire pragmatic, goal-oriented people. (Or at the very least put them in charge.) And that group rarely intersects with the type of people fascinated by the mathematical properties of the type system.

<comment><USER4> I would argue that Haskell lets you respond to nebulous requirements better than almost any other language, because refactoring is so much easier and safer.

I self identify much more with being pragmatic and goal-oriented than math-y and perfectionist, and I think for almost every programming domain we'd achieve our goals faster by moving more towards having strong static guarantees in an ergonomic, expressive language.

Finally, I would also put forth that debugging state corruption or randomly failing assertions is much harder than learning to avoid side-effects and leaning into immutability.

<comment><USER5> Alexis King, a professional Haskell coder, recently wrote an article on exactly that:

[https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2020/01/19/no-dynamic- typ...](https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2020/01/19/no-dynamic-type-systems- are-not-inherently-more-open/)

<comment><USER6> It's a very insightful article. It's clear and precise and lucidly written, and I'd recommend anyone who cares about these things read it.

That said, I found the article unconvincing. The author's writing is perhaps _too_ precise, to the point where the forest has been lost amidst the trees. I can draw the main reasons why I'm losing my religion w/r/t to static typing from out of the appendix portion of the article itself:

> _not only can statically-typed languages support structural typing, many > dynamically-typed languages also support nominal typing. These axes have > historically loosely correlated, but they are theoretically orthogonal_

The fact that they're theoretically orthogonal is small consolation. They _are_ loosely correlated, but the looseness doesn't happen in a way that's particularly useful to me. The fact of the matter is, the only languages I'm aware of that have decent ergonomics for structural typing are either dynamically typed, or constrained to some fairly specific niches. If I want structural typing in a general-purpose language, I'm kind of stuck with Clojure or Python. The list of suggested languages that comes a paragraph later fails to disabuse me of that notion. As does this observation:

> _all mainstream, statically-typed OOP languages are even more nominal than > Haskell!_

<comment><USER7> Re structural typing, have you tried OCaml/ReasonML? If so what was your experience like?

<comment><USER8> Another option is TypeScript, which is well suited for building SPA web apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >In mathematics, a monad is defined as a monoid in the category of endofunctors.

Sure. But like everything in math what it really is is a thing that the mathematician has come to know through application of effort. The definition is a portion of a cage built to hold the concept in place so the next mathematician can come along and expend effort to know it.

You've probably done this yourself, just maybe not that deep in the abstraction tower (though you'd be surprised how abstract some everyday things can be). For example, you may have internalized the fact about division of integers that every integer has a unique prime factorization. This is an important part of seeing what multiplication is, but it's not part of the tower of abstraction upon which multiplication is built.

Mathematicians tend to end up being unconscious or conscious Platonists because mathematicians are trained to see the mathematics itself.

<comment><USER10> The definition of a monoid here is not the usual definition, is a new definition for the special case of a strict category as defined MacLane's Book Categories for the Working Mathematicean. Since you maybe thinking about composition of endofunctors and unit endofunctors you get a confused picture. The monad as a monoid in the category of endofunctors is a way to show that you can confuse people using two different definition of an usual concept and both give different results. I got this from (1), look for "main confusion": monoid in the category of endofunctors is defined in a new way, and is not the expected monoid in the set of all endofunctors.

The definition of monoid in monomial categories is on page 166 and Monads in a category are on page 133. As a math person I know what is a monoid (usual term) but I did not know what is a monoid in a monomial category (well I know now because is on page 166 of the book).

(1) [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3870088/a-monad-is- just-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3870088/a-monad-is-just-a- monoid-in-the-category-of-endofunctors-whats-the-problem)

<comment><USER10> I wonder what's the point of using such a phrase, it doesn't help you to grok the concept of monad. It can help you to know that someone has given a new definition to sound cute, shame on them. By the way I admire MacLane as a math person, but people seem to use category theory to sell snake oil. Category theory is a tool to give names to some diagrams and properties that are used frequently to avoid repeating the same argument in proofs, is a dry (don't repeat yourself, as in the ruby motto). If you are an expert in category theory you can give short proofs of known facts. Category theory is like pipes in unix, you pipe diagrams to show properties. Grep, sed, awk analoges are functors, categories and natural transformations. The input is a collection of diagrams and the output is a new diagram that has a universal property and it receives a name and a collection of properties that are supposed to be useful to proof new theorems.

<comment><USER11> The phrase appears 6 chapters into a graduate mathematic text on category theory. If one reads the preceding chapters, it is a useful but pithy explanation for what a monad is, using terms which have all already been covered. Its use outside of that context is basically just a joke towards the Haskell community being overly mathematical.

<comment><USER10> I agree with you, the phrase should be preceded with: Caution, this is a math joke, don't lose sleep trying to grok it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Math is not the insurance policy. Your social skills and your ability to continually "sell" your worth to others are the insurance policy.

<comment><USER13> Its more like math is the underwriter that one is more than soft skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always figured our domain (computation) is so vast that once programming is automated, so too are all the other jobs. If we get an AGI that can program our programs and learn to learn, it won't be hard to have it write a program to make sales calls, or gather user feedback, or build buzz for the company.

So don't worry, when it happens we can all rest because there won't be any need for our labor anyway.

<comment><USER15> What about the pix2code example? It's consevable that domain specific automation will reduce the number of jobs that exist.

<comment><USER14> Assuming pix2code really did automate away traditional UI work, the development effort would then move to the next subdomain (e.g. a sales bot, etc).

I suspect as long as you're willing to learn and are competent, you should have a job until the final effort of a general AI self-learning programmer.

<comment><USER15> I'm also sceptical about pix2code, but the point is that domain specific automation could consevably reduce the number of overall jobs. The cost of switching domains is also non negligible.

The question with domain specific automation (and one of my takeaways from the article) isn't whether or not you'll have a job, but if the effort your put into getting your current job is worthwhile.

<comment><USER14> I think the total number of jobs (programming + other) that humans can do economically might go down over time. Programmers can usually pickup the next ambitious project (e.g. a sales bot) when the old domain is no longer profitable.

I think Bartosz is saying that Math and Category theory is useful to learn because it works in a number of subdomains. It can help keep the domain switching cost down somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems rather funny to write a treatise, with quicksort being a central example, where the shown code requires O(N) temporary space.

C/C++ programmers might not be good at category theory, but no one worthy of their salary would walk past a quicksort routine with O(N) memory without stopping and asking "Wait, what?"

Seriously, I remember when _this_ used to be the first Haskell code shown on haskell.org homepage, and I had to stop and wonder if these folks were just trolling or if they are actually _that_ oblivious of performance. If you want to promote Haskell, you could have hardly chosen a worse piece of code.

<comment><USER17> The article addresses that issue, its core thesis is that AI supports declarative programming. One of the author's main points is that a sufficiently intelligent compiler would rewrite code to be better optimized and have better computational complexity, eliminating low level C++ programming type jobs.

Category theory is to support the creation of specifications that are both easy to understand for a human who knows category theory and easy to optimize for the AI, compared to the original quick sort example.

The author also thinks many HTML and JS type jobs will also disappear. What I am skeptical of is that while Go, Chess and Jeopardy are challenging, they are closed domains. I think people underestimate just how much complexity building CRUD apps involves. Just like we underestimated how difficult walking to a cupboard to retrieve a mug would be for AI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _I'm sorry to say that, but C and C++ programmers will have to go._

I've heard that since I started my career in the early 90s and it's always interesting to compare what reasons people give why low-level languages are going to go away really soon now.

Other than that the article makes a lot of good points.

<comment><USER19> > I've heard that since I started my career in the early 90s and it's always > interesting to compare what reasons people give why low-level languages are > going to go away really soon now.

The main reason: They'll go away when the graybeards retire and the companies fail without them.

For the last 5 years, I've been babysitting a C-based system that generates more than 70% of our corporate profit. The youngsters working on the 7+ year- old project to replace it are on the 3rd refactoring of the 2nd programming language codebase and the "architect" is already talking about rewriting in a new language for "productivity improvements." For the 4th year in a row, the first of five essential elements of the new system will go on line Next Year, leaving still more years of work until we can shut the old system down and let the C programmers go (except we all know more new languages than the new guys, as we all have loads of free time - our old system is quite reliable). Without a substantial payment directly into my kids' trust fund, I have no intention of delaying retirement by a day - I have way too many side projects to explore!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The next job on the chopping block, in my opinion, is that of a human > optimizer. In fact the only reason it hasn't been eliminated yet is > economical. It's still cheaper to hire people to optimize code than it is to > invest in the necessary infrastructure.

What would that infrastructure be, exactly? You can write a program that performs any mathematical operation. A program that can handle any input program, and optimize it as well as any human could, would need to be an AI with at least human intelligence, and a deep understanding of all known mathematics.

But then we're told that mathematical knowledge is a defense against automation? One wonders why we don't just hand all the math off to this optimization AI.

</comment><comment><USER21> If the author is right, what subfields of mathematics will likely be the most salient? Linear Algebra? Stats? Category Theory? Isn't it possible that the species of math you invest in will turn out to not be so valuable in an AI- driven future? Or is the hope that a baseline mathematical fluency will help engineers pivot no matter what?

<comment><USER22> You cannot really predict that. Number theory was once considered "pure mathematics" in a sense that one could not even imagine practical applications for checking if a number is a prime or not. And then someone invented cryptography...

EDIT: For all those nitpicking downvoters: yes, I meant public key cryptography.

<comment><USER23> To be fair, cryptography and number theory have coexisted without much overlap from centuries (millennia?). Then, the rise of mechanized cryptanalysis forced us to look for hard-to-break ways to encrypt stuff, and prime factorization was a very good candidate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Data science seems like a gateway drug to doing more math.

I've been working through Joel Grus' Data Science from Scratch,

[https://www.amazon.com/Data-Science-Scratch-Principles- Pytho...](https://www.amazon.com/Data-Science-Scratch-Principles- Python/dp/1492041130/)

rewriting the Python examples in Swift:

[https://github.com/melling/data-science-from-scratch- swift](https://github.com/melling/data-science-from-scratch-swift)

</comment><comment><USER25> If the author is right, how long will it take to get there? I've been working in the field for 25 years. Frankly what I do today isn't that much different than what I did 25 years ago and we are busy trying to hire more people who do the same types of things. I'll probably retire in the next 15-20 years. Will this wholesale change proposed by the author take place within that time frame? Based on past experience I doubt it.

<comment><USER26> To add to this: In my career I've personally witnessed so many instances of people saying "Well, this can all be automated..." and then starting enormous projects to automate a process that is currently the sole focus of literally hundreds of engineers. As if the reason there are hundreds of engineers doing this job is that all those guys are just idiots. The result is these massively ambitious projects that promise senior management the world, drag on forever, often justifying themselves with hand-optimized toy examples to show progress. In the end the actual problem is very obviously intractable and years of progress are wasted.

It might be true that eventually we can solve "implementing cross-platform UIs in the general case" but we could also be literally 100 years away from achieving that, and in the mean time the fact that it's theoretically possible is worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting. If languages like C and C++ are really first to be vulnerable, why are they the ones used for building AI (computer vision) instead of category theoretic languages?

<comment><USER28> The author is saying that the main reason to use something like C++ instead of Python or even Java is for speed. He assumes that optimizing for speed is a problem that can fit neatly under the machine learning domain.

If a machine can optimize performance better than humans, then it would not make sense to use C++, in the context of performance.

<comment><USER29> We have JIT compilers that can optimize "better" than static. People are still using the latter because there are other benefits that nobody from the ivory tower can beat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When someone asks me, "Why don't you have X insurance?"

My reply is, "Because I can do math."

Was surprised to find the article wasn't about that.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think this article gives AI more credit than it demonstrates at present and simplifies the examples.

It's useful I expect for quick fixes/guidance like the loop example.

For example on improving performance - these days that often needs holistic architectural re-think - surely a creative process? The idea of optimizing involving a loop seems very distant from heterogeneous asynchronous behavior of modern hardware.

If AI really does start to solve in the more 'general' way not just a bit of object recognition here and there, won't software developers incorporate with it as part of process instead. Enabling even more sophisticated software to be written?

I think that is the key part of longevity to software development as a career. The compiler didn't remove the assembly programmer it simply enabled a whole new level of software complexity to be feasible.

</comment><comment><USER32> This article purports to be talking about math but then goes off down some insular functional programming rabbit hole.

For what it's worth, I can easily accept that Haskell programmers' career prospects will not be altered one whit by improvements in optimisation and automation...

P.S. Haskell is not math: [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S0956796808007004](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S0956796808007004) [https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve- JFP.pdf](https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve-JFP.pdf)

<comment><USER11> The paper you linked shows that one Haskell implementation does not exactly correspond to a specific algorithm, then gives an alternative definition which does correspond. What does that have to do with the statement 'Haskell is not math'?

<comment><USER32> It's a salient example of functional programming pretending to demonstrate an elegant expression of pure mathematics in code, while actually being nothing of the sort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > I can't help but see parallels with Ancient Greece. The Ancient Greeks made > tremendous breakthroughs in philosophy and mathematics–just think about > Plato, Socrates, Euclid, or Pythagoras–but they had no technology to speak > of.

I can't help but remark how completely untrue this sounds to you if you have read the magnificent and forgotten book by Lucio Russo, see [1]. Greeks of centuries III-II BC had plenty of tech and they were much more modern than new scientists of centuries XVI-VII.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22409445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22409445)

</comment><comment><USER34> In case anyone is interested, the author also wrote the excellent "Category Theory for Programmers", available in print or online:

[https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory- for-p...](https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for- programmers-the-preface/)

If you're interested in what Category Theory is about, it's a great place to start for people with a background in programming but not necessarily mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER35> I agree with the OP that junk programming will likely die. But so will junk math. I don't think programming is going to be automated anytime soon, but I'd imagine that the inputs of an optimizer capable of doing so would look more like vagueish business goals and policy constraints that businessmen / politicians like to write, rather than some functional monad, which I guess is why they still continue to be the master character classes of humanity.

<comment><USER36> I'm skeptical of these sorts of claims for two reasons.

1\. Creativity. What objective function do you optimize to write the first Super Mario Bros? Can you then get from there to RocketLeague or Braid? (I think not).

2\. Imagine that you somehow obtain a magical technology that takes in a natural language spec and emits highly-optimized code, just like a human. Who's writing that spec?

For interactions with actual humans, there's usually a professional drafter (lawyer, contracting officer, etc) carefully specifying what the other parties should and should not do. We'd presumably need the same thing even with some fancy AGI. This is perhaps a bit different from worrying about whether foo() returns a Tuple or List, but it's not totally dissimilar from programming.

<comment><USER15> I agree with your first point, such objective function would have to optimise something extremely abstract like player enjoyment.

As for the second, the point is not to have a specificition on the human side. Most of the time when communicating with others we don't need lawyers, and spoken contracts are valid and by law. Even with lawyers contracts can be disputed in court as there is not a formal definition of every exact scenario.

Assuming we had the power to do (1), all we'd need in (2) is something that doesn't provide unexpected outcomes.

<comment><USER36> If you don't have some kind of specification, how are you going to control what you get?

It's true that you can turn to a teammate and say "hey, can you write me a pipeline to import data from JSON files?" and you'll usually get something usable. However, you and your teammates have shared goals and background information about your particular project and the world at large, etc.

Projects go off the rails all the time because the generally intelligent (allegedly, anyway) humans don't share these things. Right now, the front page has an article called "Offshoring roulette" about this. If you don't want to click through, here's my story about a contract programmer working in the lab. I asked him to look into a problem: the software running our experiments crashed after a certain number of events occurred. It turned out that the events were being written into a fixed-size buffer, which was overflowing. This _could_ have been fixed in many ways (flush it to disk more often, record events in groups, resize the buffer). However, he chose to make the entire saving function into a no-op. This quickly "fixed" the problem--but imagine my delight when the next few runs contained no data whatsoever. In retrospect, although this guy had a PhD, he wasn't particularly interested in the broader context, namely that it crashed _while collecting data that I wanted._

An optimizer is going to take all kinds of crazy shortcuts like that unless it's somehow constrained by the spec. You could certainly imagine building lots of "do-what-I-mean" constraints into this optimizer but that requires even more magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've been hearing this for 25 years, since I was just starting college.

We are _marginally_ closer to it now technologically, and probably actually significantly (as in, "more than marginally") farther _away_ from it overall, because the explosion in programming use cases has greatly exceeded our improvement in the ability to automate.

Even the _given example_ is beyond our reach right now! We already can't automate that simple specification of a sorting algorithm into an efficient one. How are we supposed to automate the creation of a graphics card driver with AI? We'd have much better leverage just applying _better software engineering_ to that task, and I say that without particularly criticizing the people doing that work or anything... I just guarantee that they are not so well greased up with engineering that there's no improvement they can make bigger than "let's try to throw AI at it".

There are still places where category theory is a good idea. A lot of our distributed systems would be better off if someone was thinking in terms of CRDTs or lattices or something. But we're farther than ever from automating our computing tasks.

</comment><comment><USER38> Self driving cars are not coming. Jobs are not being eliminated en masse. This is hyperventilation and is not borne out by history, facts, or reality. Don't fall for the scary AI nonsense.

[https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence- scam...](https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam-is- imploding-34b156c3537e)

</comment><comment><USER39> I am not convinced. Most mathematicians embrace denotational semantics, but most engineers intuitively default to operational semantics, because ultimately, we need to make choices/trade-offs that have consequences which are too complex for any optimiser which lacks a holistic view of the system our system is part of.

Operational semantics are actually a higher order logic than Category theory when expressed in a Geometry of Interaction (GoI) grammar.

[https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Geometry+of+Interaction](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Geometry+of+Interaction)

I don't have the fancy nomenclature to utter the Mathematical phrase "endomorphism on the object A⊸B.", but I intuitively understand what operational semantics are and why they are useful to me. When a programming language/grammar comes along which implements most of the design-patterns I need/use to turn my intuitions into __behavioural __specifications - I am still going to be more productive than a Mathematician because I will not have to pay the (upfront cost) of learning a denotational vocabulary. The compiler will do it for me, right?

In the words of the late Ed Nelson: The dwelling place of meaning is syntax; semantics is the home of illusion.

Languages are human interfaces. Computer languages are better interfaces than Mathematics because we design (and evolve them) to be usable by the average human, not Mathematicians. Good interfaces lower the barrier to entry by allowing plebs like myself to stand on the shoulder of giants. Mathematics expects everybody to be a giant.

And in so far as dealing with ambiguity goes, Programming languages are way less ambiguous than Mathematical notation!

Ink on paper has no source code - no context.

</comment><comment><USER40> > As long as the dumb AI is unable to guess our wishes, there will be a need > to specify them using a precise language. We already have such language, > it's called math. The advantage of math is that it was invented for humans, > not for machines. It solves the basic problem of formalizing our thought > process, so it can be reliably transmitted and verified

The same is true of most programming languages - they were all made for humans. Math has the advantage of being to prove formally that it solves the problem, but that isn't a requirement for most software.

> If we tried to express the same ideas in C++, we would very quickly get > completely lost.

Same is true for many things that you can express in C++, but not in Math.

Math used this way is essentially just another programming language - <USER2> massive advantages in some circumstances, and massive disadvantages in others - I can't find any argument in this article as to why it is a better bet than any other language.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's a little weird for this article to focus on qsort, as surely the key point is that the algorithm doesn't have to be stated at all, just the requirements -- that the output is sorted.

This doesn't necessarily invalidate the argument, but it means all the concrete examples seem rather beside the point.

</comment><comment><USER42> Lines like this:

> The AI will eventually be able to implement any reasonable program, as long > as it gets a precise enough specification

make me less worried about the job apocalypse.

It feels to me like getting good, consistent specifications for software is incredibly hard, particularly if some unbound set of humans is meant to interact with it.

Delivering domain specifications for even simplistic "things" is incredibly hard:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNOTDn3D_RI&t=2782s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNOTDn3D_RI&t=2782s)

</comment><comment><USER43> "So any time you get bored with your work, take note: you are probably doing something that a computer could do better."

So can I send the computer to the meetings for me while I carry on coding?

</comment><comment><USER44> > One such task is the implementation of user interfaces. All this code that's > behind various buttons, input fields, sliders, etc., is pretty much > standard. Granted, you have to put a lot of effort to make the code portable > to a myriad of platforms: various desktops, web browsers, phones, watches, > fridges, etc. But that's exactly the kind of expertise that is easily > codified.

Good luck. There will always be a need for bespoke UI. Just as there's always a need for bespoke anything that can otherwise be mass produced.

<comment><USER44> [https://tonsky.me/blog/swiftui/](https://tonsky.me/blog/swiftui/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't quite understand this conflation of mathematics with category theory. This obsession of some programmers with mathematics, actually with a tiny part which is category theory, looks to me very strange. By chance, there is this recent comment of Scott Aaronson, a strong mathematician who is a rising star in quantum computing, which contains what is it probably the more balanced view.

I quote from the source [0] the relevant part: "With some things I don't understand well (nuclear physics, representation theory), there are nevertheless short "certificates / NP witnesses of importance" that prove to me that the effort to understand them would be amply repaid. [...] And then, alas, there are bodies of thought for which I've found neither certificates or anti-certificates—like category theory, or programming language semantics [...] For those I simply wish the theorizers well, and wait around for someone who will show me why I can't not study what they found."

[0] [https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4616#comment-1830447](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4616#comment-1830447)

</comment><comment><USER46> We already do automate jobs by improving our development environments. A better language can eliminate important classes of bugs, and once a reliable library is available, you don't have to write it yourself. The tools do get better, gradually.

This doesn't seem to be happening particularly quickly, though, and it's not clear that it's accelerating. Setting standards is a social process and it often takes years for new language changes to get widely deployed.

Another thing that slows things down is that every so often some of us decide what we have is terrible and start over with a new language, resulting in all the development tools and libraries having to be rebuilt anew, and hopefully better.

I expect machine learning will result in nicer tools too, but existing standards are entrenched and not that easy to replace, even when they are far from state-of-the-art.

</comment><comment><USER47> > You might think that programmers are expensive–the salaries of programmers > are quite respectable in comparison to other industries. But if this were > true, a lot more effort would go into improving programmers' productivity, > in particular in creating better tools.

...

> I am immensely impressed with the progress companies like Google or IBM made > in playing go, chess, and Jeopardy, but I keep asking myself, why don't they > invest all this effort in programming technology?

It seems like Google does invest in programming technology, but a lot of that tech is internal. Google spends an order of magnitude more money on employee productivity than any other job I've worked at. But that's probably because at previous jobs we spent <<1% of salary on tools and didn't have economies of scale.

<comment><USER48> programming productivity gets absolutely massive investment -- all of secret, proprietary, and open source.

They reason it seems otherwise is that software has infinite appetite for increased productivity, since there is minimal friction and energy cost commonly seen in almost every other endeavor. There are essentially two throttles on the exponential improvement in computing: (1) the speed of electromagnetic objects, and (2) the speed of humans to learn new things recently invented and use them to invent newer things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's interesting that he thinks UI will be 'the first to be automated,' but in my experience the variation and creativity, constraints and rules – not to mention the animations – that are emergent from a UI design are so varied and complex that although this seems intuitively correct, history has told us it's anything but.

Arguably the best way to describe an interface is through a declarative programming language, and unless we're saying that 'creativity in UI design is superfluous to our future requirements' it seems like this will remain the case for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER39> +10000

Mathematics is a user interface. Black ink on white paper is the medium which we've been using to communicate complex concepts/ideas for thousands of years.

In 2020 there are better communication mediums. Interactive mediums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> "One such task is the implementation of user interfaces." Clearly author has not used image to code tools before. The amount of junk code that is created through these tools is unusable in production.

<comment><USER22> For now. But the very fact that the code compiles and does it's basic tasks is already an achievement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> > So the programmers of the future will stop telling the computer how to > perform a given task; rather they will specify what to do. In other words, > declarative programming will overtake imperative programming.

This has been happening for a very long time with abstraction. Layers upon layers of computing "just works" without the programmer having to think about it or why. Things like GRPC/OpenAPI etc make it conceivable of a day where a product manager just needs to write the schema and methods and hit "Deploy to AWS" .

</comment><comment><USER52> > Experience tells us that it's the boring menial jobs that get automated > first.

I doubt that the economic drivers of automation consider if the job is boring or menial for the worker. I think this "experience" needs a source.

Furthermore, imagine working 40 years in a field you didn't enjoy in order to have an "insurance policy". (Just do what you like.)

<comment><USER53> > I doubt that the economic drivers of automation consider if the job is > boring or menial for the worker. I think this "experience" needs a source

You are right, no one says "lets automate the boring jobs". What happens is these types of jobs naturally select themselves because they are uncomplicated which makes them prime targets for automation

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The one liner quicksort implementation in Haskell is only really possible because a good chunk of the hard work was handled by a partition library function... I'm not sure how different that is than just calling quicksort from a library in any other high level language.

<comment><USER48> Haskell quicksort isn't quicksort, it's an illustration of quicksort. It's not an in-place constant-memory implementation.

See also the Haskell Sieve of Eratosthenes, which isn't a Sieve of Eratosthenes, and is in fact even slower than naive trial division: [https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve- JFP.pdf](https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~oneill/papers/Sieve-JFP.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> It's odd that functional programming enthusiasts always love to put the mantle of "math" on their favorite functional tidbits, while real mathematicians write imperative, stateful (and often sloppy) Python.

<comment><USER56> You may well be talking about different kinds of math here.

Most of what functional programmers / theorists tend to care about are from sub-fields like logic, abstract algebra and the like.

The "real mathematicians" that you mention are most likely working in other fields like linear algebra, statistics etc. While it is certainly possible that logicians and algebraists work with sloppy python (in as much as they write _any_ code at all), but I don't feel that it had be a great fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I agree that a lot of software will be done declaratively rather than imperatively. But we will create DSLs for that. I don't think we will use math for that. And somebody needs to create the DSLs.

</comment><comment><USER58> So why hasn't Excel already eaten our lunches?

It's the most popular, successful programming language ever but it hasn't taken the _whole_ market for programming, why not?

</comment><comment><USER59> I got interested in programming in 2000 and graduated with a CS degree in 2009. Throughout the 2000s (remember this was post-dot com) I got told software was a bad field to get into for two reasons:

1) The advent of advanced tooling would make software engineers unnecessary. Tools like Visual Basic and UML diagrams were the tip of the iceberg of "visual coding" where a business person could just specify requirements and the software would be automatically created.

2) Jobs were all going to go overseas. There is no reason to pay a programmer in California 10x what you can pay someone in Mumbai. It's better to study something like finance where the secret domain knowledge is held within the chambers of ibankers in Manhattan. The future of tech startups is a few product managers in NYC outsourcing the coding work to India.

There's also a 3rd argument that gets floated around that the field will be oversaturated, "everyone" is learning to code, etc. In 2015 I asked a startup for 125k and they told me, while that did seem to be market at the time, they thought salaries had peaked and were going in the opposite direction. In 2020 you probably can't hire a bootcamp grad for 125k.

Since then the field has exploded and wages have gone off the charts, but I still hear the same type of arguments over and over.

In 2020, you hear stuff like:

1) AI is the future, it's going to automate away all of the menial programming jobs.

2) Bay Area is overcrowded, all the jobs are going remote. The future of tech startup is a few marketing execs in SF outsourcing the menial tech work to flyover states.

Personally, I didn't believe the hype then and don't believe the hype now. I find it amusing that the author questions the wisdom of Google for not using AI to automate development, as if that's never occurred to Google.

Of course the author is right that tech is a treadmill, new skills move into the spotlight while old ones become outdated, although even then the mass of legacy code means consultants will have lucrative jobs taking care of it for a long time.

In my experience, new tooling always creates more software jobs, not less. Software is not like high frequency trading, the more people that compete to make software, the more people we seem to need to make software.

Sure, Bay Area is getting insanely expensive, but Google still tries to fit as many as it can into Mountain View, Facebook still crams as many as it can into Menlo Park. Every 3 months some VC will have the bright idea that, what if we just pay people to do the lowly engineering work somewhere else and just have execs in the Bay Area? And 99% of those startups go nowhere and Google is worth a trillion dollars.

There is a very intuitive line of reasoning that goes, software can be done my machines and software can be done anywhere. There is a thread of truth to both those narratives, but it leads people to very incorrect conclusions that there won't be as many software jobs in the future and they will be done in cheap places.

Despite all intuition, and all the logical narratives about costs and automation, a group of people dedicated to technology in the same physical room have defied that intuition. Virtually every extremely important software company grew in the West Coast of the USA, in some of the most expensive places in the world, and the more software tools have improved the more headcount these companies have had. So take all this intuition about the end of days for software engineers with a huge grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER60> This is historicism. For example, the idea that, because compilers have eliminated most hand-optimization, that process will inexorably continue, moving further up the chain of abstraction until "trivial programming" has been eliminated. The author thinks he's derived some law of historical progress. Along these lines, many smart people have predicted the "end of labor" since at least Marx.

I think that predicting the future is hard and most people are better off "optimizing local minima".</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you buy your non-DRM ebooks from? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking about buying an ebook reader, but have trouble justifying it with ebook prices sometimes being more than paperback costs, especially since they have DRM and are not lendable.<p>What are your thoughts on this and where do you get your ebooks from? <comment><USER2> Most people with some skills buy the DRMed books and use Python scripts to strip the DRM. It's not that hard to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of publishers offer DRM-free ebooks if you purchase directly from them.

For example:

<http://oreilly.com/ebooks/>

<http://pragprog.com/frequently-asked-questions/ebooks></comment>


Lyft Investors Sue over Slump, Claiming IPO Was Overhyped - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-18/lyft-investor-sues-over-stock-slump-claiming-ipo-was-overhyped <comment><USER2> Took a risk and it turned semi-sour short term. Why do people always have to sue when things don't go their way...</comment>


I just got meta-copied - <AUTHOR> http://creatingev.com/post/9610965432/i-just-got-meta-copied

<comment><USER2> In a country with a billion people, even if you're one in a million, there's still 1000 people just like you.

<comment><USER3> This is my QotD today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something is a bit fishy with that favicon. The version used by the 'rippers' doesn't use transparency, whereas Tian's favicon does have one.

That favicon source (there are probably others): [http://www.veryicon.com/icons/system/free- business/copy-4.ht...](http://www.veryicon.com/icons/system/free- business/copy-4.html)

<comment><USER5> It's on the first or second page of icons in a Google image search for "copy icon" with size set to icon.

[http://www.google.ca/search?q=copy+icon#um=1&hl=en&t...](http://www.google.ca/search?q=copy+icon#um=1&hl=en&tbs=isz:i&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=copy+icon&oq=copy+icon&aq=f&aqi=g7g-m3&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=3283l3730l2l3911l5l4l0l0l0l0l255l698l1.1.2l4l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=28bbe6c6131b6901)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel a bit disappoint that this has got so many votes on HN, when a simple Google image search shows that the icon in question is a simply a freely licensed image produced by FreeIconsWeb that turns up when you search for "copy icon".

I'm guessing the author of this article knew that (presumably that's where he got it from) but chose to omit that rather critical point from his post to make it seem more favourable to himself.

Link to original image: <http://www.freeiconsweb.com/Icons- show/Freeicons/Copy.png>

<comment><USER7> Your pedantry seems out of place considering the self-ironic tone of the article. It's not like the author was whining and pointing fingers, he's obviously taking it with humor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well as far as I know, the 'rippers' claimed by author has existed for a while now. This tweet is posted on Jul. 16 (<http://www.weibo.com/1655212723/l4EWMiVcl> ) while the author's post is posted on Aug. 30. So I would say this is just a coincident rather than a rip- off. And I believe the author should spend a little more time doing some research before accusing the wrong person.

<comment><USER9> Coincidence... really? I know the favicon is a common property and all but what are the chances two sites with similar ideas ends up using the one?

<comment><USER10> > what are the chances two sites with similar ideas ends up using the one?

Pretty high if your websites are both about copying and that icon is high in the Google results for "free copy icon".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't feel too bad, you spent a mere 2.5 hours, and as a result a website that took probably 10 times that effort popped up. You lose the personal gain from the project, but the valued created as a result of 150 minutes of work is very efficient!

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there a Chinese copy of HN?

<comment><USER13> Not a "clone", but there is an India version and it seems to still be active: <http://hackernews.in>

HN Thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908893>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Author is actually Tianfang Li. As an entrepreneur he is famous in China. I did not think he would have time to make other projects.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to see them list each other as copies of themselves.

</comment><comment><USER16> What's the consensus in protecting yourself from getting copied in China? Launch there first?

<comment><USER17> The short answer seems to be: you can't protect yourself, it's a waste of time and money trying, and just keep making your stuff the best it can be for the audience you want. Unless your target audience is in China, don't worry about China until you're Google (and even still, don't worry too much about China). Or at least that seems the best strategy for a startup that's short on time and cash.

<comment><USER18> Curiously, even Apple wasn't able to make headway in fighting counterfeit products. [1]

"China's government declined to investigate a facility ... that was manufacturing imitation Apple laptops because it threatened local jobs ... A different arm of China's government scrapped plans for a raid on an electronics mall in the Guangdong province because it could have driven away shoppers, the cable says."

[1] [http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/30/apples-anti- counterfeiti...](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/30/apples-anti- counterfeiting-efforts-in-asia-hampered-by-uncooperative-authorities/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if all these companies are really negatively impacting creativity and inventiveness?

</comment><comment><USER20> The author hasn't included a link to the "copy factory" website. I'm curious about what that link is, because I have noticed that Chrome will show favicons despite no favicon.ico being equipped on a site. I have seen this mainly has happened on local apps where I know for certain I am not serving one yet one shows up. I would like to check the "copy factory" site to see if they aren't defining one either, and if the author is simply seeing an artifact from his browser.

<comment><USER21> link to "copy factory": <http://shanzhaioff.com/>

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the link. The first thing I notice is that while the icons visually are similar, they are of two different sizes.

Indeed, the favicon.ico from the "ripoff" site is 32x32 vs the "original" which is 16x16. Further, the larger image shows more detail in the gradients and edges than does the smaller. When I resize the larger to 16x16 pixels, it looks similar but still features slightly different colors than the "original".

Finally, when I resize the "original" 16x16 up to 32x32, it lacks the pixel clarity of the "ripoff". It seems obvious that the "ripoff" icon wasn't made from the "original" as is being claimed.

<comment><USER22> I don't think the claim was that the 'ripoff' icon was literally copied from the original, just that the concept for the site - right down to the concept for the favicon - were copied.

But I salute your sleuthing, none-the-less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The webapp seem to be built using Twitter Bootstrap and Heroku. I would have thought Chinese programmers who resort to copying would be using older technology.

<comment><USER23> The app at chao.heroku.com is not the copy.

<comment><USER9> Oops, you are right. However, chao.heroku.com still seem to be made for China by a Chinese author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> haha this is one of the reasons I stick to iOS apps!!

<comment><USER25> Yeah, there are _no_ clones on there! Ever since they required that applications not be clones of each other, there's only ever been _one_ fart app!

Heaven, thy name is App Store. Thou art a pantheon of deduplication.

<comment><USER24> a)It takes a lot of time and technical skill to clone a good iOS app..and even if you are successful you have to go through the Apple Developer Program(which is annoying but it helps) and there are legal implications.

b) yeah fart apps are easy to make...but try cloning a good app like angry birds or talking tom cat!

c) if you really wanna clone and make money your best bet would be to clone as fast as possible and clone a lot of apps.You'd much rather just stick to rails apps (heroku ftw!)

d) and lastly there are people who can clone even the best iOS apps very quickly...but with that kind of technical skill also comes creativity and integrity!

<comment><USER25> There are _dozens_ of clones of angry birds. Some of them as good or possibly better. And we aren't talking about clones of polished products here, we're talking about a site that admittedly took a 2.5 hours to make. The comparison to a fart app (though their site is vastly more useful, and a unique idea AFAIK) is apt.

Lets take something with a bit less stigma. Background-changing apps. There are, what, 100+ of them? Probably more? Lots of them even share some backgrounds, which is visible if you just skim a dozen from the app store's images. And almost every single one has probably paid back the dev time it took to make, if not through sales then through ads.

<comment><USER24> > And we aren't talking about clones of polished products here.

Well when I said "This is why I stick to iOS apps" I was actually referring to the cloning of popular websites like quora,reddit etc.I am sorry if I did not make that very clear.

>Lets take something with a bit less stigma.,Background-changing apps. There are, what, 100+ of them?

Why take such an example when I have clearly agreed that it very easy to clone such apps.

> There are dozens of clones of angry birds. Some of them as good or possibly > better.

Hmm...now that makes me think !!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The three phases of software development (after the Seattle stuff by Joel) - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/06.html

<comment><USER2> He precedes his description with a nod to XP, but I still think calling these three activities "phases" is the right terminology if you're doing iterative development. The part about burdening the design phase with development doesn't make sense either.

<comment><USER2> Oops, meant to say is _not_ the right terminology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "I'm editing this in the e text editor, a Windows clone of TextMate, which is coming along nicely but could still use some polish before I'm ready to switch to it full time."

Oh snap, he's not using CityDesk anymore! Take that, Visual Basic 6!

</comment><comment><USER4> "Can you imagine Safeco Field filled to the brim with software developers?"

So THAT's what that smell was! I guess MS doesn't feel like a target in the War on Terror..</comment>


Coinbase Raises $25M - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20131212/bitcoins-biggest-bet-andreessen-horowitz-leads-25-million-investment-in-coinbase/

<comment><USER2> Now if only it worked on iPhone...</comment>


Ask HN: Technologies created by (evil) hackers - <AUTHOR> I got asked an off the wall question by a technology journalist today.  Are there any technologies that we use today that were created by (evil) hackers?  i.e. is there anything that's come out of the computer underground that is now considered mainstream.<p>Would love to hear this group's suggestions. <comment><USER2> Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but anyone who worked on cryptography back in the 1970s (and who wasn't working for their government) was being fairly subversive. Steven Levy wrote a great book about the people involved called Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. [http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy- Digit...](http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy- Digital/dp/0140244328)

<comment><USER3> Another recent one is PGP encryption. Read about Phil Zimmerman's decade of fun with the DOJ for creating it and not allowing a NSA backdoor.

<http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/faq/index.html>

I have done some crypto work for financials and trust me if you aren't using an RSA algorithm then you get lots of questions and notice.

The NSA can neither confirm nor deny that they have trapdoors/backdoor access into RSA encryption. But if you don't use it they get very anxious to know what you are up to. <http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2316>

_As the premier cryptographic government agency, the NSA has huge financial and computer resources and employs a host of cryptographers. Developments in cryptography achieved at the NSA are not made public; this secrecy has led to many rumors about the NSA's ability to break popular cryptosystems like DES (see Section 3.2), as well as rumors that the NSA has secretly placed weaknesses, called ``trapdoors,'' in government-endorsed cryptosystems. These rumors have never been proved or disproved. Also the criteria used by the NSA in selecting cryptography standards have never been made public._

They came down on Zimmerman to help dissuade others from creating more encryption algorithms. This could be because they have control over others or they simply want to limit the resources needed to break each type of encryption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm guessing you mean non-security technologies? How about consumer P2P?

See Joseph Menn's book on Napster for the backstory behind MP3 file sharing (many of us w00w00 folks were involved, including guys like "minus", who stole the Winamp source code off my friend Ian Rogers' laptop).

Other example I can think of - anakata and The Pirate Bay, which is sort of mainstream, I guess (!)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm thinking l0phtcrack.

The original SATAN scanner from Dan Farmer; the concept, though. Bad guys had a bag of tricks that they'd use to get in. He compiled a list and built an automated tester of those tricks.

Some of the concepts that evil hax0rz/crackers used to obfuscate code in viruses have migrated into the mainstream as a method of protecting intellectual property.

</comment><comment><USER6> The technology used to help attackers find wireless networks is now used in many corporate wireless network platforms, to detect and block rogue access points.

There's an entire litany of examples where initially subversive technology became useful for defending against the same. The first vulnerability scanners were written to help attackers target vulnerable systems. They were quickly repurposed to help people find and protect vulnerable systems.

The whole "evil hackers" thing is kind of a joke. Hackers are typically clever and often self-serving. By definition, they fabricate tools for themselves which, like anything we have, can be used for good things and bad alike. Many of those tools come into popular use. It's difficult to know what, actually, the intention was behind the tool's creation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Mostly security and forensics tools which aren't mainstream. There aren't many practical, mainstream uses for "evil" hacker tools. Metasploit, Nmap, Nessus, Netstumbler, l0phtcrack, Aircrack, SATAN, Snort, Honeypot/Honeynet, John The Ripper, p0f, Ethereal/Wireshark, Hping2, Netcat, Dsniff. Like others have mentioned, any copyright-breaking tools like MPlayer, DeCSS, rtmpdump but there's no way to say these were written by "evil hackers" (more like hackers who just wanted to watch their own DVDs or download free public videos)

</comment><comment><USER8> The Apple computer?

(It wasn't created _for_ cracking/phreaking, but it was created _by_ phreaks. Woz and Jobs' first venture was selling blue boxes.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Most of the Win32 assessment s/w I used in the good/bad old days of NT (take your pick) was straight-up blackhat tools - because that's what was availble. Blackhats are also responsible for a lot of proof of concept work that results in changes in core protocols - if not new protocols. I think you should reframe the journalist's question to reflect this kind of symbiosis.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some [evil] hackers go on to start security companies (Kevin Mitnick, Frank Abagnale Jr.), so any of the company's techniques could work (though not mainstream or probably even known).

</comment><comment><USER11> Could you consider the creation of clustering created by blackhats? They did start out with botnets which started the foundation for clustering and cluster management.

<comment><USER6> Clustering has existed for a long, long time before black-hats were doing botnets. The practice of breaking up workloads so that more than one computer could process it has been around almost as long as computing itself.

<comment><USER12> Including human computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Depends on the definition of 'evil' - I used DeCSS for a while and, according to the MPAA, the guys who made that were basically Satan with a modem.

</comment><comment><USER14> how about "remote desktop software" that became popular after the attacks from trojans like back orifice?</comment>


VMware embraces open source with Dirk Hohndel leading the way - <AUTHOR> http://www.cio.com/article/3095843/open-source-tools/vmware-today-has-a-strong-investment-in-open-source-dirk-hohndel.html <comment><USER2> Oh yes, especially Linux kernel as a boot manager. But I think they embraced it several years earlier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Chief open source officer? What does that mean? I'd love to see his job description.

<comment><USER3> From his LinkedIn profile:

Leading the company's open source efforts and strategy, driving common values and processes across the company for VMware's interaction with the open source communities, with a goal to more efficiently and effectively increase the company's engagement in and contributions to open source communities as well as use open source components to accelerate software development.</comment></comment>


Next Hacker News DC Meetup on Monday, November 14th - <AUTHOR> http://meetup.hackernewsdc.org/events/31554152/

<comment><USER2> Rusty, thanks for keeping this frequent. +1

</comment><comment><USER3> What are these meetups like? What usually goes on?

<comment><USER2> Usually networking/talking with other developers/start-up dreamers. There are some presentations at times although at this next venue (RFD) there would probably be some isolated laptop demos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll be crashing this party

</comment><comment><USER5> Sweet! I'll try to make it

</comment><comment><USER6> I plan on making it.

</comment><comment><USER7> awesome! will be fun to stop by again.

</comment><comment><USER8> cool, i'll try to make it

</comment><comment><USER9> will be there .. ya!</comment>


Ignoring the shiny objects and building with the tools you know - <AUTHOR> https://jily.co/blog/ignoring-shiny-objects-building-boring-tools-know

<comment><USER2> That's pure engineering practice for results. I like the way you think.</comment>


Clivern/Beetle – Kubernetes multi-cluster deployment service - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Clivern/Beetle <comment><AUTHOR> Beetle automates the deployment and rollback of your applications in a multi- cluster, multi-namespaces kubernetes environments. Easy to integrate with through API endpoints & webhooks to fit a variety of workflows.</comment>


CSS Font Stack: A complete collection of web safe CSS font stacks - <AUTHOR> http://cssfontstack.com/ <comment><USER2> Surely "Andale Mono" should fallback to "Consolas", "Lucida Console" on Windows instead of "monospace" ("Courier New").

Nice resource though, even if 'web-safe' isn't the strait-jacket it used to be. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks to cross-browser webfont support, it's been quite some time since I've read the words "web safe fonts". I wonder how useful these lists would be in a year or two. It's already nearly useless on a vanilla Ubuntu install, for example, which contains neither Windows fonts nor Mac fonts.

It would be a fine day indeed when web designers no longer have to worry about fallback fonts that look nothing like the preferred font.

<comment><USER4> I got so fed up with browsers and their font issues. That I just use one now, that I can read easily at a good size. I override the author's choice everytime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Fantasy"? That's absurd. Copperplate is a letterpress type. Papyrus, meanwhile, is a joke, but it's meant to look like bush strokes; it's hardly fantastic.

I would like to see the information about the support visible, rather than hidden under a mouseover. Maybe 2 thin horizontal bars where length = %, 1 for Mac, 1 for PC?

</comment><comment><USER6> Socialnetwork widget gets in the way of it working on iPad

<comment><USER7> It gets in the way as soon as the browser window is less than 1287px in width. Did I mess up my measurement or is this really 1287px? My browser is rarely that wide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I get confused with font stacks that have sequences like:

Calibri, Candara, Segoe, "Segoe UI", etc. etc.

Are there systems that do not have Calibri but do have Candara or Segoe UI? (Excluding, of course, cases where some of these fonts have been installed manually and individually.) I would suppose not. If so, then what's the point of specifying Candara, Segoe, and Segoe UI after Calibri?

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER9> Segoe ships with some MS products (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe>). I think the 'C' fonts are more tied to Windows releases (Vista and 7, probably 8, too)

So, I guess you can find Segoe UI but not Calibri on a XP system with a relatively (but maybe not too) modern Office. Maybe there are other requirements (newer IEs might install the 'C' fonts, too)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The social button widget blocks me from reading any of the last 10 fonts on the lower left side of the page when browsing from a tablet.

<comment><USER11> Or if, like me, you don't fullscreen your browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A sample text of each font in a stack would be nice in order to judge if the fallback makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER13> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3214273> and <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3425586>

<comment><USER14> I wonder what makes this particularly timely...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would love to see a similar list for non-Latin scripts. I'm particularly interested to know what a 'safe-stack' is for CJK characters. Anyone out there know?

</comment><comment><USER16> Handy resource - thank you. Would be great to see Linux included as well, but I wonder if that's too difficult because of the number of distros.

</comment><comment><USER17> Cool, thanks! Would be nice if there were a filter or setting to only show stacks that have > 90% support on both Mac and Windows.

</comment><comment><USER18> What do the percentages under the "i" mean?

Is that based on OS version, or browser, or... ?

</comment><comment><USER19> Can Linux be included in this list, too?

<comment><USER20> I was hoping for the same thing. It'd be nice to see some good FLOSS fonts in the stacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Where's roboto?

</comment><comment><USER22> Stats source?</comment>


Westlaw and Lexis Nexis: Are Your Days Numbered Yet? - <AUTHOR> http://www.williamha.com/westlaw-and-lexis-nexis-are-your-days-numbered-yet/ <comment><USER2> Lexis Nexis is a good example of how far a tech company can fall when it no longer thinks of itself as a tech company. One thing this article doesn't mention is how utterly Lexis Nexis used to dominate the industry. In the 1980s and 1990s, the entire law profession was entirely dependent on it, and it was massively profitable. And it was independent.

Lexis Nexis got started in the 1960s. They came up with their own proprietary format for storing and searching over legal briefs (most of the technology we have now, such as SQL databases, did not exist then). Their format started off as text files over which they could do regex, based on your search parameters, but then they ran into issues of storage and how should they show related items? (Graph databases were a long way in the future.)

They came up with a solution that would seem primitive to us now, but which was cutting edge in the 1960s, and so they became very successful.

Then they focused on hiring sales people to be sure that every law firm in the country was dependent on them. That was surely the right move in the 1960s, but they stopped developing innovative technology. They made no significant changes to their technology till after 2000, when they were clearly in trouble.

Just to repeat that, they went 40 years without making any significant changes to their technology. The lawyers and the salespeople were running the company and their attitude was something like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." This is a reasonable attitude if you are in a mature, steady, unchanging field, but they weren't.

They ignored the rise of SQL databases, but they could not avoid the Internet. Around 2001 they formed a committee to explore a possible switch to an XML storage format, and they explored RDF as a way of representing the poly- hierarchy that is natural in law. RDF tools were emerging that would allow them to do graph searches.

I am not sure what technology they eventually decided upon. I know they did eventually modernize their technology, but they were dragged to it by the Internet, they did not do it happily.

I have an admiration for the startup advice that Steve Blank gives, but when I think of companies like Lexis Nexis, I find myself doubting the line "A startup is a temporary organization in search of a business model, it must eventually transition to an organization that is focused on executing a proven business model." My problem with that idea is that things change over time, and all business models eventually die, and most businesses die (Lexis Nexis was eventually bought) so all businesses should be thought of as "a temporary organization in search of a business model" \-- the moment you stop searching is the moment you start to die.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was at LN (Examen subsidiary) from 2005 to 2010.

Back in 2010, they were working hard on a new search engine and front end UI for it. Alas, they had been sold on a .NET stack, so I imagine that was more expensive to make and scale out than a POSIX based tool set. I have no idea what became of that initiative. I remember pushing to use REST based services for product integration, rather than SOAP, but it wasn't until a year or so after I left that company architects finally got the nod from Gartner and the like that REST is OK, which leads me to think that the central tech group (at the time?) might not be the most forward thinking.

They do have other products, such as the one I was working on to track cases and/or claims, as well as (specialized) integrated billing processing, or, the anti-money-laundering package that my next employer was using in one project.

However, last year, they closed down the Sacramento office where I had worked. I suspect they can make it, but they are going to have to take a lower margin and make more products, rather than just feed off of a document search engine gravy train. Those days are gone.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right, I do remember using their billing product while I was working at a firm - Billing Matters.

Come to think of it, both Westlaw and Lexis Nexis actually have a suite of enterprise software. Even if WL and LN dies in terms of search, they're pretty deeply rooted in the marketplace elsewhere where a lot of money is coming in. I completely neglected this part of their business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > So I'm now seeing that NLP (Natural Language Processing) as confirmed by > Quora, is hard, meaning that Westlaw and Lexis Nexis is actually pretty > decent?!

NLP and search are hard to get right in a nuanced and high-accuracy-requiring field like law. And Westlaw and LexisNexis have done a pretty good job with those. It's not easy (or rather, it's not cheap -- think tens of millions of dollars) to build what they have built. Even Google hasn't with Scholar -- though to be fair, Google hasn't tried very hard to get legal search to that level.

Ultimately, in the future legal search is not going to be a money maker, and Westlaw and LexisNexis will take a big hit when free happens.

As I see it (i.e., from the vantage point of Judicata), search will ultimately be free, just as Google search is free. And just as Google has been able to make boatloads of money on "ancillaries" to the results (ads), the ancillaries will be the big money makers here -- but in the forms of extremely precise analytics and AI. Want to see cases Shepardized on an individual point of law, and other on-point or conflicting cases? Here it is, for a price. Given a set of facts and a procedural context, want to know the best argument to make to a particular judge? Here it is, again for a price. Given a legal brief presenting your opponent's argument, want to see a line by line teardown? Here it is, and once again, for a price. Want your own legal brief automatically outlined? You've got it, and again, it costs money.

Of course, getting there is not easy (it's a long road that requires going over every single case out there with a fine toothed technological comb), and so while I'd say that Westlaw's and LexisNexis's days are numbered -- that number is well over a thousand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm certainly curious about Judicata. For anyone wondering where Judicata is in terms of progress, I found this comment from someone purportedly involved in the startup: "Judicata is very much alive. We're tackling a hard problem, with little margin for error, and focused on doing it right. It's a very different model than most startups, but then again, law is a very different beast." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9528321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9528321)

<comment><USER4> Your quoted comment came from me (I'm the author of the above comment as well), the CEO of Judicata.

<comment><AUTHOR> Major fail on my part. I have a habit of not looking at usernames, and I'm embarrassed. My apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The cases are mostly barren, and the ones with annotations aren't > particularly insightful like the earlier ones from when Casetext was first > announced. This problem, I absolutely understand, given that it's a > relatively new service and the amount of case law out in the wild. Having > meaningful annotations for a substantial amount of cases will be a challenge > compared to a discography of 90s era rap music where the number most > influential tracks can potentially be narrowed down to 50.

> My money is still on Casetext to do some damage given that easy access to > annotations from practitioners and academics are important to legal > research.

This is a good example of how easy it is to underestimate the importance of momentum when evaluating startups.

Casetext has been around since late 2013. If "the cases are mostly barren, and the ones with annotations aren't particularly insightful like the earlier ones from when Casetext was first announced" nearly two years later, it calls into question the model.

There are lots of opportunities in the legal market, but trying to take Westlaw and Lexis Nexis on directly is insane.

<comment><USER6> > trying to take Westlaw and Lexis Nexis on directly is insane.

No, stating that any startup founded in 2013 could be capable of being a competitive product in 2015 - if they only had momentum - is insane.

Building hard things takes a long time. Casetext will only get better but it will take years for them to get it right.

Silicon Valley is obsessed with short-term projects and failure to its detriment.

As long as Casetext gets enough early adopters to stay afloat and improve their model, they could very well catch up one day and offer a far superior product.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure they've discussed this at length: what is the incentive for a user to annotate case law?

Law happens in such slow motion and not exclusively at the computer that you don't really get the feedback as you would in programming (fixing a bug versus arguing a motion) - which is one of many reasons why Stackoverflow is successful (not that this is really a fair comparison anyway - more of an example). If my immediate success on compiling is dependent on trying out one of these suggested solutions, I'll certainly have an incentive to comment, upvote, and potentially contribute later on knowing how much it helped me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Casetext CEO here. First, thank you for writing this. Hearing honest feedback from people who try out our service and improving is precisely how we're going to get better. And I love that you share both our enthusiasm for the idea and our optimism for the future of legal research.

I wanted to note that we will be getting a lot better. Keep checking in over the next few months, and expect to see a lot of major improvements on the issues you noted as well as many other things as well. Until very recently we were a very small operation, and as it turns out, building a competing product to LexisNexis and Westlaw is exceptionally hard. (I don't want to make excuses – trust me, nobody wants Casetext to be much better more than I do – but the reality is that a perfect product couldn't be built overnight.) That said, with the backing of amazing investors [1], we just assembled a killer team [2], and now have the people and resources to get there.

Another commenter (dmix) put it well: "Building hard things takes a long time." Think of how long it took for a lot of the best sites on the web to become what they are today. We'll get there – I promise.

Finally, we do have the case you were searching for [3]. Why it didn't show up in search is something we'll be looking into this weekend.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/legal-tech-startup- casetext...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/legal-tech-startup-casetext- raises-7-million-series-a-round-led-by-union-square-ventures/)

[2] [https://casetext.com/about](https://casetext.com/about)

[3] [https://casetext.com/case/people-v- powell-521](https://casetext.com/case/people-v-powell-521)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for getting back to me Jacob. In regards to note 3, I'm sure you figured it out by now, but I was using the citation from California Appellate Reports as opposed to the California Reporter.

<comment><USER7> Yeah we saw that. The real question is why we didn't have the parallel citation in our database. We'll investigate.</comment></comment></comment>


The U.S. Withdrawal from the INF Treaty Is the Next Step in a Global Arms Race - <AUTHOR> https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/us-withdrawal-inf-treaty-russia-global-arms-race-missiles <comment><USER2> I think it's easy for Americans to see things as a resumption of the Cold War, which we won, and think that's good.

But this time there are three players in the mutually assured destruction game, and we've been poking our thumb in both of their faces. The article mentions how much relations between Moscow and Beijing have improved.

The entire reason we normalized relations with China was to further box in the USSR, stretching them further than they could sustain.

It seems obvious to me that the tables have turned.

<comment><USER3> The nuclear aspect of the Cold War is something completely different from the rest of the Cold War which is mostly about influence and economics. Once you have MAD, there isn't really much point is continuing the nuclear game especially for intermediate range ICBMs. So I don't get what this is supposed to achieve other than to send a message that we're going into a new Cold War.

<comment><USER4> At 7km/s, it would take around 20 minutes for an ICBM fired from the US to reach Moscow. It takes about 3 minutes for an intermediate range missile to travel from Poland to Moscow.

So yes, there is a huge advantage to pursuing intermediate range missiles.

<comment><USER5> Why is 17 minutes important when the context is Mutually Assured Destruction, possibly enforced via stealth subs you can't hit preemptively and deadman switches to detect the first strike?

<comment><USER6> That 17 minutes is important in terms of being able to assess the threat and react. 3 minutes might mean by the time you launch, enough launchers are destroyed that it's "worth it" to eat the counter attack and "win" at MAD.

<comment><USER5> I thought the point of nuclear submarines was that they don't get destroyed in the other side's first strike?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is the US receiving flack for deciding to no longer uphold their end of a bargain that Russia has been breaking for years

<comment><USER8> There's a good analysis on CNN here:

[https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/01/opinions/us-pulling- out-o...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/01/opinions/us-pulling-out-of-the- inf-treaty-rewards-putin-hurts-nato-engel-smith/index.html)

<comment><USER9> The problem with this analysis is that it assumes this move has anything whatsoever to do with Russia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Incorrect. Russia's violation of the INF Treaty is the next step in a global arms race. The US withdrawal from the treaty is a common sense response, since a treaty that one side is violating is worthless.

<comment><USER11> 1\. The US never bothered to prove their allegations 2\. The US's ABM batteries are more likely to be afoul of the INF 3\. The Ruskies invited the US to explain what concerned them about their missles - they never answered. 3\. The US - particularly the folks in charge now - has a history of withdrawing from arms control treaties (see ABM) 4\. The US has a history of telling ridiculous lies about arms control (See ABM treaty, and how the Ruskies called all the US's bluffs) 5\. The US has already started attacking another treaty (weapons in space ban).

So the US doesn't supply proof. Has a history of tearing treaties. Has been almost surely in violation of the INF for some time. Is poking holes in the last few remaining treaties.

But don't worry about Armageddon: w/out an arms treaty, launching the thousands of obsolete ICBMs loaded with tungsten carbide bearings into orbit solves any countries' security concerns vis a vis space ;)

<comment><USER12> What a load of BS. The proof, that Russia violated the treaty in 2014 is mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is all about China.

[https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-opposes-u- s-w...](https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-opposes-u-s-withdrawal- from-missile-treaty-to-keep-advantage/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Highly recommend the book Doomsday Machine by Ellsberg for those interested in this kind of thing.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. We really want to make it easier to return to that way of thinking, let alone actually restart building it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like to point out that Russia violated the INF Treaty in 2014. [https://www.csis.org/analysis/putin%E2%80%99s-treaty- problem...](https://www.csis.org/analysis/putin%E2%80%99s-treaty-problem- lessons-russia%E2%80%99s-inf-treaty-violations)

<comment><USER17> That's in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How to bankrupt a corrupt Russian government? Induce them to spend a lot of money on their military. Worked in the Cold War.

<comment><USER19> Russia has already signaled openly that they know they can't keep up on spending with the US and China. Their forward budgeting statements indicate a halt to the formerly rapid military spending growth. China is what this treaty withdrawal is all about.

Pretty soon the US will be adding a new Russia every year in new economic output. Russia is not a competitive threat with the US overall, only on select regional matters and on a few important weapons systems. The dumbest thing the US could do, is worry about bankrupting Russia.

And if the US wanted to do that, there's only one good option: tank the price of oil dramatically by pushing up the value of the dollar. That won't work very well here, because the dollar is already relatively high, the US is now vulnerable on oil as a huge industry (and will be more so in the near future), and inflation adjusted (eg back to 1995 or 2005) oil is almost cheap right now (and it's not tanking Russia, they can roughly hold their ground at current prices). The dollar is how the USSR was bankrupted, as they over-bet their economic security on oil output from 1970-1990. Russia is being far better run with regard to macro economic choices right now than the USSR was, which limits their exposure to bankrupting shocks (again, short of eg sustained $20 oil).

The primary hope on the containment front is probably that Russia's need to raise or at least maintain its social welfare output (against a zero growth economy) is checked by oil prices (held down by US shale output), forcing a choice between military spending and social welfare. That's happening right now and has badly soured Putin's popularity at home. Oil goes to $110 and Putin gets a lot more money to play with while also placating domestic demands.

<comment><USER20> Long and boring necropost, but still I want to add some PoV from inside.

By numbers provided by Rosstat Russia looks somewhat stable, but in reality internal economic there is going to break if it would be treated the same way as for now. Some of the problems:

The real inflation rate is way higher than salary grow, especially in 60-th percentile and below which means 60% of active workers who already have income lower comparable to China are become poorer each day.

Whooping 11+% rate for loans on housing: with quick calculations a family of two working parents who can't apply to a subsidized loan (less than 2 children or both are older than 35) would have to pay 61% of a single average net salary each month for a 2-room apartment outside of Moscow or St. Petersburg and 10% for housing expenditures, so they both have to live on $729 in current exchange rate, which would be not enough to raise a single child.

There was a historical event on the 3rd of December, 2018: average price for Regular Conventional gas in US went below the correspondent mark of gas in Russia and is still lower. Why? Russian oil companies (there are only 3 of them as of now) haven't heard of work efficiency and ROI, but can make citizen pay to them.

The two biggest expenditures in budget from 2017 are military (with other secret parts) and current pensions, the latter is a 20-year of fkups in pension reforms, currently each worker indirectly (employees pay these to government in addition to wages without any reports to employers) sends 22% of their salary to pay current pensions and that covers 30% of them.

Social welfare spending? Education and science fundings were cut twice last year.

Would provide sources if someone asks, I just don't have enough time to lurk back on them to get the links and most of them would show you texts in russian anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The question is: why is the US backing out of this treaty now when they knew Russia had been violating it for years. I believe the US is preparing for a new arms race with China and is just lining up the paperwork.

The massive arms race in the 70s & 80s is what arguable took down the Soviet Union by applying too much pressure to a shaky economic system. With major cracks showing in the Chinese economy, is the US beginning to employ this tactic again?

Edit: I added this comment before reading the article based on news stories I heard yesterday. The article is basically positing the same theory.

<comment><USER21> I sure hope we're not trying to spend China into bankruptcy the way we supposedly did with the USSR. China's economy may not be as amazing as the official figures show, but it's in vastly better shape than the 1970s USSR. Considering how US defense contracting loves to overspend to an absurd degree, I think we'd lose that fight badly.

<comment><USER9> I think it is a multi-pronged approach to Chinese economic, political, and military containment - trade war, attack on Chinese tech, arms race, etc. It will apply various pressure points to China's economy, political structure, and world standing. This added pressure will force Xi's regime to take more extreme measures to retain control, thus adding more systemic pressure. US allies are also beginning to adopt these policies.

I believe the US will start countering Belt and Road initiatives with alternative economic packages to African and Asian nations. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the US backed off of Russian aggression in exchange for anti- China support. I bet there's a white paper somewhere in Washington which lays out a similar strategy.</comment></comment></comment>


Tesla uses 29% of the world's EV batteries - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/1h4mPLMiB6A <comment><USER2> An unspoken consequence of this is the telsa battery module secondary market. I'm mildly interested in the off-grid community and used Tesla batteries are first to nothing.

For $800 you can get a Tesla battery module, 30v and about 5kwh. Nothing else even comes close for the money.

If you're willing to do the work yourself, you can take your entire home off grid at the cost of 2 used Tesla batteries and about 2k in solar panels + the charger. About 6k for total energy independence.

The RV/vanlife community is going nuts about these batteries. The energy/weight ratio is more than 3x higher than the closest competitor. You can replace about 500lbs of deep cycle lead acid with 100lb of used Tesla packs (2) for half the money and they have close to 10x the charge/discharge cycles. The math makes them more than 30x better than anything else when you consider cost vs lifetime. It's completely insane

The tricke-down effects of Tesla's unbelievably good battery technology are being felt far beyond the world of EV's

Exciting times!</comment>


The neuroscience of getting and staying motivated (EPFL) - <AUTHOR> https://actu.epfl.ch/news/the-neuroscience-of-getting-and-staying-motivated/ <comment><USER2> There are a lot of missing components here. The article makes it sound like the simple solution to increasing motivation is the glutamine to glutamate ratio. Isn't that the result of internal neurological and biochemical processes not the causative element?

I think they are confusing correlation with causation.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems clear that it is a correlation effect and the authors make no argument to conceal that point. But it is definitely interesting to invest more work in studying this phenomemon causally by developing therapeutic strategies based on targeting metabolism to ameliorate deficits in effort engagement.</comment></comment>


Pokémon Go maker taken to court over players on beaches - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/29/niantic-labs-dutch-pokemon-go <comment><USER2> Where does personal responsibility come in to play? Seriously? Why does Niantic need to tell me not to trespass?

I could see this being a problem if pokemon ONLY spawned on these beaches that would be targeted sending of players to restricted zones. I just don't get how it's the Niantic's responsibility to control their users.

Lawsuits like this just bug me, I do recognize that this is what courts are for. AKA filing a law suit when you feel like you've been wronged to get a judgment from a third party. Hopefully the court will not place liability on Niantic because that could set a bad precedent.

<comment><USER3> I think there's some twisted analogue to the concept of an attractive nuisance here. Pokemon GO is creating an incentive for more people to goto that beach for something that wouldn't be exclusive to the beach. So people that want to utilize the beach as a beach are being hit by the negative externality created by Pokemon GO players being drawn to the area.

In this scenario it seems like any solution not implemented by Niantic will cost the municipality money/time. Reframed: why should this city have to subsidize Niantic's game?

What's funny is that the American concept around personal responsibility (or lack thereof) is less prevalent in Europe making me think that this is just the most expedient action the Netherlands could identify.

I'm against lawsuits blaming companies for others behaviors in general but this one is a bit more complex in my mind.

<comment><USER2> I would agree if it was the case that Niantic was targeting this specific beach, but instead it's all beaches because the algorithm distributes Pokemon evenly throughout the world regardless of location (this isn't the actual case but it's still an algorithm that chooses most spawning of Pokemon).

Niantic created a game that incentives people to go to anywhere in the world and get Pokemon. They don't have to go to this beach, and if it's trespassing then it's still an illegal action. Very similar to driving while texting. Is that the driver's fault or the phones fault? What if the phone company could stop alerts if the phone is going over 60 mph?

My spin is Why should Niantic subsidize the players poor choices? Or why should Niantic subsidize the government more than it already does through tax revenue?

In this case, if I were running Niantic, I would remove the game from the country in question. My game is the way it is, if it is illegal to operate in your country that is perfectly fine. Let me know and I'll go somewhere else. That is all assuming one big thing, I can afford to be harsh about this. If so (which Niantic can) then that is probably what I'd do. It's perfectly fine for you to make laws that don't enable games like PokemonGo, and a verdict against Niantic could be interpreted like that. How could I know that I wouldn't be sued again in that country?

Of course Niantic will just black out this beach and problem solved, but hey that's what I'd do.

Edit: I appreciated your answer and perspective though. I just wanted to say thanks for the well thought out reply.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's trespassing for the players to be at Kijkduin, just problematic to have people there in those numbers. The players may be making individually-acceptable choices, and it's just the collective behavior that's a problem. It's easy to say that people should have the judgement not to do some individually-harmful thing. It's harder to argue that individuals should have the judgement not to partake in a harmful collective behavior (humans just aren't generally good at considering things like that).

Niantic's algorithms are sending people around in a pattern that is causing damage. Since they've been made aware of that, and it's difficult to blame the individual players, it's reasonable to ask the company itself to make a change. Niantic's the only one in a position to solve the problem quickly and cheaply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The Hague authorities said they had been trying to contact Niantic since > mid-August but without success. "We had no other choice" but to go to court, > they said.

Well, alright then. I've had a lot of luck influencing outcomes by sending legal sounding cease and desist letters from legal sounding domain names I own.

But that was last decade, now I just complain on twitter. Super effective.

<comment><USER6> `now I just complain on twitter. Super effective.`

I still find twitter the best way to get comcast to lower my bill :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" The volume of players roaming the beaches in the so-called Pokémon capital of the Netherlands have prompted concern over the potential damage being done to the protected dunes surrounding the area.

The authorities now "want to ban these small virtual animals in protected areas and in the streets from 11:00 pm to 7:00 am," the municipality said in a statement."_

Why not ban visitors in these areas and during these times instead? Is it a matter of managing the volume of people? Why not issue limited quantities of walking permits in these areas? Going after a game maker seems like the wrong approach to addressing the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I set up a game on your street which attracts 100s of players and you and your neighbors struggle to find a parking on your street and get home then what would you do? Would your solution be to set up complex rules for visitors and parking tickets, or would you just tell the players to go and play somewhere else because they actually don't care if they play on your street or in the park? Sometimes its better so keep it to simple solutions, don't you think so?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Land of the frivolous lawsuits, indeed. I wonder how many there would be if the loser paid the defendant's court costs.</comment>


Stop unaccountable, censor-friendly ITU from taking control of the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/15/act-now-to-stop-unaccountable.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER2> Here's a somewhat different take on this perennial scare story: <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/16/greenpeace_itu/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the link. I posted the original link because I was genuinely confused about the story, and was hoping that someone would help shed some light on it. Frankly I had never heard of the ITU before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Without watching the video or looking at any of the other content on the <http://www.whatistheitu.org/> web site, I'm not willing to sign the petition, and here's why:

"Fight for the Future and Center for Rights (our 501c3) may contact you about related campaigns."

In the immortal words of Lemongrab, "Unacceptable!"</comment>