350k Books: House collapsing under the weight - <AUTHOR> http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/09/house-collapsing-weight-books?cat=books&type=article

<comment><USER2> My parents suffer from a much smaller-scale version of this problem. The quantity of books is probably only in the hundreds or thousands altogether so there's no threat of collapse; however, the living space is tiny, and doing anything to sort, donate, or sell the books is exhausting, particularly since some are still "keepers" so there's tremendous debate over which ones to try to move out. On a good, dedicated, full-time day of this one might be able to get a dozen or so into the hands of a new owner.

Fortunately, I think a lot of it will be replaceable with a Kindle in the near future, which will make it much easier to start moving them out.</comment>


Hints on Dark Matter and a Wealth of Planets - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/science/09planets.html?src=twr <comment><USER2> Brilliant:

"An Earth-like planet — that is to say, one that is the right temperature for water and thus life as we know it — would take about a year to complete a circuit around a star like the Sun."</comment>


The Universe Is as Spooky as Einstein Thought - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/spooky-action-at-a-distance/516201/?utm_source=atlfb&single_page=true <comment><USER2> I am constantly amazed at the ideas physicists will come up with to cast the universe as predictable and deterministic.</comment>


Show HN: Greta, our script for decentralized data distribution - <AUTHOR> https://greta.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone. I'm Dennis, one of the founders of Greta, a small startup from Sweden. We currently support video (dash, hls, mp4), audio, images and arbitrary data. Happy to respond to any questions or comments you have! :)

<comment><USER2> Looks Very cool, a toolkit to build all kinds of things. Does it work with dynamically changing objects, e.g. for transmitting an image from one user to a group of others?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! The way it's built is that you could add an image to a site and the users on that site would then distribute the image in a decentalized network amongst them. There is no way to post things from one user to others without first adding to a site with the script on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea, that should be doable. Must admit we haven't tried exactly that, but it works fine with dynamically added pictures.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bye lands orders for nearly 300 electric planes - <AUTHOR> https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/april/11/orders-for-eflyer-hit-300 <comment><USER2> This is cool indeed, but don't get too excited - this is a puff piece touting (220, not 300) preorders that aren't yet real orders and might never be.

The plane is not FAA certified yet (the first and only prototype flew in February), and the 4 seater (which accounts for half of the 220 preorders) won't fly until 2022, and then will have to seek FAA certification too.[1]

Electric motors and batteries have a long way to go to even come close to power density and weight of kerosene or gasoline aviation engines.[2] Batteries also don't get lighter with reduced charge - something most aircraft rely on with designs and efficiency (ie. 500lbs of batteries weigh the same when nearly empty).

It's also notoriously difficult and extremely expensive to certify new engine types for general aviation commercial pre-built's - which is part of the reason majority of modern GA aircraft still use very old engine designs (just not worth the investment from the manufactures). You can't just show it works... it has to be proven to work in a number of extreme situations and for very long duration with extreme reliability.

Getting a new engine type into an Experimental Type Aircraft is much, much easier...

I'd also hope the motor electrical system is fully isolated and separate from the aircraft's other electrical systems (maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen anything discussing this so far). Electrical problems happen, and losing all systems plus the motor at the same time would seriously jeopardize the safety of this aircraft.

I wish Bye and his company the best, but I'm skeptical.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_Aerospace_eFlyer_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_Aerospace_eFlyer_2) [2] [https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/26919/2294](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/26919/2294)

<comment><USER3> This is wrong on many levels:

1) General aviation doesn't rely at all on the weight difference from fuel burn for flight planning (I am IFR certified and fly Cirrus SR22s). My fuel not burning in my wings wouldn't change anything, as I'm constrained by takeoff weight not by landing weight, and I don't climb into the flight-levels high enough for my current weight to matter (that would require FL22 or above, and I like my breathable oxygen).

2) General aviation certification, while expensive, is far from the cost of commercial cert, especially for VFR aircraft. There is no reason why they can't certify an electric aircraft, and they have funding from Subaru's investment fund. Pipistrel (electro) did it for their ultralight.

3) Of course the motor's electrical system is separate from the aircraft's other electrical system, that's aircraft certification 101 (being able to through the master switch deactivate alternator but not battery power). On top of that 12v instrumentation is (obviously) on a different power level than an electric engine, so the batteries will be different.

IFR certification will require 2 instrumentation power source backups (like BAT1/BAT2 on my cirrus) which really isn't a problem, when you've put a 92kWh battery on a plane you can put 2 0.5kWh batteries as redundancy.

(for what it's worth, I'm currently waiting to buy an eFlyer 4).

<comment><USER4> 1) Ignoring actual question, electrics will likely benefit from flying extremely high as the motors don't care about atmosphere. Fuel burn won't really matter here though.

2) GA certification has sunk so many companies it's become a running joke. It's entirely fair to question their approach of using a heavily modded Lancair Legacy with an ipad for EFIS/EMS.

3) Yea, but again, they said they want to use an iPad as primary EFIS. Seems like a good way to piss off the FAA to me...

Enjoy your 20 mile finals :)

<comment><USER5> Motors rely on air for cooling, so they do care about atmosphere. Propellers rely on air density to "push". I don't know how this plays out in the real world, but atmosphere matters.

<comment><USER4> Motors came be 99% efficient, compared to ICE at 20%. Cooling isn't that huge of a deal. If a wing can operate at a given altitude you can design electric propulsion that will also work there. The U2 operated on a turbine at 70,000ft. A turbine is just a very complicated prop at the end of the day so in theory a large cord/diameter prop or a high speed ducted fan would also work. The actual altitudes were're talking about for GA are far lower though. Most GA aircraft top out below 18,000. Electrics will likely prefer operating at 20,000+.

<comment><USER6> Not sure if the 99% figure is correct, but it is certainly above 80%. Electric motors run quite cold compared to motors that are burning things. Cooling is unlikely to matter.

Now, wouldn't the cold air at higher altitudes present a much bigger problem for the battery? FL20 and up you can easily reach temperatures where current batteries are no longer usable.

<comment><USER7> 90% is the usual assumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These are small, low-altitude, low-capacity planes - because this is a hard problem and you have to start small.

I wonder though - does Bye have ambitions in creating larger ones that fly at higher altitudes? I've thought about this ever since Elon speculated that high-altitude electric planes could be insanely efficient: they don't require the intake that normal jet engines do, so they can fly in thinner air and thus require less power to overcome air resistance.

The main problem being battery density, IIRC. I wonder how that has changed since the ideas were floated some years ago.

I want the super-fast, high-flying, supersonic electric planes please! That could do more to alleviate greenhouse gas emissions than even electric cars might!

<comment><USER9> A propeller works by pushing off of the air. A jet works by exploding fuel. It's not clear how you'll get super-fast in thin air without the exploding fuel part?

<comment><USER10> That's not true. You're describing a rocket, not a turbofan or even a turbojet. Fundamentally, modern high bypass turbofans are just shrouded propellers. Could reach supersonic speeds in the same way using electric.

Lift to drag is about half as good at low supersonic speeds as transonic, so cut your range in half, but fundamentally there's no reason you can't achieve supersonic electric flight. Just need good batteries to get that range...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Spoiler: These aircraft are almost entirely useless outside of limited pilot training applications. You might get 1-1.5 usable hours of flight time per charge. Battery density _is not there yet_ and this is another fake it till you make it play.

To further expand, these will cover about 90% of the hours needed for a part 61 private pilot licence and and another 80-90% for instrument and commercial. The issue is you'll still need a ICE aircraft for some of the XC flights which complicates training somewhat.

Edit: Also, 3.5 hours is at barely-staying-aloft airspeeds riding the bottom of the drag curve. If you're maneuvering, doing practice landings, or actually trying to go somewhere you will not get anywhere near those numbers. The FAA also requires minimum 0.5 hours of reserve upon landing.

<comment><USER11> How many students drop out after the first class or two, or how many just take a class for fun?

Flight schools could still make this work depending on those ratios.

<comment><USER4> Don't get me wrong, these will be great for schools, but I don't think that's what the average HN reader is thinking about when looking at these. Bye is not publishing the important numbers so this whole thing looks a little too much like an attempt to say they're changing the entire aviation landscape when they're just another electric trainer (in a market that already exists and has more realistic contenders).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Impressive stats on the 2-seater: 3.5hr flight time at 1/6th the hourly operating cost of a Cessna 172. Perfect plane for flight school.

<comment><USER13> You think so until you look at TCO. A used 172 equipped for a superset of the training scenarios can be had for 1/5th the initial investment. You can buy a lot of operating costs with the savings.

<comment><USER14> Comparing a new 172 to a new eFlyer the price seems competitive ($300k vs. $350k it looks like?)

<comment><USER13> Indeed, which is part of why most flight schools don't buy new planes at all. I was mostly trying to refute the grandparents assertion that it was a "perfect plane for flight school."

On the other hand, the discontinued Cessna 162 sold for $150k and is more similar to the eFlyer's capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am curious, the aero-engines are know to be reliable but electric engines are considered to be good too. What kind of complexity variation does a battery introduce in providing reliable power vs gas tank. What can be possible weaknesses if any with electric planes?

<comment><USER16> I remember reading that electric motors are much lighter than gas engines for the same amount of power. This difference can at least partially offset the added battery weight.

Also, it's possible to have multiple, small electric motors with no loss of efficiency. That isn't possible for a gas engine. Multiple motors could add some redundancy, and therefore reliability.

I think we're going to see a lot of interesting designs over the next few years.

<comment><USER17> Smaller motors unfortunately means smaller propellers which means smaller swept area and a large decrease in available power.

<comment><USER18> Propellers are generally limited by torque, which is something that electric motors excel at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Title is confusing until you understand "Bye" is a company/CEO's last name, and "lands" as in orders.

<comment><USER20> "Bye Aerospace lands orders..." would be easier to parse, given no prior knowledge of Bye.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shout out to EMRAX, manufacturer of the motor for the prototype eFlyer2. According to the FAA filing: [https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?N...](https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Results.aspx?NNumbertxt=502SF)

[https://emrax.com/products/emrax-268/](https://emrax.com/products/emrax-268/)

Up to 98% efficiency. Up to 10kW/kg. Pretty impressive motor, and few electric motor makers like to compare their motors to this high of a standard.

<comment><USER2> > Shout out to EMRAX, manufacturer of the motor for the prototype eFlyer2

Doesn't seem to be true.

The motor is a Siemens SP70D[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_Aerospace_eFlyer_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_Aerospace_eFlyer_2)

<comment><USER10> It IS true for the prototype. Siemens is really good at grabbing these orders for production aircraft and getting their name in press releases, but the actual motor used for the prototype according to the FAA (who I don't recommend lying to) is the EMRAX one.

EDIT: And EMRAX motors have shown up on lots of other electric aircraft. My day job is making novel electric motors, and their motors are _incredibly_ tough to beat. I have much respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting product. All the discussion about training airline pilots makes me wonder if their value add is they can tune their fly by wire system to have the flight characteristics of a larger jet for familiarity with takeoffs and landings. That might make up for the relatively limited air time the plane can achieve (you don't need a lot of time for training flights per say). Turn around time would become an issue though in terms of how many you would need to sustain a full training day for a given number of students.

<comment><USER22> The majority of flight training in the beginning is learning the basic 'stick and rudder' flying skills. This is the basic characteristics and relationship of pitch, power, roll, and yaw. Those basic skills and relationships help a pilot learn how to get out of unfortunate situations. Training in an aircraft artificially more similar to an airliner would not be productive as they tend not to be as forgiving when pushing the envelope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why all the nay-saying? Give them credit for finding their niche and delivering (on the orders at least)!

</comment><comment><USER22> These aircraft may work as trainers because training aircraft come back to home base the majority of the time. This doesn't solve any type of GA point to point transportation though until infrastructure is built out to accommodate charging. Land at any FBO today and they're going to laugh you away if you ask for an electrical cord that charges these large batteries in any meaningful amount of time. Your product may be killer (Tesla Model S) but don't expect any kind of uptake without the support infrastructure (arguably Tesla's number one strategic move).

<comment><USER24> Battery swapping and offline charging has not been successful in the automotive realm, but it might be a pretty reasonable alternative for aircraft. Even cheap aircraft are so expensive that the overhead of having two sets of batteries wouldn't make that much difference on the overall price, and you could probably rely on a shared pool of batteries anyway, since a lot of light aircraft aren't flown that much.

If battery swapping works then that also opens up some interesting possibilities like aluminum-air batteries that have much greater energy densities than lithium-ion batteries but which aren't rechargeable.

<comment><USER22> I don't disagree that there are many solutions to the problem. The issue isn't a lack of solutions though. It's a lack of implementation. Swappable batteries sound great but does say Million Air FBO at Chicago MDW have swappable batteries for my aircraft? If someone wants to really make a dent in this market they need to follow Tesla and build out the product and the infrastructure to make it practical. I have yet to see anyone come up with big enough investment to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Let's see how many of these 'orders' actually get delivered.

</comment><comment><USER26> > First deliveries of the $349,000 eFlyer 2 (the original price was $289,000) > are anticipated in 2021.

There's a lot going on with DIY electric flying craft as well. For example:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ykW4zk- Hk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ykW4zk-Hk)

Fascinating to see this problem attacked from the top and bottom of the market at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER27> What if the battery used in these planes are like my phone batteries.

After using my phone for a few hours, the remaining battery will be down to 25%. And in 5 mins, my phone will be off due to the dead battery.

Once it happened to my EV. The battery was down to 50%, and then suddenly drop to 10%. Luckily, I was very close to my home.

<comment><USER28> that's because for those cases the power draw is hard to predict. in case of your phone, the BMS might be lying and also the state of health of the cell might not be accounted for, but it's more likely that some apps are juat power hungry. as for the EV, it's doing the same thing as an ICE car, it predicts the range based on your last x kilometers, if you step on the throttle your range will deteriorate as you reach higher speeds and drag increases. a traditional car will start reducing the estimated range as well. I imagine that the aviation industry is much better at predicting and controlling the power draw, therefore the range won't be so unpredictable. it's not the cells that are unpredictable, it's their end user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 3.5 hour endurance translates to about 500-800km range.

<comment><USER4> Negative. 3.5 hours is at max endurance airspeed, probably 50-60 kts and only 3 of those is usable since the FAA requires you have 0.5 available upon landing.

<comment><USER10> About 400km range, then.

<comment><USER29> If you have a headwind, which is very commonly 30 knots or more, then in this plane you are barely moving. So, it would be hard to reliably get anywhere at all.

Training flights are mostly in the vicinity of the airport so speed and range matters less. But you do still have to get places (eg the practice area and back) and a really slow plane is going to make a difference in the number of flight hours you need to accomplish the missions.

<comment><USER10> It's unlikely you'd be moving at max endurance speed if you're going for greatest range. Max lift to drag speed is probably higher, on the order of 70-120knots depending on altitude.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Generating Videos with Scene Dynamics - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/vondrick/tinyvideo/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the technical overview:

 _Our approach builds on generative image models that leverage adversarial learning, which we apply to video. The basic idea behind the approach is to compete two deep networks against each other. One network ( "the generator") tries to generate a synthetic video, and another network ("the discriminator") tries to discriminate synthetic versus real videos. The generator is trained to fool the discriminator._</comment>


Glass Artwork - <AUTHOR> http://www.kitaro10.com/artwork/30-stunning-pics-of-glass-artwork/

<comment><USER2> A lot of these pieces are by Dale Chihuly, who does gorgeous work: <http://www.chihuly.com/> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chihuly></comment>


Hacking Team Caught Taking Over Decoy Water Plant - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517786/chinese-hacking-team-caught-taking-over-decoy-water-plant/

<comment><USER2> Ok, that is an interesting result. I ran a honey pot BBS for a while (kremvax) which was fun to watch folks try to break into but this is more unsettling. Given the exploitable javascript also talked about at the conference it seems like if you were in a tor node you might still be able to do the equivalent of the DNS hack where private addresses are inverse spoofed.

One of the things about radar guided missiles that interested me early on is that you pretty much have to have your radar on for them to work, and if you had a radar on you could find it and kill it (hence the variety of HAARM missiles). Similarly when people are trying to exploit our search engine it is hard to obfuscate since they have to include what they are trying to find in the search query in order for it to work. And now netwar requiring network traffic which has to return to the source to be useful.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you in principle but not the intensity of the last couple sentences... some script kiddie yeah true statements, but in larger contexts...

<comment><USER4> Do you mean that a serious hacker would upload (encrypted) data from a compromised machine to pastebin for later retrieval?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At the end of the day, it is not in China's best interest to harm the US economy.

J. P. Getty said "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." We owe China a _lot_ more than that.

<comment><USER6> Great quote. However you're under the assumption that China will always act in the best interests of their people. You are right in that should China harm the US economy they would enter a massive recession, but who says the CPC care?

Many civilizations (look at some of Africa and the Middle East for that last several hundred years) haven't particularly cared about their citizens beyond collecting tax. This helps to explain why North Korea and Iran do what they do despite the damage to their people.

<comment><USER4> The CPC cares about maintaining legitimacy and avoiding unrest. Their legitimacy rests on continued economic growth.

China has had massive popular insurrections in living memory and continues to have local ones to this day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I don't understand is why systems like power grids and water plants need to be connected to the public internet. Why couldn't the owners of these systems lease some fiber optic cables from the internet backbone operators (AT&T, Sprint, Level 3, etc.) and set up their own control networks that are totally isolated from the internet? From what I understand, there's lots of "dark fiber" capacity that's not currently being used, so it couldn't be that expensive to lease. Or, they could just contract with the existing backbone operators to run these private secure networks for them.

And if that's too difficult or expensive, why not just set up secure VPN tunnels over existing internet connections to connect these sensitive sites?

Anyone have any insight into why this isn't happening?

<comment><USER8> Well, as far as I know "professionally run" (e.g. multi-site plants run by a big corporation with a dedicated network-security staff and so on...) industrial automation networks _are_ using VPNs, isolation of special-purpose segments with dedicated gatways, VPNs and similar technology. This I've learned from what I could see from contemporary power-plant projects.

But "smaller" projects (for example when a few-people engineering firm builds a water-plant with one or two PLCs and tries to give the owner access to monitor it from the office) still just puts a port-forward to a basically unprotected device into the plastic DSL modem/router.

Why's that?

In my experience the guys running industrial automation were very always concerned about the reliability of their field-busses, redundancy of links, possibility of faults. But they only ever concerned themselves about the possibility of someone introducing faults deliberately and maliciously when we pointed it out explicitly. It was something that, in their world of professionally installed point-to-point-links, in armoured cable ducts on fenced industrial plants, did not exist.

And that mind-set is still very much alive in the heads of the designers/engineers but takes a lot of effort to adjust to threats as they exist these days. Without a IT/Plant security department enforcing the rules (to the annoyance of all involved parties...) convenience, cheap hardware, less labor and planning will win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Presumably these are the slides of the BlackHat 2013 talk mentioned in the article.

[http://www.slideshare.net/KyleWilhoit/bh- europe-2013wilhoit](http://www.slideshare.net/KyleWilhoit/bh- europe-2013wilhoit)

The abstract of the talk is to be found on blackhat's server.

[https://www.blackhat.com/eu-13/briefings.html#Wilhoit](https://www.blackhat.com/eu-13/briefings.html#Wilhoit)

Why can those online newspapers never cite/link to the original works? Or at least cite the correct title of the talk, so it's easily googable? It's a pithy.

<comment><USER9> Because it'd become too obvious that most online journos are glorified human clipboards, cutting & pasting from feed A to feed B.

<comment><USER10> no you mean rewriting A to suit their owners agenda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand why these systems need to be on the Internet. If engineers really need to be able to connect to them remotely, those seeking to connect shouldn't be establishing the connection, just requesting that one be established. Like the old modem connections where you just wait for a call at an already known phone number.

</comment><comment><USER12> _The community needs to know there are people explicitly targeting these systems_

Is there any evidence of this? It is possible they were looking for _any_ vulnerable systems.

I would not be surprised if they were explicitly targeting industrial systems, but that claim ought to be supported by facts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Please fix the title, should be: Chinese Hacking Team Caught Taking Over Decoy US Water Plant

<comment><USER13> Making the problem you raise more explicit:

"Hacking Team" is an Italian security firm that has been in the news for other reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is far more important than the NSA bullshit.

<comment><USER15> How so?

<comment> at-fates-hands imagine an attack on the power grid. Now think about a large portion of the US without electricity and it won't come back because these hackers have full control of the power grid.

Be scared, be very scared.

<comment><USER16> Someone would totally have to swap some parts out or something to fix that! What a crisis! Make a movie!

<comment><USER17> _Live Free or Die Hard_ is the movie.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sunlight cuts risk of many cancers - <AUTHOR> http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3081843.ece <comment><USER2> They can say what they want...every other study suggests that the sun is bad for your skin overall....free radicals, basal/squamous/melanoma, etc. Plus, you can get Vitamin D from other sources.

How about the glow from my LCD screen though... Does that prevent cancers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't say every study suggests it's bad. Many do but many also many say that Sun is good for you. Look at this older study for example: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050526091912.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050526091912.htm)

It comes down to an amount of sun you get. UVB is really bad for you so if you soak up some Sun when it's not strong (around mid-noon), getting that Vit D should be good for you overall.</comment></comment>


Relay: Declarative data for React applications - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/622382554568759/ <comment><USER2> Between relay and react-native, we have the potential for a game-change in application architecture. A single repository could easily host frontends for each application target, (iOS, Android, web) along with a backend written in Relay/GraphQL. What's more, static analysis using flow/TypeScript could provide type checking across all applications, all the way back to the storage backend. Exciting stuff.

<comment><USER3> I see a lot of promise here as well. I'm not sure if the world is ready to express everything in terms of graphs, though.

<comment><USER4> I recently noticed that I want something like a graph database for an application that screams for an SQL database, a strict schema and strict constraints.

The reason: SQL, even PostgreSQL with userdefined functions, is not strict enough for me. As soon as a consistency rule involves multiple tables, things. There are some nice SQL tricks with duplicating columns across those tables, whose consistency is ensured by putting them as additional columns into foreign keys. But for my taste this is too much trickery, and this approach has its limits as well.

I hope that one day the Graph databases will be combined with strict schemas that go far beyond XML schema, JSON schema and SQL database constraints. Also I hope that expressing those constraints should be easier, not harder, to read when applied to a graph database.

<comment><USER5> > I recently noticed that I want something like a graph database for an > application that screams for an SQL database, a strict schema and strict > constraints.

You may be interested in (soon to be released) EdgeDB: [http://edgedb.com/](http://edgedb.com/)

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the devs behind it).

<comment><USER6> This looks excellent! Signed up for the newsletter. Can't wait to hear more. Do you have any other available info beyond what is on the site?

<comment><USER7> Great to hear that :) We plan on writing a series of blog posts to cover EdgeDB and some of the concepts behind it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The sheer amount of code required here just to get the trivial example set up is ... a little daunting.

I mean, if facebook are using it heavily, then one can presume it works nicely at scale, but they don't seem to be doing amazingly well at the "make the easy things easy" side of things (yet).

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I wanted to try Relay for a small project a month ago, but getting started seems really time consuming, and the documentation was pretty poor, with just a contrived sample. The architecture seems great, I hope they improve the doc now that it's out of the tech preview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is unsettling:

      class Score extends React.Component {
        render() {
          var {initials, score} = this.props.score;
          return (

              {initials} {score}

          );
        }
      }
      Score = Relay.createContainer(Score, {
        fragments: {
          score: () => Relay.QL`
            fragment on Score {
              initials,
              score,
            }
          `,
        },
      });

Soo, if I understood well, first they create a class and then they create a global variable reusing the same name of the class, in order to create and object that expands the class?

This Facebook people know how to make me uncomfortable. But I guess I could get used, the same way I got used to JSX...

<comment><USER11> In the example you used you're re-defining the class by wrapping it, not creating a global variable...

Consider it like:

      var a = 1;
      a = func(a);

Does it seem cleaner if you use the stateless functions from React 0.14? [http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/09/10/react-v0.14-...](http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/09/10/react-v0.14-rc1.html#stateless- function-components)

      var Score = (props) => (

          {props.score.initials} {props.score.score}

      );

      Score = Relay.createContainer(Score, {
        fragments: {
          score: () => Relay.QL`
            fragment on Score {
              initials,
              score,
            }
          `,
        },
      });

<comment><USER10> Thank you very much for the explanation!

I was confused because I didn't realize that, actually, a class in ES6 is just a variable. Also, I am not used to the decorator pattern. Now it makes sense.

<comment><USER12> It's even worse - classes in ES6 are just functions (their constructors); 'obj = new Class()' is just sugar for 'obj = {}; Class.bind(obj)()'. So if you leave off the "new", you'll end up clobbering whatever 'this' defaults to, which is usually the global window object.

<comment><USER13> Actually, if you leave off the "new" you get a TypeError:

        TypeError: Class constructors cannot be invoked without 'new'

<comment><USER12> Depends on your browser and/or transpiler :-)

That's definitely much nicer than the old way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I havnt really spent too much time looking at Relay, so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but if you want to use the Relay paradigm do you not have to change your backend-apis to return GraphQL formatted JSON ?

<comment><USER15> Yes, but GraphQL is just a thin layer so you can call your existing API's from GraphQL. For example you could start with GraphQL calling an existing HTTP service and go from there.

A nice talk / use case given here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0s935RKKB4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0s935RKKB4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, two independent pieces of web technology called Relay made it to the top of of Hacker News in the same day.

<comment><USER17> And then of course, the recent winner of MHacks 6 [https://twitter.com/mhacks/status/643194428975390720](https://twitter.com/mhacks/status/643194428975390720)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> But Relay was already announced a few weeks ago, right? What's new with this blog post now,?

<comment><USER19> The release few weeks ago was "Technical Preview".

Now Relay and GraphQL have been officially released and moved out of tech preview.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm just finishing my first relay/react app. This stack is amazing. It will blow REST away. This time next year I'd be surprised if people are still creating REST servers for greenfield projects. Seriously, it's a game changer.

The speed of iteration is fantastic since you don't need to constantly create new endpoints/fiddle with the data your server provides every time you want to pull in a little extra data. You also get pagination basically for free.

I can recommend sangria for the graphql server - a strongly typed language gives you better confidence, and it's built on akka-http so it'll be performant too.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've really been starting to love fb in this past year in a way I never thought I'd love any big company.

<comment><USER22> Still, you should read additional patents clause in their projects - not only license terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I feel that client-side pub/sub over WebSockets is a more natural solution to the problem of binding front-end views to server-side data.

For browser compatibility reasons, I do see the necessity for Relay (HTTP being much more widely supported than WebSockets) but Relay is definitely not the end-game.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it possible to use relay without graphql or are they baked together?

<comment><USER25> Relay is much more than GraphQL and GraphQL will be optional in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So there is no code sample only marketing fluff. How does it work , like flex "fx" namespace where web-services are declared in the xml ?

<comment><USER27> Maybe they changed the blog post after you read it, but they link to their github repo ([https://github.com/facebook/relay](https://github.com/facebook/relay)) and the NPM registry ([https://www.npmjs.com/package/react- relay/](https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-relay/))</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/technology/SVCIP_2015_PDFfinal.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> New York Times article citing the report: [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/study-highlights- si...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/study-highlights-silicon- valleys-powerful-economic- mix/?hpw&rref=technology&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well- region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well)</comment>


Ask HN: What's the biggest problem with social networks today? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious about differentiating between causes and symptoms. Seems like a complicated mix of privacy, increasing polarization, centralization/decentralization, ad incentives, just to name a few. <comment><USER2> Companies exist to maximize some measure, and maximizing "social" isn't inherently a good thing. All the nonsense that happens on social media is the same as what happens in real life, but you can't monetize/optimize the real world in the same way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Echo chambers - algorithms are optimized to show you more content related to your personal beliefs and interests. Then monetizes ads related based on your beliefs and interests.

<comment><USER4> I would agree that most recommendation engines are as you described. However, my conclusion was that this is a product of people.

Ad revenue increases with time spent on the site. So the goal is to get people to spend more time, if people genuinely wanted to engage with others of differing beliefs, or be show content outside of their obvious interests, then it would make sense to do this in order to increase the magic "engagement" numbers?

So the fact that it's not happening suggests to me at least that most people are quite happy in their echo chamber?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this line of semi logic pseudo phycology ;)</comment></comment>


What Makes Beautiful Software? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/275689/What-Makes-Beautiful-Software <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting. If anyone truly appreciates "beauty" or quality in software, it's Ole.</comment>


US Judge denies Apple request to block Samsung tablet sales - <AUTHOR> http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/12/denial-of-us-preliminary-injunction.html Judge also considers Fidler/Knight Ridder work from 1994 on tablets as prior art and believes overall value of Apple's design patents is reg. tablets is rather low.<p>see 1994 video at http://youtu.be/JBEtPQDQNcI (from 2:21 you have your rectangular screen with rounded corners as a functional tablet from 1994) <comment><AUTHOR> Judge also considers Fidler/Knight Ridder work from 1994 on tablets as prior art and believes overall value of Apple's design patents reg. tablets is rather low.

see 1994 video at <http://youtu.be/JBEtPQDQNcI> (from 2:21 you have your rectangular screen with rounded corners as a functional tablet from 1994)</comment>


How Plaid Reconciles Pending and Posted Transactions - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plaid.com/finding-the-right-fit-how-plaid-reconciles-pending-and-posted-transactions/ <comment><USER2> It's encouraging to see Plaid making this level of effort to be accurate. It seems like it could be a viable alternative to Mint using something like [https://github.com/yyx990803/build-your-own- mint](https://github.com/yyx990803/build-your-own-mint) (written by the author of Vue.js).

It's scary to think what would happen if one of these services (Mint, Personal Capital, Plaid) had a backend data breach. If they can log in to your financial sites, a breach would mean the attacker would be able to as well.

<comment><USER3> Isn't it more scary to think how many people are so cavalier with sharing their online banking credentials with a third-party app like Plaid?

I don't think enough people realize that when you authenticate with Plaid, even for apps that don't provide "Mint-like" functionality and have no need for your transaction history, you're giving that developer permission to pull your transaction history, personal information, account balance, etc without any additional permission at anytime.

<comment><USER4> "I was surprised the app I gave my banking credentials could read my transactions" seems like a weird complaint, considering there's not that much else legitimate you _can_ do with them. I have concerns about Plaid/Mint/etc. being breached. Less so about the access they have.

<comment><USER3> It's not a weird complaint at all when it's being presented purely as a tool to facilitate money transfer in/out of your bank account.

<comment><USER4> If I'm trusting an app to literally _take my money_ , them having access to transaction data should hardly be shocking.

<comment><USER3> You're giving Plaid and your average user way too much credit.

If the inherit trust is so obvious, then why would Plaid not include a very common step in authentication flows like FB and Google to explicitly tell users what they are agreeing to share with XYZ developer before submitting their credentials (which may be _just_ a bank account number, but might also be transaction history, personal information, account balance, etc.)? They've purposefully omitted this step because conversion would almost certainly tank.

<comment><USER5> I've been playing around with Plaid the past few days and they very clearly list the permissions during authentication:

[https://i.imgur.com/xNPTIzy.png](https://i.imgur.com/xNPTIzy.png)

They even link to a dashboard that displays all the information you are sharing with developers:

[https://my-sandbox.plaid.com/account](https://my-sandbox.plaid.com/account)

That said, I agree that the average user won't realize the implications. Additionally, revocation/deletion of the data requires emailing them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This mostly seems to be required because banks don't provide usable data properly. There should be a way to tie together authorisations and finalized transactions. Any API/interface that doesn't permit this is just broken.

Monzo's API includes a unique transaction ID as well as a timestamp to indicate when (if it has happened) the transaction 'settled'. The open banking APIs implemented by the CMA9 include a BookingDateTime and Status (Booked or Pending) and an immutable transaction ID. It's surely just common sense to do this.

Why is there no regulation to require banks expose a _usable_ API in NA?

<comment><USER7> why would a bank be required to expose this for a 3rd party commercial user?

<comment><USER8> As mentioned on another thread, the UK enforces such an API for the largest banks (it's voluntary for the others at the moment) [https://www.openbanking.org.uk/](https://www.openbanking.org.uk/)

This is part of a wider "challenger bank" initiative. Creating space for smaller, usually digital only, banks to create more competition in the consumer banking market. This was thought to be especially important after the "too big to fail" crash. Directly breaking up the larger banks was never going to happen, so instead they created an environment where competition could (hopefully) flourish.

<comment><USER7> the US doesn't need more banks. The market is actually culling them dramatically- [https://www.fdic.gov/bank/statistical/stats/2019Mar/FDIC.pdf](https://www.fdic.gov/bank/statistical/stats/2019Mar/FDIC.pdf) (number of banks since 1990!)

From what I can tell there are 10x (about) as many "banks" in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminder that most banks still don't provide an oauth api for granting read only access to your account info, so we end up with scraping data and problems like this to solve. Plus there is a ton of completely unnecessary risk created here by forcing users to furnish full access credentials to their bank accounts. It's beyond stupid.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, it's crazy to me that we're all talking about how evil Facebook is for selling the fact that I liked "Family Guy" 15 years ago but for some reason we're all OK cheerleading a company that literally enables real-time financial surveillance on unsuspecting users with a purposefully deceitful onboarding flow that hides any mention of what permissions you're actually providing and no simple way to revoke those permission.

<comment><USER10> On the other other hand it literally takes 30 seconds to change your bank credentials so...</comment></comment></comment>


A Real-World HTML 5 Benchmark - <AUTHOR> https://clubcompy.com/rwBench.jsp

<comment><USER2> How are they doing this?</comment>


An introduction to Wave Digital Filters (jupyter notebook) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/multivac61/wave_digital_notebook <comment><AUTHOR> Equations are weird on GitHub. Use [http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/multivac61/wave_digital_n...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/multivac61/wave_digital_notebook/blob/master/WDFs_in_circuit_emulation.ipynb) instead.</comment>


How do I create my own programming language and a compiler for it - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/84278/how-do-i-create-my-own-programming-language-and-a-compiler-for-it <comment><USER2> I think it's a great question coming from a 15 year old. That's a kid who wants to know and do everything. He'll go places.

<comment><USER3> It is a pretty good question - I was involved on a forum about operating system development and we would get so many people coming with no experience and asking questions in exactly the opposite way.

Pretty much people would say, "I know [VB6|Python|Javascript|HTML] and I want to make an OS. Tell me how"... Like compiler design, building a kernel is one of the most complicated types programming, and none of them had anywhere near the coding skill or experience to do it (or the patience usually - coding an OS for the most part is far less exciting than it sounds - the breakthroughs are great but they usually take intense debugging and reading great deals of the Intel and AMD manuals).

This guy has actually done some research (including reading books!), which was unheard of from most newbies there, so he's doing far better. But if he doesn't know how libraries are made, he should get some experience doing that in C or C++, and will need a good grasp of Assembler if he's going to do code generation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> NAND to Tetris

<http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/>

Watch this video:

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7654043762021156507#>

</comment><comment><USER5> Does the idea of a self-hosting language implementation ever stop seeming slightly magical?

<comment><USER6> Eh, you work on one for long enough and you start to take it for granted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The better (and maybe more interesting) question would be is _why_ people create new languages, i.e. what aspects of existing languages bugged them and/or how do they discover deficiencies which motivate them to create a new language.

<comment><USER8> For me it was a big case of Not Invented Here syndrome that caused me to make my own compilers and languages. It is a great way to learn deep stuff about how languages work, and helps me debug issues that others can't fix.

<comment><USER9> As someone who has to endure the results of NIH, I want to say that such thinking is a poison to the industry.

I wish that, if someone is overcome by the vapors of the NIH disease, such a person would confine their reinvention of the wheel to their personal time and not introduce such silliness to the workplace.

Of course, I wish for lots of things.

<comment><USER10> I got the impression from bartwe's post that the NIH symptoms _were_ confined to personal/learning time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised that no one suggested "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". (The "Little Lisper" suggestion is reasonable if SICP didn't exist.)

</comment><comment><USER12> The concept of Assembly language is not that hard, provided one starts with simpler processors, simple said it's mapping processor codes to 3 letter instructions. Processors nowadays are way more complicated than the ones of yesteryear, my tip is when one really wants to understand is to start with a beast like the 6502, it's a straight forward processor and there is tons of documentation for it, also there are many emulators of the machines that used the 6502/6510. In the process you learn concepts like memory mapped graphics and IO. You can use that knowledge to explore and build on modern day processor concepts like segmented, protected and virtual memory and things like OS/User separation or floating point processing. Compilers are mainly programs that translate higher level languages to Assembly language. A lot of today's languages like Python, Perl or Ruby are not compiled but interpret and bring yet other advanced language concepts like automatic memory allocation and garbage disposal, but also higher up algorithms like sets, dictionaries and collections etc... Start in the recent past like the 80's and work your knowledge towards the present, there is not much use to go further back than the 80's because before that era there were not that many standard solutions for these concepts, only historians want to know about things like mercury delay line memory, crt scanline memory, core memory, programming panels and so on.

</comment><comment><USER13> And not a single reference to Programming Language Pragmatics.

<comment><USER14> PLP is pretty good, but I found it didn't live up to the reviews and recommendations. The chapter at the beginning on parsing just flew by too fast to be genuinely useful. The rest of it seemed to follow that trend of breadth rather than depth.

That being said, I found EOPL 3ed also didn't live up to it's reputation. I don't really know what I'm looking for in an introductory PL text, something that could bridge the divide between the end of SICP and the more advanced, serious PL stuff. I don't know if such a text exists.

<comment><USER15> Have you looked at Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation [1] by Krishnamurthi? It doesn't address your concern about parsing---it's explicitly excluded from the book---but I found it to be a reasonable follow- on to SICP and a relatively enjoyable read to boot.

[1] <http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/>

<comment><USER14> PLAI is on my short list for new reading, but thanks, that's good to know re: parsing.

I actually think that skipping parsing altogether, the way a lot of Lispy texts do is the way to go for intro PL stuff, because you can get to interesting stuff much faster.

My gripe about PLP is that after deciding to cover parsing and scanning, he goes too fast. I might have been happier if he'd skipped it altogether.

<comment><USER16> I wish my list for new reading was short. Amazon wishlist is near 1000 books now :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Two words. Lex and Yacc. These are freely available tools that should (if nothing else) atleast give you solid launching platform into writing your own language.</comment>


If anyone is interested to track the progress of Covid19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ <comment><USER2> This has already been posted numerous times, including less than 24 hours ago.

Here's a post with extensive discussion about the mortality rate of provided statistics. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22432358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22432358)</comment>


London vs San Francisco – back and forth - <AUTHOR> http://jh47.com/2016/03/01/london-vs-san-francisco/ <comment><USER2> I visit SF and Silicon Valley fairly regularly from London (where I live so potentially biased).

I am always, always, always shocked by the homelessness (and the mental state of those poor souls) in SF. People call London a dirty, unfriendly city but I've _NEVER_ gotten any trouble from any of the homeless people in London apart form the usual begging, yet in SF its pretty much guaranteed you're going to get hassled/shouted-at/shoved/threatened by one of the homeless people once or twice per visit as you just go about your business.

I was considering moving to SF to work a while back. Housing is not cheap for sure, it is probably around about the same as London ... except in London if you pay $4000/month you dont get a vagrant shitting on your doorstep.

It is a genuinely shocking situation in SF. I am permanently shocked by the homelessness. It is terrible but no one seems to want/be able to do anything about it.

<comment><USER3> We do manage to spend a quarter billion dollars a year on homelessness in San Francisco, amounting to tens of thousands per homeless person. And that doesn't even count costs that hospitals and medical centers have to spend on ODs, various stabbings, etc. So finances aren't the issue.

If I had to identify the issue, it's that there's a lot of status quo players who comfortably exist in the current state of things (after all, that's a lot of money floating around). The people who suffer worst from the state of affairs (the homeless themselves) pretty much have no political pull or people looking out for their well-being, and the rest of us get shouted down if we complain about having to step over used syringes and human shit as we open the door to our apartments every day ("you think you have it bad? Think how bad they have it!")

Last month, I was walking through SoMa with my boyfriend, and a homeless guy literally came up and punched him in the back of the head for absolutely no reason at all. He walked off, we called the police, an officer came, and his response was basically.. "well, what do you want me to do about it? There's no point in arresting him." Even though the perp was standing on the corner like half a block away.

As a city, we need to decide whether the homeless are autonomous people who can be held responsible for their actions, or whether they are desperate souls who really can't be expected to care or look out for themselves and really don't have any "rights" beyond being treated humanely and compassionately. Only the latter really makes sense in my view, but this in between place of "they can do whatever they want no matter the ill effects on the community, but we're morally required to continue to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at their self-described champions every year with no improvement in the situation" is ridiculous.

<comment><USER4> Is homeless the right word to use here?

This word is used to describe a very wide range of people, some of who are not homeless. Americans are very tolerant. Many have no problem handing a heroin addict cash and actually feel really good about themselves after doing it.

I've walked Manhattan alone at all hours, I've been in the worst neighborhoods of Chicago, bad neighborhoods in Brooklyn, major cities in the developing world alone on foot at night with no other caucasian in sight, all over Mexico, along with many other places and the one place where I am very aware of my surroundings and concerned is SF. I do not live there and never have, so that is as much opinion I can give.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I moved here with my wife from the UK on a H1-B a few years ago now.

Three weeks ago we drove (less than 1hr) to Stinson Beach, spent all day hiking the hills, spectacular views of the Bay, the City and the Farallon Islands in the distance.

Two weeks ago we drove to Monterey, took a Whale Watching boat ride for a few quid. We spent an hour watching a group of Orca hunt Sea Lion a couple hundred feet away.

Last weekend, we drove to Tahoe. Spent two days learning to ski, hung out with friends in our cabin.

This is all in February, the weather has been great. I don't know what we're doing next weekend, but it's probably not something that was in driving distance back home.

It's obviously a personal preference thing, but for me, the lifestyle matters far more than the job. Both me and my wife couldn't stand London any more. It's great for a visit, but that's my fill.

<comment><USER6> Edinburgh here - we've got the hiking, spectacular views (and then some), islands, aquatic beasties, skiing 2 hours away. Even some nice big bridges.

You may have a point about the weather though! ;-)

[NB Obviously I forgot to mention the history, culture, the festivals, an ancient castle on the plug of an extinct volcano, glorious architecture....]

Weather can be a bit grim though.... (and has been particularly miserable this winter).

<comment><USER7> 2hrs to skiing where?

<comment><USER8> Glencoe 15cm of snow on the ground today according to Google.

I live in Edinburgh and have always been able to live less than a 15 minute walk from work, often in my own flat, for very reasonable sums. Everyone I know in tech has been able to afford their own property within 6 years of starting work.

I'd choose here over London any day of the week. You sort of get used to the weather eventually...

<comment><USER6> One of my colleagues, who is from Spain, was struck by the speed of the clouds when he moved here.... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is like Stalin vs. Hitler

London: gloomy, tremendously overcrowded, stressed people everywhere, binge drinking until 11pm and then you're out of luck, spineless european investors, and a cost of doing business so high due to high rents and expenses, that the Startup scene is really a non-starter.

SF: The frat boys have won, the nerds are a long-gone memory, the city is eating itself with brogrammers while america's homeless population of unfortunate veterans and mentally ill, pile up on the streets, looking in on the privileged class. The gridlocked system prevents even basic infrastructure enjoyed by most other civilized part of the world to exist (trains, housing, etc.)

Hitler vs. Stalin.

Live somewhere else. It is a wonderful world out there.

Try Prague for example. Safe, easy, cheap, full of great tech talent. Just to give one example.

<comment><USER10> > Live somewhere else.

There is a catch though - for programmers, London is by far the best paying city in Europe (except maybe Swiss cities).

<comment><USER11> In terms of gross salary, absolutely. In terms of net earnings after paying for the cost of living in London, probably not. I'm quite sure I could double or even triple my salary by moving to London, but my quality of life would very likely go down. For a start, where I live I can afford to buy a house. On a multiple of my income in London I don't think I could do that.

I see no value in earning more just to pass the money directly to my landlord.

<comment><USER12> Remember that your savings are measured in absolute terms. If outside London I'd earn x and spend 25% of it on housing and in London I earn 2x and spend 50% of it on housing, I'm still earning more non-housing money in London. And in the case of paying a mortgage then at the end of it all you sell the house, so the extra expenditure isn't "lost".

Quality of life comes down to personal preference. I'm not sure there's anywhere else I could live (at least without having to learn another language) and not feel any need to own or use a car, the pub theatre scene is probably the best in the world (likewise the museum collections), a huge range of musical performances, and it's the best place to find people for specialised hobbies (netrunner in my case, again literally the best place in the world for it in terms of the community size). Of course other places have their own selling points, but London has a lot going for it if you like that sort of thing.

<comment><USER13> I lived in London for 12 years, and earned good money working in banking. I loved it for all the reasons you spelled out. But then the financial crisis happened, the banks started firing people, we got burgled three times in one year, and I got mugged at knifepoint. We moved out to the countryside where our kids could go to good state schools and found that they stopped having asthma attacks. I earn less money, but I'm much less stressed.

<comment><USER12> It's worth saying that despite what one hears in the media, both burglary and knife crime are continuously falling.

But sure. I think age, kids and general lifestyle make a lot of difference; for a lot of people London delivers more of what you want when you're young, but the countryside is better as you grow older and your priorities change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, I moved to SF in 1994 in my early 20's, which means my bona fides are longer than the OP, but still not native. However, from the greater baseline I can say a few things that won't be easily available to someone having lived in SF for a year:

1) public transit has sucked since well before the tech boom. When I moved to SF Oracle was probably the northernmost tech company of note (not counting Autodesk in San Rafael!) and the center of mass was decidedly in Mountain View. Today center mass is probably Foster City or perhaps Burlingame. Also, because the commute was only slightly less bad (CalTrain in particular hasn't improved much over the intervening 22 years) and there was no shuttle system, very few people chose to live in SF and commute south. And yet Muni was awful -- I worked in "Multimedia Gulch" (what the area around South Park used to be called) -- and typically if I wanted to get to work in any reasonable amount of time I had to take a cab. Today you'd take Uber, but same story.

2) Homelessness / dirtiness were just as present, if not worse. The Mission corridor was much worse, and parts of the Tenderloin have made huge improvements. Not to mention the tent cities around Rincon, the dramatic difference in the Embarcadero, Hayes Valley, and the Presidio. The Sunset and Richmond are mostly unchanged, and Visitacion Valley is still a part of town no one you work with goes to. :)

3) Housing prices -- ok, this is the one place where things truly have gotten incredibly, insanely worse. My efficiency in the city cost $600/month in October 1994. An equivalent space today costs $2100/month. There's a lot of things contributing to this, but I honestly think the shuttles are a huge part of the demand side of the problem. And of course the supply side has many well-documented shortcomings.

3) The number of silly companies getting started? Well, companies are just people, and honestly the number of silly people with crazy ideas in SF feels mostly unchanged. Their motivations are dramatically different, though. Today many of the most silly ones are simply in it for the money. Back in the mid-90's the people with rich fantasy life were all artists of the starving type. ;)

<comment><USER15> Author here. This is fascinating to read! I (naively) assumed that things were better across the board prior to any of the tech booms. I lived in SF and commuted to San Mateo which was a non-trivial trip (coming from the tiny UK) and the BART/Caltrain combination was horrendous for different reasons (Caltrain was unreliable, BART was dirty). I did notice that a lot of the Caltrains were old Japanese trains from the 80s. Also, my rent here in London isn't that much different to my rent in SF, but I'm told I got very, very lucky there. Thanks for reading!

<comment><USER16> I don't remember anything prior to the mid-70's but I have a distinct impression that cities everywhere in the western world were much dirtier and crime-ridden in the past (things began to improve around the 1980s, or Rudy Giuliani time).

<comment><USER17> That's certainly true of the US in general. The standard narrative is that it was driven by "white flight," which in turn reduced investments in urban infrastructure, etc. Like many narratives, there's some truth in it but it doesn't really account for the fact that at least some Western European cities were also dirtier and more crime-ridden than today.

Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993, which did line up pretty well with New York getting cleaned up a lot. However, this was a more general trend even if it didn't apply everywhere (e.g. Detroit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Regarding the "how did these guys raise so much money?" thing. I'm afraid this is mostly just a sampling bias - one that I've experienced as well.

Here's why: the people who forever can't find good talented engineers are usually the bad companies with bad ideas. Getting capital from MBA-educated VC's isn't _that_ challenging or any significant validation of success (although still a notable one).

So you are more likely to come across a large number of the crazy ones who can't find engineers/designers during your recruiting phase coming from out of town.

Once you build a network you will start to be invited to work for good startups and smart people. Good companies recruit via networks until they reach scale.

<comment><USER19> I don't know about that. I'd say over in the UK (and maybe a lot of places outside of the US), investors are definitely more cautious about how much they'll invest. I mean, over here, getting an investment of a few hundred thousand pounds is treated like a decent deal, where it's seen as pocket change to a Silicon Valley investor.

Which all kind of feeds into why getting talented engineers is difficult here. Cause the money you raise isn't enough to pay the kind of wages they're used to in San Francisco, nor market the business quite as much.

And people are definitely more cautious here too. Over in the US, it seems people will start a business or invest in one on the off chance it might potentially succeed at some distant point. Over here, it's 'prove your business is making/will very quickly make money or get out'. And the good engineers (if they haven't moved somewhere with better wages) will probably be at larger companies, which their friends and relatives say is a 'safe' career choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I currently live in London and have never lived in SF but have travelled every year for GDC (games developer conf) for 1 week a year.

I tend to agree with the author. The place is lovely, it's almost like a heaven on earth with almost all ameneties, temperatures and people within a 3h driving time from SF, but for some reason London with it's grey grimey and dirty history has more appeal. Perhaps it's the fact that you can explore and get lost down a back alley, or that your friends tell you about this new bar which started up but is in zone 4 and you just have to see it.

I also like the fact that Tech is an asside and people are key. I don't want to live in a bubble but I love what I do. I admire mingling with the theatre crowd or simply watching the tourists navigate the bus timetables.

I think everyone has their preference, but both are fun for different reasons.

Now if you want a real up and coming tech city, I would suggest Berlin.

<comment><USER21> People generally agree that it rains between 140 and 160 days a year on average, in London.

Do you ever get acclimated to the constant soggyness / dampness, the mugginess & the lack of steady bright sunlight even if you were born & raised there ?

Especially when you have to live in such small quarters without ample backyards, which are puny even by SF standards.

I don't know if Seattle gets such frequent rainfall although the total rainfall might actually be higher [1]. But I couldn't live in a place enveloped with constant dampness. It just drives me nuts. Dryness is something I've to have.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Why-does-it-rain-so-often-in- London/an...](https://www.quora.com/Why-does-it-rain-so-often-in- London/answer/Tom-Goodwin-9?srid=3oHY&share=7e506d3c)

<comment><USER22> > constant

Nothing about the weather in England is especially constant. On average, it rains more than some places. But mostly people appreciate the change — it's nice to have a week of clear blue skies in the winter, but it wouldn't be appreciated if the whole month was like that.

And, of course people are acclimatized to it. People are born and used to living in Greenland, or the Sahara. London is easy!

San Francisco is actually more humid in the mornings than London, year round.

Look at the bottom for average conditions (humidity etc):

[http://www.bbc.com/weather/2643743](http://www.bbc.com/weather/2643743)

[http://www.bbc.com/weather/5391959](http://www.bbc.com/weather/5391959)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _In London, tech does not rule the city. No single industry does. Not even finance._

Apart from the City, which is quite literally ruled by the finance industry. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London#Elections](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London#Elections)

<comment><USER12> The City is one small area where hardly anyone actually lives.

<comment><USER23> Approximately 7,000 residents [1], but over 400,000 employees. [2]

[1] [http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/environment-and- plan...](http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/environment-and- planning/planning/development-and-population- information/Pages/demography%20and%20housing.aspx)

[2] [http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/business/economic-research- an...](http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/business/economic-research-and- information/statistics/Pages/research-faqs.aspx)

<comment><USER24> Exactly. So it kind-of makes sense that those workers are represented in local elections as well (via their employers), don't you think?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very interesting read, but also very sad. I think the local authorities in San Francisco are the ones that have to wake up and invest quickly into growing up the infrastructure to accommodate the influx of talent. Otherwise the exodus will hurt everyone and it's already happening (e.g. [http://qz.com/627414/tech-workers-are-increasingly- looking-t...](http://qz.com/627414/tech-workers-are-increasingly-looking-to- leave-silicon-valley/))

<comment><USER26> The housing situation has been in the same state with the same dynamics for over 20 years even before the first bubble started in 2000.

The vast majority will simply never be able to afford a house there. The only way that could possibly be attempted would be to build massive condos everywhere like you see in some Asian cities. That would kill the character of SF. No one wants to have a huge condominium plunked down into there neighbourhood and I can't blame them.

<comment> david-given Come to Switzerland. Four to five story apartment blocks everywhere; quiet, green, safe, underground parking everywhere, gorgeous and huge flats at reasonable prices, and despite having a pretty high population density it feels way less crowded than my old terrace in the UK.

<comment><USER26> Four to five story apartment blocks is what a large portion of SF is already. The peninsula is just very tiny and everyone wants to live there. The only large scale development that developers want to do is massive condos. Its a goldmine compared to anything more reasonable. Keep in mind this is in the USA the property developers here could give 2 craps about keeping the city an interesting and livable city.

<comment><USER17> Which is why you have zoning which is what people complain about. In addition, it's a lot easier in general to find a relatively undeveloped area and build high-rise condos there than increase the height of multiple blocks of an existing neighborhood by a few stories.

There are probably areas in the Bay where you could build some sort of tech worker arcology if you really wanted to do so and spend enough money. But I doubt people would really want to live there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've lived and worked in the UK most of my life and moved to SF three years ago. There were a few things you omitted in your comparison but probably won't immediately apparent in the short time you were here.

Salary difference. On average Most decent experienced devs in London make around 50-60k pounds which is around 80-85k dollars. An entry level dev in SF makes anywhere between 90 - 120k dollars and most experienced devs earn at least 120k dollars with the range around 110-150k. So roughly a 30-60k+ dollar/year difference.

Healthcare. Almost all the companies I've worked for have covered my healthcare costs so I only have to pay copays - as an idea 20 dollars to see my GP and 30 to see a specialist. I had 8 weeks of physio last year and my total out of pocket was around 600 dollars including a CT scan, which I could pay using pre tax dollars. So the overall cost was pretty low. I also got to see a physio the same day rather than waiting 6 weeks+ on the NHS. My total max out of pocket is 3000 meaning I don't pay anything more than that. Given the significantly higher salary even if I were to hit my max it would still be worth it.

The cost of living is comparable although certain things are cheaper - gas, trainers(sneakers), car insurance to name a few. Food is roughly the same I reckon.

Overall working in London vs working in the US I saved significantly more money - it's not even close. Although a tin of heinz beans costs two dollars so that's made a pretty big dent in my savings ;-)

<comment><USER28> It is difficult to find a well paid senior developer job in London. I'm not sure if this is the cause or effect of so many experienced developers becoming freelance consultants. Rates of £500-700/day for long term contract work with corporate / finance clients are fairly common, so you can easily double your salary vs permanent employment (or work half the time.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can anyone comment on the dating scene for heterosexual males in SF vs London? I've been considering moving to SF, but the male-female ratio makes me think dating will be hard and I do want to find someone to settle down with at some point...

<comment><USER30> I did the whole PUA thing for a while in SF. If you want to, going on 3 to 4 dates per week is doable, 2 per week is easy. Everyone is also very sex positive so getting laid regularly isn't hard either.

After a few months of that I wound up liking a girl enough for more than a first date. We were sort of living together within 3 months of meeting.

That last part happens fast in SF because rent is high and sharing rent helps.

<comment><USER31> >PUA

I'm assuming the person you're relying to is excluding borderline megalomania from their calculations.

<comment><USER30> My point was that if you want to, meeting a lot of women is not hard. Young people in SF date a lot.

If anything, the hard part is finding someone who is willing to commit. Granted, I have a skewed sample because of how I met people, but most of my friends are facing that issue. Easy to date, hard to relationship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've only been briefly in San Fransisco. As a non American I think there is a certain exhilaration with these American cities. All sorts of people talk to you, while at the same time American cities to me often seem quite scary and dangerous, but often in a kind of exciting way.

I remember my first day in San Fransisco in the tenderloin district. It felt like I was walking in a real world grand theft auto with dangerous gang bangers, people yelling and each other across the streets and gangs of though guys on the corners. It was both exciting and scary.

But I also met very open minded and exciting people and went to some really nice restaurants.

But as this Londoner describes it. All sorts of transport and infrastructure seemed absolutely terrible in SF. I was surprised that this sort of tech capital of the world was so run down in many ways. The airport was an awful mess, and subway getting there was really filthy.

I've been to London a number of times. Kind of hard to compare. Despite being much bigger I actually felt safer in London, and it has great public transport. What the tech scene is like I have no idea. But I come from small town Norway so London is way too big for me. My favorite city is Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

<comment><USER33> I've been to SF and Oslo for business. The homelessness in Oslo seemed only near the Nationaltheatret, whereas it was much more widespread in SF. Granted, I was there in the summer and have no idea where they would go come the hard winter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> A tech job in Europe does not mean Berlin or London. Zurich has the ETH university and the biggest Google office outside the US. It is a great place to live and is the only place where net-salaries are on par with the Bay Area.

Salaries are in the range of 7000 - 10.000 CHF / month after taxes and apartments can be way cheaper than in San Francisco.

Zurich is expensive but als tiny. Almost everyone lives "in the suburbs" where the rents are half as much and which only means a 10-15 min commute[1] to town (using the superb public transport).

I am a technical recruiter with a software engineering background and I live in Zurich. You find my email address in my HN-handle.

<comment><USER35> Can an American citizen without a college degree and without a million dollars in savings gain the right to live in Switzerland permanently ("permanent residency") if he can get a job there?

<comment><USER34> If you do not hold a Swiss / EU-passport, it is hard. A Swiss company can get you a work permit, if they can prove to the authorities that no other suitable candidate could be found in Switzerland / in the EU. This can be done if the company really wants you.

So unless you are an expert in some field AND a company really knows you, the chances are unfortunately low. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> favorite bit:

"The world is a big place, and it's really not that unique. It's not a utopia to be built through a technological elite. It's a city, where people live."

</comment><comment><USER37> "London and San Francisco are very different cities; I like London more."

Sorry, but it's just such apples and oranges and talked about at such a vague level in only 1 minute worth of content. It deserves a significantly more detailed treatment if you want to do justice to the topic.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm currently in the middle of a 7 month stint working in London, and I have lived in SF for 2.5 years prior. Funny coincidence.

I don't think Henson is necessarily wrong about anything he says. Hell, I actually like London a bit more than SF for some of the reasons he lists. But it came across to me like he was more homesick than anything.

I'm curious what industry he worked in, and who he spent his time with. I'm guessing tech based on the blog and the section devoted to it, but in any case, that alone greatly determines how you'll fare.

Here in London, people are polite and always love chatting up the American, but it is a little hard to make friends outside of work/housemates. The focus on pub culture - while awesome - is a large reason for this, in my opinion.

I've been debating writing more about my experience. Maybe I'll do it to give a voice from the opposite perspective.

</comment><comment><USER39> Not sure why there's such a concentration on San Francisco: it's a much smaller place than London (10m inhabitants).

As a Londoner, I've visited tech companies in San Francisco, but also in San Jose, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale and various other places. They're not all the same.

However, in the UK, a lot of tech companies are similarly spread out around the M4 corridor. Wikipedia says: "this part of the M4 Corridor is sometimes described as England's Silicon Valley" and includes "Slough, Windsor, Maidenhead, Reading, Bracknell and Newbury". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_corridor)

That seems to me to be a more useful comparison....

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't think there's an objectively best place to live. Some people like bars while others like mountains. Some like crowds while others like solitude, etc. And that's totally cool, because we're all different. I've lived 1 year in CA, 2 years in Sydney, 9 years in London and just moved back to Switzerland (where I'm from) a few days ago. All the places I've lived in had their nice and not so nice sides. Guess that, at the end of the day, it's about figuring out what's right for you and accepting the tradeoffs. I, for one, am very grateful that I'm able to choose where to live because not all of us can.

<comment><USER12> Yes and no. Different places are better for different things, but some places do combine a lot of positive factors, and some places do combine a lot of negative factors; I suspect there really are pairs of cities where you can say that X is just better than Y for most reasonable criteria.

Even if you don't believe that, many people on this site have the choice between London and San Francisco, so it's well worth exploring the differences between them here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Thankfully both became great tech hubs, so you can easily avoid them.

</comment><comment><USER42> Have to say this was a good write up. Having lived in London for 25 years of my life I am now living in Toronto on a holiday working visa for a development company. Never visited SF but the things I've heard about SF seems quite true. This is an Apples and Oranges topic, but being a former Londoner I have to say you will never be short of a job in the tech scene. To some degree I feel in the climate we live in Finance and Technology is what is running the heart of London right now.

</comment><comment><USER43> I haven't visited the US but having been to London multiple times, it's not THAT multi-cultural (maybe by British standard). It's definitely the most multi-cultural place in the UK, but compared to Australia where I've been to a couple times with my Australian fiance, it was a bit of a let down.

</comment><comment><USER44> London? Manchester is equally viable for business, Bristol has better quality of life and Edinburgh is top for arts. Each for 1/3 - 1/2 of the cost. Even cheaper is Birmingham, and strategically located in the West Midlands. Who needs the rat race in London if you work with computers?

<comment><USER45> I'm looking forward to Google opening an office in Bristol. Until then, I'm stuck on a daily commute from Bath to London.

The commute sucks, but I couldn't stand living in London (nor SF or the bay for that matter).

<comment><USER12> Google's offices at Victoria? I can understand wanting to live outside London, but surely there are optinos that would at give you a shorter commute - Caterham? Epsom? Dorking? Sevenoaks? Brighton even?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I have stayed in London for around 1 year. It's lovely. How easy it is to find work in London (for a Canadian)?

<comment><USER47> Lots of work, but getting harder every year to employ people without visa.

<comment><USER48> Is it better if you're EU?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder what a similar comparision between London and New York would be... Anyone has a good link?

<comment><USER17> This answer from Kim-Mai Cutler on Quora that I read recently seems pretty spot-on to me. (She's also written about housing in SF.)

[https://www.quora.com/How-does-London-compare-to-New-York- Ci...](https://www.quora.com/How-does-London-compare-to-New-York-City-when-it- comes-to-quality-of-life/answer/Kim-Mai-Cutler)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> He thinks SF is multicultural? By that standard Oakland must be Africa.

<comment><USER50> This comment isn't very good. For one thing Africa is very very diverse (heck the most genetically diverse place on Earth) and full of different cultures, including western cultures.

Also 'Africa' isn't very closed off to the rest of the world contrary to what you may believe. Things have changed over the past few decades.

If you're going to generalise you might want to visit Africa before comparing her to something else, or mention a city that is a more apt comparison to Oakland.

<comment><USER51> They're not saying Africa isn't diverse, they're saying if SF is diverse, then Oakland is REALLY diverse (aka Africa)

<comment><USER52> It all depends on what you mean by "diverse" really. In some circles, it seems to be a code word for "not white people" as if white people are all the same.

<comment><USER51> If Africa was indeed used as an example of high cultural diversity, and we agree it's mostly "non white people", then I don't think that would be an issue here, right?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have any bots running doing some task? - <AUTHOR> I don't know why I have this thought/obsession with the idea of developing bots that do work for me while I work elsewhere myself.
I have a Raspberry Pi that I setup as an "always on server" that I can program. I know why not rent a VPS and have the hosting provider deal with power/connectivity. The answer to this is a dumb "cron problem" where with Rasbperry Pi it worked. I currently use Apache on Debian/Ubuntu.
Aside from PHP/JavaScript those are the only languages I know how to use to do things... I have in mind to start learning Go but have not had the time.
Anyway the other question is "What do these bots do?" Scraping? (taboo)... maybe you run a Bitcoin node and watch demand/sales... I don't know... just that thought of automating something to do something for you.
But what does it do? haha
edit: one interesting thing, I've seen some really shitty, lowest of the low jobs on sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk where you do things like "translate photos of receipts into data" for a couple of pennies... tasks like these I suppose you could try to build a bot for "train a neural net" yeah anyone can do that... but... it is something though... should go back there and see. <comment><USER2> I have a couple of git merge, rebase, mirror cronjobs, which fetch from some crazy svn or mercurial remote, rebase my branches and commit to my GitHub forks, triggering CI and even deploy. Mostly upstream is not able to or too slow catching up with proper dev practices. I also had a combined openssl/libressl repo, keeping thrm up to date, but the CVS bridge was too unstable.

Git rebases rarely need manual intervention with rerere enabled.

Summary: git bridges

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are for your own purpose right? Not for commercial use? Not a bad thing, I'm split on both myself.

Did you have any problems running/setting up CRON? I can't seem to get them to run on Debian/Ubuntu Apache, I had no problem having it run on Raspbian Apache though haha on my RPi.

Do you have some GUI or popup notification that's like "I just did this".

I use Linux with i3 and pop up notifications I don't know how I would do that natively but with Chrome I noticed on some sites like Slack for example, they do popups that appear on separate windows/outside of the browser window. Not exactly related (what I wrote) but thanks for chiming in.

edit: I'm also wondering about alternatives to persistent/scheduled services like I'd like to learn Go eventually not sure why aside from hype/insane performance numbers that I've seen that isn't event relevant to me at this stage but... you know have a "Go process" running non-stop even after exiting back end and it does scheduled stuff... I don't know need to learn more. Aware of PHP approach (what I can do) and no-hup but CRON is ideal/Daemon.

<comment><USER2> Notifications: Cron sends mail automatically. The trick is to silence output in the default case, no updates from the server. So I write to a session log file and grep it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh nice. I always get that 'You have mail' due to failed outbox/not configured.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Accidental layer creation - <AUTHOR> http://jsbin.com/efirip/5/quiet

<comment><USER2> Instead of z-index hacks, you can solve for Webkit (the only browser where this quirk happens so far) with:

        -webkit-font-smoothing: subpixel-antialiased !important;

<comment><USER3> This is what I do... it should be noted though that some devs may not want that style rendering by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a bug in chrome: <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100666>

<comment><USER4> <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=122083>

You will also see other artifacts when placing text with css transforms over any other compositing layer (canvas, elements with css transform/animation etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's unfortunate to see claims being made about best practices for performance and behavior entirely based on what Chrome Canary does (on one platform, no less). If you're going to tell people to cover their pages in z-index, you should at least test it in other browsers to see if there's a performance penalty (or improvement) there...

<comment><USER6> This works the same way in Safari 6 on OS X Mountain Lion. z-index: 1 does the trick. And this is a wonderful advice - losing of subpixel antialiasing on the text while something is animating on the screen was always killing me. And now I know exactly why it happens and how to fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bug closed: Won't fix Please contact your browser vendor.

</comment><comment><USER8> The text in Firefox doesn't lose subpixel antialiasing, at least in my browser.

Also, it's perfectly possible to use GPU compositing with subpixel antialiased texture, you just need a separate texture to store the (Ra, Ga, Ba) pre- component "alpha" vales and either dual source blending, two rendering passes (first to apply alpha to destination, second to add color), three rendering passes (one per color), or a pixel shader that takes the pre-blend target surface as an input.

If your browser doesn't do that, file a bug.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but once the text is cached in a layer that layer might be rotated or scaled or similar, in which case subpixel antialiased text would cause ugly artifacts. Keeping subpixel antialiased text in the layer and re-rendering the layer without subpixel antialiasing when a rotating or scaling animation starts would lead to stutters in the animation.

Looking forward to high DPI displays obsoleting subpixel antialiasing as it leads to a bunch of problems when wanting to create fluidly animating UIs.

<comment><USER10> I don't know what Firefox does on GNU/Linux or OSX but on Windows 7 with DirectWrite, applying transformations to subpixel-AA'ed text is very fast and has excellent fidelity.</comment></comment></comment>


Python language moratorium is accepted - <AUTHOR> http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-3003/

<comment> cool-RR I hope very much that the freed up cycles will be used to improve Python's packaging/distribution mechanism, which I think is the weakest link in the chain of using Python.

<comment><USER2> seconded. Ruby's gem might not be perfect, but it is much more _intuitive_ than anything python has (no idea about "pip" though)

<comment><USER3> What's unintuitive about easy_install, in your opinion? In general, all I have to do to install a Python package is:

$ easy_install «package name»

<comment><USER4> And that's about all it does. You have to update packages manually and you can't remove them at all with easy_install. What's so beautiful about gem to me as a Python dev is this:

$ gem update && gem cleanup

A lot of headache I don't have to deal with at all. I really wish Python would grow an equivalent tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's important to note that improvements to the standard library and C API are still permitted while the language (grammar) moratorium is in effect.

</comment><comment><USER6> great move. Most of hosts I use still are at 2.5 / 2.6 levels. This moratorium will indeed give time to catch up. Probably I missed it - but does the moratorium apply to bugs/security patches as well ?

<comment><USER7> Fundamental language bugs (ambiguity, etc.) can be fixed. Security bugs will almost certainly be the result of something in the standard library, which has not been frozen.

<comment><USER6> cool - thanks. good to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any word whether PEP 380 ("yield from") made it in before the cut-off?

<comment><USER9> It did not. PEP 380 will not see the light of day until the moratorium is lifted. This made me sad while I was writing it, but it is what it is.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=it+is+what+it...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=it+is+what+it+is)

> Used often in the business world, this incredibly versatile phrase can be > literally translated as "fuck it."

Edit: tongue-in-cheek

<comment><USER9> Well; that's not what I meant when I said it. I would love to see PEP 380 in, but I think that the possible benefits of this moratorium outweigh the usefulness of a new feature only a relatively small populace of users will use over the next two years.

Remember, well above 90% of the users out there are still on 2.4 and 2.5 - even if pep 380 went in, it would more than likely be in 3k only (a few years from widespread adoption anyway) and in a release OS vendors won't ship for a few years.

<comment><USER4> Are there some sort of studies or statistics out there regarding adoption of different versions? I'd be interested to see them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how much it was ever in doubt that this would happen, when a 'benevolent dictator for life' wants something it happens.

From the introduction of the subject on the mailing list it seemed as though the moratorium was already in place at the time of the announcement.

</comment><comment><USER12> After reading the PEP I'm still not sure: does it mean that no changes will be made at all, or are "from __future__ import ..." additions allowed (but won't be integrated until 3.3)? [Not allowed - now I see it, my bad]

<comment><USER9> __future__ additions are banned under this. See "cannot change" point 4

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Smart move...Also allows people time to learn the language, and then move into 3 gradually... Go Python People...

</comment><comment><USER14> I wish Ruby would make the same promise. I'm kind of bitter about 1.9.

<comment><USER15> That surprises me. I've been learning Ruby recently (only really working with 1.9), but every time I learn about something that's new or different in 1.9 compared with earlier versions, the new version seems better, cleaner to me (e.g. 'hello'[1] # => 'h' not 101, Enumerators and MiniTest::Unit, off the top of my head).

Also, it's significantly faster, no?

<comment><USER14> Most of 1.9 is indeed "better", but getting to "better" breaks a lot of code.

<comment><USER16> Wasn't that stated in the 1.9 -> 2.0 plan? I seem to remember that code would be broken by the 2.0 language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I actually really think the Linux kernel would benefit from something like this too; it doesn't have to be a freeze for two years, but dedicating maybe every third release to strictly bugfixes and performance and stability improvements and no new features, or something like that, would do a lot of good, imo. Tightening sessions like that where Linux devs ask everyone to pitch in to tightening and accept no major feature additions or alterations would go a long to making things cleaner and faster, and maturing patches before they are merged (because the skipped cycle would allow extra improvement on features before the next merge window).

</comment><comment><USER18> Just two years? I suggest six years.

</comment><comment><USER19> This will give Perl and Ruby a good chance to pull even farther ahead of Python. It would be nice if "we" didn't learn anything about programming that needs new language features, but we do, and it's silly to omit features that make programming easier.

Oh yeah, it's Python.

<comment><USER20> Language wars are so pointless. Spend your energy on something else.

Guess what. The programming language you use is pretty irrelevant to success. It's a matter of taste, what other people are using (If you care), what has convenient libraries for what you're doing.

edit: OK I'll bite:

>> "It would be nice if "we" didn't learn anything about programming that needs new language features, but we do, and it's silly to omit features that make programming easier."

Examples? What have we _really_ learnt about programming say in the last 5 years that requires new language features? Maybe it's just individuals that learn things about programming, and change their tastes.

<comment><USER16> "Language wars are so pointless. Spend your energy on something else."

I think flamewars on languages are painful and wrong, but not pointless. Programming Languages are how we frame our thoughts about problem solving, and I think too many people go with the theory any language is ok.

I hope for the sake of language design that the last 5 years would teach us a lot. Heck, for starters how many languages really have a good story about the multi-processor hardware that comes standard these days. I think leaving that solution to libraries really hasn't served us well.

<comment><USER20> Programming languages shouldn't be concerned about multi-cores IMHO. That should be some magic sauce that goes on without anyone knowing/caring. (Also, 5 years ago people were hyping it up saying we'll all have 20 CPUs. Most still have 2 at most. The need for CPU power on desktops is going down).

Would Charles Dickens stories been any less had he written them in French rather than English? :/

<comment><USER16> Well, all programming is not done on a client and poorly using the many CPUs of a server is not cost effective. I think we are a long way off from the "magic sauce" and languages designed to allow programmers to express their programs in a parallel manner are going to have an advantage.

"Would Charles Dickens stories been any less had he written them in French rather than English? :/" - yep, they would have been - a particular turn of phrase or expression doesn't always translate well. Different languages bring different world views.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>