Free unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.therestartpage.com/ <comment><USER2> Nice one. The Amiga one (the one with the Workbench dialog) is slightly incorrect.

The disk drive reader head doesn't sound right, at least for an Amiga 500, which it ought to be seeing as it's using the 1.3 kickstarter.

It's also not mechanically checking if there's a floppy disk in the drive at the kickstarter screen after the workbench has shut down, which the Amiga needs to do to detect if there is a floppy disk in the drive. The checking mechanism manifested itself as a slight "clicking" sound.

Very cool though!

<comment><USER3> I think there's a typo also in the phrase "All rights reserved" \- "reserved" is misspelled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, when the author reads this, we want:

      Irix
      Solaris + OpenWindows
      Solaris + CDE
      AIX
      HP/UX
      BeOS
      PC/GEOS
      VMS/DECWindows

;-)

Funny thing: I never saw a QNX desktop restarting in real life. The thing was always connected to some piece of big and dangerous machine and restarting would be terribly dangerous. It was the first time I saw machines with a 5-year uptime.

<comment><USER5> Yup, I was looking for

        #reboot

and did not find it :-)

Seriously, excellent. I'll be using this with teenagers on an interactive whiteboard for giggles on Friday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This actually reminded me of the old "It is now safe to turn off your computer" orange text that would come up on older versions of Windows.

Eventually computers began being able to turn themselves off.

Does anyone know what prevented older computers from doing this? And if it was possible, why the design decision was made to make the users turn the computers off themselves? Was it some sort of "feel in control of this new thing in your house" thing?

<comment><USER7> Fun fact about that "It is now safe to turn off your computer" orange text: you were actually dumped to a DOS prompt even though the display was set to a graphics mode. You could type commands and switch the display to text mode.

<comment><USER8> You mean in Win95? What would you type in?

In WinNT 4 the same text is displayed in a window. Though, afaik it is displayed by kernel mode and not from Win32 subsystem.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, Win95 (and subsequent versions to ME). It was a DOS prompt, so you could type anything. I believe typing CLS<enter> would clear the screen and show you the prompt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fun!

I spent way too much time watching the systems reboot after I understood that the dialogs were active. Very nice collection. Curious how this was done. Screen captures, recreated from videos?

<comment><USER10> I was impressed that the mouse changed then I read your comment and spent way ...

<comment><USER9> Appropriate username :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Did anyone else hit DEL or Fx to see if they could get in to a functioning BIOS config?

My laptops firmware has mouse support and an IPv6 network stack. It's terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER12> Oh, the page is interactive; drop downs work, which makes this better than a bunch of static images. Ironic that a page demonstrating ui/ux variation has low usability.

<comment><USER13> Not just drop downs, but you can click on, e.g, restart and the page will restart. Took me a couple of minutes to get it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately GEM on Atari ST didn't have a restart dialog. Otherwise I'd be loudly complaining the page being badly incomplete.

<comment><USER15> A few years ago I pulled my ST out of the closet, hooked it up to a hard drive and turned it on.

Blammo. Within about a second I was looking at the desktop.

This was so much fun to see that I hit reset about 30 times in the next minute or so. Reset. Desktop. Reset. Desktop. Wheeee!

Most BIOS-based computers won't get to a single desktop in that amount of time. I don't know what they're doing, but most of it is not useful to me.

<comment><USER14> I wish I had a hard drive for my Atari back in the day :) Had to survive with extra SF314 drive. Fortunately there was a SM124 monitor to accompany my Philips CM 8833 at least.

1040STFM is still stored inside a waterproof plastic box along with few hundred floppy disks and extra floppy drive. Seemed to be working a few years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is it that looking at those old computers fill me with the hope of what can be (the oldest of the set), and as the things get newer, I loose that feeling?

QBasic was killed when? When was it that a computer became a thing that did a list of stuff and not a thing that I could make do anything?

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice!

Seeing this page made me notice the professional look of Windows 2000 Professional. I wonder why. I don't think it has to do with the word 'professional' but with the blue color and the white top. Also the gray is warmer than most Windows versions.

<comment><USER18> I would still trade the XP or Aero themes for WINXP2K look any day.

I remember those days at the library, where one could browse the internet, download stuff, but could not run any of the downloaded files. I then figured out that if you renamed an executable into SETUP.exe, it would run without questions. Then the library computers got cluttered with warez, music and games.

<comment><USER19> I partially agree. I really like the way Windows 7 Aero feels, but that classic look and feel of Windows is a wonderful blend of functional minimalism and nostalgia...

It also really reminds me of the 90s and my first computer, an IBM with a Pentium clocked @ 200Mhz with 64MB of RAM and running Windows 95. I got good use out of that thing.

<comment><USER20> Aptiva series? My first computer at home was an Aptiva C6E, 133MHz Pentium with 32MB RAM (8MB for video) and Win95. Also had the Mwave card, which was IBM's interesting and novel combination modem/sound card. Got it in 1997 and only got rid of it last year. :P

<comment><USER19> Actually - yes. It was an Aptiva S. Actually I still have the Joystick and keyboard that came with that computer, they are pretty solid.

I played a lot of MechWarrior 2 and SimCity 2000 on that thing. I was still a kid in the 90's. It kicked around in my house until 2000/2001 when it was finally replaced with a Dell Dimension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tried to reboot Windows ME but it crashed.

<comment><USER22> From my vague memories of running Windows ME, that's expected behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would love to see one dedicated to OS install processes one day, my highlights are the OS X intro videos and "helpful hints" provided during an install of Windows XP.

</comment><comment><USER24> Surprisingly this is actually really interesting.

Nice to see OS/2 in there!

<comment><USER25> My thought when I saw MS OS/2 1.3: "Hey, an old version!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice!

Suggestion: BeOS, old (~1998) Linux distros RedHat/SuSE

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm not seeing SGI Irix!

<comment><USER27> 2nd vote for Irix. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's funny that OS shutdown time has seemed to be increasing over the years, despite Moore's law.

(I admit I sometimes just hold down the power switch rather than go through the agony of a proper reboot on my MacBook)

<comment><USER21> > (I admit I sometimes just hold down the power switch rather than go through > the agony of a proper reboot on my MacBook)

Please don't do that! Try with an SSD instead.

<comment><USER28> Why should I let kernel panics have all the fun? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> oh, I am missing XP now

</comment><comment><USER30> Wow nice touch with the cursor image changes! This is cool, I love old computer stuff.

</comment><comment><USER31> I know when I'm feeling old when XP is called 'vintage'.

Time waits for no OS?

</comment><comment><USER32> Terrifically realistic in Full-screen mode. Nice one.

</comment><comment><USER33> Beautiful. Needs way more unices.

</comment><comment><USER34> I feel like XP wins this one. Too much text on the others.</comment>


Show HN: Slate-md-editor – A markdown editor that allows live editing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Canner/slate-md-editor <comment><USER2> IMO, the markdown editors that format the text you're editing, but still retain the markdown, are the very best. They're a good compromise between readability and functionality. Editors like this (and typora) that obscure the markdown tend to make it more awkward to change a heading level, for example.

<comment><USER3> I used to agree with this, but since I started using Dropbox Paper as my primary editor, I've changed my mind. I don't need to see the markup if the editor / formatting works consistently.

The different header sizes are immediately obvious without trying to find how many #'s there are. Monospace words and sections are immediately apparent without trying to figure out if i used backticks or apostrophes. And I don't want to "Preview", even if it's a live Preview. I want to see my fully formatted document as I type it without switching context.

On that note, one thing I wish _all_ markdown editors would pick up, and have only seen on StackOverflow, is the "Reference Style" links, where you can denote a link using something like [1], and then list the url below the text. I have never once, ever, needed to know and immediately see a full url while reading or editing text. Inline urls actively make editing and reviewing more difficult.

This is hidden by Dropbox Paper with an actual link as expected, but their export still has inline urls, which is standard, of course, but I don't agree with the standard.

<comment><USER4> > ... But their export still has inline urls, which is standard, of course, > but I don't agree with the standard.

Just to clarify, inline urls are one of the two standard [Markdown link styles]([https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link)).

The other is [reference-style][ref].

[ref]: [https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link)

<comment><USER3> Thank you, I hadn't realized that was actually part of the spec. I also hadn't realized how long it had been since I actually read that document.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When a project appears on HN that's identical to one you're working on… always a sad moment.

[https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown- editor](https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor)

Anyway, If you're interested in an open source team wiki built on a very similar editor then check out the underling project, [https://github.com/outline/outline](https://github.com/outline/outline)

<comment><USER6> It means free early feedback. For example I'm working on a JavaScript based editor like Atom and vscode, and when I announce it will be very fast and it will be possible to edit GB sized files without any lag. And it will be very thin, less then 10 MB in size. And use less then 100 MB of memory. If it wasn't for the other similar projects I would have no idea about these requirements.

<comment><USER7> I don't want to sound like a jerk, but you didn't know people like things to be fast and memory efficient _before_ the dumpster fire collection of web view "code editors" became popular?

<comment><USER6> I used to worry too back when I only had a few MB. But now I have several GB's of memory on my dev machine. Also I have not heard people complain about Ecipse et-al, but when it comes to the web and JavaScript it has to be fast, or it will be "slow because of JavaScript".

<comment><USER7> I have 16GB of memory, and I use a java IDE. It uses _more_ memory than the javascript toy editors do, but it does _so much more_.

If you just want a text editor, there are dozens of native ones for each platform that don't require java or javascript and are fast.

It's when you want stuff like advanced code intel, refactoring, etc that the likes of JetBrains products make the memory usage a good trade off.

Using a boat load of ram to render a text file slowly with no more features than textmate or kedit or what have you "because electron" is fucking stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're interested in customizing a web-based (rich) text-editor, I can't recommend enough the underlying library, SlateJS ([http://slatejs.org](http://slatejs.org)).

I've been relying extensively on it for a quite big project, it's been a pleasure to use. Especially if you need to change the editor's content programmatically.

<comment><USER9> SlateJS is a really neat way to handle rich text editing. I worked shortly on a project to build a rich email client with SlateJS being the underlying library to power the editor. This introduced some interesting issues though around finding the correct way to serialize and deserialize the html due the way that slates core plugins normalize the slate state when working with the different node types (block, inline, mark, text).

The main issue is how to properly associated each html element to a node type, and fit within the core plugin normalization. This is difficult for having to deal with arbitrary html coming from all the different kinds of email client that choose to represent the html structure in their own unique way. However, this is also where SlateJS shines I believe, as you can just normalize all the different html formats into a single representation.

strong, b, font[style="font-weight:*"], etc => Mark Bold

The library has probably changed quite a bit (last I used it was v0.21), so I don't know if my issues are even there anymore, or have changed in some way since.

Overall though, SlateJS is a really neat project, and really fairly simple, and allows for some awesome things to happen in text editors that previous I would believe to be fairly complicated. This is all thanks to the fact that nodes in the slate state can be rendered as rich ReactJS components.

A simple example of this for our use cases was around using template variables in an html email template. I never got around to actually doing this bit, but a variable could be it's own unique node type in the slate state, and allow us to inject a special react component that would make working with the variables much nicer for our users. In the production editor at the time, these variables were just handle bars `{{ first_name }}`, which a lot of customers accidentally would mess up as they had to write out the syntax.

With SlateJS the vision was to simply render a Variable component that would serialize back down into handle bars, or later down the road take the json serialization of the slate state and render that into our own html for sending out.

I really like the patterns SlateJS uses, and I'm excited for any future projects that will allow me to work with it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's working as I'd expect it to, which is good. The only problem I have with it is how it slows down when there's much markdown.

For casual editing though, I still prefer working with a raw markdown file with a live preview. Simply because I feel like I have full control over styling. I can remove bold from text without removing the text itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason we are developing this markdown live editor is that companies have some non-tech editors, for them raw markdown is hard for them to learn, write without real-time feedback.

<comment><USER11> It'd be interesting to learn more about what exactly these non-tech editors (that are somehow writing for the web on computing machines) find difficult about Markdown.

Markdown was designed to be really, really, really easy to write. But it was designed by techies based on their own experience mostly. Maybe there's a better, simpler MarkPopular that can be used by a wider user base.

<comment><USER12> Two things that tripped up my users (and sometimes me) and made a live-preview essential were:

\- Links and images. ![]() and []() are something you'll see people consistently reverse.

\- Nesting markdown in a list, like images and codeblocks. And forgetting that two newlines will end the list which can create an unobvious result in the live preview.

Markdown is easy to write (unlike BBCode) but not always simple to remember, format, or reason about with its strict whitespace rules (unlike BBCode).

<comment><USER13> _> []() are something you'll see people consistently reverse._

Yeah, I've seen this. To help people remember (not ideal, but useful) is the phrase "Robot brackets for human text, human brackets for robot text."

No idea why it helps, you'd expect the reverse to be equally memorable, but it seems to stick with people.

<comment><USER12> Heh, and then one still accidentally writes !()[] or ()[].

The other nuisance for my users was that the [] text is optional (and relatively worthless from user POV) in ![]() but not []().

I wonder if `!<url>` for images would've been nice alongside `<url>`.

Reddit + the Reddit Enhancement Suite browse plugin have a decent middleground where all urls are autolinked but image urls have additional expand/collapse UI.

<comment><USER14> > the other nuisance for my users was that the [] text is optional (and > relatively worthless from user POV) in ![]() but not []().

Is it not converted to an alt attribute in the rendered HTML?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks decent but some odd things happen.

I don't appear to be able to put more than one formatted section in a paragraph. The first one works and the second doesn't.

Here's an example with two paragraphs, firstly with bold followed by italic and second vice versa.

[https://i.imgur.com/QKEz7qM.png](https://i.imgur.com/QKEz7qM.png)

Edit. Also, it appears to add unintended spaces around those formatted words (see `<em> dog</em>`). And I wish HN supported inline code snippets.

<comment><USER16> Odd. Just tried it and it works fine for me.

<comment><USER15> Strange. I'm on Chrome 65 on Mac if that makes any difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think ProseMirror potentially solves a similar problem, but is more efficient: [https://prosemirror.net/examples/markdown/](https://prosemirror.net/examples/markdown/) (then click the WYSIWYM radio button). ProseMirror's API became stable a few months ago; I recently read straight through the documentation and was very, very impressed (I'm a huge fan of the author marijnh's contributions to open source, and want to integrate ProseMirror into CoCalc and Jupyter notebooks soon). ProseMirror is of course very low level though...

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd really, strongly, very much like this for the Org file format.

</comment><comment><USER18> I hope to see a pluggable markdown editor sometime. Pluggable in the sense that the syntax (lexer & parser) are highly configurable and can cater to the needs of the domain. Because in effect most websites, documents, et cetera 1) use a certain flavor of markdown and 2) have extensions.

It would be nice to be able to configure a certain syntax and then have the editor be aware of that syntax. Most editors out there currently only work with a fixed syntax or a fixed set of syntaxes.

</comment><comment><USER19> YAME, Yet Another Markdown Editor.

<comment><USER20> NAME, Not ANOTHER Markdown Editor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This sort of editor makes it impossible to edit text. Say I want to change a link or image.. I have to delete it and insert it again. I prefer editors that show a side by side of markdown and rendered text so I can type/edit markdown but also see the output. I think that's a better compromise than replacing the markdown with live text.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why people stopped doing solutions that are universal? Does everything need to have react as as dependency is now?

</comment><comment><USER23> "A markdown editor, that allows you to edit live."

I see this exact grammatical tick, adding a comma where one shouldn't be after a noun clause, all the time. Maybe it's native speakers of some other specific language that tend to do it? Which one?

<comment><USER24> I—a native German speaker—suffer the same tick. Therefore my guess would be German.

Sentences like the one you quoted have a similar structure as those deconstructed in ReadsLikeGerman[1]. The "that" feels like the equivalent of "der"/"die"/"das" and I have the urge to place a comma in front of it.

[1]: [http://wiki.c2.com/?ReadsLikeGerman](http://wiki.c2.com/?ReadsLikeGerman)

edit: rephrased for clarity

<comment><USER25> > I—a native German speaker

It's hilarious that you had a very similar tic in this response, only with a hyphen instead of the comma... :-)

<comment><USER23> But that was a correct emdash! Not quite the same.

In fact "A markdown editor -- that allows you to edit live." would be correct, though with a slightly different meaning, sorta treating the latter clause as a surprising bonus, as though you would expect the opposite if you only heard the words "a markdown editor".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's like typora.io ?

<comment><USER27> I love typora, but this is open source which makes it extendable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have to click just to see what is "live editing". So far, it works pretty much like org-mode.

<comment><USER2> Isn't it obvious from the context what "live editing" is? What else could it be? What term would be preferable?

<comment><USER25> It's obviously not obvious to everyone.</comment></comment></comment>


The controversy around Tim's Vermeer is missing the point - <AUTHOR> https://www.leonlinsx.com/tims-vermeer/ <comment><USER2> The Hockney documentary mentioned is fascinating. He shows works where the painter has reproduced optical effects (ex: depth of field), conclusively showing that a lens must have been used. Wiki has a good article on the topic: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis)

<comment><AUTHOR> What's your take on the pushback against Hockney?</comment></comment>


Here Are the 13 Books I Recommend to Everyone on My Team - <AUTHOR> https://seekingwisdom.io/here-are-the-13-books-i-recommend-to-everyone-on-my-team-8b331f93ca98#.sfy30v3hr <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all,

I wrote this post last night after being asked by a few startup friends about the topic.

Any great books you think I should add to the list?

David</comment>


Interactive Voronoi diagrams in WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alexbeutel.com/332/interactive-voronoi-diagrams-with-webgl/

<comment><USER2> Interactive multiplayer Voronoi Diagrams in Java/Processing. <http://uncc.ath.cx/applets/Voronoi_Standalone/>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of those things where playing around with the example leads to a much quicker/better understanding than reading the text.</comment>


Chairman Elon's Great Leap Forward - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/chairman-elons-great-leap-forward-68f49ffde372#.55l1ayfv8 <comment><USER2> I'm a big Musk fan and think the ambition of his current projects are incredible.

But, my fear with Tesla is that the AutoPilot stuff derails and ultimately kills the company. Not because it lands up being more dangerous than conventional driving but because of the bad image the media could/will paint of the technology as the number of crashes increases. Pushing forward electric cars is important, autonomous driving is going to happen with or without Telsa driving it forward, I don't think electric cars will happen without them getting out the Model 3 and growing their market share appreciably - it would be a shame for that mission to fail because of a feature that is essentially a development of established car technology (cruise control -> cruise control+ -> autonomous).

As an aside, if you've not read the articles on Wait But Why[1] on him then I highly recommend setting aside a few hours to do so as they give a clear (if biased) picture of what Musk has set out to do and why.

[1] [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds- raddest-m...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest- man.html)

<comment><USER3> Tesla's problem is Musk denying that they have a problem. That's not flying.

Tesla needs to immediately issue an over the air update so that after 5 seconds of hands-off-wheel, the vehicle starts to slow down. That will keep the driver in the loop.

Longer-term, the radar blind spot at windshield height has to be fixed. They need a vision system and control system which doesn't treat "unrangeable uniform surface" as "no obstacle". And the system should have a database of limited access highways and refuse to engage on anything else. What Tesla has is only good enough for freeway driving, and it needs to refuse to operate on anything else.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, he's a great salesman vision wise but he is not good at crisis management with front line press - his press releases/blog posts are coming over very poorly at the moment.

Which comes back to my point that they should be focussing on the electric car aspect, let Ford etc take the lead on consumer autonomous for now and come back once they've proved everyone wrong with electric cars.

<comment><USER3> Car companies can't "focus". Automotive manufacturing is about doing several hundred things simultaneously yet in a coordinated way. Most YC-type companies don't have that degree of operating complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am not a huge fan of Musk, and agree with some of the sentiments of the article, but I found the title quite offensive - to me saying, "Elon's Great Leap Forward," sounds like saying, "Elon's Final Solution."

<comment><USER5> That's the intention. The title is being facetious about Musk's denigrators.

<comment><USER6> Referring to events that killed 10s of millions of people (by unnecessary famine, in the case of the Great Leap Forward) invokes a corollary to Godwin's Law. Not a smart rhetorical device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not much content there.

Musk's companies have consistently been late with getting product out the door. (Or, alternatively, they have a problem with top management setting unreasonable schedules.) When he announced that he wanted the Model 3 shipping at 500K units a year in 18 months, his top two production people quit.

The Model 3 will probably be late, and it will probably cost more than the presently announced price. But there's no reason it shouldn't ship.</comment>


A regular expression matcher in Scheme using derivatives - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-regular-expression-matching-in-scheme-with-derivatives/ <comment><USER2> As to why using RE derivatives might be interesting, this if from Owens, Reppy and Turon's, "Regular-expression derivatives re-examined", which is cited in the originally referenced web site:

       Specifically, RE derivatives have the following advantages:
       • They provide a direct RE to DFA translation that is well
         suited to implementation in functional languages.
       • They support extended REs almost for free.
       • The generated scanners are often optimal in the number of
         states and are uniformly better than those produced by
         previous tools.

<comment><USER3> Unluckily there are regular languages where you can prove that the number of required states of a DFA is exponential in the input length of the regular expression describing it. That's why one should use NFAs for parsing REs, see [https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html](https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html)

For an example of such a regular expression, consider

[ab]*a[ab][ab]...[ab][ab]

where the number of [ab] at the end is n-1. Then any DFA for this regular expression needs at least 2^n states, while there exists an NFA using only n+1 states (the proof is an easy exercise that any Computer Science student should easily be able to do on a whiteboard ;-) ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A regular expression matcher in _C_ using derivatives:

[http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/regex.c](http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/regex.c)

Starting at the function "dv_compile_regex". (The source file contains an NFA and derivatives implementation; the top level regex compiler will choose one or the other based on the absence or presence of exotic operators in the abstract syntax.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can we do submatch addressing with derivatives?

I think the answer is yes: extend the definition of an expression to include a recorder R(re,recorded-string) such that D(R(re,),c) -> R(D(re,c),c) -> R(re1,c). D(R(re1,c),d) -> R(D(re1,d),cd) -> R(re2,cd). Eventually you have R(,string), the recorded sub-matched string.

Checking each of the rules with it...

      D(R(∅,s),c) -> ∅.
      D(R(ε,s),c) -> ∅.
      D(R(c,s),c) -> R(ε,sc).
      D(R(c,s),d) -> ∅.
      D(R(re,s),c) -> R(D(re,c),sc):

        D(R(re1,s1)R(re2,s2),c) -> δ(R(re1,s))R(D(re2,c),s2c) | R(D(re1,c),s1c)R(re2,s2).

         D(R(re1,s1)|R(re2,s2),c) -> D(R(re1,s1),c)|D(R(re2,s2),c).

         D(R(re*,s),c) -> R(D(re*,c),sc).

      R(∅,s) -> ∅.
      δ(R(∅,s)) -> ∅.
      δ(R(ε,s)) -> R(ε,s).
      δ(R(re*,s)) -> R(ε,s).
      δ(R(re1,s1)R(re2,s2)) -> δ(R(re1,s1))δ(R(re2,s2)).
      δ(R(re1,s1)|R(re2,s2)) -> δ(R(re1,s1))|δ(R(re2,s2)).

I think it's good: when the input is done, you have a match only if the AST is only made up of R(ε,s1)R(ε,s2)...

</comment><comment><USER6> Benchmarks would be appreciated. As things are, this is neat and I'm curious to read more of the technique. However, I don't see this being used in either rapid prototyping or in hardened implementations. The first because you would just use a language that implemented regexes anyway; the second because performance is important.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow. I've always enjoyed Russ Cox's articles on regexes, but this is something else entirely.

<comment><USER8> The follow up work on _parsing_ with derivatives is even more fantastic: [http://matt.might.net/articles/parsing-with- derivatives/](http://matt.might.net/articles/parsing-with-derivatives/)

<comment><USER9> I implemented a parser combinator library for regular languages in Haskell:

[https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/redgrep](https://github.com/matthiasgoergens/redgrep)

(Still work in progress.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very interesting and I think the performance is pretty good with the right AST. Consider the regular expression "hello".

There is no recursion to take the derivative of this, so O(n): (, h (, e (, l (, l o))))

but with this AST, you have O(n!): (, (, (, (, h e) l) l) o)</comment>


The Apple Watch, Five Years In - <AUTHOR> https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/apple-watch-fifth-anniversary <comment><USER2> And you still cannot use one unless it's "tethered" to your iPhone (assuming you have one). The day Apple un-tethers the thing is the day that I buy one.</comment>


HyperDev – Developer Playground for Full-Stack Web Apps - <AUTHOR> http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2016/05/30.html <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of Fog Creek (having worked there for 7 years). But I'm a little stumped on who this is for.

Without any persistence (Mongo, SQL, Redis, something) this is nothing more than a toy. Right now, the forums suggest setting one up via some PAAS, which obviates the whole "it's only one step" thing. Presumably persistence is on its way, as this is just a beta.

Persistence aside, it's still lightweight for an experienced developer. All of the things listed in Joel's "look what you don't have to do list" exist because they are good practice. In fact, 16 years ago Joel wrote about the 12 things that you need to make good software[0], which, coincidentally, includes almost everything on that convenience list.

On the other hand, if you're just learning to code, not having to provision a server or deal with Git isn't really fixing the hard part. Heroku and GitHub are making that easier and easier. HyperDev drops you right into an active NodeJS project without explaining what package.json is, where you define your views, or even what views are.

This leaves it serving a very narrow demographic, which is often the problem with these sorts of tools. Hopefully Fog Creek will be able to make it more broadly appealing before the shine wears off.

[0] [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html)

<comment><USER3> Even without persistence it has its uses. I have a couple of proxy services on heroku that would fit, for example.

<comment><USER4> And I made a Skype bot. Persistence would improve some things about it but it works just fine without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool tech, fun toy! I hope it is successful. I think Joel should focus on it's toy-like nature, and potential as a learning tool, rather than trying to build this into a production grade tool.

I spent years building tools for this market between professional devs and non-developers. (Backlift.com and then Brace.io) It's really tough. Most people learning to code are trying to gain transferrable skills that can help them land a job. For them, learning git is a fruitful tangent along the path to shipping. Those that aren't interested in building those transferrable skills probably don't self-identify as developers. Making developer tools for non-developers is tough.

<comment><USER6> > Cool tech, fun toy! I hope it is successful. I think Joel should focus on > it's toy-like nature, and potential as a learning tool, rather than trying > to build this into a production grade tool.

Agreed, and I think the latter part of the post (the "FAQ") indicates that Joel doesn't see this as a deployment strategy for professional developers...

"Listen, this is not the future of all software development. Professional software development teams will continue to use professional, robust tools like Git and that's great. But it's surprising how just having continuous merging and reliable Undo solves the "version control" problem for all kinds of simple coding problems. And it really does create an insanely addictive form of collaboration that supercharges your team productivity."

Basically it's a platform that makes a major trade-off: practically zero accountability in exchange for maximum usability. To us professionals, this doesn't seem like a worthwhile choice. However, to those non-programmers or budding programmers which I believe this product is geared towards, it's a step in the right direction. This feels like it wants to be the "Google Docs" of programming.

<comment><USER7> I could see this as a great tool for doing coding interviews. You get instant feedback to see if it works, and you can share the results with others almost as a code resume of sorts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're on the front page of some major sites so things are blowing up a little bit, but we should have it sorted out soon!

Thanks for your patience!

\- A frantic HyperDev developer

<comment><USER9> I'm excited to see this in fruition. I don't know how much of a concern this is but [https://hyperdev.com/about/](https://hyperdev.com/about/) loads an attachment (mime/octet-stream). I've never seen this behavior before so I didn't download it. Win 10, FF 46.0.1

<comment><USER8> Oops, good catch, a CloudFront misconfiguration pushing the fix now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pretty cool, the idea looks similar to `now` by Zeit[1]

Platform as a service has gone from click to get a server that needs configuring (AWS), to get a server already configured (Heroku), and now to write code and get URL without even needing to think about servers

[1]: [https://zeit.co/](https://zeit.co/)

<comment><USER11> Could someone please help me understand why I would use Hyperdev over say JSbin or JSfiddle (if I were only using html/javascript/css)?

Also, would Hyperdev be capable of PHP, MySQL?

<comment><USER12> Because this allows you to run server side code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would be interested if I could

1) host this myself. Something like apt-get install hyperdev.

2) have an integrated SQL database in the runtime. Concept of migrations should be known by the runtime.

3) have a one click deploy option that synced everything to a remote runtime, be it on my own servers or hosted by a 3rd party. Syncing to a runtime with older schema should automatically run migrations.

<comment><USER2> 1) Check out Meteor. It's very similar and can be self hosted. [https://www.meteor.com/](https://www.meteor.com/)

2) You can use your favorite Node SQL package for that. Yeah, the DB has to be hosted somewhere else, but that's getting pretty easy if you're using PAAS services.

3) Yeah, that'd be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like the theme—I'm guessing it's supposed to be reminiscent of early Mac OS and HyperCard? That seems to fit HyperDev's goal of getting up and running quickly so you can enjoy building something.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Looks like we're over capacity... [Get notified when we're back]"

Wish the site wasn't down, but I like this as a way to handle the blow up during launch.

<comment><USER16> > [Get Notified When We're Back]

The email notification during overload is a very thoughtful feature. Awesome UX enhancement especially for a dev service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I see the big potential in having an always-on development environment in the cloud. It would enable better collaboration. It also enables features not possible with in the old way, like easier deployment, ready-made persistence, moving back in time, … .

But for me the problem with them is that the text editor is not Emacs. I guess a lot of developers who are somewhat experienced have similar attachment to their editors and scripts. And it's not just an emotional one: it directly affects productivity.

Not trying to be negative here, but this is really an issue.

<comment><USER4> vi master race! _shakes fist_

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "What if I literally type 'DELETE * FROM USERS' on my way to typing 'WHERE id=9283', do I lose all my user data?"

Nope, you'll just get an SQL syntax error.

</comment><comment><USER19> I feel as a developer I have a personal debt to Joel. So first I wish him and FC best of luck with any endeavor.

It's unclear to me which crowd this tool is useful for. I'm usually using cloud9 for the "deploy a toy now" use case. Between wix, Heroku, google apps, c9.io, github pages, jsfiddle, ngrok... which unoccupied niche is left for HyperDev?

<comment><USER20> Sounds like it would be useful for prototyping / proof of concept stuff (in other word it will end up in production).

<comment><USER19> "Prototyping" is done by developers. We have many existing tools for that use case.

<comment><USER20> This still saves a ton of setup time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really like the concept of this. Especially with node/react I found learning webpack and setting everything up takes FOREVER.

Unfortunately, platforms like these always seem ridiculously overpriced when compared to a bare metal dedicated server. I'd be curious to see how it is priced.

<comment><USER22> There should be plenty of bootstrap projects for node/react to get up and running quickly, e.g. [http://yeoman.io/](http://yeoman.io/)

<comment><USER21> I'll have to check it out. I remember back when I was doing Angular I looked through several and none of them were even close for what I wanted to do. I think React is much more standardized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cool idea, but it feels a little like using FTP to develop in a live environment. The pitch seems to be saying SCM and deployment tools are bad things, but they're valuable and useful tools.

<comment><USER24> Joel made very clear he is not saying anything of the sort. He is saying they are very useful tools for professional development, but sometimes you just want to type some code and see what it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know it's down right now but I used this a couple of weeks ago and it was very powerful. Well worth bookmarking and checking out later.

</comment><comment><USER26> Could't get anything to load.

Got a message saying Hyperdev has hit capacity and to try again later.

:-\

<comment><USER27> same issue for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nobody mentioned AppJet yet? AppJet was exactly the same product, 10 years ago! It was awesome and I hope this product sticks around longer than AppJet did (pivoted into EtherPad and then acquihired by Google).

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

<comment><USER29> +1 Had the same thought when I saw it. AppJet was awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I just checked my own site and noticed I was retargeted with a HyperDev ad; I guess they are agressively pushing this?

[http://i.imgur.com/icNiRy1.png](http://i.imgur.com/icNiRy1.png)

</comment><comment><USER31> Ok they are down and I did read the announcement.

How does this compare to c9.io?

<comment><USER32> I haven't had a chance to test HyperDev extensively cause it's a bit early and unstable, but c9 is like a full-fledged traditional IDE supporting anything you might program while a full Ubuntu virtual machine can install anything your project needs. C9 is open source and can be deployed on your own hardware.

HyperDev is specifically for web stuff and really slickly optimized around that handling deployment and everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am getting a 502 message on your about page (hyperdev)...really frustrating that I get the over capacity message two weeks after signing up for the private beta, I would have thought this would have been resolved by now especially with this new press.

</comment><comment><USER34> It also supports python.

[http://support.hyperweb.space/t/server-side-python-proof- of-...](http://support.hyperweb.space/t/server-side-python-proof-of- concept/94)

</comment><comment><USER35> One more thing...

...is a reference to:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenote#.22One_more_thing......](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenote#.22One_more_thing....22)

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm trying to see what's here: [https://hyperdev.com/about/?utm_source=fcblog&utm_medium=ref...](https://hyperdev.com/about/?utm_source=fcblog&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=HyperDev%20Launch) but all I get is:

{ "status": "Error", "statusCode": 503, "statusDetail": "GetPort: Application failed to start on container cosmic-panther" }

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that - a lot of the same detail on that page is included in the blog post at [https://hyperdev.com/blog/hyperdev-open- beta/](https://hyperdev.com/blog/hyperdev-open-beta/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Oh, and it's free."

<comment><USER38> This is concerning as free tools often don't make economic sense. Even more concerning is how casually Joel treats this issue in the Q&A section. He should know better.

<comment><USER22> Worse than not making economic sense, it opens the door wide for malicious users - I'm sure some guy is already working on setting up JS-based bitcoin miners that just use up these free, no-login servers' CPU capacity, or set up malware sites, child porn hosting, you name it.

The barriers - login, mainly - aren't there to annoy users.

<comment><USER32> I was looking at issues on the c9.io github yesterday and saw someone complaining that he was banned ... after running a minecraft server, slack bots and more lol.

<comment><USER39> [https://github.com/c9/core/issues/304](https://github.com/c9/core/issues/304)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Seems like an awesome tool. For all those pros who are wondering who will use this tool. Let me tell this, this is an invaluable tool to teach programming for web without scaring them with all complexities. And the learners still have a url where they can see things in near realtime.

</comment><comment><USER41> The biggest potential I see with this is with helping people initially learn to program. imo the biggest hurdles with programing aren't programming itself; instead it's getting the proper setup (installing x, y, and z and configuring a, b, c properly)

</comment><comment><USER42> Looks interesting - I'm not a node user myself but will probably take another look once other languages are added. Might be useful for prototyping.

I also found refreshingly honest: > This is still a beta so don't ask me how many 9's. You can have all the 8's you want.

</comment><comment><USER43> The names looks alot like HyperDex ([http://hyperdex.org/](http://hyperdex.org/)). I found it weird that the HyperDex DB was pivoting to full stacked Web Apps.

</comment><comment><USER44> Interesting to see someone willing to trust strangers in their containers.

</comment><comment><USER45> So for folks who've used both, how does this compare to CodePen?

<comment><USER46> 1\. Codepen is front-end only, whereas hyperdev runs back-end code as well (node.js)

2\. Codepen gives you 1 html, 1 css, and 1 js file per pen... hyperdev lets you have as many front-end and back-end files as you want. (Technically you can have multiple files in a codepen by linking to them, but it's not the primary use-case and is not as in-your-face as hyperdev is).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> That was a fast beta invite! Got errors and looking forward to when it's more stable. Curious about pricing -- if this is freemium set up like heroku, will gladly dive deeper in

</comment><comment><USER48> I think the interesting opportunity here is can bring this real-time workflow to professional software teams that use git and micro-services?

</comment><comment><USER49> As Heroku starts to put away free users, this will help a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER50> We changed the URL from [http://blog.fogcreek.com/announcing-hyperdev-the- developer-p...](http://blog.fogcreek.com/announcing-hyperdev-the-developer- playground-for-building-fullstack-web-apps-fast/) to Joel's blog post. We can change it back if people prefer, but it gives more background and is a fun read and there shouldn't be two articles about the same project on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER51> Whenever I use these services they are pretty much never as responsive as a local editor, which is to be expected I guess, but I don't see how this could replace someones dev environment if they're a serious programmer. Big companies are going to want to have a lot more control over the backend and how things are wired together. People just learning will want to know how to actually make things work and not just have their hand held the whole time. For small freelance work this looks like it cold be good, but even then you have to learn the "HyperDev" work flow.

I just build and deploy everything in containers using Vim as my editor.

<comment><USER8> There isn't anything special about the HyperDev work flow. You can take any project that runs in HyperDev and `git push heroku master` and have it running on Heroku, or run it locally in a similar manner. HyperDev gives you an environment where you can update and deploy your code without having to set anything up to get started. You can collaborate with anyone by just sending them a link. There will always be a place for more custom environments, but we hope that HyperDev can serve 99% of developers and people who write code on computers.

<comment><USER52> Hmm. I don't know about serving "99% of developers" without support for at least top 10 languages/frameworks, catering for enterprise (which is, in my country, like 50% or more of all jobs for software devs), and an IDE that has at least the most basic of features... but most of all, I do not feel like the blog post or the site itself communicates in any way the two most important feelings I'd like to get as a developer: 1) I'm in control if I need to be, 2) I understand what's going on. These are of course related, but I have neither the sense that I can control things here, nor that I understand what's so special about this. For working alone my own dev machine is better in every regard with the exception of being able to code away from that machine; for working together I would never let a 3rd party provide glue and choice of architecture, security etc. anyway, since anything bigger would likely be a more serious (not more frivolous) endeavour... what am I not getting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> About as useful as their "language" Wasabi [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html).</comment>


What was that live-updating AJAX domain name generation web site? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Try <http://grabagooddomain.com/> they charge $100, but they have a money back guarantee, if you don't like the names they suggest.

</comment><comment><USER3> instantdomainsearch.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Omar! You're the man!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> www.Ajaxwhois.comm</comment>


IPhone, iPod Apps worth more then Facebook apps  - <AUTHOR> http://latestgeeknews.blogspot.com/2008/06/iphone-ipod-apps-worth-more-then.html

<comment><USER2> Um. Duh. Is this a surprise to anyone? Really? There are really otherwise bright people who think facebook apps are going to be bigger then iphone apps? Really? This is like saying dark blue is a darker blue then light blue. OF COURSE.

Think of the best thing a facebook app can do.

Now think of 100 places where your interaction with an aspect of your environment could have improved UI (in a broad sense of what UI is). Now think how easy it would be to replace the UI on everything with your iPhone. Now think about how much better the UI would be if it were as elegant as iPhone.

In one corner. FunWall. In another, the sci fi future we all spent our childhood dreaming about. This isn't a nailbiter, folks.

Like when a circle jerk is interrupted by an orgy, the facebook devs and their VCs are going to look stunned and out of place with their useless dicks in their hands when the real sex they aren't a part of starts.

<comment><USER3> Re: your last paragraph...I'm concerned. I think you need to step away from your computer and your iPhone and go out on a few dates. Shocking as it may seem, "real sex" is not an iPhone app. You'll understand what I mean, in time.

<comment><USER2> When I say "facebook apps are to iPhone apps as circle jerks are to orgies" I'm not actually saying iphone apps are orgies.

Shortly after people acquired the capacity to represent objects with words, they acquired a higher order of symbolic thought. One feature of this higher order language is analogy. Analogy is a way of talking about relationships between things in the same way that words are a way of talking about things. You pick four concepts, and structure them A is to B as C is to D. You use these concepts to compare the relationship AtoB and the relationship CtoD. If AtoB is less obscure, and CtoD is more obscure, analogy can be used to explain things.

Analogy works particularly well when one of the components is somehow linked to our drive for survival, because everyone relates to that. Sometimes, a writer will use analogy, but in a looser form. An implicit analogy.

I'm concerned you don't seem to understand this concept of analogy and implicit analogy.

In this case, the analogy gets bonus points because sex and iPhone apps are both (different) pretty pure expressions of universal evolutionary principles, while facebook and circlejerking are weaker in their evolutionary significance. In this way, my analogy conveys more then one meaning.

Also, and a more poetic level, real sex is everything because real sex breaks down the ego and then all thats left is everything.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the lecture, LPTS. That was fascinating.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alzheimer's appears to be spreadable by a prion-like mechanism - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/autopsies-reveal-signs-of-alzheimer-s-in-growth-hormone-patients-1.18331 <comment><USER2> Please don't editorialize story titles.</comment>


Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics - <AUTHOR> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14678/ <comment><USER2> "The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect."

Bertrand Russell

<comment><USER3> Great passage, thank you!

I think some of the umbrage between the STEMy folks and the philosophers comes from the educational differences. Namely, math. STEMy folks, especially physicists, take a LOT of math. In my limited experiences, most philosophers do not have the calculus, let alone the matrix algebra, diff. eqs., Lagrangians, or the stats background (anecdata, so please rebuke!). Not that those things are required to do philosophy, but the lack of them limits the philosopher a lot. This is especially true in today's world filled with matrix algebra and stats, err... Machine Learning and AI. We constantly hear about the ethics of a self driving car near a school-bus, but it's all so much jawing discussion and shows an infantile understanding of the machines that are doing the driving. The lack of rigorous high level logic (Godel, Escher, Bach comes to mind) hinders many modern philosophers and puts their discipline off at the separate table for kids at Thanksgiving. If they want to be relevant in the modern world, they need to speak one of the important languages: math.

<comment><USER4> >... most philosophers do not have the calculus, let alone the matrix algebra, diff. eqs., Lagrangians, or the stats background (anecdata, so please rebuke!).

While this is certainly true for many philosophers, it is false for philosophers of physics. The best among them (say, Tim Maudlin, Laura Ruetsche, David Wallace and others) have a very sophisticated understanding of their target science and many hold advanced degrees in it.

<comment><USER5> also don't forget the strong historic connections between mathematical logic, number theory, and philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never understood how some physicists disregard philosophy and do it with a straight face. How else are supposed to understand and make meaning of their findings?

Take scientific realism for example. Roughly, whether our theories have a 1-1 mapping to reality. Are the entities described by, say physics, really exist? Say an electron? Or is it just a concept or a tool we use to understand the world?

A common objection to scientific realism is Pessimistic Meta Induction. Roughly, we've been always wrong about physics and physical entities, even when we made progress, therefore we're likely wrong now (maybe less wrong but still wrong).

I personally find Structural Realism to be a compelling argument -- it's sort of a "third way". Roughly, look, we've been wrong and theories change and evolve but the basic structure of our theories remains intact. Therefore the structure must map on to reality. Full discussion here [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural- realism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/)

That's merely one example of meta questions about physics that physics itself cannot fully answer and only philosophy can help us understand. I think part of the reason we don't have consesus on the interpretation of quantum mechanics is because of this dismissal of philosophy by physicists.

<comment><USER7> > Roughly, we've been always wrong about physics and physical entities, even > when we made progress, therefore we're likely wrong now (maybe less wrong > but still wrong).

This is an extremely good point and one that people very often overlook.

It applies to all sorts of different areas of life.

For example in health/safety, we have always believed many things to be safe (or at least not deadly) and found out later that they were not safe or caused more harm than anyone thought (radiation, smoking, asbestos and more). So there are likely many deadly things today that we don't take seriously and in 300 years our children will gasp when they look back.

In programming, when you are fixing "buffer overflow number 15,452" you have to understand if this bug was going to be the last one it wouldn't be number 15,452. So just like the 14,451 that came before it, there will be more to come. So you should stop for a moment to think at a higher level or consider taking steps to completely eliminate the problem at its source instead of focusing on that specific instance because otherwise that number is not going to stop growing.

In general it's very good to be able to recognise the patterns that have been consistent over a long time and appreciate that the present time is probably not that different from what came before it. Time is going to pass, your present is going to be simply added to the next person's past, and it's unlikely to magically be void of those patterns that have been persistent for thousands of years.

<comment><USER8> > _This is an extremely good point and one that people very often overlook._

A good point to clarify to people who think science is like religion, that it states assertions about the world and those assertions are somehow binding to reality. But that's a complete misunderstanding of what science is.

The ultimate result of all of science is a bunch of heavily abstracted "we've observed that if you do this this, then that happens" statements. Newton's mechanics are a bunch of observations generalized into clean mathematical form, that turned out to be useful at predicting results of further observations. Not all observations fit it, so we added a bit more of maths and came up with Relativity. Etc. There's nothing more to that, and physics isn't first "wrong" and then "right"; it's always striving towards more accurate, more predictive models.

<comment><USER9> > "we've observed that if you do this this, then that happens" statements

The whole endeavor of making science "map to reality" seems wholly misguided to me. Really, it's a set of predictions and outcomes. That's why the phrase "nature of reality" when applied to science irks me. Science isn't searching for the "nature of reality" and it couldn't find it even if it were. Science is about predicting the future ever more accurately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope more scientists, specifically those in the public eye, don't blatantly berate philosophy "because they can't do experiments on important questions".

The incident that jumps to memory involves the science "popularizer" Lawrence Krauss, who berated (although he has issued a non-apology) a philosopher of physics, David Albert, for critically reviewing Krauss's book:

 _In response to a critical review by philosopher of physics David Albert, Krauss called Albert a "moronic philosopher" and told the Atlantic's Ross Andersen that philosophers are threatened by science because "science progresses and philosophy doesn't"._

Peter Woit, Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia, discusses (although, it is roughly six years old now) that here[1], with references. Here[2] is a comment from that same blog post sharing "examples of contributions from philosophy to progress in physics".

Don't mean to single out Krauss on that; of course there are other well-known scientists too.

[1] [https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4623&cpage=...](https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4623&cpage=1)

[2] [https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4623&cpage=...](https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4623&cpage=1#comment-109987)

</comment><comment><USER11> But what is philosophy? To say that physics excludes philosophy is philosophy. Physics, at its core, is based on a philosophical statement. To choose empiricism as physics' main epistemological method is philosophy. Then there is physicists' discussions of the oldest scholastic and philosophical subjects of time and space. And physicists' love of cosmogony, another tradional philosophical topic.

So why physicists claim that physics is not philosophy while the evidence shows that physics studies old philosophical topics? The reason is simple. To hate philosophy is a tradition of the profession. Why? Because physics became a profession when people who used to call themselves "natural philosophers" became "physicists". People like Faraday objected to this change because he thought this reduced physics to a profession like "pharmacists." Like most natural philosophers at the time Faraday considered himself a philosopher.

And there is also the textbook story that physics was born as a "scientific revolution" against those scoundrels and enemies of science called peripatetic Aristotelian philosophers. Since most physicists' knowledge of history of science comes from sidebars in physics textbook they studied at school, they still fight this old fight: physics is the opposite of philosophy because philosophy is nothing but writing yet another commentary on Aristotle. Therefore physics cannot be philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Amongst other things I study Philosophy and find it fascinating. It can really open your mind to a variety of subjects, whether it is maths, physics, business or law. Doesn't matter. There is a whole area dedicated to technology [1]. I started studying it because I felt many important questions lingering in my head, but no satisfying answer.

And the truth is: philosophy does not give to satisfying answers. But what it does give you is a sharper mind, a mind that can formulate the right questions, which can give you so much more insight.

If you come from a technological side and have not wandered into philosophy yet, why not start with something analytical? Start with type theory by Bertrand Russell [2]. Then move onto his thoughts on religion and science [3].

In my eyes, philosophy is beauty and I would never want to miss it. It's very often a challenge, to challenge your own convictions, your thoughts, your way of living. If you let yourself "fall into" it, then there is a whole universe.

Currently I am reading Ludwig Wittgensteins "Philosophical Investigations" [4]. It's almost a complete opposite of what he wrote decades earlier about language, that it is much more than a logical system. What is language? Why does it work? How does it work? It's a fascinating journey into the mind of another brilliant person (who also happens to be a pupil of Russell).

So please, go ahead and enjoy philosophy :) I am all for it.

[1] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/)

[2] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/type- theory/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/type-theory/)

[3] [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.52360](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.52360)

[4] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#PhilInve](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#PhilInve)

<comment><USER13> My experience with philosophy was all undergrad and peaked at the 300 level. That experience is what has led to my belief that the overwhelming majority of philosophy has little of value to offer me.

I'm certainly open to being wrong about this; if I were to judge the field of computing solely by what is taught in undergraduate courses, I'd have a lower opinion of it. However I still got the impression that the most well grounded fields of philosophy are no more related to reality than the more ivory-tower fields of computer science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There seems a difference between philosophical thinking by physicists or at least people who understand the physics which can be useful and philosophising by people who don't which is often not.

</comment><comment><USER15> Newton's famous science book uses 'the philosophy of nature' in its title, not 'science'. I think those two terms tend to have different connotations these days.

</comment><comment><USER16> A related discussion for laymen like me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tH3AnYyAI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tH3AnYyAI8)

</comment><comment><USER17> Physics doesn't need philosophy. Physicists do.

High energy physics and cosmology have run into the limits of what can be tested experimentally. Theorizing in advance of the data has become mainstream. Hence string theory. This is a jobs program, not science.

The experimental action seems to be down at the low end, around absolute zero. Many new interesting results down there, some of which are turning into useful technologies.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> His lecture on this topic:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ0uPkG- pr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ0uPkG-pr4)

</comment><comment><USER18> If anything this seems like an argument for even _less_ philosophy in physics.

<comment><USER19> If physics removes itself even further from philosophy... it will slowly become a cesspool of rigid dogma, becoming blind to reality. Physics, as it is, is already lost in a jungle of abstractions, becoming more and more divorced from the real world.

Mathematical models are simply not equal to real world, even if we use models in an attempt to approximate, so that we can do useful things. Mathematics can never truly model reality. The best it can do is a caricature, and not the real thing.

Without solid philosophy to guide the scientists who drive the scientific institutions, the sciences fall stagnant, because it is philosophy that is the very bedrock and lifeblood of the scientific endeavour, in all fields. Without philosophy, that endless hunt and search for meaning and understanding, we lose our way.

<comment><USER20> Science avoids the "cesspool of rigid dogma" by experimentation not by a priori argumentation.

This point seems to be lost on a bunch of physicists these days who wallow in their derivations and forget that the fundamental revolution in modern science was the empirical method. The silly philosophers who got overthrown never knew it.

<comment><USER21> I'm currently reading a book that talks a lot about the history of particle physics from 1950 to 2000. It amazes me how diverse the scientist's philosophical outlooks were, the only thing they agreed on in the end was empiricism. Given their success, I think that's a strong testament to the idea that philosophy doesn't "power" science the way math does.

Here's a philosophy-free formulation of science: (i.e. one where scientists don't have to know any philosophy)

\- People set up symbol games with rules, that produce symbols.

\- They also set up physical machines that produce symbols.

\- When they match, they're happy.

I think that does a good job of capturing why physics was able to progress so well without concurrent progress in philosophy. At the end of a day, a physicist will have a number on their scratch paper and a number on the meter and the goal is to get them to match. Mainly the role of philosophy is to guard them from any distractions that would confuse them away from doing that, and perhaps to bend their brains into coming up with good symbol games.

<comment><USER22> Except that's unnecessarily inefficient and still incomplete, since it doesn't tell you anything about what to do with multiple games that predict the same symbols, about what sort of games you should focus more effort on, what should you do with games that don't produce the right symbols, why you should or shouldn't modify game rules that fail such tests so they pass such tests, and more.

Philosophy informs these questions. For instance, a scientific process modelled on Solomonoff induction would give you more insight on what kind of games you should set up _and why_ , which games are better than others for the same symbol outputs _and why_ , to what extend modifying a game is a valid approach, etc.

<comment><USER21> Insights on how to write down symbol games that match sensor readings would come from trying to do that, and gaining experience, would they not? It has an empirical kernel: whether or not you are successful at writing down good symbol games. That might technically be classified as philosophy, but since "the art of writing down good symbol games" is clearly founded in a task where you can easily evaluate your success, it strikes me as having more in common with other bodies of knowledge that grew around goal achievement than it does with philosophy.

If you have multiple matching symbol games, maybe just either prove them mathematically equivalent (a la matrix mechanics and Schrodinger's equation), or if they aren't equivalent, write them both down and keep an eye on them until you develop an experiment that can distinguish between them. As far as I can see, that remains within the paradigm of "go forth and match the symbols."

<comment><USER22> > Insights on how to write down symbol games that match sensor readings would > come from trying to do that, and gaining experience, would they not?

But your rules provide no guidance to do so, which would require philosophy.

> As far as I can see, that remains within the paradigm of "go forth and match > the symbols."

Absolutely, I'm not suggesting changing the spirit of the basic empirical game you outline, merely that a different set or a few additional rules would permit you to generate _better games more efficiently_. Blind trial and error would eventually work too, but we ideally want to converge on accuracy and precision as fast as possible. What this means in practice is a philosophical question worth answering.

<comment><USER21> > _merely that a different set or a few additional rules would permit you to > generate better games more efficiently._

It seems suspicious that this is classified as philosophy - it has an empirical foundation! You can even design experiments to test these "theories of metascience:" just check to see how fast the scientists that work according to them produce successful theories. So it sounds like what you're advocating for is a human science (i.e. very difficult to design experiments, but fundamentally based on empiricism), as opposed to a branch of philosophy.

Roughly speaking, the division I am making here goes: experiments plus arguments makes science, arguments without experiments makes philosophy. In this context, I can say, "scientists are only (professionally) interested in experiments and therefore uninterested in philosophy." However if something involves empiricism but is also labeled philosophy, that's just language and I gladly concede that scientists might be professionally interested in it.

<comment><USER22> > It seems suspicious that this is classified as philosophy - it has an > empirical foundation! You can even design experiments to test these > "theories of metascience:" just check to see how fast the scientists that > work according to them produce successful theories.

I'm very skeptical that such a foundation would work faster or achieve more optimal results than an analytical approach. You can keep going meta, but so can I, and the analytical approach will always outpace the empirical one.

> Roughly speaking, the division I am making here goes: experiments plus > arguments makes science, arguments without experiments makes philosophy.

I suppose it depends what you classify as "arguments". Science traditionally produces theories that provide predictive power, but also _explanatory power_. This latter aspect is often overlooked, but it's essential since it provides insights into further possible experiments. If your "arguments" includes an ontology for scientific theories, then I could agree with your breakdown, but notice that an ontology overlaps with philosophical inquiry.

Also, there's a new and growing branch called "experimental philosophy" which includes experiments that test intuitions on philosophical questions, so it's still not quite clear cut!

<comment><USER21> > _the analytical approach will always outpace the empirical one._

It sounds like you're describing and empirical meta-approach: that we should pick the approach that goes the fastest. I'm not proposing that analysis be thrown away, just that it is and should be controlled by empiricism (at _every_ meta-level). Essentially, I'm arguing that science applies to itself recursively: if you take empiricism as axiomatic, then science can "choose" its own philosophy, just like it chooses its theories: empirically.

> _Also, there 's a new and growing branch called "experimental philosophy" > which includes experiments that test intuitions on philosophical questions._

In that vein, you could claim that all philosophy is empirical: _An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals_ was plain evidence that Hume's brain had produced certain beliefs about morals. So, is philosophy of science an exploration of its namesake, or an exploration of the brains of philosophers of science? I say, whenever it has empirical grounding (in the success of science), it works like science and tells us things about how to do science, and when it's inwardly-focused it is just information about how philosophers' brains work.

> _but also explanatory power_

As far as I can tell, explanations are stories that make our brains feel comfortable with the procedures that we use to predict things. Why? Because perfect stories will be discarded without a second thought if another completely unpalatable theory comes along with better predictive power. Story- sentences about this stuff (for example, "the virtual particles pop in and out of existence in the vacuum") carry as much information about our brains as they do about the universe that they're supposedly describing.

<comment><USER22> > Essentially, I'm arguing that science applies to itself recursively: if you > take empiricism as axiomatic, then science can "choose" its own philosophy, > just like it chooses its theories: empirically.

It's not at all clear what "take empiricism as axiomatic" even means. This itself consists of a few a long-running philosophical debates:

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constructive- empiricism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constructive-empiricism/)

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism- empiricism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/)

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical- empiricism](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism)

> Because perfect stories will be discarded without a second thought if > another completely unpalatable theory comes along with better predictive > power.

I disagree. Newton's theories are still widely taught despite their inaccuracy, because their predictive power suffices and their explanatory power is superior to more accurate but sophisticated theories.

Furthermore, there's a good reason why the foundations of quantum mechanics are still hotly debated in some circles, despite the fact that such debates will have little practical impact on most practicing physicists. And such debates over explanatory power have yielded valuable insights into QM, like Bell's theorem which resulted from Bell's interest in the de Broglie-Bohm theory, and numerous other no-go theorems.

Certainly a theory with superior predictive power will be employed _for predictions_ , but it will immediately launch an effort to provide a coherent explanatory framework.

<comment><USER21> Does Newtonian mechanics really have explanatory power? You can equally well describe motion in the language of forces and acceleration, the language of fields and momentum, and whatever other combinations you would want to pick. Textual "explanations" are just (non-unique!) assignments of literary constructions to procedures of prediction.

<comment><USER22> Some textual explanations better match our daily experience, and thus our intuitions, than others. Ask anyone if they are mapping something whether they prefer polar or Cartesian coordinates.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cutting the Cord and Feeling Good About It - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/opinion/cutting-the-cord-and-feeling-good-about-it.html <comment><USER2> It was the heavy advertising which drove me away. When programming has 16-22 minutes of ads per hour, it becomes unwatchable.</comment>


Companies of the future: No CEO, no boss, managed by blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/23/companies-of-the-future-no-ceo-no-boss-managed-by-blockchain/?utm_content=bufferb6e1e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER3> The concept of a DAO is too simplistic when presented in all these examples. An organization has multiple levels and on each level there are many decisions being made constantly. Some escalate up, some don't. You cannot just expect that each decision within an organization will be decided via a DAO's shareholder voting mechanism because what will ultimately happen is, there are so many actions to vote on, shareholders will ignore most. If there were 100 shareholders, 2 voted yes, 1 voted no and 97 didn't vote. Do you proceed? This is why a board exists, to represent the interests of shareholders. How much work do you think would get done if you needed to prioritize things with a large body of shareholders on a regular basis?

<comment><USER4> What about a variant which employs representative democracy? Shareholders vote for members to serve on a decision making board.

<comment><USER5> And then the board selects a CEO to run the day-to-day operations... and we're back to the current system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't see anything in this idea that can't be done without a blockchain. As a matter of fact, organizations based on the same principles have existed for (at least) a couple hundred years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)

<comment><USER6> Paraphrasing Sheldon fron "The Big Bang Theory": "Everything is better with blockchain".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ya'll need to go outside.

</comment><comment><USER8> They talk about members voting on external contractors. This is not really a new concept and it's basically how governments work too. And we know stuff like this is still susceptible to curruption and bribery. The difference is that with a DAO there's nobody to take responsibility, so these problems will be amplified. I don't really think it will work in general. There may be some narrow, specific things that this will work for but it can't replace actual corporations.

</comment><comment><USER9> This documentary "Machines of Loving Grace" immediately comes to mind;

[https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of- lov...](https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving- grace/)

      Part one explores the myth that rose up in the 1990s that
      computers could create a new kind of stable world: They
      would bring about a new kind global capitalism purportedly
      free of risk and failure, without the boom and bust of the
      past, would abolish centralised political power, and
      create a new kind of democracy mediated by technology and
      the Internet, where millions of people would be connected
      as nodes in cybernetic systems without hierarchy. This
      film explores how this myth came to be by following two
      groups that converged on the ideas. One is the small group
      of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s who
      saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where
      everyone could follow their own selfish desires and that
      would somehow create a stable and equitable society. The
      other is the digital entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, many
      of whom were also disciples of Ayn Rand, that espoused
      grand visions of global utopia to be delivered by their
      technology. They believed that new computer networks would
      allow the creation of a society where everyone would also
      follow their own self-interest but that would similarly
      somehow miraculously bringing a stable and equitable
      society too. They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had
      also been a disciple of Ayn Rand, who became convinced
      that the computers were creating a new kind of "stable
      capitalism."

<comment><USER10> I haven't read the works of Ayn Rand, but this quote makes her sound like a cult leader.

Does the author of this documentary have a bit of a disdain for her, or is he merely saying that her readers/followers are misguided in some way?

<comment><USER11> > I haven't read the works of Ayn Rand, but this quote makes her sound like a > cult leader.

Ayn Rand was very much like a cult leader if you read all about her and her followers, known as "The Collective".

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/09/possessed-3](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/09/possessed-3)

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0085E7E3E](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0085E7E3E)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whether the technology can be molded in a way to address the need to make hundreds of "votes" or decisions a day I think is inevitable and it will happen.

I think what this author gets wrong is that a great boss is as _amazing_ as a bad boss is shitty. People ultimately want to be led, they want to learn and be inspired. I don't seen an etheruem smart contract inspiring humanity on its own.

<comment><USER13> As usual, this is a solution in search of a problem. It adds a lot of complexity to re-implement solved problems in expensive ways, while not addressing the very real unsolved problems of corporate governance, none of which involve a lack of technology to record/tally votes.

Look at Enron, for example, setting up fake trading floors, or lying to investors. What happens inside organizations is opaque. This is a fundamental characteristic of public corporations because if shareholders got full transparency, then a rival business could purchase 1 share of stock, or have an agent purchase 1 share of stock, and then they would know everything happening inside of their competitor. A vendor could purchase 1 share of stock, and gain access to competitive pricing information, etc. So corporations are necessarily secretive. They embargo information, and they don't provide a lot of specifics. They give only roll up summaries to public investors and don't release enough information for investors to verify that the summaries are correct.

None of that will change at all with blockchain. This isn't a technological problem, where we don't have a way of correctly tallying votes, or we lack mechanisms of sharing information with investors, so thank God blockchain came along so we'd know how to hold elections.

As long as anyone can dispose or acquire a share in the open market, corporations are going to withhold most of the details from shareholders.

It doesn't matter what protocols the shareholders are going to use to reach agreement or count votes. They will never have enough visibility into the workings of the corporation in order to be able to enforce this type of micromanagement.

Going back to actually addressing the problem -- the current state of the art is to have third party auditor verify the roll up summary statements. This auditor is necessarily bound to secrecy -- e.g. they cannot disclose to shareholders the proprietary information that went into verifying the summaries. The state of the art is to trust these auditors and to have penalties for making misleading statements. However these audits are necessarily a manual and expensive process, as they require judgement to classify millions of transactions into known categories which then roll up to income and balance sheet statements. How would blockchain help here? The transaction is secret, and without the appropriate contextual information, we don't know how to classify it. Is this working capital, should that be booked as revenue for this quarter, should we do a Goodwill write off, etc? But if shareholders can't be trusted with enough contextual information to adjudicate even these types of classification problems, how are they going to adjudicate the hundreds of thousands of smaller decisions that happen every day in a firm? On the other hand, if we are relying on third party auditors, then what do we need the blockchain for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't get the revolution to the n'th degree thing. Companies in the modern world are ripe for really deep chnage (weird oasis of top down dictatorships in a democratic society, centrally planned economies trying to espouse free market thinking)

Ronald Coase' theory of the firm tells us as organising anything gets easier firm sizes will shrink - and the Internet _should_ make organising anything easier - the blockchain being a great low cost such technology.

But - why the total war approach. Why "no leader, no management, totally decentralised". I think we shall see "Programmable companies" arise but this extreme article just seems silly - we will get revolutionary improvements - <USER2> happy and be prepared don't moan it's not enough.

<comment><USER15> It's an exercise in thought and hive management. Will it work? Who knows.

My concern is that while humans can be terrible managers, an automated system that has no checks (depending on how it's set up) could end up being worse if it does not take into account dealing with unforeseen challenges and repercussions if it's dissociated from people.

<comment><USER16> The point is I guess humans can only do so much, and the question now with a DAO is: Can we create Code/Algorithm than can align more people, "better" than a human manager could do?

Even if code only allows for "better" cooperation in some narrow dimensions, if these are important to the participants, this system will win.

DAOs are about scaling human collaboration.

It's not completely AI, but a way to understand ourselves in great masses better than we are able to to by ourselves.

Think about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The blockchain is the new vr. It's only good for a few things but now people are dreaming up and investing in unrealistic uses for it.

<comment><USER18> What is going on?!

Why do they pick the bad examples to serve as the argument for what they are trying to shove down our throats?

What about the Good Boss? The person you look up to, the holder of the company vision, the one that motivates you - even without talking to you? Someone who's there, simply put.

Are they so disconnected from reality that they forget we're talking about people here? Do they think people would want to work for an organization without a head, who's directives trickle down from a blockchain decision in a memo on their email boxes?

There are plenty of examples where the board had no clue what they are talking about, because there's only that much that can be carried on a report.

This is ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is like trying to run a business by having everything done on TaskRabbit or Upwork.

</comment><comment><USER20> I know the depiction of DAO in this article is rather simplistic, but, wow.

The main thing it says to me is that the contractor of the future has to be adept at marketing and communicating to an audience of shareholders in the company, as well as doing their job.

I would guess that most contractors wouldn't make the grade according to investors. After a few rounds of abject failures, I would reckon that the investors would come up with a scheme where they hire someone to intermediate for them.. someone who could better speak the contractors' language in order to deliver requirements. While they're at it, this person could also manage the schedule. Such a scheme would make it so the technician would only have to communicate to one person instead of a large group.

Eventually this intermediator would get so busy that they'd no longer have the time or energy to communicate with this army of people, so they'd have to hire someone else to do it for them...

</comment><comment><USER21> Isn't this basically anarcho-syndicalism?

<comment><USER22> But with a higher carbon footprint

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another thing I'm having hard time visualizing is how would innovation work or how to avoid 'design by committee', we have hard time as it is now to avoid new thinking not getting side swiped by legacy thinking in an organization.

<comment><USER24> A good place to start would be understanding the holocracy model and why it hasn't become more mainstream yet. Companies like Valve and Medium have experimented with flat organizations to varying degrees of success (I believe Medium ended their holacracy experiment in favor of a more traditional org structure).

Personally, I believe decentralized organizations will look more like small markets than companies. You could almost argue that a completely flat organization _is_ a market. What's the difference between a completely decentralized Uber and a "ridesharing market" of drivers and riders whose logistics, contracts, and payments are handled by a blockchain instead of people?

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the pointer.

Good example for Holocracy would be Zappos. Interesting read on their experience around it..

HOW A RADICAL SHIFT LEFT ZAPPOS REELING. [http://fortune.com/zappos-tony- hsieh-holacracy/](http://fortune.com/zappos-tony-hsieh-holacracy/)

Excerpts:

Employees were shocked and frustrated by the numerous mandates, the endless meetings, and the confusion about who did what.

Holacracy created new winners and losers—and it sparked fresh ideas. With experience and expertise de-emphasized, less "typical" and more junior types have been able to succeed. Introverts have benefited from the expectation that everybody speak in meetings.

Holacracy also lacks some crucial elements, such as a compensation process. The system doesn't value seniority or the size of your budget. There are no formal performance evaluations. How, then, do you calculate how much to a pay a person, and for that matter, who makes the decision?

Holacracy's value remains far from proven. Its creator, Robertson, says the process takes five to 10 years to be fully integrated—an eon in business.

Some 300 companies use his system—Zappos is easily the largest—and there have been failures. In early March, content site Medium announced it was abandoning it. Bud Caddell, a consultant who has studied self-management systems, says his former firm, Undercurrent, tried it without success. "I found it extremely dogmatic and rigid and overly complex, and it took attention away from our customers," Caddell says.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Boss" a weird way to spell employment</comment>


Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7258 <comment><USER2> I don't think it's effective to describe pervasive monitoring by state actors as something that requires a technological response. There is no technology end-run around the law, as has been proven again and again.

If pervasive monitoring in nsa style is legal and culturally accepted, then the solution must be cultural, not technical. Either by embracing the death of privacy and having no real secrets, or by convincing hearts and minds of the immorality of the monitoring until it is outlawed and people who do it are jailed.

<comment><USER3> The BCP's scope is broader than state actors: "The motivation for PM can range from non-targeted nation-state surveillance, to legal but privacy-unfriendly purposes by commercial enterprises, to illegal actions by criminals".

Also, the BCP does not contend that an technology end-run around law exist (or that it is desirable). The BCP is about mitigating, not entirely preventing, the threats described: "'Mitigation' is a technical term that does not imply an ability to completely prevent or thwart an attack. Protocols that mitigate PM will not prevent the attack but can significantly change the threat."

Surely, given commercial practices such as HTTP header injection by Verizon and the Pharma saga in the U.K., a BCP that promotes privacy/security thinking in the design of new protocols is a good thing. Which is not to say that attackers, commercial or otherwise, will not find other ways; but let's at least try to increase the bar by weeding out unnecessary attack surface and information leakage.

<comment><USER2> I didn't mean to say efforts to improve privacy through technology are bad or pointless, just that it would be dangerous to do that and only that. The complete solution is technological and cultural/legal. It is not superior lock technology that prevents homes from being burglarized daily, but the threat of legal consequences, although it is a good thing to have better locks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are people scared to comment?

<comment><USER5> Maybe just the generic nature of the problem description. Are they talking about Google Analytics? Cloudflare? Black hats running WiFi access points? Infiltrated Tor endpoints? Forced proxies at schools and companies? State actors? Local malware and antivirus? Rogue apps and browser extensions? Via what mechanisms?

Hard to comment on it in a general sense. There's lots of forms of pervasive monitoring.

<comment><USER6> "Pervasive Monitoring (PM) is widespread (and often covert) surveillance through intrusive gathering of protocol artefacts, including application content, or protocol metadata such as headers. Active or passive wiretaps and traffic analysis, (e.g., correlation, timing or measuring packet sizes), or subverting the cryptographic keys used to secure protocols can also be used as part of pervasive monitoring."

Seems somewhat specific.

<comment><USER5> It's all "what" with no "who" or "how". Wiretaps and/or traffic analysis can happen all the ways I outlined above and more. And by different entities. As far as I know, combating it requires being specific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (2014)

<comment><USER8> Thanks! Updated.</comment></comment>