Dell 38 inch UltraSharp monitor - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/11653/dells-ultrasharp-u3818dw-available-curved-3840x1600 <comment><USER5> Off-topic but I wish 16:10 hadn't died with the move to 4k. I have an old 1200p dell ultrasharp in 16:10 and it's sublime compared to my other 16:9. You'd think it doesn't make much of a difference, but it really does. Especially when you have it vertically oriented, but otherwise too.

<comment><USER6> Golden ratio strikes again!

Historians in a millennia will probably look back at us as heathens for deviating from using the perfect rectangle to construct our screens.

<comment><USER7> hopefully in a millennia mathemeticians will have finally convinced the world that the golden ratio really isn't special.

<comment><USER8> Nor does it make sense for a monitor. I can't remember ever wanting to arrange a bunch of windows as a square, a smaller square, a smaller square, etc.

<comment><USER9> You must not use a tiling window manager.

<comment><USER8> I must not want my wm to give me a geometric series of ever shrinking squares.

<comment><USER10> What else does it default to, if you open a new window?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I apologize if this is an incredibly stupid question, but why do these monitors cost so much? As I understand it, you can buy a good 4k TV for considerably less, so what features of this monitor make it a better deal?

<comment><USER12> I've been using a Samsung 40" 4k TV as my main monitor for development work for about 8 months and it's been great for me.

A couple caveats -- Because I don't game or do graphics work, I don't know or care about color reproduction. I made sure to get a TV, graphics card, and cable that supported 4k@60hz with 4:4:4 chroma so the text is perfectly sharp and the refresh is not obtrusive. It's not hard to find a Samsung TV around $350 that supports that, but as far as I could tell, I had to go up to a GTX1050 graphics card to get that. I sit between 24 and 28" away from the monitor so the text is readable to me at full resolution. At that distance, I do have to turn my head to comfortably read text in the corners of the TV, especially the upper corners. In practice, that means I keep monitoring-type applications such as CPU charts, Datadog graphs, etc., in one of those corners for quick reference. While I still have two 1920x1080 monitors on either side of the TV, it's quite nice to be able to open up on my main monitor a huge IDE window and, when necessary, put 3-4 normal-sized windows next to each other for comparison work.

<comment><USER13> Same here. I bought a Philips BDM4065UC monitor in 2015 (40 inch, 3840x2160 resolution) for 740 € (in Germany) and I'm loving it. The only cave-at with that model is that reaction time is a bit slow (I would guess 5 ms between full black and full white).

When I replace it, the replacement will be the same size and resolution, but I'll probably go for OLED and HDR-10 or better.

<comment><USER14> I happened to buy the same, and import it from Germany to the UK.

Was very excited for it as it featured a very similar DPI to a 27" 1440p Korean import, coming from 3+ 1080p monitors originally the lack of bezels was incredible.

It's not built for gaming at all though, extreme screen tearing and poor response times has me now looking to replace the 27" 1440p Korean import with something >144Hz and G-Sync, before replacing the Philips BDM40.

<comment><USER13> The tearing is the monitor's fault? I'd noticed some tearing, but attributed it to driver issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Dell has managed to increase maximum brightness of its U3818DW to 350 nits (from 300 nits on competing monitors)"

Bah, why does everyone seem to love blinding themselves? Am I the only one who doesn't like a bright screen? (Ergonomically, we're supposed to have the monitor's backlight match the brightness of a white sheet of paper in the same lighting conditions.)

<comment><USER16> I imagine it's easier for you to dim the brightness to your preference than for others to somehow manage to tweak every bit of brightness out of their graphics card settings after the monitor's settings tap out

Use case: I'm in front of a window, if the sun's out and I've got the curtains open I might as well just turn the screen off

<comment><USER17> You would think monitor manufacturers would the brightness control go all the way to barely visible, but they don't. I have two monitors, an Asus and a Dell, both set to what they consider brightness level 0, and neither quite as dim as I'd like.

<comment><USER18> On most display devices, "contrast" controls the white level and "brightness" controls the black level. (These controls of course interact.)

For your use case, you might want to be adjusting contrast down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd rather stick with 2x 25" Dell UltraSharp U2515H 2560x1440 monitors[0].

2 of those are nearly 3x cheaper than the 1x 38" curved display and for tasks that require a lot of horizontal space (video editing, etc.) 5120 is WAY wider than 3840. Also a curved display is pretty questionable for professional image editing (it distorts pixels).

I run the 25" here for development and video editing. Probably the best development environment upgrade I've made in 5 years.

If anyone wants to read a deep dive on how to pick a solid monitor for development, I put together a detailed blog post[1] that covers why I picked that 25" Dell specifically.

[0]: [http://amzn.to/2jF3WHp](http://amzn.to/2jF3WHp)

[1]: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor- fo...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-for-software- development)

<comment><USER20> > Also a curved display is pretty questionable for professional image editing > (it distorts pixels).

Isn't the point of a curved display that at the designed viewing distance, each point (at the same vertical position, at least) is equidistant from the viewer, eliminating the distortion that occurs that occurs when viewing a large flat screen.

It would seem to me that for professional image editing where you often need to zoom in to a higher magnification than an image would usually be viewed at by the target audience, a curved display would be very useful.

You probably _also_ want to verify work on a display and conditions (viewing distance, etc.) that match the target environment.

<comment><USER21> I'd have to try this myself but I use straight guidelines all the time and I can't imagine having them look skewed if I turned my head from the precise targeted distance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> And here I am with a Vizio 40" 4k[1] that I got for less than $500. It's not perfect, and the refresh rate is only 60Hz for 4k (which is the same as this Dell offering), but it's served me well for the last six months at a fraction of the cost and with more pixels.

1: [http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/vizio/d-series-4k-2016](http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/vizio/d-series-4k-2016)

<comment><USER23> I've done the TV as a monitor thing, and the value is good, but the picture will be nowhere near as nice as a real monitor. Color reproduction is usually really inaccurate and even when you turn all the sharpening and post- processing off that they will let you, you still have an inferior picture.

That said, for gaming they are a solid choice and $500 is obviously a whole lot cheaper.

<comment><USER24> If you're just using it for something like coding and browsing the web is it good enough?

<comment><USER25> I don't have one, coworker does, but for coding it shouldn't be too bad. Browsing usually means more scrolling and so you actually will get tearing but if you don't care then should be fine.

Your other reply talked entirely about games so I responded to your actual question.

<comment><USER22> I wasn't talking about games at all. I was talking about input lag, which for TVs as displays manifests in some negative effects, most notably mouse lag.

Many TVs have a mode to reduce this lag and turn off other processing effects that are undesirable when playing games, and that tends to map well to the settings that make for a good computer display experience.

<comment><USER25> Aah good to know. It wasn't clear from my read of your other comment

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Only 60 hz. Sigh - I hope mainstream moves to 100+Hz monitors soon. I love the fluency of my far-too-expensive 'gaming' IPS 144hz monitor despite I don't play that much. Just the fact that web pages and mouse pointers don't lag is a noticeable improvement.

<comment><USER27> I rather we invest in PPI rather than refresh rate. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but as I look at my use cases, most of the time the screen is static, so a higher refresh rate would be wasted, whereas higher PPI screens improve readability and legibility (when they work on Windows).

<comment><USER26> You mean 4k on a desktop is not dense enough for you?

<comment><USER6> 4k / 28" is 157 PPI, which is only indistinguishable at around 2 feet view distance on average. Better eyesight puts that distance further back.

8k at 28" is "retina" at just under a foot.

So depending on how far you sit from your screen PPI can matter more or less to you, but when we finally get 8k panels we should also finally be getting people in retina range most of the time.

8k / 120+hz is the holy grail for me.

<comment><USER28> I can see Apple bringing 120hz to the iMac, so 5k at 120hz would be getting close.

I wish they sold screens still.

<comment><USER27> Apple is still using panels by Dell, as far as I know. So that 5K Dell display is the same panel that is used in their iMac range.

<comment><USER28> They are LG panels ultimately. There were some Samsung panels previously but since 2015 they have all been LG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I bought the U3415W when it first came out. At first it was for games (coming from 3x U2412Ms) however I quickly realised how incredibly good the 21:9 3440x1440 resolution is for programming. No DPI scaling needs be involved, so I'm looking at Visual Studio experience where even with NCrunch unit test runners and the Solution overview, I have plenty of room for two main code editing windows. Brilliant.

I ended up buying an extra Acer X34 for home (surrounded by 2x U2412Ms on an Ergotech stand) and brought the U3415W to work as a personal device.

The 38" could potentially be even better, however I'm rather happy with the 34" as is. It's a bit of a shame they didn't add Freesync to it.

<comment><USER30> I've had the Dell U3415W (3440x1440) since it was released two years ago, and it is the best monitor I've ever used. The resolution is great, and avoiding the DPI scaling needed for practical use of most 4K screens is key. As a bonus, it is absolutely perfect for movies in 21:9.

If you haven't seen one, a more familiar comparison might be that the U3415W is essentially the same as a 27" IPS panel, only wider. It has 1440 pixels of height at roughly the same physical height as the 27" IPS panels.

Many people argue that curved screens are unnecessary or a gimmick, which I would agree is true for TV screens with multiple off-center viewers. From my own comparison of several 32"\+ monitors, I do think the curve is very useful in reducing neck/eye fatigue.

The new 38" does sound appealing, but at 2-3x the cost of the U3415W on sale I would probably still recommend the 34" to most people.

<comment><USER31> >> The resolution is great, and avoiding the DPI scaling needed for practical use of most 4K screens is key.

While ymmv, I have been using a pair of 27" 4K Dell P2715Q's as my working monitors running with no scaling (1:1). I have a standing setup (although lately I've been using a drafting stool because of plantar fasciitis, but that's another story) so I do have the monitors closer to my face than most people, but I find it's more than tolerable.

<comment><USER32> Out of curiosity what font sizes do you use for your editor? I have a 27" 4K monitor around 20" from my face and find it too small without scaling, 1.5-1.75x is around perfect for me (although support for that under Windows and Linux is hit or miss).

<comment><USER31> In Sublime for Windows, I am using the default font with a size of 10.5. I have always tended to use higher dpi screens on laptops (i.e. 1680 and 1080 @ 15" running at 1:1) so I have years of conditioning to small text on screens.

An added piece of information - I got presbyopia (in addition to my existing myopia and astigmatism) about 5 or so years ago, so I now use reading glasses, which also helps a little.

I had a special pair of single vision glasses prescribed to me from my optometrist where its optimal range of focus is between 21" and 27". I got those distances from measuring the closest and furthest points between my eyes and monitors. I see everything fine. Before I got the single vision glasses, I was using a flip up reading glass attachment that I wore over my normal progressives to see the screen, which a - looked goofy, b - was unwieldy, and c - not as good as the single vision glasses.

<comment><USER32> I had a colleague who did the same. Size 10 on a 27" 1440p monitor. Whenever I had to pair with him I always had to ask him to increase the font size.

I also have myopia and astigmatism, but if I use a smaller font eventually my eyes get tired and I get headaches. My optician suggested I wear slightly weaker than my prescription glasses for computer work which helped a bit, but still I find it more comfortable to stick to my size 14 at 1.75x scaling :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I suspect that in a few years a hololens / google glass style device will become cheaper and work as well as a big bank of monitors, and at that point it is going to rapidly replace physical monitors - and then economy of scale and iteration of the product will do the usual to the price/performance ratio of head-mounted devices, then screens go the way of CRT monitors when flat screens came along.

I'm not saying that a head-mounted device and virtual screens will necessarily be better than a bank of monitors - in fact it's time to asses drawbacks - <USER2> once it's cheaper and seems "just as good" then business will want to switch over, for better or worse.

<comment><USER34> Will I still need to be sitting at a desk with a keyboard and mouse?

<comment><USER35> "Need" is a strong word, but you'll probably want to if you're trying to be productive. VR/AR won't replace the tactile feedback of a good keyboard, etc.

Then again, as someone who can't even use current VR/AR offerings (high myopia, don't use contact lenses) and is only following all of this as a fairly disinterested spectactor, it looks to me like the initial craze is already blowing over and people are taking a better look at the disadvantages and limitations of the current products. I don't see VR/AR taking over monitors or much of anything else, though I'm sure AR will find productivity applications in specific fields soon enough.

<comment><USER36> perhaps with gestures and voice input integrated into good software applications , the keyboard will altogether be eliminated..

<comment><USER37> There isn't a voice input in existence that I'd be interested in using while writing code or doing photo/video editing.

Even dictating code to another human who is as fluent as you are in the language of choice is a non-starter, so I don't see any machine based way of doing it catching up soon.

<comment><USER38> I can't speak as fast as I type, which makes any kind of dictation solution a non-starter.

<comment><USER37> The only solutions I've seen that even "come close" in the speed / accuracy comparison are unfair comparisons.

An example was posted by someone in another comment of a guy doing Python coding with Emacs using Dragon Dictation. In that example, the guy used over 2,000 custom "macros" to get to something close to his pre-RSI speeds. This sounds fantastic, but the speeds of a typer who has learned to leverage 2,000 custom macros would be an order of magnitude faster (imho) than someone dictating using similar macros.

<comment><USER38> This is the principle behind [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype) machines.

<comment><USER37> Exactly!

There are also specialized keyboards for computers that have existed over the years that have had typists reach 300-400wpm, but they never caught on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> PSA - don't get tempted by UltraSharp reviews and recommendations, like I did. Just pick an Eizo instead.

UltraSharps are widely recommended for coding with glorious reviews and endorsements. Got one and no matter how I adjusted it, it was still too... eye-piercing, if you will, for longer coding sessions. Got mild headaches, tired eyes and general feeling of discomfort when working on hem even for shorter periods. Then switched to FlexScan and it's a completely different ballgame - softer, more gentle feel, incomparably more comfortable. The best monitor I've had a pleasure of staring at in my 20 years of programming.

However the interesting part here is that both monitors use the same panel (!), so the panel itself is only part of the recipe, which is something that many reciews tend to either downplay or not mention at all.

<comment><USER40> Definitely. I made the mistake of buying an UltraSharp U2713HM which actually _buzzed_ with lots of text on the screen (apparently it's a feature, just google the model). I tried swapping my new display and they sent me a refurbished one with dead pixels that buzzed also. I'm never buying Dell again.

This time around I did the right thing and went the more expensive route and got an Eizo and it's just absolutely perfect.

<comment><USER41> I had the same experience with the same model. Never again, Dell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'd much rather see one with higher resolution. The DPI is quite low with today's standard.

<comment><USER27> Sadly, outside of macOS, the support for high PPI display is dodgy at best. On Linux, it is becoming better, but still a lot more to improve. On Windows, it's a real shitshow. Windows 10, for the most part, is OK (still a lot of inconsistencies and lack of polish when scale > 100%), but application support is just terrible, be it blur, tiny scale, inconsistent elements (some small, some large) or plain crashing. Really, any vendor that makes such display is taking a risk that people will complain and a sizeable portion of the customers that purchase such a display will not understand the technical difficulties.

<comment><USER43> _On Linux, it is becoming better, but still a lot more to improve._

Even on Fedora 26, I have to manually patch and recompile Mutter to get HiDPI support on Wayland. Mutter is hardcoded [1] to use 2x scaling on displays that are 192 PPI or more. My Dell p2415q is 188.2 PPI, so you get 1x 'scaling' by default and everything is tiny. This problem has been known for a while [2].

And even though GNOME applications then generally work well, you have to start Chromium with a special flag to let it run with scaling. There are a lot of glitches throughout the system, e.g. the mouse cursor has the right size, but when you go to a window corner to resize a window, it becomes tiny. A lot of icons are blurry, because they have a low resolution and are scaled up.

macOS is basically plug & play. All applications are in full HiDPI glory. The only exception are websites that use low-resolution images. There is one catch: the (terribly expensive) Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter only supports 4k at 30Hz. This refresh rate is very tiring and annoying. However, a USB-C -> DisplayPort ALT mode connector works great @ 60Hz.

[1] IIRC there is work in the master branch to solve this.

[2] [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1258155](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1258155)

<comment><USER27> Chrome/Chromium is notoriously bad at adopting any technology. On Windows, it took them years to support scaling other than 1x, color Emoji was added very recently, etc. I think on Linux it is even worse. Have they finally fixed ligature support in Chromium?

With Firefox rapidly improving in performance and memory usage, less and less reasons to use Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's interesting to see the variety of monitors people are using - <USER3> especially the variety of pixel densities, all the way down to 69 pixels per inch on a 32" 1080p panel.

For anyone who is curious to compare the pixel density of a variety of monitors and televisions, I have a spreadsheet with about 120 different display sizes and resolutions and their pixel densities:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K4bCgr- VjMmeCjHf6Udy...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K4bCgr- VjMmeCjHf6UdyR6Hg4rRz7aKz-BOz8U2tF0o/edit?usp=sharing)

Email me at the address in my profile or use the chat box in the spreadsheet (to avoid cluttering this thread) if you have any other displays you'd like to add.

<comment><USER31> For the past few years, I've been using this tool to give me information on pixel densities: [https://www.sven.de/dpi/](https://www.sven.de/dpi/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Ugh, I bought the 34" a few months ago and replaced it with a 42" 16:9 yesterday. The ultra wide format is really awkward for everything except gaming and media, and those have tons of software issues with the aspect ratio.

</comment><comment><USER46> Last time I tried such giant screen, I ended up extremely frustrated with the screen splitter feature, I prefer triple monitors for this reason.

Had there been significant progress in this field the last few years?

<comment><USER31> Have you ever tried DisplayFusion?

\-- edit, DisplayFusion is for windows. When I used to use Mac, I used Moom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Low DPI, certainly Dell's traditional low quality anti-glare filter (3h). When will they wake up and build monitors for people who work with letters and numbers (vs video or image) and favor quality over price? For a few years I think I will still have to switch every programms to dark theme as a work around to hide the poor quality and defaults of the monitors... sad. :(

</comment><comment><USER48> Beware if you're somewhat of a messy, like me, you're going to have hundreds of (terminal) windows and another hundreds of browser tabs open simultaneously on these, until you can't find your current stuff on your desktop anymore at which point you have to spend half an hour to sort out what you want to close. I actually sold my fat 27" and went back to 24" (and to 13" notebooks).

A special window manager is a requisite on the big screen, but which one? I like the original Expose feature on Mac OS <= 10.6 while the remade 10.7 version just doesn't blend from/into full desktop view as spatially recognizable as the original for me. Ubuntu's Unity does an ok job, too, but it's going away ([1]).

[1]: <[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631>](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631>)

<comment><USER49> Tabli solves the problem of losing tabs by letting me search for them: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabli/igeehkedfibb...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabli/igeehkedfibbnhbfponhjjplpkeomghi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wish it were available in HiDPI version, i.e. twice the resolution - <USER4> would make it way better to look at, as seeing pixels while editing video or producing audio in Live is no longer acceptable.

<comment><USER51> Honest question: why does it matter if you see pixels while producing audio?

<comment><USER50> I have 3x 4k displays, one of them 30" DCI 4k, one 55" UHD, plus a rMBP and an ultrabook with 3200x1800. I simply can't go back to see pixels again. Once you get used to better, you dislike a downgrade.

<comment><USER51> I get that, but it's a general point. You specifically called out producing audio, and I was curious if there were specific _visual_ features that are necessary in producing audio. I get it for video editing. I also understand the general "I like high resolution" case.

I am wondering if there is something I am unaware of about the combination of high resolution and audio that made you call that out as a specific use case.

<comment><USER50> Beside nicer fonts you have "sub-pixel" resolution in e.g. your piano roll/channel list, so you can zoom out a bit more while still able to distinguish stuff there. That is handy if you work with a very large number of channels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is based off a monitor from LG that is over a year old and is not 4K.

I have a 34 inch flat LG thunderbolt screen right now on my 3 year old MacBook Pro. Great screen

I plan to swap the computer to the MacBook and get a LG 32ud99-w when they finally ship (4K, USB-C from MacBook). I fly 100K a year so I want the smaller laptop. I hate giving up on the thunderbolt. I have been waiting for a decent USB-C monitor.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is a difficult time to commit $1500 to a monitor. For that kind of money I would really want better support for new color standards.

But the standards are still settling, and you can actually end up worse off with better color if the stars are not aligned with your operating system and applications.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm pretty sure the 38" Acer ultrawide is cooler - same resolution, better refresh rate, $1200.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N6S1P2D](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N6S1P2D)

</comment><comment><USER55> Why is the vertical resolution so poor?

<comment><USER56> It is not. Is is a very wide screen. 24:10 aspect.

A UHD/4k pixel density that you would find in a 16:9 display would mean a lot more horizontal pixels.

Though I would like to see one that is 5184x2160 or 5760x2160 pixels. I expect that is just too expensive and niche atm. And pushing gfx cards and display ports to its limits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> At the office we have a dozen QNIX 4K 32 inches monitors. They are not quite IPS, although it says it is, and they are $399 USD from eBay. Hard to beat that price. They are bright and they have DP & HDMI 2 ports.

<comment><USER58> They're $399 on Amazon, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Pretty interested in this as I'm not a fan of 21:9, I'm wondering how I'll feel about looking at 24:10. As stated I wish it was a way higher refresh (120 I feel should be the new norm now?)

<comment><USER44> I'm guessing you don't like 21:9 because it's too wide relative to its height, or put another way it's not tall enough relative to its width.

If that's the case, 24:10 would be even worse.

Don't be misled by the :9 vs. :10 part - that is meaningless. Reduce them both to a single number for a fair comparison: 21:9 and 24:10 are 2.333:1 and 2.4:1 respectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Not for me. Resolution/DPI too low for work at desk, too small to use in the living room.

Who's this for? Only good use cases I can think of are Excel jocks and folks who like to watch movies at their desk.

</comment><comment><USER61> Super happy with the return of 1600 line displays even if they had to go ultrawide to get there.

</comment><comment><USER62> Is 110 ppi considered ultra sharp?

<comment><USER63> I think UltraSharp name is refering to the fact that those are IPS panels with:

1) wide color gamut, compared to TN screens

2) Better contrast ratio, again, compared to cheap TN panels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> 3840x1600?

My new Laptop (Lenovo Yoga 910) does 3840x2160

Hence: Acer ProDesigner BM320

</comment><comment><USER65> No FreeSync in $currentyear, not even worth considering.

<comment><USER66> If you RTFA, the competing Acer model has FreeSync with a lower price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I can't read the article because of this horrible ad that takes over the whole screen: [https://imgur.com/gallery/tBeOG](https://imgur.com/gallery/tBeOG)</comment>


Charles XIV John of Sweden - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_XIV_John_of_Sweden <comment><AUTHOR> "Born in Pau in southern France, Bernadotte joined the French Royal Army in 1780. Following the outbreak of the French Revolution, he exhibited great military talent, rapidly rising through the ranks and was made a brigadier general by 1794. In 1810, Bernadotte was unexpectedly elected the heir- presumptive to the childless King Charles XIII of Sweden, thanks to the advocacy of Baron Carl Otto Mörner, a Swedish courtier and obscure member of the Riksdag of the Estates."

"Upon the death of Charles XIII in 1818, Charles John ascended to the throne as the first monarch from the House of Bernadotte. He presided over a period of peace and prosperity, and reigned until his death in 1844."

</comment><comment><USER2> you stole that from reddit! :) [https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/fdtym6/til_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/fdtym6/til_that_the_french_soldier_jean_bernadotte/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x)

<comment><AUTHOR> Guilty :P I thought it was interesting and thought I'd share it on HN.</comment></comment>


Coinozi.com – Cryptocurrency News Aggregator - <AUTHOR> Https://coinozi.com <comment><AUTHOR> CoinOzi is a Cryptocurrency News Aggregator Platform curating crypto news from top publications in US, Europe, Africa, South America and Asia specifically for cryptocurrency traders and enthusiasts.

Other Features Includes; \- A Decentralized Exchange to swap your coins easily. \- - Legit Ongoing Airdrops \- Live Cryptocurrency Charts \- - <USER2> Crypto to Fiat Converter. \- YouTube videos of top crypto influencers.

First News Aggregator to cover crypto developments in Africa.</comment>


How we manage plans and features in our SaaS app - <AUTHOR> https://blog.checklyhq.com/how-we-manage-plans-features-in-our-saas-app/ <comment><USER2> From experience, associating an account directly to their current plan in this was adds some complexity in being able to have a history of plan changes (downgrades/upgrades etc). You might be accommodating for this in other ways, but a typical setup I've seen is to add a "subscriptions" table between account and plan.

The account has many subscriptions, only one of which can be the current. The subscription is linked to a plan.

When a customer upgrades, the current subscription ends, and is replaced by a new one. Tracking start and end dates helps with churn and upgrade/downgrade metrics reports, such as time on premium before downgrade etc.

I've also been stung before by checking for a specific plan, as opposed to checking for the abilities or attributes of the current plan. In your example you're checking if the plan name is "trial" to determine if they should have trial limitations put upon them. This becomes tricky if you need to introduce a new trial option, named differently in the future, that needs to co-exist with your current single trial plan set up. I'd prefer to be checking "is the current plan a trial" or ideally link them to a real plan, but check if it is "in trial" (via dates, boolean etc).

I've seen (but not done myself) products that let you move up and down between plans during trial so you can really assess the impact of not having feature available on higher plans. Doing this is impossible with a single plan called "trial".

Subscription billing, dunning, pro-rated upgrade, taxes, discounts etc is a ridiculously complex set of functionality.

<comment><USER3> Just a note that if you're using Stripe you get that upgrade downgrade history for free, so might not need the complexity.

Also ProfitWell plugs in to Stripe and does a pretty good job with analytics for that for free too.

Of course if you're using multiple payment providers you'll want to roll your own abstraction as the above comment describes.

<comment><USER4> The data isn't lost, but it's not straightforward to query if you don't have a record of it in your own database.

Eventually you'll want to find out what your resubscribe rate is, or what the average interval between subscriptions is. Answering these types of questions via Stripe's API is no fun.

<comment><USER2> Yup - we've always duplicated that data in our systems. Aside from anything, if Stripe/payment-processor-of-choice changes their data model, or rearranges feature tiers in the future to make reporting beyond the last 180 days an enterprise add on or whatever, we'd rather not be beholden to them to be able to analyse our business performance metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok, now explain how to handle the situation where a user that has been grandfathered into a new set of features and kept paying the original price is at a tier limit and they downgrade halfway through the period they have currently already paid for.

Downgrading would put them over a tier limit, so they can't be automatically downgraded unless they first delete enough stuff to be within the next tier limit down. Then I suppose they need to get a credit on their account or a refund etc. But do they get new pricing or are they still grandfathered or what?

Not to mention if they are a South African customer their invoice needs to display the VAT subtotal in Rand and Stripe etc don't cater to that. That's on you.

This stuff becomes kinda nasty when the edge cases stack up and there isn't anything in the market that handles it all beautifully.

That'd make all our lives a lot easier. SaaS billing still sucks.

It's good to see some discussion on how to handle some of this stuff. Information is really thin on the ground.

<comment><USER6> > Not to mention if they are a South African customer their invoice needs to > display the VAT subtotal in Rand and Stripe etc don't cater to that. That's > on you.

I might be wrong but paddle.com helps you solve exactly that.

<comment><USER7> 5% + 50c!

They only make sense if you are small in scale. Use them when you are starting out and then build your own after you have a good number of paid users.

<comment><USER8> Everything has its price. I preffer to improve a core product than to get drowned in international accounting maze (hello EU VATMESS).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This set of blog posts highlights the example of where clever architecture can outperform clever coding:

\- By abstracting some of the most volitile aspects of an early app and business logic.. The combinations in which you sell it can greatly increase the speed of iterating through ideas and offerings.

\- There is more than one valid way to implement feature flagging. It's good to start somewhere that seems familiar and grow with it.

\- One way I like approaching this problem is tying feature flags into sub roles and roles, which tie into subscriptions of plans. Depending on the nature of your app, the previous sentence can be longer, or shorter to allow flexibility in abstraction.

I'd love to hear how others have seen this implemented in their worlds as well!

</comment><comment><USER10> I run a small SaaS app that also has volume-based features. Instead of using queries to check the count, we compute the total count of resources via database triggers. I'm not saying this is a better approach, just that there are multiple ways of doing these calculations.

<comment><AUTHOR> We actually do this on the frontend with Vue.js computed properties. Triggers will certainly do that in the backend, but they are bit more initial work than just a simple query.

<comment><USER11> Please tell me you are not basing any plan/usage decision on computed properties in the frontend without verifying them on the backend

<comment><USER12> Honestly, at an early stage startup, especially if your target audience isn't developers, it's pretty safe to only do checks on the front end. Just add them later, once you have enough volume that it's a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've previously wondered [1] if there was a market for a pricing SaaS, that does this customer feature tracking separately, like LaunchDarkly, but tied to payment processing, like Stripe.

[1]: [https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/ask-ih-how-do-you-keep- tr...](https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/ask-ih-how-do-you-keep-track-of- your-pricing-plans-in-your-saas-51c8ac5730)

<comment><AUTHOR> Crazy right. There are very little blogs or docs written on this.

I've kinda struggled with this while signing up the first 20+ customers (and still am). You sorta figure it out, but it is all custom code tying into frontend and backend routines. Really does prohibit experimentation.

The blog is a way of getting knowledge out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have multiple SaaS apps I manage and others which I have assisted developing.

Starting off, I've always done the following:

1\. Free option with a limited number of queries

2\. Premium option with unlimited number of queries and a few "key" features unlocked.

This simplifies development significantly, as all you have to do is track the queries (per hour, day, month, total, etc.). You can also limit routes based on the features.

This has been extremely effective on my website Easy-A.net ([https://easy-a.net/](https://easy-a.net/)), essentially people can view the grade distribution for courses and we estimate the workload.

Pricing is always difficult, and by scaling it based on API hits it's much easier to price. It's essentially pay for use.

I think (as identified in the first line of the article):

> How do you deal with what a user can do on their account in a SaaS app? Can > Jane on the "Starter" plan create another widget when she is near the limit > of her plan? What if she's a trial user?

If as a SaaS you're typically targeting one customer archetype starting off -- then you should only have two plans. One to get their feet wet, the other to help them dive in.

<comment><USER3> You're probably leaving money on the table with only a free and a paid plan.

Mainly because you'll loose conversions without a high price point third plan that acts as an anchor and makes the middle plan seem like really good value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very well written. We've ended up with a lot of similar structures in our codebase for managing plans and trials. Additionally, we've decoupled plans and trials so that it's always possible to create a trial of any tier on the fly; some additional flexibility there. We also chose to do columns in postgres for features, and not use an array or JSON object for storing it (at least for now).

</comment><comment><USER16> "All plans include all features."

We arrived at this after many years building multiple products. In all products we built we have just 3-4 plans. All features are included in all plans (including the trial plan). Only the usage amount differs from plan to plan. This makes it so easy to explain to end customers and leaves your engineering team with valuable time to deal with improving product. Further the number of billing related support requests decrease drastically. Your support staff also need less training.

The advantages are many to keep billing simple. This has been our experience. YMMV.

<comment><USER5> There are definitely a few moves you can make which avoid massive amounts of complexity if you're willing to accept a small downside. Another one is not allowing billing cycles to go past the 28th of the month thus making renewal logic simpler. Another thing would probably be just bill only in one currency (say USD).

Can you think of any other small things like that that help you massively reduce complexity? I think in the beginning it seriously makes sense to go with the simplest billing possible for as long as you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find this interesting:

> During our 14 day trial we do not give trial users an SSL secured public > dashboard. Due to technical and abuse reasons this only kicks in when you > become a paying customer.

I see "technical reasons", but it would make sense to give even trial users a LetsEncrypt certificate. I don't see how issuing TLS could be abused.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I guess you caught me there. The SSL feature is actually still in beta, primed to ship this Monday.

Being fairly new to Lets Encrypt and the eco system around it Checkly is mostly being cautious. Having a none SSL encrypted dash for the trial is probably fine.

If this whole process runs super smoothly, we will lift this blockade.

Also, I come from the days where I had to call Verisign in Switzerland and fax in my passport details...

<comment><USER18> Having no SSL in a trial will probably make customers worry about the products security and the competence of the devs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you are right about this. The moment I can switch it out to every other trial user I will probably do it.

Just want to give the Lets Encrypt integration a bit of a trial period before going 100% in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for writing this.

When I started my SaaS two years ago, I also found it hard to get concrete info about how to design my database scheme to handle multi-tenancy, plans, and billing.

In hindsight, it all seems quite straightforward, but I was sometimes quite lost at the time. Posts like yours would have helped!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly the reason I'm writing this. The "just add Stripe" mantra is generally just the beginning of the journey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another idea I have heard is to encode your feature flags and entitlements as a bitwise string, and include this string in your customer's signed auth token. This way, your front end and back end don't have to hit your entitlements API all the time. When they change plans, just refresh the auth token.

</comment><comment><USER21> We just did this for our own SaaS. Our backend is Django and we use djstripe[0] to connect to Stripe.

The model is as follows: A user pays per site (he can add multiple) and we decided to have all features available to all plans except for pageviews (we supply a search service like Algolia, but better ;-), and a notification service (small persuasive popups) for e-commerce).

We tie a so called 'module' to a site. A module has a product, start date, end date and subscription (FK). When a user signs up he can start a trial for a specific product which in effect creates a module with a start date, end date (now() + trial_length) and an empty subscription (ie. no subscription means trial).

In our middleware we check if a user wants to view a specific page from a product and we allow/deny access based on having a valid trial (now < end_date). We have jobs running that check which trials have ended and we suspend serving the javascript (which you need to have the service on your site).

After the trial we redirect to a plan picker (but you can still see reports for instance) and let them choose a plan. All plan meta data comes from Stripe as single source of truth (it sits actually in our db because dj-stripe has cached that using sync and webhooks).

Choosing a plan does the whole CC flow and when we get an OK from Stripe we attach a subscription (payment tied to a plan) to the module and delete the end_date. We set the limit in pageviews and check on the usage every minute using a job. The current usage is also communicated to the customer.

The same check we did with the trial is in place to see if a customer has an active subscription (now < end_date) and if the current_usage < usage_limit.

Upgrading and downgrading is easy: tie a new plan to the subscription and Stripe handles the rest (prorate, new invoice).

Canceling is easy as well: cancel call to Stripe, get the returned end_date and set this on the module.

You also have to think about reactivating the subscription (before the cancelled subscription has ended).

A fews things to consider:

\- VAT: we're based in the Netherlands, so we have 4 (2x2) cases: Individual/Company and EU/Non-EU. Based on that we have to charge or charge no VAT, you have to add that yourself in your call to Stripe.

\- Expired CC, declined payments: Stripe calls a webhook and you have to handle that in a way that it will (a) change the subscription/module (b) tell the customer

Our model also allows for:

\- old/defunct pricing plans by setting the subscription to an old plan

\- different/special usage limits for clients using special plans

\- payment without CC (e.g. bank transfer) by using out_of_band option on Stripe

[0] [https://github.com/dj-stripe/dj-stripe](https://github.com/dj-stripe/dj- stripe)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool stuff! Checkly is also a dutch company, although I live in Berlin.

I will do a write up soon too on how we deal with Stripe and EU taxes. I found it not THAT hard as people make it out to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Man you nailed it</comment>


Dream Machine: The mind-expanding world of quantum computing (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/02/dream-machine <comment><USER2> David Wallace's 'Emergent Universe' is an engaging account of the Everett Many Worlds Interpretation. 'There is no quantum measurement problem'.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Emergent-Multiverse-Quantum- Accordi...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Emergent-Multiverse-Quantum-According- Interpretation/dp/0199546967?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0)

<comment><USER3> 'There is no quantum measurement problem'.

"These aren't the droids you are looking for"

<comment><USER2> Wallace also has some nice quotes, among them are:

"I don't know how to refute an incredulous stare". (David Lewis)& Paul Davies: "So the parallel universes are cheap on assumptions but expensive on universes". David Deutsch: "Exactly right. In physics we always try to make things cheap on assumptions."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is so much more quality content on quantum computing than this sham of an article.

<comment><USER5> Can you be more specific or helpful? I don't know anything about the topic, where can I find what you would call quality content?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article is unavailable to non-subscribers

Edit: or just in my browser...? No article content is loading

<comment> maze-le Is it? I can read it, and I am no subscriber at all.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps adblock is the cause then? I'm on Firefox Mobile with ublock.

Edit: it was the adblock</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: tweetvaultHQ, my Twitter archiving and stats app - <AUTHOR> http://tweetvaulthq.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

Long time reader, first time submitter! I recently launched my first proper web app, tweetvaultHQ (<http://tweetvaulthq.com/>), which is a hosted personal archiving service for Twitter. A while back I was in need of a more effective way of accessing my own historic content on Twitter, so I created a very simple app that would periodically grab my tweets and store them. A friend suggested this would make a useful hosted service, so that is what it became.

tweetvaultHQ archives your tweets and favourites from Twitter, presenting them in an easily searchable interface. It features export options to get your data out in various formats, and also provides a bunch of stats on your tweeting activity that may inform or amuse in equal measure.

For me, it addresses two major needs: 1) giving better access to the content I've placed on Twitter and 2) giving me better ownership of that data, in the event of something awful happening to Twitter or my being otherwise unable to access that content. I've built up quite a collection of tweets over the last few years, and additionally have quite a bit of value in my favourites collection. I wanted better control over that data.

This is the first app I've produced to provide a service to the public, so this has been a real learning experience. Any feedback would be hugely appreciated - I've received some valuable advice already, including suggestions that I should raise the price (currently £1/$1.60 per month)! Several people have mentioned competitors to this app (a few self-install apps exist, such as TweetNest, and I'm aware of ThinkUp which has similar functions), but I'm not too worried about being a market leader right now, I'd just like to make enough for lunch now and again, and learn what I can.

I've got plenty of features on the roadmap, but feel free to suggest any you desire. If you like the app, let me know. If you don't, I'd still like to know! Many thanks for reading.

</comment><comment><USER2> £1/month? What is a '£'? I am kind of joking.

As a web-surfing American, when a website wants money and I don't see a '$' sign, for whatever reason, the website loses credibility. I have no idea how much this is going to cost me. So, I'd suggest having the USD pricing on your website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment! This is a very good point.

I know the pricing is only in £ on the front page, but it is visible in $ and € on the subscribe page.

Pricing across continents was something that caused some some consternation from the beginning - I think I really need to do some geolocation, and present more relevant prices throughout.

FWIW right now, a £ is worth about $1.60 :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You must start a job to import my account as soon as I sign up. 15 minutes after signing up, I have already forgotten your website exists.

I will give you more feedback in 9 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - you're absolutely right about this. I've forced an archive run for you, your data should show up now.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Yeah, I like it. I've just used it to see all Tweets I've ever sent to a particular person, which isn't something you can do on twitter.com (as far as I know). It's also nice to see who I've tweeted to the most in the past.

Random suggestions:

* consider charging annually instead of monthly. * a shareable link to searches might be interesting * I'd like it to archive more! Like full conversations I've been in. * put pagination at the bottom as well as the top, took me almost 3 seconds to find it ;) * It'd be nice to have more detail on people I've mentioned, like a graph of mentions to each person where I can see when I started/stopped tweeting them etc.

What's your stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it and thanks for taking the time to follow up with this feedback.

I think the charging model needs overhauling because a vast number of people sign up on the trial and never subscribe. I think this is because the trial is too limiting - what I should probably do is a give a free month (or at least, some measure of free time) to everyone who signs up.

Do you think the monthly price is reasonable? Would you pay £12 / $20 per year?

I'm investigating archiving mentions as well so the opportunity for conversation threading would be there. Glad you mentioned this.

I'll duplicate the pagination controls too, good point!

Will take your stats suggestions onboard - this is definitely an area with a lot of potential.

Thanks again :).

<comment><USER3> Roughly reasonable yes. But it would be more palatable as an annual cost, for some reason. That might just be me.

Re conversation threading: you are already archiving the reply_to_status_id values, you don't need to look at mentions to figure out conversations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point! I could thread those in already. Will look into that. Thanks again!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Happens When You Defy a Secret Government Order? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2013/06/nsa_surveillance_what_if_google_and_verizon_refused_to_hand_over_data.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "Secret jail time"? Do your loved ones get to know where you are? Why is that a thing?

<comment><USER2> >"Secret jail time"? Do your loved ones get to know where you are?

No. You have to lie to your family.

and:

"The most likely punishment for defying the secret order would be a hefty fine, although the defendant might have a difficult time explaining the massive payment in the company's public financial statements, especially if the contempt trial is conducted under seal."

I find it curiously persistent how truth weaves through even `legal' obstacles to be free.</comment></comment>


Mathematics of Topological Quantum Computing - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06206 <comment><USER2> So they touch on 4-dimensional theories only briefly, but one thing I'm very curious about is if higher dimensional theories provide a richer computational structure, in any of several senses.

Every 1-knot has a sort of 2-knot analog (actually, a whole family of them) made by "revolving" the knot, but there are 2-knots not generated in this manner. (The same holds true for higher dimensional knots.)

As we go higher, there are knot moves not even possible in lower dimensions (such as twists).

Just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone explain this to as you would a five year old.

<comment><USER4> My approximate understanding: Some problems reduce to calculating the trace of a matrix. The matrix might be really complicated, but sometimes you can approximate it by having particles braid around each other and measuring how likely the particles end up in a particular state. In theory it can be put into practice using materials called "topological insulators."

The Jones polynomial is a thing which can tell knots apart. The quantum computer can calculate the Jones polynomial by having particles trace out the knot. The Jones polynomial usually takes exponential time to calculate.

The "topological" in "topological quantum computing" refers to the braiding and the fact that they're computing topological invariants of a space.

<comment><USER5> I think he meant a 5 year old _without_ a PhD in mathematics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Elementary particles are elementary excitations of the vacuum, which explains why they are identical." (pg 4 ref 3) Is this now accepted fact, everything is a wave and there are no particles?

<comment><USER7> This isn't really a question, all particles exhibit both wavelike and particle like behaviors. What matters is the scale (mass and energy) which determines which behavior will dominate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has someone found a particle for which some exchange yields something like a magic state? I've been told that known nonabelian anyons can only be exchanged up to Cliffords</comment>


Compile to JavaScript: The 10 Best JavaScript Alternative Languages - <AUTHOR> http://noeticforce.com/alternative-programming-languages-that-compile-to-javascript <comment><USER2> Dart deserves a better place in this list dear sophie</comment>


Stealing sensitive browser data with the W3C Ambient Light Sensor API (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com/stealing-sensitive-browser-data-with-the-w3c-ambient-light-sensor-api/ <comment><USER2> > There is currently an ongoing discussion within a W3C Device and Sensors > Working Group whether to allow websites access the light sensor without > requiring the user's permission.

Why is this even a thing?

Just make this the same as location or microphone prompts? I never understood the fear of being transparent or give choice to users.

I hope at least firefox has a setting to permanently disable this feature.

<comment><USER3> What a dumb idea. We just wised up and took away the battery API because it was being used for fingerprinting, and now they want to add more permissionless hardware info back in.

You just know the argument being made is "Light sensor input changes frequently enough that it isn't useful for fingerprinting." But history tells us that literally everything will be used for fingerprinting.

Provides a tiny amount of differentiation to maybe identify particular devices? Scoop it up!

Or if you're already able to identify a particular person, how about keeping a persistent log of whether they're indoors or outdoors and aggregating that from as many different sites as possible? Collect _all_ the data and store it forever! Maybe it will help sell ads 0.004% more effectively, and there's no downside!

IMO, whatever amount of risk this carries clearly outweighs the benefit of websites being able to access my light sensor without asking for permission, because the value of that is 0.

<comment><USER4> > But history tells us that literally everything will be used for > fingerprinting

I don't think you realize how right you are. Fingerprinting is eventually going to be a lost cause. In 10 years or so, we will have the tech to fingerprint anyone just by their writing style (some companies even claim to be able to do this already today). What do you do then? Ban posting stuff online?

<comment><USER5> >In 10 years or so, we will have the tech to fingerprint anyone just by their writing style (some companies even claim to be able to do that already today).

...given a large enough corpus of text. I doubt that you're able to pick up much from a dozen 1 sentence replies on reddit, for instance. You could even use some sort of neural network based sentence transformer to scramble the structure without significantly altering the meaning.

<comment><USER4> I am not sure it has to be too large.

It only takes 33 bits of information to identify 1 person out of 7 billion. How many bits did you lose just by talking about neural networks in that one sentence? How many bits did you lose from the timing/time zone of your comment? By the language of your comment?

<comment><USER6> I imagine that there's a lot of information in the specific cadence of typing, in addition to the final text.

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

<comment><USER5> As a low tech solution, you can always compose the contents in a separate window and paste it in when you're done. Hardened browsers (eg. Firefox with resistfingerprinting) can frustrate attempts by throttling key events (key events get coalesced into 1s/5s/10s intervals).

<comment><USER7> This is another browser stupidity. Dont send anything until the submit button is pressed. It's the browsers job to implement the text edit box and spell check, not every website.

<comment><USER8> Being able to see keystrokes in Javascript is pretty useful for things like autocomplete. Say you want to send an invoice to "Foo Bar, Inc.". Do you really want to type that every time? Do you want to type "Foo" and then click submit, and then be taken to search results? Why make a 700ms task into a 5s task, especially when you're doing it hundreds of times a day.

There are hardened browsers that will make the script wait for a while to get the key events. That seems like the right solution; most people using controlled enterprise apps don't have to deal with huge amounts of input lag, while people that are paranoid won't be profiled by their typing cadence.

<comment><USER7> How limiting would it be to have auto complete implemented in the browser? Probably not quite as nice as Google but still useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I miss the time when web sites were just simple documents.

<comment><USER10> I don't. The number of people who wanted to publish things online but couldn't due to the technical barriers was huge. I'd much rather deal with the complexities of browser security than keep the internet the exclusive domain of technically-minded nerds. The internet as a platform is _far_ better now even if the technology that drives it sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why not just ask the user for permission for all APIs that interact with hardware?

Not all apps need it, and the ones who do, should be able to explain why.

The Battery API was removed due to fingerprinting concerns, but a permission- asking battery API would still be helpful to bring web apps closer to native apps.

</comment><comment><USER12> A logical evolution of what I did 5 years ago and other people did before me. I can only assume what are ad networks doing...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7863418](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7863418)

Though this one is much cooler :)

</comment><comment><USER13> That's insane but kind of valid - maybe restrict access to the light sensor api to same-origin sources?

<comment><USER14> From the article:

> Perhaps the most obvious solution is to require the user to grant permission > to the website requesting access to the sensor

Which makes sense... a light sensor is really a 1 pixel camera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can this also be exploited using CSS `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)` if the device's configured to use dark mode in low-light conditions (as opposed to time-based switching)?

<comment><USER16> That wouldn't work for a lot of people (like me), who have a dark theme on all the time.

I don't have any statistics to back it up, but most everyone I know just leaves dark theme on all the time (or in the case of one light theme on all the time).

<comment><USER17> Automatic dark mode switching is also usually based on time, not lighting. And even if it is based on lighting, it usually has a very low temporal resolution -- if the user is in a dark room with occasional flashes of bright light (say, a disco), the UI isn't expected to flash in synchrony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think in practice people would close a website that was flashing the screen at them in black and white. _Maybe_ you can make it work with a more subtle change but I bet your signal to noise ratio would be abysmal.

Totally impractical but a neat idea anyway!</comment>


See the amazing CSS sprite of Google Play Music - <AUTHOR> https://ssl.gstatic.com/play/music/fe/ab9e5954fb1698f40c50af7928ee9aef/sprites_extended_b2b52c8b0662c265914c044480fa698eebf4c811.png

<comment><USER2> Pretty big? Yes. Amazing? Not really.

Try opening it into something like [http://www.spritecow.com/](http://www.spritecow.com/) to see how easy it is to work with sprite these days.

I find that the only downside of using sprite is that it's hard to make sure nobody else is adding sprites to the sheet while you are working with it. It's harder to keep track of an image than is it to keep track of code or separate image files .</comment>


Why I'm in Love with .Net Core - <AUTHOR> https://codinginfinite.com/love-top-futures-net-core-2019-future/ <comment><USER2> I really enjoy C# as a language and I think .NET core has some great potential if Microsoft can fulfill the cross platform promise.

That said, this article makes a lot of mistakes. Xamarin and Unity use mono not .net core.

.Net core isn't ready to bet the farm on. The cross platform tooling is still too weak atm. Its a huge headache to get profile data on Linux.

<comment><USER3> The entire .Net Core ecosystem is in a weird funk right now. I think it will be a few years before everything is transitioned over to .Net Core and settles down.

Still if people have the mental capacity and time to spare, right now seems like a great time to getting started with .Net Core, and especially on Linux and Docker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This poorly written article provides nothing of value. It's mostly a laundry list of .Net facts and a whole bunch of ads.

</comment><comment><USER5> Poorly written article. But overall I can understand the enthusiasm the author is expressing for .Net Core.

I am programming with it since 1.0 and we already have a big productive application running on it. Every update brings needed features like EF Core improvements in 2.1. and also it gets easier to upgrade. 3.0 will be very interesting since microsoft is indicating a shift to .Net Core away from .Net Classic.

Combined with Visual Studio Code I can see C# and .Net core as a very good alternative to be taught at schools and universities since its easier to pick up with the right guidance.

</comment><comment><USER6> Takes forever to load :(

Hope it's not powered by .Net core :trollface:

PS. ex-.net engineer

</comment><comment><USER7> Does .NET and its family have functional paradigm as feature rich as Haskell, Ocaml or Scala?

I just don't understand the appalling attention given to F#. Is C# doing good in that regard?

<comment><USER8> I would say that one of the main reasons why F# gets comparatively little attention is that, yes, C# is being evolved with a fairly big focus on taking lessons from functional languages. Pattern matching is coming along (though it will probably never be as powerful/expressive as in e.g. F#), C# 8 will have nullable reference types, essentially providing null safety in the same way as Option, immutability is being touted as a Good Thing (I hope record types will be with us soon), etc. As someone who loves functional programming, C# is without a doubt my favorite not-mainly-functional-language (and it's way up there overall).

Compare this with Java and the functional JVM languages, where Java didn't even have lambdas until fairly recently - no wonder a (relatively) large subset of JVM developers focus on Scala and Clojure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> .Net Core has come up in the shadow of .NET (Windows version) and JEE. The latter two have lost momentum and a bunch of other languages/frameworks are nibbling at market share. If it weren't for this unfortunate timing, I think .Net Core would be a lot bigger than it is.

Microsoft seems to be in this one for the long haul. I suspect .Net Core will slowly continue to gain share as time goes on, eventually reaching parity with the other 'big' players.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article unfortunately does bot provide valuable information. .NET Core is great nevertheless. You should check it out.

<comment><USER11> .Net core is not bad, but ATM I feel like there are a lot of breaking changes and small revolutions in the platform and specially in all official and third- party modules, not to mention lack of features and official support for some basic components.

ASP.NET Core is much worse in this regard.

Right now .NET Core feels like it's a gigantic beta testing experience. The motto "move fast and break things" is being taken very literally, which wouldn't be bad if we weren't talking about a platform used to develop infrastructure.

Perhaps .NET Core in general and ASP.NET Core in particular wil be an important platform 2 or 3 years from now, but right now I feel it takes too much courage and too little good sense to base a relevant project in .NET Core.

<comment><USER12> The point of Core is that it can and may evolve faster. If you don't want that, use the full Framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't feel like the article really says anything. He just says I love .NET Core, the end.

</comment><comment><USER14> 503

<comment><USER15> It said something about insufficient storage. However reloading the page helped.</comment></comment>


Chinese Scientists Become First to Use CRISPR Gene-Editing on Humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a23898/crispr-gene-editing-tool-used-on-a-human/ <comment><USER2> No pressure, scientists, but if you could perfect this technique before I go totally blind, that'd be great. Not even looking for vision restoration (though that'd be great), just a halt ot the degradation ...</comment>


UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content?utm_content=buffer77e52&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=IHEbuffer <comment><USER2> Previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856)

</comment><comment><USER3> I randomly picked a video [0] from their course list, jumped to the middle of the video, and compared the YouTube automatic closed captioning (CC) with the spoken word. I'd say CC was about 95% accurate.

In addition, the videos have slides, which would provide context to be able to figure out the remaining 5% that wasn't properly captioned.

So, my question is: who is served by this lawsuit? Surely there are deaf people who are quite alright with watching these videos with the auto CC, and believe they would be better off if the videos were available in their current form than not available at all. Just look at the list of courses [1] that will be removed.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL- XXv-cvA_iAShOv65z-FQswFbEClTbW6)

[1] [http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s)

<comment><USER4> Who is served are people with disabilities that get quality educational content instead of half-baked educational content.

<comment><USER5> Except that in this case the blind will no longer be able to listen to the audio recordings and the deaf will no longer be able to use the animations and automated closed captions.

They should have struck a deal where all new content will be ADA compliant and all courses will never depend/actively refer to the old material, but keep the old material still online for further research.

Of course UC needs to stay compliant. But that doesn't mean forcing it to take down old material will help anyone.

<comment><USER6> Harrison Bergeron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's 2017, and two employees from Gallaudet University can cause the destruction of 20,000 free lectures, including some with nearly half a million views, because of ADA requirements?

Of all universities, I would've expected Berkeley to stand up for how blatantly this damages public access, but I guess not.

<comment><USER8> Nope, regulations and compliance always end up trumping the public good. I think they should work to make the courses ADA compliant, but that doesn't mean they should remove all of the content in be meantime. Just replace them as they go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Berkeley should attempt to crowd source the captions. I'm sure many of the more popular classes could be captioned by volunteers.

With the right software, the rest could be cut up into segments, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be used to caption it for very little cost.

Berkeley could add a button to the viewer to report (or even for viewers to correct) errors that were made by Mechanical Turk users, when they are found by others viewing the material.

The costs for the Mechanical Turking could probably be raised very easily at any number of funding sites.

The worst part is that Berkeley should have these captioned for their own students anyway. I don't see how making the videos available to Berkeley students only helps in anyway.

Berkeley will probably have a policy that they will caption anything requested by a Berkeley student.

If I were enrolled in Berkeley I would request that 100% of the videos be captioned, so I had access to any of them I needed to learn something in the middle of the night before a test or for a paper.

Maybe they'd have to comply with that, and it would stop this nonsense.

<comment><USER10> With amara, there already is a software solution for crowd-sourced transcribing (and even translating).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In response, Berkeley is planning to release new and compliant content. Their official statement[1]:

"[W]e have determined that instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old, much of which sees very limited use, we will work to create new public content that includes accessible features ... This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that the YouTube and iTunesU content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from "pirates" who have reused content for personal profit without consent.

... Berkeley will maintain its commitment to sharing content to the public through our partnership with EdX (edx.org)."

They also released FAQ regarding the old content.[2]

[1] [http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course- capture/](http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/)

[2] [http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public- cou...](http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course- capture-content/)

<comment><USER12> > instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old

Plato's Republic is almost 24 centuries old. De Re Metallica is almost 500 years old.

I imagine that lectures just a few years old are not worthless.

A university should not be in the business of taking down knowledge, and the Department of Justice should be ashamed of itself.

<comment><USER13> Have you _read_ Plato's Republic? It's awful. A modern reader will discern nothing resembling logical argument, just an endless stream of fallacy.

<comment><USER6> Maybe the problem lies with the "modern" reader.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There should be a 'good samaritan' provision to the ADA which allows for less- than-accessible things to be done if they're provided for free. Accessibility is great, but it doesn't serve anyone to raise the bar required to release free content above what institutions can provide.

<comment><USER15> {I am not a lawyer [1]}

For better or worse, ADA is Federal _civil rights_ legislation. The legal status of a good samaritan exemption in the ADA would be equivalent to a good samaritan exemption for a 'whites only' drinking fountain. The basis of the law is to remove actual discriminatory barriers to access.

[1] As an architect I've been dealing with ADA since 1990 when it was signed into law by the first president Bush. UC Berkeley has been well aware of its requirements since then and modifying built environment to remove barriers. Web page guidance has been available from the DOJ since 2003. This all could have been baked into the process for content creation since it created its very first online course. It wasn't.

<comment> Ar-Curunir You do realise that captioning costs money, right? Already a number of popular courses aren't recorded because of budget issues.

<comment><USER15> Recording the video costs money. The instructors who lecture cost money. The buildings where the videos are shot cost money. UC Berkeley systematically budgeted for each of those and many other costs such as administrators and legal council and student recruitment and admissions officers and an inter- collegiate athletics and systematically did not budget for accessibility.

<comment> Ar-Curunir Accessibility for all of the US? Indeed they did not, because it doesn't make sense. Students at Berkeley already have these transcripts available to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just so I understand...

In order to make the information more accessible we're removing them from YouTube and requiring users to sign up for an additional account?

How does this improve anything? Either you have the internet and can access these videos on YouTube or you don't have the internet and you can't access them on YouTube. How does this satisfy the court order?

<comment><USER17> Yes, this line of reasoning has been discussed in a recent thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856)

The gist of it is: you have to think past the current situation. The U.S. passed the American Disabilities Act because it decided that creating an equal society for the disabled was an important value for America. Overlooking violations that disenfranchise the disabled makes that law meaningless. Every business that has had to install handicap-accessible facilities has had to eat major costs that indisputably hurt their bottom-line. But business owners don't get to say, "Well, having a wheelchair accessible doorway would force me to close my shop, so I can't do it, and having my shop open to serve the non- disabled is better than nothing."

The other thing to consider is that Berkeley's content is not free content. Berkeley is a state university funded by tax dollars. State employees created, curated, edited, and produced that content for the web, all on taxpayer dime. It would have cost more to close-caption them, but that's the law. And when you don't enforce the law, you get institutions like Berkeley deprioritizing what they are federally mandated to do, which is to follow the ADA.

<comment><USER6> Here is the problem with your "enforcing the law" argument:

Berkeley is not being inconvenienced in the slightest by "enforcing the law". The general public is.

Disabled people aren't being helped in the slightest by "enforcing the law". Instead, they are losing access to material that at least some of them can use.

When "enforcing the law" harms people who had nothing to do with violating it, does nothing to help those who were supposed to benefit, and doesn't really punish those who have (allegedly) broken it, it is quite clearly a poorly- written (or perhaps, enforced) law.

<comment><USER17> The law argues that disabled people were harmed when Berkeley used public resources to publish something not accessible to the disabled.

Again, you have to think more broadly than the specific parties in this incident. Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff doesn't mean that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks that may have been interested in the past.

If this lawsuit hadn't raised attention, then it's possible Berkeley (and others in society) would continue to make inaccessible content. The law isn't very effective if it requires a disability advocate to file a lawsuit before it is enforced.

<comment><USER6> "The law argues that disabled people were harmed when Berkeley used public resources to publish something not accessible to the disabled."

But Berkeley isn't being punished. The general public, _including disabled people_ is.

"Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff doesn't mean that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks that may have been interested in the past."

I realize that. However, it seems to me that this outcome is, if anything, making the situation _worse_. Blind people could presumably get something from the audio content. Deaf people could get something from the video content. Now they can't. How is this better?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A shame. Lawsuit filed was unlikely to have been done with the interests of the disabled in mind - but it's correct that "public" (government) institutions must abide by the ADA and implement accessibility standards.

It's an incredible shame that this affects the sharing of free knowledge.

<comment><USER19> I somewhat understand the intention, but this feels like a ham-fisted 'solution.' Deprive majority of people access because it doesn't suit everyone? Being partially physically disabled, I absolutely sympathize with the need to push for more adherence to accessibility standards. But why not work with the institution to hammer out a timeline to meet certain standards and while allowing for people to still access the information?

<comment><USER20> >But why not work with the institution to hammer out a timeline to meet certain standards and while allowing for people to still access the information?

I suspect very little of this actually has to do with helping the disabled, if that was the goal then your solution would be the logical conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Could they just release it all under CC and let the world worry about distributing it? If you're going to the trouble of making things available to the public, why set yourself up for hassles like this? Just release all control of it and be done.

<comment><USER22> Most of the videos are already Creative Commons licensed (Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) and all have been been saved by ArchiveTeam.

<comment><USER23> Do you have a link to this? I couldn't find it.

<comment><USER22> This should have what you're looking for:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berkeley_courses_time_to_seed/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there a word for cases where ADA action causes net harm to society? When a great good can be achieved for almost free, and it is hindered because ADA compliance would cost a lot, what is the benefit to the disabled?

<comment><USER25> From a strictly economic standpoint, the ADA as a whole is a net negative to society. It is a case where the government has decided to make society slightly worse off to provide a large benefit to a small portion of the population that would otherwise be highly disadvantaged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> TBH this makes Berkley look pretty bad.

The classes and videos should have been ADA compliant in the first place.

And I don't like how they're handling the response. The court ruling doesn't require them to delete the videos, only to make them accessible. But instead of doing the right thing and captioning the videos, they're kind of throwing a fit and deleting them all.

</comment><comment><USER27> Similar issue happens with public bathrooms / venue bathrooms. Many cities / countries have laws saying that should be certain % of accessible bathrooms. Solution? Do not have any! Or have one regular and one accessible for like 1000 people venue. Seen those examples both in North America and Western Europe.

</comment><comment><USER28> The ADA is an example of a regulation that's entirely well-intentioned, but has tremendous second-order costs to society that very plausibly outweigh any benefit it's ever provided.

Hopefully this serves as a lesson. Next time we hear a "common sense" law proposed, take a few minutes to think about how people are going to abuse it, or what market mechanisms it's going to break, or how much it's actually going to cost society when you multiply the cost it introduces by the number of people it hurts.

Now, thanks to excessively litigious hard of hearing people at Gaulladet University and the ADA, society is objectively worse off. No one has benefitted from this action, except perhaps a few spiteful people with the attitude "If I can't have it, no one can." It truly disgusts me.

<comment><USER29> To see how horrible your words sound to some of us, replace ADA with 'elderly healthcare'.

It's not always about efficiency, and that slippery slope you are calling for, historically, ended bad.

What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money.

<comment><USER30> Yet to see how accurate his words sound, replace "elderly healthcare" with "banning books".

If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word in it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not locate a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to remove the content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I request until they cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also removes content. I can harass any institution providing service to the public that incidentally contains content that I dislike for political or religious reasons or any reason of my choice. I can deny service to millions using theoretical lack of service to hypothetical individuals as my weapon.

Why, I could go after HN for presenting your comment itself in textual form instead of braille or audiobook format. They could fix that technologically, but I'm sure it would be easier to delete your comment entirely. The fact that I'm only bringing up deletion of your comment because we disagree politically is mere coincidence, I assure you its solely for ADA compliance that I must ask for HN to delete your comment ... surely you must agree with my reasoning that your comment must be deleted, right?

<comment><USER31> > If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word > in it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not > locate a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to > remove the content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I > request until they cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also > removes content.

Or hire a lawyer that defends ADA cases, since "reasonable accommodation" does not, in fact, mean "whatever anyone demands", successfully defend the case, and move on. And, if the instigator has a pattern of doing meritless ADA cases for extortion or political suppression, possibly tack on some nice counterclaims in the process. While they aren't perfect, the justice system _does_ have tools to deal with the kind of abuse of process you describe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Time to make a 'college' torrent for people who have no money. Download all of the content through OCW, UCB, UCI, etc and put it back up as torrent seed to make sure this crap doesn't happen.

</comment><comment><USER33> There are many torrents of UC Berkeley courses here! [http://academictorrents.com/collection/video- lectures](http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures) There is an RSS feed to mirror the entire collection!

</comment><comment><USER34> Another view might be that universities realize that putting free quality content online would do to them what free access to quality news sites did to newspapers.

Why go to university and come out in debt, when you can educate yourself online? (rhetorical question)

</comment><comment><USER35> Another example of the dangers of overregulation.

<comment><USER36> It's easier to look for regulations that are actually good for society. Always assume the opposite unless the benefit can be proven.

<comment><USER35> What is "good for society"?

If everyone gains, then it is "good for society" but what if some people gain and some lose, as in most regulations.

<comment><USER20> "Good for society" in my view is a measure of what is lost compared to what is gained. It is good when that ratio is a positive number. Removing the content entirely seems to be a pretty clear net negative.

<comment><USER37> For ratio rather than sum, I think you mean greater than 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If its up under CC is there any reason someone like archive.org cannot download and republish?

</comment><comment> Paul-ish If someone gave a talk and it was recorded, would the same ADA requirements apply?

</comment><comment><USER39> Shame. Time to youtube-dl the interesting stuff before it's gone.

</comment><comment><USER40> Seems like a knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk order. As usual, the sufferers will be people with less access to quality education all over the world.

</comment><comment><USER41> A prime example of an overreaching state.</comment>


A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html <comment><USER2> 2009, but always well worth a re-read, and if it's your first time, congrats on being one of today's lucky 10,000 [0]

[0] [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

<comment><USER3> Unsure why Diet Coke is always specified. My son and his friends tried grape soda. Inside. It worked just fine.

<comment><USER4> I've heard (but not tried) that Diet Coke is used because not having sugar, it's less sticky when it dries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still love "Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C....."

(On another note, James seems to have written a post back in March of this year. It's been such a long time since he wrote anything I wondered if he ever would again.)

Now back to writing an application in PL/SQL....

</comment><comment><USER6> "Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them." hahaha

</comment><comment><USER7> This article is the origin of the infamous joke about Haskell:

> Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to > control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that __" > a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?" __

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe, that's actually how I ended up on this article, trying to understand what is meant by that statement in more detail. I found that apparently the original is from here [0]. :)

[0] [https://books.google.com/books?id=gfI- BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA138&dq=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=gfI- BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA138&dq=All%20told%2C%20a%20monad%20in%20X%20is%20just%20a%20monoid&pg=PA138#v=onepage&q=All%20told,%20a%20monad%20in%20X%20is%20just%20a%20monoid&f=false)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20Brief,%20Incomplete,%20and...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20Brief,%20Incomplete,%20and%20Mostly%20Wrong%20History%20of%20Programming%20Languages&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER9> >It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.

Or to not be polite to the compiler.

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

</comment><comment><USER10> I can tell it's been a few years since I've read this, because:

 _His goal is to create a language with the intelligence of a two year old. He proves he has reached his goal by showing a Prolog session that says "No." to every query._

is both more and less funny than it used to be now that I have a two year old.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++" was validating. A friend who has worked on desktop software in C for 30 years has it figured out IMO: he uses the C++ compiler, but always defines no-op constructors. Instead he defines an init() method on each class, which he calls explicitly. Essentially his only use for the C++ compiler is to sort out inheritance and build a correct function dispatch table.

<comment><USER11> This gives up the significant benefits of RAII, which are made significantly safer and more useful through the use of references and std::unique_ptr. By using initialization methods rather than constructor methods, you create a situation where your destructors don't necessarily make _sense_ and can't be relied on to be dealing with initialized objects (thus increasing the amount of boilerplate code that can fail) or you don't use destructors at all (at which point you regress to the "boy, I hope I scope-guarded correctly and cleaned up along every path of execution!" state of C).

Writing C++ without using C++'s idioms is usually, if not _almost always_ , creating more technical and business risk for the writer and the consumer than using C++'s idioms in the first place. (That some of these idioms are conceptually very difficult is a very valid criticism of C++, and one that Rust in particular seems well-positioned to be better about, but I'd take the bear traps of C++ over the land mines of C almost any day.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Regarding "recursion and condescension", that's just an unfortunate back- formation from a misunderstood pun.

In a lecture once upon a time, some famous Lisp hacker joked that, if you will, to recurse over tree structure is to "cons descend". A blue-tied Fortran programmer from IBM in the audience didn't get the joke, and walked away with the idea that Lisp programmers are arrogant jerks who even program via condescension.

</comment><comment><USER13> oh yes James Iry :) must be this time of year again: [https://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/james-irys- his...](https://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/james-irys-history-of- programming-languages-illustrated-with-pictures-and-large-fonts/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Absolutely hilarious mix of trolling and absurd by someone that obviously knows what he's talking about. Well played.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hmmm, I wonder what would be said about Nim, Rust, Racket, Go.... I'm drawing a blank, but those are some recent ones that come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER16> >1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

>1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Brilliant

</comment><comment><USER17> Curious to read Rust and Swift entries.

</comment><comment><USER18> Every time I read it, it's as interesting as the first time!

</comment><comment><USER19> APL never mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've probably read unfunnier articles in my time. But I'm having a hard time remembering when

</comment><comment><USER21> It needs more additions.

After all the only way Haskell could be conceived is after a very long LSD (needed to grok monads) fueled BSDM (the type system) session.

Edit: Missed Haskell in the article. But I guess you could say the upper for different reasons about angular, enterprise software and spring. Or anything that transpires to JS, due to the build chain and difficulty debugging.</comment>


Intel Working on Chips for Improving Video Quality on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12intel.html?ex=1352523600&en=4688c16d63ed41ab&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

<comment><USER2> I wish they'd work on their crappy gfx chipsets instead.</comment>


BornYet: Notify friends when your baby arrives - <AUTHOR> https://www.bornyet.com/

<comment><USER2> 1) If your friends want to know the _moment_ your baby is born, they need a life - you'll be gibbering about it from the rooftops soon enough anyway.

2) In the unlikely event that masses of your friends really are interested in up-to-the-minute baby updates (gah), what's the added value over a mailing list?

</comment><comment><USER3> Old idea, nice execution. The design is refreshingly different. You may want to show the price(s) (if any) before signing up.

</comment><comment><USER4> You should upsell customers on things like cards, clothing, etc.

<comment><USER5> I actually think this should be the funding source. This is basically what Facebook is for as my very pregnant wife said as soon as she saw the site. But she was still pretty enthusiastic till she saw the 10$ cost. "Facebook it is!"

<comment><USER6> Then the price should be fifty dollars. Make it about status.

<comment><USER5> This might work, but the people getting the message need that value communicated. Cute dinosaur emails do not say 'I'm throwing money around'. The site would need a complete redo.

On the other hand the cute dinosaurs are very appealing right now. And this service is likely really cheap to run, and collects the names and emails of people, new parents, who will be purchasing lot of stuff right now... That's valuable and I think that's the revenue stream I'd go after.</comment></comment></comment></comment>