Why the Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the Result is SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant-innovate-and-the-result-is-sopa/ <comment><USER4> I don't know about "can't" but the reason why the studios _won't_ innovate alternate business models is simple and is another example of the classic Innovator's Dilemma. The studios are huge companies embedded in other, even bigger companies, so there's a large amount of inertia. The MPAA is just the symptom of this. Go through the list Blank mentions: none, I repeat , none of those advances came from the industry itself, it was always some outside influence that the movie business resisted and then had to eventually deal with.

But the inertia of the studios is only part of the story. Large actor's unions, e.g. SAG, also oppose drastic changes, because they understand the current model and don't want it to be disrupted too much. This is similar to how teacher's unions are generally against efforts like the Khan Academy. Remember that many actors (e.g. Charlie Chaplin) in the 20s were against the introduction to sound to movies due to precisely the same kind of intellectual and business inertia.

One of my favorite quotes: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."

<comment><USER5> This is why I think Apple is more or less behaving the same as the movie institutions. I think it's strange because Apple can be innovative. But lately they try to sue everyone to preserve there dominant position.

Maybe large companies do this because they fear change because change is much harder for large companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The movie industry _does_ innovate. They've been innovating like crazy. Tons of new tech and innovations come out of the movie industry. It's the MPAA that doesn't care to innovate. The MPAA doesn't produce anything. They just want/need control. Their sole job is to make money and any time you have an organization whose sole purpose is to make money, they're just going to want control.

The problem isn't the movie industry or piracy, it's the relentless fight for control that the pushers of a dying business model want over you.

<comment><USER7> MPAA's actions can be attributed to its members. MPAA cannot exist and act without its members' approval. Witness how BSA initially supported SOPA, but then backtracked, probably because some of its members weren't too happy about it.

        Their sole job is to make money

When freedoms are attacked because some fatso feels those pesky pirates are affecting his bottom line, then "making money" is not an excuse.

And governments should be careful as they are walking a very thin line. A French revolution can always happen again.

<comment><USER6> I agree. All I'm trying to say as that blaming it on the 'Movie Industry' is not being able to see the real problem. Many independent and main stream movie industry workers don't support SOPA and don't feel the MPAA acts in their favor. We need to vote with our dollars and not support organizations that support the MPAA. And we need to vote with our mouthes and make it clear that as culture consuming citizens we feel an organization like the MPAA is more harmful to culture and business than it is beneficial.

Now I understand that rights protection organizations are useful and necessary in many cases, again all I'm saying is that if you feel that the MPAA is being abusive and of little value then you should speak up to free yourself from them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've worked at studios and networks for a large part of my career. They have hired plenty of people over the years with "skill at managing disruption." They've poached talent from the Microsofts, Googles, Facebooks, hot startups, etc., of the world plenty of times over.

The problem is that they tend to place these folks -- or any of their people ostensibly charged with "innovation" -- in isolated silos. Typically they'll hire a handful of "innovation" people, most of them ex-McKinsey consultants, but a lot of them tech people, and put them in a sort of internal consulting group. This group will have no P&L of its own, and no real authority to change or mandate change. And it will be tasked with influencing the rest of the company to change. As you can imagine, it's a recipe for failure.

And even this is a symptom of a bigger problem: silos, silos, silos. Every department might as well be competing with the next -- because nobody talks to one another, people are constantly politicking against one another, and nobody wants to fund a win that shows up on somebody else's P&L. The whole thing is very reminiscent of "Game of Thrones," actually. Each studio is host to a bevy of competing fiefdoms, and the heads of the fiefdoms are constantly plotting each others' downfalls.

And even the studios are, themselves, fiefdoms within much larger media conglomerates. The head of the Disney movie studio, for instance, still answers to the head of The Walt Disney Corporation, and competes for his favor with the heads of ABC, ESPN, Theme Parks, Licensing, etc. And the head of The Walt Disney Corporation is beholden to Wall Street and quarterly reports. (Big risks and disruptive strategies are extremely hard to implement when you've got quarterlies to answer for).

If you ask me, these companies have grown too big and unwieldy to innovate properly. I'm not saying that in an antitrust-activist sense, but rather, in the sense that it's extremely hard to get everyone within a giant conglomerate on the same agenda when the goal, business, and job description of each P&L leader is so wildly different from the next.

None of this is meant to be an apology for the entertainment conglomerates, but rather, an observation. It's an observation born out of intense personal frustration, of course, at having seen the same patterns over and over again. At the end of the day, "innovation" is a very easy word to preach, but a much more difficult word to implement.

At the same time, I get the sense that a tipping point is very close at hand. Producers, writers, actors, directors, and other talent are themselves getting very tired of the same old studio game. And many of them are seeking out innovative deals with tech firms, brands, and other direct-to-consumer channels. All it takes is a handful of breakout hits -- shows, movies, or what have you -- that occur outside of the established Hollywood distribution system. The second you've got a legitimate hit series only on Netflix, or a direct-to-Amazon smash hit, or a Facebook series drawing in more viewers per week than a network show ( _very_ feasible), Hollywood will take notice, and it'll start getting serious about rethinking its approach. It may be too little and too late by then, but that's how these things go.

[Sorry for the tl;dr text wall!]

<comment><USER9> Studios are hopeless, for the reasons you detail. They're just big companies in the end, and they move slowly if at all.

But there's another layer of Hollywood, the indie production companies, that has been a world of what are essentially startups, and that's existed for decades. The ability to innovate isn't just available, it's almost essential to those folks.

So Hollywood can innovate, and can do so quite well, actually. Independent producers are as good at what they do as anyone in silicon valley. One of them, or a group of them, will stumble on a model that is wildly successful and then the herds will follow. It'll happen.

<comment><USER8> I tend to agree with you here. The challenge I've run up against is this: big studios can't really position themselves for innovation, but tech companies don't always understand the complexities and idiosyncracies of putting AAA content together.

Producers bring the material and content expertise directly to the tech companies, who can function as distributors (and need not get their hands too dirty on physical production or development).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I will point out that while the cries of "it'll ruin us" (meaning, our business model) have been going on for some time, each time it seems to get closer to the truth. When the original business model was "people going to theaters", new technology options meant that fewer people _might_ go to movies. And that does happen from year to year, and may be on a downward trend for a variety of reasons. Other markets open up but it can take time to adjust (and rather than adjust, big studios seem to just fight).

I do think they're pretty close to the mark on music these days. The cry of "radio will destroy us" is rather silly in hindsight because radio is still a physical limited system. I can only tune in X stations, signal isn't always good, and I'm limited by the realtime aspect of station X only playing Y songs per day. Instant access to all music (or, a very large subset) all the time means ... a big shift in how people consume and think about music. Bigger than most big companies are ready to deal with.

What I'd like? $10-$20/month for instant streaming access to all movie content from X major studios. Another $10-$20/month for instant streaming access to all OTA/Cable channels. When I say all I mean _all_ \- every movie in an archive going back to the dawn of time. Every episode of every TV show that was aired (and maybe some that weren't). I'd even be content with _not_ having access to current stuff. I don't particularly care about being "up to date" with whatever the latest shows are - I much prefer going through entire series after the fact.

Index everything - make it searchable. Let me search up actor FOO, find the shows he was in, and go watch those scenes. We're _close_ on some aspects of this, but still so far away.

All of this content exists, somewhere. Yes, it'll take time to convert it to online. But that's a one time expense (big as it may be). And the 'long tail' effect I believe would justify people spending a nominal amount per month to get at all the old stuff whenever they want. There's _no_ value in movie X sitting in a vault.

<comment><USER11> > What I'd like? $10-$20/month for instant streaming access to all movie > content from X major studios. Another $10-$20/month for instant streaming > access to all OTA/Cable channels.

It's a simple, mathematical fact that the current people paying for films and television are paying much, much more than your hypothetical $30/month.

New content is simply not available at the present quality level for the price you are offering.

To put this in perspective, it'd be similar to telling Apple/iOS developers that instead of buying apps a la carte, you want to spend $1/month and get instant access to every app, both paid and free -- the math doesn't even remotely add up to compensate the people writing the apps.

Hollywood, both for feature films and for cable is _insanely_ competitive, with massive downward price pressure every single year. There simply isn't the amount of overhead to be removed from the system that people not in the industry seem to think there is.

<comment><USER12> "It's a simple, mathematical fact that the current people paying for films and television are paying much, much more than your hypothetical $30/month."

"New content is simply not available at the present quality level for the price you are offering."

I'm not sure either of these statements hold up. People may be spending more than $30 a month on movie-related entertainment, but a large portion of those dollars don't end up in the pockets of the content creators. It's like saying that a $10 CD can't be less profitable for a musician than a $1 MP3.

A large percentage of the dollars that consumers currently spend on entertainment go to the channel rather than the creator. I'm sure if Louis CK had distributed his recent video via traditional channels, the total dollar volume of the purchases might have been 10x higher between pay cable, DVDs and downloads. But he, as the content creator, might have made less money (and certainly would have had less control.)

As for downwards price pressure, the average price of a movie ticket has been rising for years while studios watch ticket volumes decline. Where's the price pressure there?

<comment><USER10> Furthermore, while many people are paying high cable/satellite bills, many other people aren't - they're already priced out of that market. And many other people are dropping out of that too, whether for 'pirated material' or just other media/entertainment. A smaller monthly fee with greater access to more content on demand - even if there is _some_ DRM attached to it - <USER2> bring people back.

Watching BBC programs, for example - or maybe 70s NBC dramas - there's huge vast collection of back catalog stuff that simply isn't doing anyone much good sitting in vaults. If I knew I had access to all of that stuff for a flat rate, it's be much less worth it to hit up pirate bay.

Yeah, we may not really be talking one flat rate, but I'd love to pay BBC $10/month to have access to all their back catalog. And NBC. And CBS. And ITV. And ABC. Wow - gosh, I might just be willing to pay $50/month for all that stuff. But yeah, that'd mean they'd have some work to do - one time work - <USER3> make continued ongoing revenue streams. Without even having to put up ads!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think government and the populous as a whole play a large part in this natural progression of things as well.

When it comes to innovation and changes to the way the world works we're faced with two competing sides:

1) Let innovation take over and increase all things good to the consumer

2) Protect jobs

Once the MPAA/RIAA or whatever finally realize that their role is no longer to play the middleman between the artists and the consumer there _will_ be massive job loss. Its not my job to envision where these workers will migrate but its an unfortunate truth of life when processes become automated and require less people in the whole scheme.

And that's primarily how people maintain support for the associations instead of piracy or streamed content. Those ads in the theater of the key grip going "piracy is killing my job" is the pity response they're trying to drive from us. The Key Grip in reality shouldn't be hurting MPAA should be. They haven't realized yet that their role in the process isn't worth the same amount as it was 10 years ago and they're refusing to take a pay cut as a part of things.

<comment><USER14> Somebody on HN once described the state of the music industry as a transfer of wealth from the record labels to the internet companies. That made a lot of sense to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Gaming killed them.

WoW has made more money than any movie ever will. As the top shelf creative types realize the winds have changed, you will see a brain drain. The next Spielberg or Lucas will work for a game studio, and the movie industry will never get them back.

<comment><USER16> Do you have a link that shows WoWs revenues? That's the first I've heard that WoW has outsold all movies in history.

<comment><USER17> > Do you have a link that shows WoWs revenues?

As far as I know, there's no such thing, only estimates based on e.g. the subscribers base. These estimates are generally in the $1bn to $1.5bn range (edit: per year), and usually on the lower end of that range, since ~2008.

Which definitely does not put any given WoW year at the top of grossing movies (but still in a healthy position, 10 movies so far have gone beyond a billion gross). Still I think a fairer comparison would be to movie franchises, if we put WoW's total revenue around 5~6bn it would rank #2 behind the Harry Potter franchise ($7.7bn) and before James Bond ($5.1bn).

However, I think it's fair to say WoW is an anomaly in terms of revenue. Even more so than billion-grossing movies.

<comment><USER18> >However, I think it's fair to say WoW is an anomaly in terms of revenue.

Yes, and it may be WoW has to fade away for another MMO to succeed at that level, which limits upside growth for the industry. People who see movies will see multiple movies over the course of a year, but MMO players tend to play one at a time. It's a different model - service vs. product.

<comment><USER17> And MMORPGs seem to be moving towards "freemium"/"free to play" models: Guild Wars has been from the start, EQ2 recently switched to freemium following what was apparently a successful "Everquest II Extended" experience, Clone Wars Adventures is a freemium, City of Heroes added a freemium mode (City of Heroes: Freedom) this year, ...), and both of Turbine's recent MMOs — D&D Online and LOTR Online — are now freemium, which makes a new WoW (in terms of revenue) unlikely, apart from WoW2 (or Starcraft Online) maybe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While I'm not a fan of the industry tactics, which seem to essentially amount to throwing a tantrum anytime the world decides to do things a little different, this article seems to show an amazing resilience. It baffles me how these slow anti-tech companies continue to remain well planted as the "owners" of our content.

Especially considering how well developed the internet has become, I can't imagine how these companies have continued to thrive.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think Hollywood is very interested in the internet as a distribution medium. Already it's clear that advertising CPMs are several times higher online than on conventional television -- and online advertising isn't even fully mature!

Hollywood isn't opposed to the "internet" as a technology; they just want to control it.

<comment><USER14> I agree, and it frustrates me more, because -- as the article points out -- they don't innovate.

That said, lack of innovation _could_ be related to the historic divorce from distribution channels; their business is content, not medium, and that's why they don't put resources into medium development. I don't know enough about the industry to say for sure, though.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: The startup conference is tomorrow in Redwood City - <AUTHOR> Speakers: Ron Palmeri (Grand Central), Michael Seibel (YC), David Hornik (August Capital), Max Mullen (Instacart), Holly Liu (Kabam), Michelle Zatlyn (CloudFlare), Nancy Hua (Apptimize), Alex Garden (Zume Pizza) and many more.<p>The conference for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Info: thestartupconference.com <comment><USER2> Nice line-up. Any folks on here going?</comment>


Ask HN: Can I get solidarity stories on senior devs writing overly complex code? - <AUTHOR> I'm a front-end dev at a well known US company and I keep finding other devs using every possible trick they can to make their code "re-usable" and "robust" when in fact it's impossible to read, difficult to modify, totally uncommented, and many times longer than I would think necessary.<p>Other seniors tell me the comments aren't needed if I'm good at reading code. It takes me a lot of time to make changes to their code and it's very discouraging sometimes. <comment><USER2> I will agree that there is something I might call the "re-usability trap". Spending time and effort to abstract a problem or platform under the banner of re-usability and/or portability when the reality is that the principles are rather unlikely to swap in a new part of the platform.

However....

I would strongly caution you that if your senior people seem to be making the solution more complicated that you feel is necessary, then perhaps you don't fully understand the problem.</comment>


Trying to restore iPhone from backup deleted backup - <AUTHOR> Updating my iPhone got messed up, I was in a state where I couldn't factory reset it or update it or use it at all. So I sent it away, and just got my iPhone back from Apple today, it was restored to factory settings. I turned it on, set it up, chose "Restore from backup on Mac". It wouldn't work because the software wasn't up-to-date enough, probably because the iPhone was on 13 but the backup was from beta 14. So I said forget restoring just setup as a new iPhone. Then I downloaded the beta profile, put it on my iPhone, selected it, the device rebooted (I still had the iPhone plugged in to my Mac), and when it turned back on it was already trying to backup to my Mac, overwriting my other backup. At this point I have a backup that is completely useless which overwrote my actual backup. I don't believe I have any iCloud backups, and even if I did some of the most important information to me isn't backed up to iCloud.<p>I seriously doubt anything can be done, so this is mostly me being pissed and letting Apple know that their backup/restore process is terrible. <comment><AUTHOR> Oh, and they were kind enough to take off my screen protector. You know, take it and not give it back. "Steal" it if you will.</comment>


A curator of the best films screening in your area - <AUTHOR> https://whatshouldiwatch-test.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> What kind of "curation" gives Holmes and Watson 75%? Rotten Tomatoes gave it 8%.

</comment><comment><USER3> Creator here. Check it out and please oh please try and break it.</comment>


Magic Mushrooms Do the Opposite of Anti-Depressants, That May Be Why They Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discovered-how-magic-mushrooms-alleviate-depression-antidepressants-psilocybin-amygdala <comment><USER2> [no comments? I'll say something..] What about the effect on people without depression?

It seems most human societies have incorporated hallucinogenics in an official way, part of spirituality or rites-of-passage or medicine etc. When that stopped in our culture I'm not sure. [Facts and figures welcome.]

Personally, mushrooms are the best thing I've ever done. (Half a dozen times, in my 20s) Similar to LSD. Similar to religious enlightenment. Similar to... hmm well.

It's difficult to say anything that seems like it captures even 0.1% of the experience. It's like your brain can think 10000x faster, and also sideways, indexing items and memories by emotional content, meaning, in a way it couldn't before. And the flood of thoughts, images, emotions, can become so vivid and real that it seems real. Time disappears. You can experience in a minute what seems like it must have taken many hours ..But the experience isn't one thing, it's a thousand things.

I recommend it to everyone, especially with experienced/good friends to guide you the first time.</comment>


DNA seen through the eyes of a coder (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/ <comment><USER2> As someone building software to design genetic tools, this is actually a pretty good overview. It's analogies are pretty solid, even if they are just analogies. It's a well-described snapshot of the early phase of education where this helps build a grand intuition and relations between disciplines. Just be careful to remember that they're just analogies, and in general can't be relied on to actually discover, invent, design or conclude.

The fun part for everyone here is that the science has improved so far so quickly that at this point that we _are_ starting to be able to improve, implement and otherwise make good on those coding-style capabilities. We can start to write, patch, update, and affect that code - and do so in intelligent and rational ways, rather than the screens set up in the past century.

The next section I would add would be one that actually started to talk about the compiled programs - the protein's themselves. All that code, all those rules, all those heuristics are there to be run through an atomic 3D-printer to produce proteins. And in an ensemble, those proteins form a closed community within a cell, which then form communities in a tissue, which form in communities called an organism. Those compiled proteins actually do the work at the lowest levels but often get a bit of short shrift while we all stare at their source-code in amazement. The source is elegant, but the programs are even more amazing, in my humble opinion.

Here are some 'profiles' of the kinds of economically and socially interesting programs we've started to make based on the above source-code. An 'app-store' of compiled apps if you will: [https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/](https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/)

<comment><USER3> > The source is elegant, but the programs are even more amazing, in my humble > opinion.

Makes me curious about the 'runtime' which makes their impressive execution possible—granting that the analogy has definite limitations and could be misleading. The aspect of a 'runtime' which I see carrying over is that once the 'source' is 'compiled' into proteins, _something_ makes the interesting behavior of those proteins what it is. I think where the analogy could be misleading is that the architecture of programming language runtimes tends to be a single coherent system with definite separation from programs executing within; whereas in the case of proteins, a large part of what provides for their biologically interesting behavior is just their general chemical properties (which are sort of contained within the 'programs' themselves, rather than in a separate external system). But there are probably aspects of the environment into which the proteins are released that systematically influence their behavior in a way that could be abstracted and studied (at which point it might have some loose resemblance in role to language runtimes). Maybe?

<comment><USER4> Your 'runtime' is physics.

A protein is a chain of concatenated amino acids.

The chain will "ball up" into a 3-dimensional shape.

Its shape = its function.

Why does the balled-up chain function the way that it functions? Because other balled-up protein chains bump up against it in a certain way and suddenly an iron molecule can be contained within the confines of this mega-structure that has formed, and you now have hemoglobin.

Why does the chain ball up the way it does? Can we predict how a protein chain will ball up? Well, protein folding is an NP-Complete problem. Solve it and you will get _at least_ $1M USD, change the world, etc.

\- Software Engineer with a B.S. Degree in Biological Science w/ a focus on genetics + minor in Chem.

<comment><USER3> But physics is the 'runtime' for everything at some level of interpretation. I point out this other hypothetical system because it's possible for 'higher- level' runtimes to emerge from lower-level physicals rules, and this looks like it might be one of those cases. (To clarify, by 'emerge', I mean another consistent set of behaviors appears which are capable of formal description and which can be viewed as consequences of a lower-level system without actually resembling that system.)

<comment><USER5> I had a discussion about this a few days ago. If the current state of DNA programming is done at the physical level, that's like writing your code by doing photolithography on silicon: not very productive. A level up, maybe the Von Neumann architecture for genetic engineering is the world of DNA and the various proteins like transcriptase. When will we come up with the equivalent Structured Programming? Or Object Orientation? Or Operating Systems?

Each represents an abstraction over the others, and increases productivity.

<comment><USER6> The level up from DNA is proteins, the molecules that actually do stuff. These are relatively structured: Primary structure is the amino acid sequence.

Secondary is the structures that from out of the primary sequence: Helices coil, like DNA except except only a single helix not double. Double and triple helices (see keratin and collagen respectively) are more like winding 2 or 3 single helices around themselves, and Sheets: two or more strands that bond to each other either parallel or antiparallel.

Then it starts to get interesting. These secondary structures form domains which are the functional subunit of proteins that actually do (or are in the case of non-enzymes) stuff. These are the equivalent of structured programming. E.g. join an antibody variable domain (the bit that stick to stuff) to an enzyme, inject it into the bloodstream and you get expression on the enzyme wherever the antibody happens to bind (e.g. to a cancer cell).

(Tertiary and quaternary structure refer to the complete protein and to proteins that form a functional unit with other proteins respectively.)

The OO analogy is like the OO analogy for HDLs, the protein _is_ an object. OS is whole organism level.

<comment><USER7> Although it doesn't alter the analogy much, there is also the even higher level of 'quinary structure' \- although it is disputed:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23943406](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23943406)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You know what blew my mind about DNA? The "Gene Regulatory Networks". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_regulatory_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_regulatory_network)

They work analogically like neural networks, where genes act as signals to other genes in a complex graph of dependency. Isn't that amazing? Each cell has a "gene based brain" (an RNN) which can do computation - it can map states to actions. Each neuron in the brain is actually a whole neural network. GRN's are probably the most energy efficient neural nets that exist in the universe, and they're also self replicators.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Is here. This not a joke. We can wonder about the license though. Maybe we should ask the walking product of this source: Craig Venter."

The reference build of the human genome (provided here by Ensembl) is almost entirely derived from the public human genome sequencing project, not the private project led by Venter.

<comment><USER10> And the public reference genome is about 2/3 from a single African American individual from Buffalo, New York!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Definitely an interesting take on the "coding" of DNA.

Something that has always interested me is similarities in natural and unnatural mechanisms, like how modern cameras mimic eyes right down to the tiny motors that drive the auto-focus mechanisms.

The long sequence of nucleotides reminds me of a strange sort of Turing machine capable of building humans.

<comment><USER12> the big difference between modern cameras and eyes is that a huge amount of neural processing is done in the retina of the eye. There aren't any cameras (that I know of) that compute such sophisticaed levels of processing (edge detecting, contrast detecting, motion detecting) within the sensor package.

<comment><USER13> There are CMOS sensors with in-array edge detection. More flexibly, all optical mice have integrated sensors that do motion processing in the same package if not the same die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is amazing and I was looking for such analysis for a long time. I only wish it included more information about the actual programing language of DNA.

>Now, DNA is not like a computer programming language. It really isn't.

Maybe it would be interesting to talk about how it differs and what programming paradigms do not have analogies in the genetic code.

</comment><comment><USER15> A very important aspect of DNA as code the heavy use of macros. The code itself heavily influences the expression of other parts of the code.

<comment><USER16> How so?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very nice piece, as a biologist turned programmer I think it nicely sums things up. Some remarks though...

"Similarly, as an embryo develops in the mother's womb, its DNA is edited substantially to reduce its growth rate, and the size of the placenta. In such a way, the competing interests of the father ('large strong children') and the mother ('survive pregnancy') are balanced. Such 'imprinting' can only happen within the mother, since the father's genome doesn't know anything about the size of the mother."

This is strangely worded, I think there is indeed a trade-off between size of the child and the mother surviving but the father also benefits from the mother surviving (better have breast milk available and love and care, right? Father genome?). Moreover, the fathers' genome is half inherited from a woman and is mingled with a woman's DNA every generation (most of the genome is not specifically male of female). I don't believe there is evidence that the Y chromosome solely drives this push for a larger child in the uterus, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

I also think it is theoretically possible to produce a female child from two fathers by merging their genomes and supplying the child with two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. So the statement that "the father's genome doesn't know anything about the size of the mother" is also wrong (for the used definition of "knowing"), the male genome "knows" just as much as the mother.

<comment><USER18> > So the statement that "the father's genome doesn't know anything about the > size of the mother" is also wrong (for the used definition of "knowing"), > the male genome "knows" just as much as the mother.

It knows something about possible future female child, but not about that particular mother that will have to give a birth?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a layman, I've always wondered about something but I'm not sure how exactly to ask/frame the question:

How did biological _"software"_ "evolve?"

As in, the basic features that are common to many macroscopic lifeforms, like knowing one's position within 3D space, as well as the related-but-distinct sense of proprioception [0].

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

<comment><USER10> The short answer is that it was useful! The parameter space of things that have been tried in uncountable organisms over _billions_ of years is vast.

And proprioception is incredibly useful, even in small doses. Imagine you're a single-celled organism:

At the simplest level, some vague sensory input about your surroundings so that you can avoid the predator/find the food gives you a massive advantage over other organisms that can't. Every random mutation that improves this ability, even a tiny bit, is rewarded, as you can grow faster/die less and ultimately, reproduce more. (this is what we call "fitness" \- how many of your genes get passed on).

If you get a mutation that hurts this ability, you're going to be massively penalized - eat less, grow slower, reproduce less.

In pretty short order, the organisms with higher fitness are going to take over.

Mutations occur all the time. In humans, the rate is very low - about 3 new mutations during every cell division. In many bacteria, the fidelity rate is much lower, and the reproduction rate is much higher, and so they are _constantly_ exploring new combinations of parameters. Most are neutral, many are disasterous, a few give a slight advantage.

Pile up these small advantages over millions or billions of years, and gradually, in fits and starts, very complex abilities evolve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a fun parallel, but I feel like it fails to go the other direction.

How is DNA different from programming?

This is important to understand because those differences are the foundation of our intuition about how DNA operates. We can't let ourselves fall into the misunderstanding that cells are like computers. In particular, the ideas of random mutation and populations are inherently different from software.

Imagine a piece of code whose bits slowly decay over time. Where functions compete with functions in every other program on the filesystem to see who is most efficient. Where scripts need to constantly copy themselves to other folders simply to maintain their integrity.

Its this kind of stochastic and unreliable environment that I think a lot of people forget about when talking about DNA. Yes it is a consistent heritable genetic library, but it is also in a constant state of change. Genes are strange little islands in a sea of noise.

<comment><USER21> > Imagine... Where functions compete with functions in every other program on > the filesystem to see who is most efficient. Where scripts need to > constantly copy themselves to other folders simply to maintain their > integrity.

That sounds a lot like computer viruses.

<comment><USER22> Good analogy!

Funny, but in fact there's even a whole class of self-replicating biomachines named after computer viruses! [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_viruses](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_viruses)

The similarities are _eerie_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great article, so no unit testing? I knew it!

</comment><comment><USER24> From what I know genes don't exist as distinct parts of the genome, genes are just a way that we humans grouped the DNA.

97% is not junk is is just not coding for pure proteines. The machinery can jump in to "commented" genes. We don't know exactly how non protein coding dna works to the lowest level. Allot of it is probably useless but you probably can't remove it without destroying stuff.

Compared to a software project the DNA code has the worst code quality you will ever see in a working system.

Almost everything is dependent on everything else. Is is essentially a software project made by a toddler cutting and pasting assembler code during millions of years.

<comment><USER25> Calling it junk didn't make sense to me 10 years ago, and today it is plain false.

DNA before protein sequence is used for binding modifiers. This means that every protein has a huge if() { before them, and many kinds of different stuff can bind there in order to either suppress production of this protein or increase it. This is how all this stuff work.

How would it work otherwise, I always wondered. Will all proteins in DNA be produced at the same rate, as naive models will imply? It turns out, they aren't, and this is regulated by areas in 'junk' DNA.

Complaining about junk in DNA is like complaining about dispatch in computer program. All kinds of ifs and whiles and fors. Everybody knows our programs are 97% dispatch and 3% business logic computations after all. Or worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I might have missed it, but key is that DNA is not executed linearly. Instead all instructions are executed all the time. Much like the difference in normal programming and programming an FPGA, but then probabilistic.

<comment><USER27> >Furthermore, 97% of your DNA is commented out. DNA is linear and read from start to end.

Looks like he is saying the opposite?

<comment><USER28> That statement is only true in a very narrow context.

Much of your DNA is silenced by being formed into dense chromatin - DNA that is tightly packed onto a protein scaffold. However, the regions that are silenced change throughout development, and these regions are not strictly inaccessible. This is seen with CNSes, conserved non-coding sequences. As the name implies, these are not traditional genes that make protein products, but are usually small regulatory sequences that often affect chromatin state, and sometimes at a great distance. I've had colleagues attempt for years to identify a mutation, only to find it that the causative change occurred many kilobases away from the relevant gene. This is partly the reason why DNA _is not_ 'plug and play', as the genomic context of a particular sequence often matters.

Which is why DNA isn't really linear, at least on a genomic scale. The processes of transcription and translation (DNA -> RNA -> Protein) are linear to be sure, but the regulatory networks that determine gene expression are happening all at once on a massively parallel scale. These molecules are also 3-dimensional and can fold back on themselves and cause modifications. Essentially every fundamental process in gene expression is able to be regulated, whether it's enhancers and repressors affecting transcription, RNA- mediated silencing, RNA splicing, RNA modifications and stability, histone modifications, protein modifications, protein stability, phosphylation or any of the dozens of other post-translational regulation, and on and on and on.. And there are thousands of genes which can impact all manner of other genes at any of those levels, either directly or otherwise. It's a wonder that we're able to tease anything out of it that makes sense.

Generally speaking, I caution against computer analogies for biology. Biology is messy! It rarely works how you want it to. Even relatively common and basic techniques in molecular biology require a great deal of troubleshooting, and even in the best labs with loads of experience, sometimes things simply refuse to work how you'd like them to. You don't hear too much about synthetic biology anymore (it's still going, just less hype) because the premise was incredibly naive; you were never going to get bits and pieces of DNA to behave in a predictable manner. Just about everyone with wet lab experience suspected this.

For context, the current hype about CRISPR is almost entirely based on _how well it works_ , not what it does. We've had a few different techniques for modifying DNA for a while now, but none of them worked quite well enough to practically accomplish all the interesting things that CRISPR is now enabling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> More like (2002)

<comment><USER30> What's wrong with it? Seems like a fantastic micro introduction to DNA for those with a computer science background.

Of course it's not perfect. I'd bet most readers like myself were enjoying it, while thinking of analogies that might be more apt or illustrative. But the power of it is how quickly it can establish a frame of reference, and if desired a jump off point for further understanding.

If there are parts so fundamentally flawed or outdated as to negate the value, please, point them out. Of if you know of a better article that illuminates as much given only a 10 minute time investment, by all means please share it.

<comment><USER31> I took his comment to reference the fact that this was originally written in 2002 with minor additions over time, as evidenced by the "Updates" section.

<comment><USER29> This was the intent of my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think that his talks on SHA2017 were the best. Not just with respect to the contents but also for the manner he presented them. A definite watch for anyone who wants to know a little more about DNA.

</comment><comment><USER33> Since this was written, we've discovered CRISPR, which started off as a bacterial analogue to antivirus software that works against actual physical viruses.

<comment><AUTHOR> The author did a talk on this with updated content, apparently including "A little bit on CRISPR". Blog post with links to the talk videos: [https://email@example.com/dna-the-code-of- life-12db4a1...](https://email@example.com/dna-the-code-of- life-12db4a17c66d)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34>
      What happens if you copy paste
      the 'legs selector' part of a
      mouse HOX gene into the fruitfly
      Homeobox:

        'In fact, when the mouse Hox-B6
         gene is inserted in Drosophila,
         it can substitute for Antennapedia
         and produce legs in place of
         antennae'

Mother of God, is that ever strange.

</comment><comment><USER35> On similar topic: [http://250bpm.com/blog:89](http://250bpm.com/blog:89)

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting, that was a really useful analogy.

So what I learned is that our body is like an Actor model with lots of asynchronous processes sending messages to each other. I'm sure that's a leaky analogy, but it makes things simpler in my mind. I have the sudden desire to go emulate it with Elixir.

</comment><comment><USER18> My internal model of DNA programming:

\- make 1 million sed scripts acting on directory X

\- put all of them in directory X

\- run all of them in parallel in infinite loops

</comment><comment><USER22> Ah, the good ol' _"imagine gravity like aaaa... sheet of rubber"_. Except this time for biology!

<comment><USER14> So you prefer the _" imagine gravity like aaaa curvature of space and time"_?

We explain our science in analogies. We think in analogies. And DNA like a programming language is a useful analogy.

<comment><USER10> It's definitely a good starting place for people from a CS background, but if you really want to learn biology, don't get too attached! As you get deeper, you'll quickly discover the limitations of that analogy.</comment></comment></comment>


A Clean Start for the Web - <AUTHOR> https://macwright.com/2020/08/22/clean-starts-for-the-web.html <comment><USER2> This comes up so often I wrote an a blog post explaining why it won't work that I can refer to every time it comes up. Here it is: [https://robert.ocallahan.org/2020/05/why-forking-html- into-s...](https://robert.ocallahan.org/2020/05/why-forking-html-into-static- language.html)

<comment><USER3> It's a classic case of engineers thinking they can solve people-problems with technical solutions. Both the thing that makes the web so important (a critical mass of adoption) and the things that are ruining it (Google's monopoly, adtech, product-over-engineering mentality) are societal. You can make pristine new monuments to your personal vision for the web all day long, but no amount of engineering by itself will have the tiniest impact on this status-quo. Changing things requires changing minds - of product managers, of legislators, etc.

<comment><USER4> > It's a classic case of engineers thinking they can solve people-problems > with technical solutions.

Linux, Wikipedia and a number of other proves this is not the entire story.

If the new <x> is good/fast/cheap enough people will sometimes start using it.

Often this is gets great help from the incumbent solution being either really bad and/or slow and/or expensive.

This way of thinking is not just not entirely correct but more importantly it is demotivating. Maybe what we do won't succeed but for me it sure beats watching more TV :-)

<comment><USER5> Does Wikipedia count as a technical solution? I don't think the tech does anything without the people editing it. I believe it's the policy ("everyone can edit") that made the advancement, not the specific system they built to allow it.

I agree on the second point, but it's more by accident in my opinion. If the technical solution leads to people finding it easier or cheaper to do something, they'll adopt it. Whether it's new, good, pristine, perfect, free & open etc, doesn't matter. It has to make their life easier, save them time and/or money or otherwise enhance the experience, that's what counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We had pretty much this exactly with XML and XSLT. The XML would be entirely about content/data with only _suggested_ presentation based on linked stylesheets. The browser could use the linked stylesheets or ignore them and use its own. Since the XML would declare its schema a browser could handle pretty much any data so long as it had a handler for that schema.

Since the XML could carry pretty much any sort of data server endpoints could back an "Application Web" just as easily as a "Document Web". A browser could take a music playlist and transform it into a listing of tracks via XSLT while a music player would take that exact same URL and enqueue the tracks for playback.

Unfortunately the mixed presentation and content model had a lot of momentum. By the time a lot of web developers caught on to separating concerns XmlHttpRequest existed and let everyone reimplement all those cool XML/Web 2.0 ideas poorly in JavaScript.

<comment><USER7> As someone who has done a lot of work in XSLT for data transformation in ESB or integration..

Honestly if I actually improved my tools a bit better, I'd almost enjoy using it. But it sucks, so damn much, in the current state.. And now nobody seems to be interested in XSLT ("XML is legacy"), I don't think I'm ever going to be interested in "fixing" it.

<comment><USER8> This is sad because as Json seems to be taking over. Despite its terseness Json lacks a standardized way to do validation (ie xsd), transformations (ie xslt) and service definitions (ie wsdl).

Its regrettable that such a vast ecosystem exists for a markup language to facilitate its use in data transfer, transformation and validation.

It seems like a waste that so many working standards seem to have just been tossed away with nothing to put into their place because Json saves a few bits on the wire.

Also regrettable is the fact that there seems to be resistance in developing similar standards for json.

<comment><USER9> Json is not popular because it saves bits but because it's easily readable and maps 1:1 with js objects. I've worked with xml and xslt and while I see the advantages I still prefer json for anything. Your validation should come from annotated objects on the backend anyways which should be a single source of truth and then it doesn't matter which markup format you are validating

<comment><USER8> I can kind of see what you're saying, but what does "annotated objects on the backend" mean. If there is not a standard I can only hack a solution together. I cannot ensure anything with 100% certainty, instead I'm left guessing if my logic is correct.

With a standard, however, I can be sure that what I intend is being validated and if my logic is wrong then I can change it to match the spec.

<comment><USER10> Json schema maybe [http://json-schema.org/](http://json-schema.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is really no need to reinvent or start with a clean slate. You can just do the following:

1\. Use HTML and vanilla JS or jquery without using the huge set of javascript libraries needed to render a simple page.. as an SPA. What was the problem with plain old HTML in the first place? and whats the problem with server side rendering?

2\. Avoid Google Adwords and the rest of the nonsense.. including AMP.

3\. Support search engines like DuckDuckGo

Now, none of this means your website will be visited often or find its content listed high on Google.

However, if you can live with that, why not?

</comment><comment><USER12> So I'm not sure I understand the point of the article. Or if I do, then the argument seems unlikely.

Split the Web? On the server side? Or the client side?

Splitting the server seems unnecessary - since servers already let you serve as simple a site as you like. If you want to make simple sites with no javascript you are welcome to do that.

So split the client? Have one app to read some sites and another to read some other sites? That sounds contrarian to literally every program evolution in history. Because all client software strives to read all relevant formats (think Word loading WordPerfect files.) why would a user choose 2 separate apps when 1 would do?

It seems to me that the author misses the point that sites are javascript heavy not because they have to be, but because their makers want them to be (largely so they can make money)

<comment><USER13> Correction: Sites are javascript heavy because it is easy to accidentally create javascript-heavy sites, and the programmers who do this also do not care that they have done it.

<comment><USER14> > it is easy to accidentally create javascript-heavy sites

It's definitely not easy by any definition. And also not happening accidentally. Almost all frameworks/libraries mention about how small they are in overhead.

<comment><USER13> I'm sure the front-end programmers you work with really pay attention to the size of their JS build /sarcasm

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> it's OK to have one browser engine -- this means the web is mature (We have one linux kernel after all). The problem is that google controls that. To attack that, one has to fork chrome and add features that google would never add , because they directly threaten their business, e.g. instant in-browser payments. Brave browser does that (ironically, i dont use it because my websites have ads and i do want to see if they are showing up). More of these google-unfriendly features (e.g. built in pseudonymous blockchain-based or other decentralized identity) would appeal to web devs and cause enough people to switch.

Otherwise, the problems he s describing have 100% to do with the miserable culture of CV-padding that has taken over the silicon valley and led to SPA monstrosities, rather than with web standards themselves. WWW as a standard is OK, old websites work, and HTML/CSS is still there. Trying to make the DOM work as some kind of window rendering engine is a travesty that doesnt work.

<comment><USER16> _> Otherwise, the problems he s describing have 100% to do with the miserable culture of CV-padding that has taken over the silicon valley and led to SPA monstrosities, rather than with web standards themselves._

I don't understand what you're saying here. SPAs aren't circumventing web standards, like Flash — web standards are what make SPAs as they currently exist possible in the first place.

Indeed, the complaint is that the standards _themselves_ have gotten too complex, such that only Google —with its obvious conflicts of interest — has the resources to develop a browser that complies with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > For folks who just want to create a web page, who don't want to enter an > industry, there's a baffling array of techniques, but all the simplest, > probably-best ones are stigmatized. It's easier to stumble into building > your resume in React with GraphQL than it is to type some HTML in Notepad.

I've experienced this. I started web development in 1996/1997, so I have a lot of experience building pages by hand. These days I do use Vue.js, but sometimes I'm still known to build pages by hand. I've gotten so much grief for it over the years. Not because there is anything technically wrong with my files, but because "it's not the way things are done today".

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm going to focus on one aspect of the article only.

> _You might want to start with a lightweight markup language, which will > ironically be geared toward generating HTML. Markdown's strict specified > variation, Commonmark, seems like a pretty decent choice._

Markdown of any form would be a catastrophically bad choice for something like this. Remember this: _Markdown is all about HTML_. Markdown has serious limitations and is very poorly designed in places, but it works well enough despite being so bad specifically because underneath it's all HTML, so you can fall down to that when necessary. If you go with Markdown, you're not actually supporting "Markdown" as your language, but HTML. If the user writes HTML in their Markdown, what are you going to do about it? You're supposed to be able to write the HTML equivalent of any given Markdown construct and have it work, and I find that perfectly normal documents _need_ to write raw HTML _regularly_ , because Markdown is so terribly limited—so your document web is either (a) not actually Markdown and uselessly crippled (seriously, plain Markdown without HTML is extremely limiting for documents), or (a) actually completely back to being a subset of HTML, which is exactly what you said you didn't want it to be (rule #1).

If you want to get away from HTML, you want something like reStructuredText, where you _don't_ have access to HTML (unless the platform decides to set up a directive or role for raw HTML), but have a whole lot more semantic functionality, functionality that _had_ to be included _because HTML wasn't there to fall back on_. I think AsciiDoc is like this too.

But the whole premise that "HTML must be replaced because it's a performance or accessibility bottleneck for documents" is just not in the slightest bit true. HTML is fine. Even CSS is well enough (though most pages have terribly done stylesheets that are far heavier than they should be, e.g. because they include four resets and duplicate everything as well as overriding font families five times). The problem lies almost entirely in what JavaScript makes _possible_ —not that JavaScript is inherently a problem, but it makes problems _possible_. The proposed variety of document web would be unlikely to perform substantially better than the existing web with JavaScript disabled.

All up, Robert O'Callahan's response is entirely correct. You can't split the web like this; you will fail. Especially: if your new system is not compatible with the old (which your rule #2 precluded), it will fail, unless it is _extremely_ more compelling for everyone (rule #3), but I don't believe there's anywhere near enough scope for improvement to succeed.

<comment><USER19> > Remember this: Markdown is all about HTML. Markdown has serious limitations > and is very poorly designed in places, but it works well enough despite > being so bad specifically because underneath it's all HTML, so you can fall > down to that when necessary.

Originally, this was the case, but I'd argue that modern MarkDown flavors have been separated from HTML. It's common to compile via other pathways than HTML now (e.g. MarkDown → LaTeX → PDF), and many implementations don't support inline HTML anymore (e.g. many MarkDown-based note-taking apps).

> I find that perfectly normal documents need to write raw HTML regularly, > because Markdown is so terribly limited

Out of curiosity, what do you need it for? I write a lot of MarkDown, but haven't felt any need for writing raw HTML. Modern versions of MarkDown (e.g. the Pandoc variant) have native support for things like tables, LaTeX equations, syntax-highlighted code, even bibliography management.

<comment><USER18> These are the three most common cases that I find for needing raw HTML:

1\. Adding classes to elements, for styling; admittedly this may be inapplicable to some visions of a document web, if you can't write stylesheets.

2\. Images. If you're dealing with known images, you should _always_ set the width and height attributes on the <img> tag, so that the page need not reflow as the image loads. Markdown's image syntax (![description](src)) doesn't cover that. (Perhaps an app could load the image and fill out the width and height as part of its Markdown-to-HTML conversion, but I haven't encountered any that do this.)

3\. Tables. CommonMark doesn't include tables, and even dialects that _do_ support tables are consistently insufficient so that I have to write HTML. For example: I often want the first column to be a heading; but I don't think any Markdown table syntaxes allow you to get <th> instead of <td> for the first cell of each row.

<comment><USER19> Fair enough :). For the record, Pandoc MarkDown supports all of these via its extended MarkDown syntax. For the first you can write [desc](src){.test} to get a class=test attribute on the link, for example. For the second, you can write ![desc](src){width=50%} to set the image size. For the last, tables do automatically get <th> on the first cell of each row when converted via Pandoc. This is however not standard MarkDown but Pandoc's extended version of MarkDown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So everyone is dreaming for their own version of the web / browser. As a game developer I was just thinking couple days ago the browsers should only provide the lowest level rendering, audio, user input and networking API, let users provide anything that they need on top like HTML/CSS/JS engines and network protocols. Here the author talks about a Markdown web, I would argue this should be built on top of my low level browser, there's never going to be an answer. Let's just start building, the fun is immense designing and building protocols like this, of course it won't change the way the mainstream web but I really like how projects like gemini turned out, having its own scene and supporters

<comment><USER21> That would absolutely wreck performance, particularly startup times. You're not going to beat the performance of having 100 open tabs share the same highly optimized PGO-ed browser runtime by replacing that with 100 different runtimes. You're talking about downloading and keeping a small browser engine in memory for every page.

<comment><USER22> I've not seen PGO before, are you referring to this? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile- guided_optimization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile- guided_optimization)

<comment><USER21> Yes, Chrome just made recent changes to their PGO: [https://blog.chromium.org/2020/08/chrome-just-got-faster- wit...](https://blog.chromium.org/2020/08/chrome-just-got-faster-with- profile.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My 2cents.

1\. A markup language taking multi-lingual considerations to heart is a must for me. Markdown doesn't work well for non-alphabetic languages in terms of typesetting etc. The web is global and multi-lingual, a new web (if there is one) should be, too.

2\. I prefer a new content web rather than a new document web. When I use the web, I absorb and sometimes create content beyond documents. I don't want art communities, for example, to be excluded from the new web. Although an art sharing community can be modeled after documents technically, 'content' is the more apropos. Your mileage may vary, though.

<comment><USER24> I don't have experience with non-alphabetic writing systems, but I was under impression that for simple written communication nowadays plain text is good enough for every language supported by Unicode. I've heard e.g. about Han unification, but is it bad enough even for non-linguistic purposes?

Which features, in your opinion, are required for decent non-alphabetic language compatibility on top of plain Unicode text?

<comment><USER17> The first thing that comes to mind is things like right-to-left or top-to- bottom languages. Some ancient languages were written right-to-left and then left-to-right and then repeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Stop, already" might be a good idea.

As in, no more of the stuff on this list [1] without really broad buy-in. We're seeing Google do "expand, engulf, devour" to the Web.

Already, it's hard to send mail unless you're a big player. Writing a browser is a huge job. Just fetching an HTTP file is now complicated enough that people run "curl" as a subprocess to do it.

[1] [https://mozilla.github.io/standards- positions/](https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/)

</comment><comment><USER26> I think the document web markup language would have to be more like server- side HTML templating languages[1] with the added ability to talk to REST endpoints than markdown. That means declarative support for

* declaring JSON (or similar format, but why reinvent the wheel) variables

* rendering the values of these variables

* interacting with the variables with controls (inputs, check boxes, selects, etc)

* conditional rendering based on those variables

* iteration over them

* submitting a form as a JSON object

* saving a JSON response from the server into a variable

* re-rendering the effects of a variable change without a full page reload

I think a major reason for why we ended up here[2] is because browsers did not add these features to HTML and thus devs resorted to AJAX and small JS snippets at first and then kept expanding the use of JS.

[1] as a Java dev who used to do front-end before the ascendance of client side SPA frameworks I'm thinking of JSP, JSF, Thymeleaf, etc. Maybe the client side stuff used nowadays is similar, I'm just not familiar with it.

[2] being forced to run a turing-complete programming language just to display a fully static document, leaving one exposed to security risks (yes, the browser guys are doing a much better job sandboxing than Flash, Java Applets, etc) and tracking.

<comment><USER27> _> I think a major reason for why we ended up here[2] is because browsers did not add these features to HTML and thus devs resorted to AJAX and small JS snippets at first and then kept expanding the use of JS._

That's my hunch as well. If HTML had built-in features such as modals (maybe as an evolution of popups), or partial rendering of server side data (maybe as an evolution of frames/iframes), it would have taken more time to reach the current state.

Btw, your list reminds me of Intercooler.js.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> User stylesheets were removed from Chrome for entirely valid and pragmatic reasons. The feature was poorly implemented and a maintenance burden, and fares much better in an extension (though I gather that the replacement wasn't quite perfect until two or three years later due to precedence of style application).

I don't believe Chrome's user stylesheets even supported anything like Firefox's @-moz-document for scoping the styles to an origin or similar—it was a completely blunt instrument that had very limited use, even less than Firefox's userContent.css.

I wouldn't complain if userContent.css were removed from Firefox for the same reasons (though I would certainly complain if they removed userChrome.css, since no alternative exists in _that_ case). I used to use userContent.css. I've used extensions (now Stylus) for the equivalent functionality for years now.

The tweet this article cites about its removal six years ago is terrible: it quotes the most recent comment on that issue as though it were fact stated by the developers, when it is in fact a random person (probably a disgruntled user) jeering; said comment is completely false.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't think a clean division into two categories "document" and "application" will work.

It's more of a spectrum than a binary, a lot of things exist at various points in between "completely document" and "completely app". Even wikipedia has _editing interfaces_ which are arguably "app" right? I guess it could be split into two separate "things", one using the "document web" for display and another using the "application web" for editing. This doesn't seem all that appealing.

I think the ability to be wherever you want on the document/application spectrum, and have a site (or a part of a site) move along the spectrum over times without having to "rewrite in a new technology" is part of what leads to success of the current web as it is.

The OP is probably not wrong that it's also part of what leads to the technology mess. But I don't think it's realistic to think you can bifurcate the architecture for two ideal use cases like that.

<comment><USER29> >I don't think a clean division into two categories "document" and "application" will work.

Do you also believe that there can be no clean division into "data" and "code"?

If a program I wrote is interacting with an API, is it not completely unambiguous for me to ask the maintainer of the API to give me some way to directly read all of the persistent data behind the API?

<comment><USER28> Sure. I specifically don't think it's realistic to think the architecture of the web can be divided into two separate architectures, one for web sites that are purely "documents" and another for websites that are purely "applications". Because I think the success of the web has been due to the fact that you can move along the spectrum from more "static document" to "interactive application" with the same technologies and architectures.

I don't think it's a general principle about "data" and "code" in general", although of course data and code can also slide into each other in many other venues.

But of course you can write programs that access APIs. I'm sorry if I was unclear and you thought I was saying it was impossible to write programs that access APIs to get persistent data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In many ways, browsers have become Rube Goldberg machines for rendering text, images, and video.

A major reason people are concerned about the recent Mozilla layoffs is because they're one of the few competing browser vendors. Why does that matter? Because browsers are too complicated for reasonably sized teams to implement competing solutions. If a larger percentage of web content was accessible to simpler software, this would be much less of an issue.

It's not hard to make simple document browsers. My personal content is accessible in the console as plain text:

        curl https://apitman.com/txt/19

        nc apitman.com 2052 <<< /txt/19

I like the idea of splitting the web between documents and apps (and using separate browsers to access them), but don't necessarily agree making it incompatible is the way to go. I think specifying a subset of HTML/CSS and allowing the "new web" to grow over time might see more adoption better in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER31> Oh wow, I just wrote my own version of this rant, reaching a radically different conclusion:

[https://lab6.com/0](https://lab6.com/0)

TL;DR: I'm abandoning HTML and switching to PDF.

<comment><USER18> So, a megabyte of PDF which both downloads and renders far more slowly than the equivalent HTML, which could be 20KB of HTML, no JavaScript, 1KB of CSS and perhaps 50KB of images (which don't block page rendering, either), all bundled into one HTML file (base64 the raster images) of under 100KB.

I can imagine why you might have concluded as you have, but your conclusion is nonetheless baffling. Most of the reasons you've chosen PDF over HTML apply just as truly to HTML; page-orientation is the only one that doesn't, and I refute your claims that that page orientation is a good thing for the web at large or the hardware that most use. (Guess how I read the document? By scrolling, not by pagination; the footer and header of each page transition is just a minor annoyance in the middle of a paragraph of text.) I disagree with every point of your assessment on PDF's historical disadvantages, too: PDF as used still includes patent-encumbered things, and implementations are complex enough that major deviations and incompatibilities are common; PDF files are still ginormous (nothing has changed about this ever), and tooling is terrible (perhaps even non-existent?) for trying to shrink files without butchering the lot, with yours as a good example of _not_ being an order of magnitude smaller as claimed; it's still far harder to make PDFs accessible, because most free tools just can't do it, and it takes far more effort than HTML where it's _easy_ (as before, tooling is terrible, where with HTML you can just edit the source in a text editor); most PDF readers _can't_ reflow text (don't think I've ever used a tool—reader or writer—that could); most PDFs _can't_ be edited freely; and PDFs _don't_ render well on screen.

You've thrown out the HTML ecosystem because _some_ people abuse it, and are choosing to use PDF despite the rampant abuse and many problems of the format, because it's _theoretically possible_ to work around those problems. (You may quibble with my judgement of "rampant abuse", but most PDFs I encounter on the web are PDFs for no good reason and perform terribly, loading slowly and being worse for task performance. It is perhaps a slightly different class of abuse, since spying on users via JavaScript isn't part of it, but it's related inasmuch as it's not about meeting the needs of the _user_.) This does not seem internally consistent.

<comment><USER31> Thank you for your feedback. I'm not going to vigorously defend PDF, because a lot of the distaste you express is legitimate. It's a statement of my disappointment in current web/browser trends that I would be willing to accept all of PDF's hardships to distance myself from the churn.

For what it's worth though...

That 1MB of PDF still loads nearly instantly on my phone - subjectively no slower than the equivalent much-smaller bare-bones HTML version.

PDF patents are all licensed royalty-free for the normative parts of the PDF 2.0 spec.

PDF tooling sucks, but I'd rather see effort put into improving this situation than into yet another expansion of the web browser.

<comment><USER32> Ok, let's see what we can do to improve your PDF. I ran it through qpdf so I could view it in my text editor: qpdf --stream-data=uncompress 0.pdf 0.uncompressed.pdf

The Tj operators (for printing text) are operating on numbers instead of ascii text making it difficult to read.

I'll see what I can do to duplicate your PDF using some cli tools and a text editor... (hopefully I have time to do it today)

<comment><USER31> I'm intrigued and would be very interested if you find any tools that can create or verify tag structure.

FYI the file has already been linearized through qpdf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I support the idea of re-starting the web. Although, I believe the new web should be more deeply differentiated from the current one than what's offered by the author. Decentralized payments, notifications, persona-based authentication, privacy, content aggregation, structured data should be deeply ingrained in the new web, instead of being an afterthought. Re-starting the web requires a thorough analysis of what's lacking in the current web, and an open discussion on addressing the shortcomings in the new web.

Also, while not it doesn't have to be compatible with the current web, there should be mechanisms that translate the new web into (maybe limited) form of the current web, to utilize at least some of the tools and standards.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if it would be impossible to carve out a set of standards of a browser (e.g. WebRender, HTML, CSS, JS Engine, ...) and then have everything outside of that be a modular plugin you can install. And make building those modules easy.

"Netflix needs a DRM module. Download this official release from <Browser Org>, <Netflix>, <Tom who really likes DRM and encoding alrogithms>".

Or am I just too naive and don't know enough about how browsers work?

</comment><comment><USER35> Another proposal: a standardized search protocol over HTTP that can be implemented by most web servers and a DNS-like system of search indexes that use websites' built in index query endpoints (rather than crawling). Essentially decoupling search and advertising by building a search function into the internet standards.

Perhaps commercial products can improve over the quality of results, but simple text and keyword search can work this way.

<comment><USER36> you can't do that. when you implement search you need a global view over the collection to understand what are the most relevant documents. You are describing the paradise of the spammers :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If I think about a document web, I don't think everyone will like to write in Markdown. There are many ''lightweight markup language''s to choose from. So maybe there could be a ''low-level'' markup language like Scribe or Texinfo to compile into from your favourite markup language. I have a small example of what that might look like here (just the sketch, not impl): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24249636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24249636)

What do you think?

<comment><USER18> You seem to have just taken HTML and provided it with a different syntax, for no clear reason.

HTML _is_ the compilation target, the low-level markup language that Markdown, reStructuredText, _& c._ can render to.

<comment><USER37> Yes, this does look like html in another cloth. I learnt about this from here: [https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/...](https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/scribe)

Compare:

            <strong>important</strong>

with:

            @strong{important}

It looks like some characters saved here. I don't know how much savings would be in the long run.

For big sections, one could use @begin{blah} content here @end{blah}.

It looks a bit plesant in my eyes (than html). And only _one_ special character @, which is repeated twice to escape it.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, but… why? We already have all our tooling built around HTML syntax, why start something new that is not meaningfully better? All you're doing is fracturing the ecosystem needlessly.

<comment><USER37> hmm. all toolings are around html. it isn't or meant to be going mainstream. just a niche...

>> All you're doing is fracturing the ecosystem needlessly.

I haven't done anything yet ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Document and App web has an underlying unified component -- message. Design a universal message format and exchange protocol, each only in one A4 page, that may be the foundation of New WEB.

</comment><comment><USER39> Glad to see Gemini mentioned, I think it provides a good answer to his Document Web 2.0 idea.

Gemtext might not be as full featured as some might like, but you can always serve markdown instead.

<comment><USER40> Last I checked, Gemini can't have pictures, only text.

<comment><USER24> Well, Gemini can have links to pictures and clients may render pictures — inline, in separate "graphics" column etc. No one does it yet, as far as I know, but we will see.

Table and math bring more problems. Probably SVG or other images can solve them, but it is a pain for authors. In my opinion, no plain-text markup language today has tables with features even remotely close to HTML (at least colspan, rowspan and alignment) while remaining convenient to both write and read. AsciiDoc is fine in terms of features, but not in terms of syntax:

[https://asciidoc.org/newtables.html](https://asciidoc.org/newtables.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The problem is that you can not _sell_ something that is 20 years old, works, easy to use, and is freely available.

</comment><comment><USER42> Yes, please.</comment>


Facebook Design Getting All Hipster - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/designjobs/

<comment><USER2> "Move fast and break stuff" - they're actually proud of that shit?

I heard that line before but I didn't realize they had made it their mantra. I wonder if they realize how it rings to all the third party developers who are fighting a daily struggle against the notoriously fickle Facebook APIs.

<comment><USER3> Well, that explains a lot. Every time I attempt to accomplish something on Facebook, one of two things happens: (1) the interface has changed in some way or (2) the feature is broken. Just last week, every "Load More" link was broken in Google Chrome (but worked in Firefox). The week before, I wasn't able to upload photos repeatedly failed, but the iPhoto integration worked fine.

Agile development is great, but Facebook is a mature product: I wish they would keep the breaking to internal test builds.

<comment><USER4> Why would they? They get free QA this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is the word "Hipster" suddenly trending so much? [http://trends.google.com/trends?q=hipster&ctab=0&geo...](http://trends.google.com/trends?q=hipster&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

<comment><USER6> Good question. I'm not sure what the recent momentum is about, but I remember two widely-linked stories about "hipsters" and "hipsterdom" back in 2007 and 2008:

[http://newyork.timeout.com/things-to-do/this-week-in-new- yor...](http://newyork.timeout.com/things-to-do/this-week-in-new- york/8355/why-the-hipster-must-die)

<http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html>

It's interesting to note that "hipster" really started ramping up after "emo" had started sliding downward:

[http://trends.google.com/trends?q=emo%2C+hipster&ctab=0&...](http://trends.google.com/trends?q=emo%2C+hipster&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

I compare the two because they are both subcultural labels that have become terms of abuse in fairly recent years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In case folks don't realize, the image changes on reload

<comment><USER8> if you'd like to cycle through the background images, go to the site and paste this in your URL bar:

      javascript:document.getElementsByTagName('a')[0].onclick=function(e){e.preventDefault();document.body.id=switcher[(switcher.indexOf(document.body.id)+1)%switcher.length]};void(0);

now each time you click the facebook logo, the next background image will load

edit: in related news, it looks like Chrome won't let you paste javascript links into your URL bar. you may need to manually type the 'javascript:' part at the beginning.

<comment> mike-cardwell Interesting. I just did that in Firefox 5 and the following message popped up:

"javascript: and data: URIs typed or pasted in the address bar are disabled to prevent social engineering attacks. Developers can enable them for testing purposes by toggling the "noscript.allowURLBarJS" preference."

I guess that is a new FF5 feature.

EDIT: Oh. That's NoScript, not Firefox. Will read more carefully next time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The text is illegible against a good number of the background images they've chosen (at least on a mobile browser). That doesn't seem like a good advert for a design team, or am I missing the point?

<comment><USER10> I could read the text fine. It seems like they even set it up so that the text turns black or white based on the lightness or darkness of the current background.

<comment><USER9> They have, but it hasn't worked particularly well: <http://imgur.com/PSvIm>

<comment><USER11> I'm curious, what browser/OS are you using? Your screenshots look different from my view of the site, specifically, the text is either displaced or enlarged in your screenshots, making it look weird.

<comment><USER9> Safari on iOS 4.3.3; standard 3GS setup.

<comment><USER11> Interesting. I'll file a bug. Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can someone please photoshop the background image to spell something, ahem, more interesting? <http://dragon.ak.fbcdn.net/cfs-ak-snc6/84980/796/hack.jpg>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Saw this ad via the deck on @Dribbble.

Not sure, but I saw some pics of some devs who built a loft in the facebook office and thought this picture might have been the loft.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoa, refreshed the page and the image changed!

Checked the source and found this, haha:

<!--

      Facebook - The Deck Ad (Summer 2011)
      </comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

      If you're looking at our html, this is a good thing.
      You should reach out to our design team recruiter directly.

      Drop a line to Greg Hoy at: Greg Hoy <firstname.lastname@example.com>

\-->

<comment><USER13> I saw that, wondered who wouldn't look at the html just out of habit...

<comment><USER14> Ha, does everyone else do that too? I always feel like I'm alone.

<comment><USER15> I come here to tell you, you are not alone my friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of the British The Office show's intro: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKTvAP06ECM>

</comment><comment><USER17> I am such a facebook noob. When I think of facebook design, all that comes to mind is walls of light blue text on white and pages and functionality that I find difficult to navigate.

What am I missing?

(I did that reloading background image thing back in 99 if I recall, but you don't find my valuation at 20 gazillion dollars. :( )

<comment><USER18> Clearly ahead of your time, my friend. If Facebook does it, it's cool...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That one picture looks like something out of a Japanese horror film

</comment><comment><USER20> Please note, bold design and strong typography !== hipster.</comment>


Slack is down - <AUTHOR> https://slack.com/ <comment><USER2> Huh, Freenode is still working YEAH I WENT THERE.

<comment><USER3> And they laugh when you try to explain that decentralized services are good. :/

<comment><USER4> It's almost like the text editor wars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We see about 15% of Slack connections failing at [https://sameroom.io](https://sameroom.io)

As an aside, we highly recommend having a contingency plan with another chat system on hot-standby. Here's more: [https://sameroom.io/blog/when-team-chat- goes-down-are-you-re...](https://sameroom.io/blog/when-team-chat-goes-down- are-you-ready/)

<comment><USER6> Would be awesome if you had some sort of status page for all chat services.

<comment><USER5> We actually do, but it's way too ugly at the moment (raw JSON).

We plan on beautifying soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ironically, everyone at our company is heads down and working uninterruptedly. Productivity seems to have gone up without the interruptions!

<comment><USER8> Aside a jaunt over to HackerNews? ;)

I agree. As an aside, Slack has been getting so much usage internally (and everyone learned about @notifications) that it's turned into a massive source of interrupts. It's hard to idle in a number of channels without eventually getting @channel notifications. Perhaps it's a cultural thing here, but there's an expectation that questions are answered immediately unlike email.

I've taken to turning off Slack for periods every day to get work done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't even get to status.slack.com ... I really hope that isn't on production infrastructure!

GET [https://slack.com/favicon.ico](https://slack.com/favicon.ico) 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity

<comment><USER10> | "Back-end server is at capacity"

DDoS?

<comment><USER8> 503 = at capacity, default response an ELB returns when all the servers in the ELB are OutOfService (or missing).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For the few people that managed to get to their status page it appears that they're also having problems there: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUhbPDOW4AA35Y-.png:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUhbPDOW4AA35Y-.png:large)

<comment><USER12> ouch status page is down too

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's an interesting decimal truncation convention.

[http://i.imgur.com/FiJ4G4i.png](http://i.imgur.com/FiJ4G4i.png)

"Let's only show precision that makes us look good."

<comment><USER13> For convenience, the numbers on their status page [1] are:

      May 2015        99.999%
      April 2015      99.9%
      March 2015      99.999%
      February 2015   99.995%
      January 2015    99.99%
      December 2014  100%
      November 2014   99.84%
      October 2014    99.9%
      September 2014  99.998%

1: [https://status.slack.com/calendar](https://status.slack.com/calendar)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just another reason for OSS projects to never trust closed (centralized!) protocols: no recourse when it (inevitably) hits the fan.

<comment><USER15> I feel like this is the same sort of argument that opponents of self-driving cars will use - "We shouldn't use self driving cars, because they have problems sometimes and a driver doesn't have recourse to correct it!"

While this might be true, we are still trading more problems for fewer problems. Yes, we can't fix slack when it breaks, but it still breaks a lot less than when we were running our own internal chat client.

<comment><USER14> Except, of course, that self-driving cars _do_ have a recourse for the driver - manual overrides. I do see your point, however, and you're correct in that running an internal chat network probably isn't the best course of action for most groups/small business. Luckily, that's what IRC and XMPP networks are for.

<comment><USER15> Manual overrides cause more problems than they solve, and probably we should get rid of them in future self-driving cars:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/29/427467598/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/29/427467598/episode-642-the- big-red-button)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This might have something to do with it? They are Inc. magazine's company of the year: [http://www.inc.com/magazine/201512/jeff-bercovici/slack- comp...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/201512/jeff-bercovici/slack-company-of- the-year-2015.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> What's the real world analogy to Slack being down? Locking your entire team out of the offices?

Since the start, at our company we've used Slack. We have never experienced an outage like this. Definitely a strange and uncomfortable feeling not having Slack available.

</comment><comment><USER18> At some point Group chat is crossing into tier1 messaging infrastructure and all the sexy things that go along with it, especially when you start charging money.

</comment><comment><USER19> I also can't connect and status slack seems down.

What I saw was their twitter status :

> We're having sporadic connectivity issues, and we're investigating, and > working as hard as we can to resolve them. Updates will follow!

[1] : [https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/668879517922914304](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/668879517922914304)

</comment><comment><USER20> Yeah but [http://chatroom.horse/](http://chatroom.horse/) isn't.

<comment><USER21> It lacks some features until it can be a Slack replacement. What's their current valuation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So this makes me wonder... Why hasn't Slack made a self-hosted version yet?

Having a self-hosted option would make them viable to businesses that would never consider having their team communications archived and dependent on external servers outside their control. I imagine there are plenty of those out there.

</comment><comment><USER23> Decentralisation ftw :)

</comment><comment><USER24> We experienced connectivity issues until a few minutes ago. Everything appears to be back to normal on our company's Slack account now. YMMV

</comment><comment><USER25> I didn't notice an interruption on the desktop client and it's been logged in for about 7 hours now and slack.com looks fine. Interestingly enough [https://status.slack.com](https://status.slack.com) is currently down while curling status.slack.com returns a page that says it's moved to [https://status.slack.com](https://status.slack.com)

<comment><USER15> You mean the http redirect to https is up but the https site is down.

<comment><USER25> No I meant it returned an HTML page that said "this link as moved" with a link directing you to [https://status.slack.com](https://status.slack.com)

<comment><USER15> Umm, yeah that is called a 302 redirect:

curl [http://status.slack.com](http://status.slack.com) <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">  <title>302 Found</title>
Found

The document has moved here.
](https://status.slack.com">here.
)
 <address>Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) Server at status.slack.com Port 80</address>

The HTML parts are fallback for if your browser (or curl) in this case doesn't handle a 302

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can connect to my Slack team, but then "Apologies, troubles connecting to Slack" :/.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ha. if you refresh it comes back up. Looks like only some of the nodes are down

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't envy being their social media person right now.

</comment><comment><USER29> Feels very DDoSe

</comment><comment><USER30> This is why IRC is superior.

<comment><USER31> Apparently you've never experienced repeated netsplits under DDoS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hipchat is always down.

</comment><comment><USER33> Or not. Is this really news?

</comment><comment><USER34> My company is unaffected because we use MatterMost internally</comment>


Verizon is trying to sell Tumblr, the blogging site once worth $1.1B - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/verizon-looking-sell-tumblr-2019-5 <comment><USER2> As far as I could tell, the entire purpose for that site was porn, and they killed that along with the userbase. Good luck selling it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe they can bring the porn back and sell it to PornHub.

<comment><USER2> You were right on the money it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Such a strange thing for Verizon to hang on to them in first place. They seemed incompatible from the start.</comment>


Show HN: Start your day with this self-help alarm clock - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tonyalarm-alarm-clock/id1306454896?ls=1&mt=8 <comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm missing something obvious here, but why would I want to shake my phone in the morning?</comment>


Learning transistor mimics the brain - <AUTHOR> https://liu.se/en/news-item/laraktig-transistor-harmar-hjarnan <comment><USER2> One popular topic in science fiction is the notion of backing up people to a computer network, the cloud, etc. Actually, I'm eagerly awaiting Neal Stephenson's upcoming novel on this topic.

Of course the process of backing a brain up is a bit challenging and not exactly a solved problem. E.g. scanning microscopically thin slices of brain is possible but still magnitudes off in terms of resolution. Also, doing that typically destroys the brain under study.

IMHO it is much easier to backup non organic brains; like proposed in this article. And building those is a lot easier/feasible than it is to pick apart existing ones. With stuff like this and general improvements in electronics, we're approaching the moment where computer systems matching e.g. the neuron count in humans with the equivalent in transistors, electronic neurons are becoming a reality. Backing those up is going to be lot easier.

Which brings me to the point that there's actually only going to be a brief period where electronic brains are not vastly more capable than our own ones. Raises all sorts of interesting questions when you start thinking about that.

<comment><USER3> How is the theoretical energy efficiency of these polymer transistors? The last time I checked, silicon was much hotter than neurons, even considering theoretical limits, even though the size is fine.

<comment><USER4> No comment on your actual question, but your last sentence reminded me of some research I saw an article about in the last few years premised on learning from nature and trying to address both power-delivery and heat-diffusion problems posed by "stacking" by accomplishing both with a fluid. Here's IBM's page for the research: [https://www.zurich.ibm.com/st/energy_efficiency/redox_flow.h...](https://www.zurich.ibm.com/st/energy_efficiency/redox_flow.html)

The intro section of one of their recent articles is a little meatier than the research site: [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7967719](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7967719)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Achieving even 100x improvement in the energy efficiency of training / inferencing neural networks sounds too good to be true. Still, as ASICs are getting to their limits, it makes sense to try lower level changes in the architecture.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some of these new devices remind me of the old "memistor" technology used by the ADALINE/MADALINE machines in the 1960s:

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

These are not to be confused with "memristors"; the latter being a two- terminal device, while the memistor is a three-terminal device.

If you look at the original papers describing the ADALINE/MADALINE machines, there's a good description on how these devices were originally made - there's nothing about them that couldn't be duplicated today in one's garage or workshop.

So - if you have a hankering to build your own hardware neural "logic" element...

<comment><USER7> this is the 1960 paper about ADALINE that discusses the memistor: [http://www- isl.stanford.edu/~widrow/papers/t1960anadaptive.p...](http://www- isl.stanford.edu/~widrow/papers/t1960anadaptive.pdf)</comment></comment>