BioBIKE – A Web-based, programmable, integrated biological knowledge base (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/suppl_2/W28.full-text-lowres.pdf <comment><USER2> More here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioBIKE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioBIKE)

It was actually a multi-user, multi-tenancy, biologically-knowledgable lisp machine, sort of like Wolfram Alpha (where Lisp -> Mathematica, and without the constraints that make WA pretty much useless for anything except one shot answering of random questions).

It even had a theorem prover!

Unfortunately, it was built in 2002, which is well before there were well worked out standards for bio/omic representation, and also before the idea of through-the-web programming (PaaS?) - at least in the SalesForce sense - caught on.

Seems like yet another idea that was too far ahead of its time to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would there be any users of these knowledge systems that could give any comments on how

a) the user base evolved b) how effective this system is in comparison to existent genomic/synthetic pathway/etc databases

Thanks!</comment>


Response to John Resig's comments about YUI - <AUTHOR> http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2010/11/03/response-to-john-resigs-comments-about-yui/ <comment><USER2> I evalutated JavaScript libraries for my current employer and obviously had jQuery and YUI as two of first on the list before I even did any real research.

For me, YUI ended up being too much like a solution architected and run by people coming "down" to JavaScript from more high level languages, whereas jQuery still works like a framework built by people who use JavaScript a lot and wanted a way to make their lives easier (though granted the jQ UI stuff is a bit off the mark). Immediately even the way the YUI documentation hub is written and managed put some of our more designery-developers off and once they felt intimidated by that then their next reaction is to come up with reasons why they don't want to use it, or other developers end up wasting time supporting them.

I thought YUI would make a more suitable choice for us in terms of the approach the YUI team expect YUI code to be architected and written, but if the entire team can't get behind it then rather go with something less architected and at least have everyone on board from the start.

jQuery is popular because it gave a solution to "I was always told to avoid JavaScript but now everyone is using it, how do I get into it easily?". YUI solves the slightly different issue of "I want to base my entire codebase off a well architected JavaScript core that I can extend in a way that my OOP front end engineers will feel at home with".

Sabre wrattling not required.

<comment><USER3> To me, YUI smells like a big bloated "Enterprise software" while JQuery is small and "Made by hackers".

I have used them both and when I run into bugs, the ones in YUI are still open and waiting for the time until their "paid" developer has time to fix it..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _jQuery is great for smaller sites and it's easy for anyone to pick and use, which is why there is such a strong designer community...but I wouldn't want to use it to create the Yahoo! homepage. For scalable web applications, YUI really excels._

I'm curious: what about YUI lends itself to scalability?

<comment><USER5> I took that to mean scalability in the sense of UI complexity. Building something like some of the denser Yahoo pages in jQuery would be painful.

However, most of the YUI-based stuff I've seen struck me as overly complex and slow and heavyweight, like Ext/JS. If you want to build something that looks and feels like a desktop app those libraries are probably the right choice but I almost always prefer something lighter and cleaner in a web UI.

<comment><USER6> That's exactly my experience as well. I recently worked on two "enterprise rich web apps"(I hate that term) that were desktop-like.

App A: the UI was mostly composed of HTML glued together with JQuery components, with a custom Model/Controller implementation (similar to Backbone.js) for the data. The view did have a lot of glue, but the data separation ended up a lot cleaner, and was easier for designers to maintain (HTML/CSS).

App B: Was taken over from another team that used ExtJS. App B, had full UI without much effort, but ended up with a lot more cruft and direct view/model dependencies.

Plus the ExtJS documentation is terrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> YUI2 was the first JavaScript library I started with, then I got into a project where I found jQuery code. At first I thought that jQuery's selector- centric method is weird, but I quickly found out that I was wrong. The thing that I love in jQuery is that it feels like HTML and JavaScript. YUI2 is an OO framework and a good one, but to me jQuery feels more like the web.

I seen little YUI3 but as I seen it's kind of shifted into a more functional style than YUI2.</comment>


Ask HN: Do I need to register with the state to be a freelance programmer in US? - <AUTHOR>

I am located in the US, and have a green card. I have a fulltime job and am looking at doing freelance on the side.
Do I need to do anything official such as register with the state or setup some separate bank account to be able to do freelance programming and accept payments?
I searched and read that unless you incorporate you will need to report taxes as a sole proprietor. Do I need some legal stuff to work as a freelance programmer? <comment><USER2> why are you posting this again? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1698433></comment>


Product Hunt wants to help you ship your product with its new product Ship - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/14/product-hunt-wants-to-help-you-ship-your-product-with-its-new-product-ship/ <comment><USER2> the feature they really should provide are pre-matched-first-adopter users. THAT is valuable. the rest is just a spackling of existing services.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love the idea of connecting makers with specific beta testers that match their target audience. We're exploring this as well.

Re: "spackling of existing services", you're right. We saw so many people piecing various services together (Mailchimp, Typeform, homemade landing pages, etc.) and see an opportunity to simplify and connect all these things together so that makers can focus more of their time building their product.</comment></comment>


Can banks individually create money out of nothing? – theories and evidence - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001070 <comment><USER2> yes, its called commercial credit. When you go to a store and pay with a plastic card issued by the bank, its almost the same as paying with cash as long as you have credit on the card.</comment>


I threw out most of my pots and pans, ate some dinner, and wrote this. - <AUTHOR> http://joshwhiton.com/?p=174

<comment><USER2> If you're going back to the future, get yourself a cast iron skillet or two. You can still buy an American-made one at the local hardware store. It will cost more than the same skillet did back when I last bought one, but it will last. We cook now and then with a skillet that belonged to my wife's grandparents. I'd be surprised to hear that it's less than 75 years old. They require very little maintenance.

<comment><USER3> There's also thrift shops and garage sales. ("Who wants Grandma's old, clunky cookware?"). Just be comfortable that you're not buying one that some ignoramus used to melt lead or who knows what.</comment></comment>


Visual Studio 11 Express (Free) Editions will only target Metro Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/25977/Visual_Studio_11_Express_editions_Metro-only

<comment><USER2> The problem with this is that the express editions are a stepping stone for new / younger programmers (and for devs wanting to contribute to OSS). The harm that it'll do will be to the whole .NET platform (and the ability to find good .NET devs in the mid-long term), which would overshadow any benefits of people moving to MonoDevelop or similar (they're more likely to just move to other languages).

Not sure what Microsoft is trying to achieve by this - it's a bit of a shift from their previous stance of giving as much stuff to developers as possible, using that to prop up the windows ecosystem.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft is clearly trying to encourage people to make touch apps. Windows phone and windows 8 fondle-slabs need an ecosystem of apps if they are going to be competitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The actual source of this information: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/05/18/a-lo...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/05/18/a-look- ahead-at-the-visual-studio-11-product-lineup-and-platform-support.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER4> So what this means is that if you want to write Windows 8 desktop applications, you'll need to fork over $$$ for pro Visual Studio or not use Microsoft's IDE tool chain. I'm not sure what to think about this.</comment>


Ask HN: Evaluating app ideas? - <AUTHOR>

Me and a friend have been thinking of multiple ideas for smartphones [and iPad]. I expect that we'll continue coming up with ideas till we have a bunch, and then decide what to work on. We already have a few ideas, but are not sure how to go about evaluating the viability of those ideas [Would a large number of people want it? Would they pay for it? Approximately how much effort would this app be worth? etc]
For example one of the ideas we had is something similar to "Local Chat" for iPhone [ link http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/local-chat-whats-good/id307838489?mt=8 ]. We would definitely want to use the app we want to make, but other than that, how do we objectively evaluate the idea.
Seeking advice and experiences! <comment><USER2> Checkout <http://searchyc.com/submissions/evaluating+idea?sort=by_date> for some related posts in the past.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I had done a Google query - "site:news.ycombinator.com evaluating idea|ideas" and most of the good results didn't come up on first 5 pages. Changing "evaluating" to "evaluate" in the query gives much better results, still I wonder why they are not stemming [or something with similar effect] right away..</comment></comment>


CBS Acquires Wallstrip, the financial videoblog - <AUTHOR> http://howardlindzon.com/?p=2043 <comment><AUTHOR> You can tell this was started by financial types (Ehrenberg is a former derivatives trader; Lindzon runs a hedge fund) because they spent $600K when all they really needed was an iSight and a Macbook.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is Everyone Leaving Google? - <AUTHOR> Why is everyone leaving Google?
Google has been rated the #1 place to work for graduating MBA's for the past 5 years. Magazines like Forbes and Fortune talk about how great it is to work at Google.  I always hear about their supposedly super perks - free lunches, 20% free time, etc.  Yet, people seem in a rush to get out of there.  There was a recent stat on HN that said 20% of Facebook employees are former Google employees.
What am I missing? <comment><USER2> I think there are a few reasons.

First of all, I think all the "perks" Google talks about are really just HR marketing. They have good benefits, but so do Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and any other large company. But the others don't seem to have to talk about it all the time.

The 20% thing is s sham. Believe me, no one is working 32 hours per week on Google stuff and 8 hours per week on personal ideas. Everyone works to the bone and rarely do people actually have time to work on something outside of that.

The perks like free lunches, car washes, laundry, etc are less interesting as people get older. These are all designed to keep you in the office longer. Maybe it's cool to have your social life revolve around work when you are 22, fresh out of college. But at some point you realize you want to get away from work when you are done with work.

There is less upside to Google stock than there was before. With a $600 stock price, you really need to think if you're better off staying at Google or going elsewhere. For people who are fully vested, I'm sure Facebook looks like a great option with more upside potential.

Personal opinion: Google doesn't build great products. They are a technology company. If you are working on search or ads, that's exciting. But otherwise there are few products at Google where I would feel proud to work on.

In general I find it odd that magazines and newspapers are constantly writing about how cool it is to work at Google. I'd much rather hear this from the employees themselves, in blogs or just word of mouth.

I worked at Apple for six years and I can't stop talking about how great the experience was all around. I am modeling Posterous around what I learned there. I'm not sure I've heard the same from ex Google employees.

<comment><USER3>
      The perks like free lunches, car washes, laundry, etc are less interesting as people get older. These are all designed to keep you in the office longer. Maybe it's cool to have your social life revolve around work when you are 22, fresh out of college. But at some point you realize you want to get away from work when you are done with work.

This warrants a separate reply. As a 30 year-old I could not agree more. I want to put in productive hours and then get the hell home to spend time with family, friends, or other projects. I would go insane eating three meals a day at work, hauling laundry in, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just like Microsoft and Yahoo, the perception that "everyone is leaving Google" is wholly out of line with reality. A few big names do not everyone make. Don't worry about it.

<comment><USER5> Consider that 20% of Facebook is 1.6% of Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why has no one said for the lure of financial gain? Google isn't going to make many of their new employee's multi millionaires through stock grants. There are a lot of appealing companies that have an opportunity to make it really big right now and pay off handsomely for those that work for them.

Along the same lines a lot of people at Google have worked "enough" and want to take their money and relax / go do something else. Since many folks there are financial secure it is really up to them when they want to take a break. It seems in the technology space anything beyond about a two year term is considered a long time to work at a company.

Overall I believe Google is still very attractive, however if you want to hit if big financially there are a lot of other places nearly as appealing with that large financial incentive still out there.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a soon-to-be MBA, jaded from consulting experience, let me give one piece of advice. Screw any "rankings" or "best places" to work lists. Most are completed and submitted by the companies themselves with no checks, vetting, or due diligence. Research the kind of company you want to work for, interview and learn about their culture, and ignore the headlines about people joining or leaving in droves. The most important thing is to find a company that is a good fit and will value your contribution. That may or may not be at whatever "hot company of the month" the valley press is fellating at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER7> You're missing the normal ebb and flow of employees in a company. Typically, no one leaves until the first person does, then a few of their friends will leave, etc. The first guy to leave pushes the energy levels up enough to catalyze a chain reaction.

Meanwhile, the same thing is happening to other companies. It's completely normal for employees to 'graduate' from a company and move on to another.

Both google and their employees are reaching different stages in their life cycle where the expectations of each party on the other are no longer optimal. Think of senior and accomplished devs leaving as opportunity to train the next generation of great devs. If they've handled their life cycle well there should be many proteges ready to fill the now empty shoes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Notice that those that are leaving are mostly developers and not MBA-types. It may be a great place to work for MBAs with all the perks, but that's not what drives developers.

Developers like to build things. Developers like control. Developers like autonomy. Why do you think a tool like emacs exists?

In a lot of departments are Google, they can do just that. However, I imagine for those that have been around a long time now feel that they can't get as much done as they did before.

In fact a lot of those perks were even added to allow developers to save time and get more done. Free car washes, car pools, 24 hour food, onsite daycare, etc. Those may have a monetary value, but it's their time-saving value that matters. It's possible time that all those perks have saved is now being eroded away by the sheer size of the company and the policies and bureaucracies that come with that size.

This makes it a perception issue. Google might still be a lot better than everywhere else, but it may be perceived as worse than it once was. That's the kicker. Once you've been in a stellar place for getting things done, it can be demotivating to see that environment ossify.

Startups are the logical place to go for those that want to get things done. On the other hand, others may just want to work on the next big thing, which is generally considered to be social stuff like at Facebook. Facebook with more than half a billion users is better positioned to change the World than anybody else right now.

Who cares if Google loses its MBAs, it's the loss of developers which is worrying.

my 2 cents. I don't work at Google so I don't know for sure, but that's my guess as to what's happening.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is Everyone Leaving Google?

As far as I can tell from the outside, many of the well-known employees of Google are still happily with the company.

Someone might want to check this table ( <http://www.pixelbeat.org/misc/google_stars.html> ) to evaluate whether these "Google Stars" are still with the company in order to get a feeling of whether the sentiment of top employees abandoning Google holds true.

<comment><USER10> If you view source you can see people who used to be in the table

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know a number of people who have left Google in the past year. The reasons have been because they were bored and/or hated their manager or other people they worked with. In my experience these are the main reasons engineers leave their jobs at any company.

That said, I doubt it's the case "everyone" is leaving Google.

<comment><USER3> People don't leave companies, they leave managers.

<comment><USER12> As a manager, I agree with this statement.

However, I will add a small note to say that many employees often blame their managers for decisions which the manager has no control or influence. Which is okay, managers are the 'face' of the company to employees, but I just wanted to point out that whilst the statement 'People don't leave companies, they leave managers.' is true, the possible interpretation that managers are at fault for causing people to leave a company is not necessarily always true.

<comment><USER8> I kind of agree. I had a discussion about this with a friend of mine who was the lead architect at the last company I was at and he made a good point.

Every manager, once promoted to management, needs to make a choice between:

1) Being on the side of upper management

2) Being on the side of the employees they manage

3) Being on the fence, where they neither have the trust of their bosses or their employees.

We came to the conclusion that the best place for a manager to be is on the side of the employees. The reason being is that the healthiest, most productive teams have a manager that the employees trust in. They know they have someone higher up looking out for them and shielding them so they can get things done. If the company isn't one where this is possible, a really good manager will probably leave for greener pastures.

The next best place for the manager to be is on the side of the upper management, because at least this leaves no room for confusion among their subordinates (uggg, I hate that work, but it's appropriate here).

The worst place to be is in the middle. In this position the manager sabotages his own career and therefore his department because his upper management doesn't trust him and his employees don't trust him because they don't know if he has their best interests at heart half the time.

I think Todd Jackson, GMail product manager, said it best, when he said that "[A manager] can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella."

ref: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/key-to-gmail/>

I propose that we call this new metric a manager's "body count".

After an employee leaves, his compatriots should rate him to be an asset or liability. Those who quit voluntarily and are considered assets are added to a manager's body count. If the manager is on good terms with the employee who should know why the employee left and will have incentive to raise issues for living that are not his fault as a manager.

<comment><USER13> Isn't it sad that employees need to be "shielded from upper management" in order to get things done?

Not saying I agree but if you're right then shareholders should sack upper management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why would google hire lots of MBA's? Seems like an MBA wouldn't count for much at google.

<comment><USER3> You're kidding? We had this discussion the other day - finance, accounting, HR, recruitment, legal, tax, logistics, supply chain, sales, marketing, enterprise support, etc. There might be more CS/engineers but it still takes a LOT of other roles to run a company their size.

<comment><USER14> Oh I wasn't knocking the need for non-developers. But the emphasis on "MBA" as requirement for these positions as from the posts above. I just thought an MBA wouldn't mean much at a place like google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Being a former Palm guy, I know Google's recruiting power hasn't waned that much. A big percentage of Palm engineers that bailed ended up on the Android team. Makes me pretty excited for the future of Android, actually.

</comment><comment><USER16> Soon there will be another facebook and we will have "Why people are leaving "NEW-Facebook". The point is attrition rate gets higher as the company matures, because they are hiring at a higher rate. Its no "fault" of any company. There will definitely be cases where a company screws up and doesn't treat the employees right, but I highly doubt Google is that kind of company.

</comment><comment><USER17> _Google has been rated the #1 place to work for graduating MBA's for the past 5 years.... Yet, people seem in a rush to get out of there._

I think you've answered your own question there. Once the MBA culture takes over, engineers want out.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am pretty sure that quite a few of those 20% went to facebook just because of the pre-ipo stock options. Others may look for a better career in this emerging company.

</comment><comment><USER19> MBA != Engineer

</comment><comment><USER20> The 20% time is a sham, and the incentives at the company are perverse.

It's not __that __great of a company to work for, albeit one of the better ones.

<comment><USER5> > _and the incentives at the company are perverse._

Can you expand on that?

<comment><USER20> There's been a kajillion posts on this, but let me see if I can find an example. I'm doing this trusting you won't try to turn this into some kind of academic exercise.

[https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajfcdscjzbvp_976rt9c...](https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajfcdscjzbvp_976rt9cfw)

This is the #3 post on the front page.

I know a good number of Googlers and Xooglers, all with complaints about the things mentioned in the slides and much more.

I'm not commenting further on the matter, if you care, you can read up on it on your own time.

<comment><USER5> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will stocks plunge further? Some suggestions about what and when to buy? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> My guess is that most of the damage is done and markets will remain volatile over the next few weeks. Once they start lifting these mandatory lockdowns, I'd predict that we will see fast upswings of stocks up to about 80% of what they were before, then return to gradual growth until the next major world event shakes things up.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's impossible to time the market, and especially the one like this - it can be 20% higher or lower tomorrow.

Read some of Ray Dalio (one of the most knowledgable people about economy and finance out there) posts about how complicated things are: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/implications-hitting- hard-0-i...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/implications-hitting- hard-0-interest-rate-floor-ray-dalio/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been buying as the market is going down, and will continue as we hit whatever bottom we are headed towards. I'll keep buying until there are obvious signs things are stabilizing. From there, I'll dig deeper and look for specific undervalued equities as we start the long, slow slog out of recession. I still regret not rigorously doing this in 2008-2009.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wait to see what happens with the banks. Big swaths of the economy are shutting down and not paying bills, so it's risky to be buying equities.

You this is bad - wait till NYC goes into a shelter in place situation.

I'd wait until summer and look for signs of deflation. Right now short term bonds and cash are king.

</comment><comment><USER6> Stocks will certainly go down a bit more and once everything returns to "business as usual", you should probably just save your money for now because the market is very volatile and if you stare at it day-to-day, you'll go insane. Once they announce a definite vaccine, or when the Western world understands a direct population infection, like Asia is far more in the know now than Western countries, than that will probably be your time to start buying again. Mid-April likely.</comment>


Why soap bubbles are colourful and windowpanes are not - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/jmoy/4dda9b8b8e2b3eb27666bd6ebe208ea3 <comment><USER2> This treatment is missing an important thing: Sunlight is not coherent over such long distances such as window pane thicknesses. Basically the two reflections cannot even interfere in the case of sunlight because they do not have a phase relationship.

<comment><USER3> You're right, but soap bubbles in the sun also appear colorful.

You only care about those that come at a specific angle and are reflected to an observer. For most angles it doesn't matter, remember that lakes polarize their reflection (as seen by an observer).

<comment><USER2> Soap bubbles appear colourful in the sun in spite of low coherence because the soap film is thin. Soap films can be as thin as tens of nanometers meaning that light has to be only coherent for a femtosecond for interference to happen -- and this is very comparable to the cycle time of the light itself so that coherence is practically assured. But the round trip time in a 5mm window pane is 50 picoseconds, which is thousands of times larger making coherence important.

<comment><USER3> Ah I see your point. I guess a similar thing happens when you look at plastic with polarized sunglasses, then you see different colors (though there's a chemical issue with plastic as well that affects the polarization of light)

You could do a 5mm(+/-10nm) glass pane for it to reflect/absorb a specific wavelength but it would be hard.

<comment><USER4> Most plastic sheets are birefringent due to the way they are produced. In the right circumstances, that can make a very colorful appearance when viewed in polarized light. As the difference in refraction index is normally rather small this works also for thicker sheets as no long coherence length is required for the effect to work. The effect should be strongest if you hold up the sheet to the clear sky with the sun behind you (the light coming from there is polarized horizontally). Sunglasses have the polarization vertically (to block exactly this light). As the birefringence turns the polarization the patch viewed through sheet becomes brighter. If you add in dispersion, you can get colored patches.

It's the same effect mineralogists use with polarizing microscopes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure why, but I see the raw markup rather than a formatted article. Interesting content nonetheless, but difficult to read on mobile.

<comment><USER6> Formatted from the gist, served on nbviewer.jupyter.org:

[https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/jmoy/4dda9b8b8e2b3eb27666b...](https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/jmoy/4dda9b8b8e2b3eb27666bd6ebe208ea3)

<comment><USER7> I know this is a techy sort of place, but this article isn't about the code. I think the original link should be replaced with this one since it is useful without additional steps.

<comment><USER8> It seems like an issue with Gist on mobile. On desktop, Gist properly renders the notebook exactly as that other link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Feynman's explanation for iridiscence: [https://books.google.ch/books?id=2o2JfTDiA40C&pg=PA33](https://books.google.ch/books?id=2o2JfTDiA40C&pg=PA33)

See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin- film_interference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film_interference)

</comment><comment><USER10> The colours of a soap bubble can be understood with a Michel-Levy chart and thin film interference of a birefringent medium.

[https://www.itp.uni- hannover.de/fileadmin/arbeitsgruppen/zaw...](https://www.itp.uni- hannover.de/fileadmin/arbeitsgruppen/zawischa/static_html/twobeams.html)

You can observe the same colours in thick plastics under crossed polarisers.

<comment><USER11> Yes, there is also a simple derivation in Boys's classic book, "Soap Bubbles: Their Colors and Forces Which Mold Them", p. 136. [1, 2]

[1] pdf link (it is out of copyright): [http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/soap-bubbles- boys...](http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/soap-bubbles-boys.pdf)

[2] google books link (free preview), go to the very last page for the color plate

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, because the thickness on the soap bubble is on the order of the wavelength of visible light, which causes interference that we can see. Windowpanes are far too thick for this to occur.

<comment><USER13> I would have explained it by the irregularities at the surface of windowpanes. Huh, is it what is said in a more mathematical way in the link?

<comment><USER14> Actually the authors point would stand even for a perfectly smooth window pane. The point is that as the thickness increases the length scale over which light goes from constructive to destructive interference reduces, and as this happens you end up sampling more and more uniformly colours from a uniform spectrum. At some point our eye can no longer tell that we are only seeing n monochromatic wavelengths of light.

Okay not monochromatic, but very narrow bandwidth peaks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having read QED early on, my understanding is that while treating a windowpane or mirror as a front and back surface is a useful simplification in most cases, it is not for interference.

The "sum of the histories" explanation is that light interacts with all of the molecules at every depth, and once the depth becomes larger than the "wavelength," the interactions statistically can el each other out, and the probability of an interference pattern appearing beco,es infinitesimal.

I have also heard that while "sum of the histories" was useful for explaining QED to undergrads, it wasn't an effective way to calculate results and didn't yield any predictions that more math-heavy approaches coukdn't produce, so it was discarded.

For all I know it has been shown to be wrong for some observed phenomena.

Anyhow... Is that explanation the correct "sum of the histories" explanation? And if so, is ot considered useful to think of it in these terms for laypersons who don't want to dive into the math?

<comment><USER16> It sounds like you're thinking of Feynman's popular book QED (which I'd agree ought to be great for people who want an actual idea of what's going on without taking a college course) -- but in chapter 3 he shows how "we can get the correct answer for the probability of partial reflection by imagining (falsely) that all reflection comes from only the front and back surfaces... what is really going on: partial reflection is the scattering of light by electrons _inside_ the glass." This comes from adding up the coherent effects of that scattering -- he wasn't saying the interference goes away (becomes incoherent).

It's not my field, but my impression was that path integrals (sum over histories) did initially figure mainly in discovering the Feynman rules for QED, without getting used much directly by others, but later did find more applications.

<comment><USER15> I am most definately speaking of the book.

<comment><USER16> Sorry that wasn't friendlier -- I was writing on too little sleep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's great to read an explanation for this. Glassblowers can see iridescence when we blow 'bubble trash', which happens when you blow glass so thin it can float away in the air. If one could get it on thicker bubbles without using chemicals such as tetraisopropyl titanite, that would be fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER18> IIRC, this is also exactly the reason that anodized metals create a rainbow effect. In that case, the thin oxide layer creates the necessary interference.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think there are some big misunderstandings here unfortunately, and it's likely because coherence is rarely defined well.

yomritoyj claims that the lack of coherence shouldn't impact whether or not destructive or constructive interference occurs. That is, if a monochromatic light source is impinging on a layer of material, one will ultimately still get that the returning electromagnetic wave is the sum of the wave that hit the front surface and reflected, and the wave that hit the back surface and reflected some time earlier. For white light, one could simply say that you could decompose it into many separate wavelengths that behave this way (a continuum of wavelengths).

The missing point here is the following: imagine the above is true, and you can absolutely draw plots as is given by the notebook above. Now, let's make the analysis a little more general: assume that in the time that the light hit the back surface of the layer of material, something happened to the incoming light and it shifted in phase. That is, your final sum-of-two-fields (as described above)

E_returning = E_incoming (2 * thickness/lambda) + E_incoming(0)

is NOT that simple, but instead written as

E_returning = E_incoming (2 * thickness/n) + E_incoming(phi)

where phi is some extra nasty angle. It should be clear this happens, for example, from this first result for "incoherent light" on google [1].

Now, we haven't proven yomritoyj's conclusions to be wrong --- there is still interference. Now, however, let's add two details:

1) phi depends on wavelength. if phi depends on the wavelength, then the plots he drew could have a random extra phase added _at each wavelength_. This would destroy any interesting features in the plots, and you'd get some basically random reflection from each wavelength.

2) phi changes over time. if phi changed in time, you now not only get a random reflection, but the amount of light reflected at a certain wavelength will change to something else sometime later. This time is usually very quick for incoherent light like the sun, and your eye is constantly averaging over many different intensity reflections over time for each wavelength.

Lastly, given the above, why the hell does this work at all for soap bubbles then? Well, for soap bubbles, the light is not so terrible (so incoherent) that it gets a chance to have that extra "phi" phase to include in the interference --- that's because the wave reflecting from the back surface comes back so quickly! (soap bubbles are so thin!)

I encourage people to plug in the speed of light to get a feel for these timescales --- this is the sort of thing physics phd's get used to =).

[1] [http://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/age16-19/Wave%20properties/Wa...](http://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/age16-19/Wave%20properties/Wave%20properties/text/Coherent%20and%20incoherent/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks, great. Slight addition: visible light spectra is between 400-700nm; sure you can still see 390nm and 730nm, but the sensitivity is rapidly decreased there.

</comment><comment><USER21> Um, thin film interference. It even has a nice succinct name.

It's a simple byproduct of basic optics :-/</comment>


90 Law Professors sign letter in opposition to Protect IP Act - <AUTHOR> http://volokh.com/2011/07/04/and-speaking-of-the-inalienable-right-to-the-pursuit-of-happiness/

<comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_IP_Act>

70 year-old senators should not be allowed to influence technological law.

<comment><USER3> That's some blatant ageism.

<comment><USER4> No, it's not. It should be reasonable to have an expectation that the people writing laws have a working understanding of the subjects they're writing them on. Very, very few 70-year-olds have a sufficient understanding of the Internet. It's not ageist to be frustrated by this situation.

<comment><USER5> Very, very few people of any age have a sufficient understanding of the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Sigh_ This is why you don't wait until the very last stage or after that point in the political process to lobby on an issue.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is that enough?

<comment><USER8> ...to paraphrase Einstein, if they were right, even one person would be enough. But true, it needs "change", because it is seeding just more trouble.

btw Slavoj Žižek argues, that capitalism cannot handle imaginary property, and actually this dichotomy is strong enough to take it down eventually down the road.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure about his prediction, but intellectual property _does_ highlight more than most other issues the split between the individual- rights/libertarian version of capitalism, and corporate/pro-business version of capitalism. Intellectual property requires a particularly high level of intrusive government policing; for example, it can be illegal to copy a book by typing it on a typewriter in your own house, where you own the land, house, typewriter, and paper. It's _definitely_ illegal to screen someone else's film for payment, even if the entire transaction happens in your living room (you project the film, in your house, using your own projector, to people who pay you in cash inside your house).

This sits very poorly with the government-out-of-my-house-and-off-my-land version of libertarianism, since it inherently requires agreeing that it's the rightful role of government to police what you do in your own living room. It feels more like social engineering than anything libertarian: the government has decided that, in order to promote the good of society (encourage artistic production, technical innovation, etc.), it must police what you do on your land.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> so..where are all the free speech advocates when someone willfully violates the GPL?

<comment><USER11> Lacking the privilege to obscure, hide or restrict access to information is not a violation of free speech. Similarly "I'm not allowed to shut people up!" doesn't mean you are persecuted.

<comment><USER10> yeah, well pirating software, music, and movies isn't free speech either.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but having a website IS. If someone is suspected of a crime, they should be formally accused and put on trial (aka "due process") before stripping them of their rights and property. Wild concept, I know.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Svelte is the most beautiful web framework I've seen - <AUTHOR> https://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/svelte-is-the-most-beautiful-framework-ive-ever-seen <comment><USER2> Let the "soap box brigade" commence!

I got introduced to Rich Harris via a podcast (not personally), but am a big fan of his perspective on JS. I think we can all agree that; if you don't like Svelte, then fine. If you love JSX/TSX - then great! If you're a Vue person, then awesome - its exactly what makes this community great - the diversity & innovation. Not the soap-boxing antics, polarised opinions & vilification of opinions that aren't congruent with your own.

As someone much wiser than me once said - "always bet on Javascript".

<comment><USER3> > *"always bet on Javascript"

I've been keeping all the modern javascript frameworks at arms distance, because I've always preferred to bet on HTML, for the client at least. That said, I've no issues with heavy reliance on JS on the developer machine, but I always prefer pages that can work without the reliance on JS.

So, it seems opportune to ask: Is there a JS framework around that actually compiles to HTML and CSS rather than embedding the HTML in JS/DOM calls? In my rudimentary analysis of React/Vue and others (eg svelte), I can't find out how to have the end result without the framework sitting in there too. Perhaps I keep missing something in my understanding?

<comment><USER2> So this is what Svelte does, the app gets built at build time so you don't need the include any script in the browser for it to run. I remember RH talking about the React Hooks inspiration thing, so whether the API will go more in that direction (and eventually be a runtime thing), I'm not too sure.

<comment><USER4> GP wants something that compiles down to HTML and CSS.

Svelte compiles down to JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like playing with different web frameworks, but the article had a bad hype:information ratio, so I googled the Svelte homepage, which I think is really well presented: [https://svelte.dev/](https://svelte.dev/)

<comment><USER6> I get a 404

<comment><USER7> The site is hosted on Google Cloud Run, which seems to have been having some intermittent problems for the last couple of days. _EDIT: some other people have had the same issue and the Cloud Run team are investigating_

<comment><USER8> Looks like this issue: [https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/136539678](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/136539678)

<comment><USER7> Yep — I added our details to it. I mentioned the problems we were having on Twitter and a Cloud Run PM came to help immediately! So I'm hopeful we'll get a resolution before long. (Aside from this glitch, Cloud Run has been great for us, and we're looking forward to it coming out of beta)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I watched Rich Harris's "Rethinking reactivity" presentation ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao)) and was incredibly impressed.

Has anyone with React/Vue experience used Svelte for a significant project? I'd love to hear about your experience with it.

<comment><USER10> Yeah - I wrote [https://www.beyonk.com](https://www.beyonk.com) in Nuxt first, and I've now rewritten it in Svelte (Sapper).

There are some things which weren't ready when I started, but I worked around them. The overall experience is that Svelte results in faster pages, less code, more predictability, faster builds... overall, it's a better experience.

<comment><USER11> Other than performance, was the developer experience any different? Just curious!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The idea behind svelte is neat, i wonder though what the impact of its approach will be on a developers ability to understand what is happening under the hood. In my experience opaque abstraction layers can really hamper your ability to properly understand what is going on. Traditionally the JS ecosystem has been a frontrunner in this area (e.g. sourcemaps). But I have had terrible experiences in the Java ecosystem, with all its aspect weaving and annotation magic.

<comment><USER13> I think svelte compiling to native javascript is lightyears more understandable than whatever the hell react is doing

<comment><USER14> I think it's the reverse. If you write pure functional components, React is very understandable. It's easily testable, you know that you'll have the same output if you pass it the same props. Svelte templates just take us back where we've been, with the twist of compiling the templates, which I believe some templating libraries already did.

<comment><USER13> React conceptually is very understandable, but understanding what it's actually doing under the hood is not.

<comment><USER14> You can dive down and learn the inner workings, the same as you can dive down and learn how the svelte compiler works, but it's not needed for either one. Understanding the concept is more important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a table of 100 rows x 10 columns mostly of numbers which change 10 times a second (think trading).

The source data sits in an array of objects.

On each update, I need to update the table cells with the latest values from the source array. The content of each cell can change, possibly it's css class too (from red it become blue for example).

I'm using Vue/Bootstrap-Vue table at the moment, but it's quite slow.

Is Svelte suitable for this? Other options to quickly update a <table> from data in an array of objects, one object per row?

<comment><USER16> No matter which framework you describe, this is an iterative approach and will be inefficient. The optimized (or, at least faster) way to handle this would be to have a unique ID attached to a cell and offer a direct callback to it via the data.

E.g. the symbol for "GOOG" stored in a hash table, when GOOG updates; call that hash directly: "symbols[symbol].update(data)" then re-render the cell DOM element.

<comment><USER17> If you update all the data why is this more efficient?

<comment><USER18> contents _can_ change, not _will_ change. So this approach should update fewer cells per update cycle.

<comment><USER17> For a realtime view of stock symbols, it's highly likely they _will_ change. And a hashmap lookup is not free.

You really have to profile the code to figure out what's expensive. Maybe there is no scaling wrt. the number of nodes that change because repainting/relayouting is more expensive than updating the DOM.

<comment><USER19> > And a hashmap lookup is not free.

They are basically free when you have this little data. 1k cells updates 10 times a second means that you have around 100 micro seconds per cell, you can do thousands of lookups in that time. The only things which could even come close to costing 100 micro seconds are if you accidentally re-flow the html each cell update, re-render the html each cell update, send a http request each cell update or if you go through all the data each cell or the framework you are using is extremely inefficient or other unnecessary work. Each of those are easily fixable by doing the html and javascript by hand instead of using frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So I just read about "Choosing Boring Technology" before coming into this thread. I guess React.js is the boring technology (already 5-6 years) one and Svelte is the new and exiting one! :)

<comment><USER21> I went through the svelte examples and I was exited until I reached the _If block_ example:

        {#if user.loggedIn}
          <button on:click={toggle}>
            Log out
          </button>
        {/if}

To me such template language is a huge step back from JSX. JSX is JavaScript, thus you get the full power of the language (JS/TS) with the full support from your editor (type checking, auto-completion, etc.).

<comment><USER22> I hate template languages myself. But in Svelte's defence, their template language in version 3 seems to be well-designed and streamlined.

It doesn't have the ad-hoc nature of "oh crap we forgot to add if-then-else" of Angular or "let's create half-a-dozen incompatible javascript-like DSLs" of Vue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My main gripes are no TypeScript support and going to mustache-like templates after working with JSX/TSX is a step back for me.

Also losing React Native, which is non-issue if you're just developing a web app.

<comment><USER23> Agreed, JSX/TSX feels so incredibly natural it's hard to imagine giving it up, and starting a significant JS project in 2019 or 2020 without using TypeScript would feel professionally negligent to me.

<comment><USER24> Using JS ternaries for conditional rendering doesn't feel natural to me at all

<comment><USER25> Using {#if} or v-if or whatever feels even less natural -- especially when these template languages are hyped as being "logicless".

<comment> core-questions I don't see why anyone would want a "logicless" templating language. Doesn't that sort of kill the point of it being a "language" to begin with?

/me goes back to happily "server side rendering" HTML with PHP

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There was a really interesting discussion recently in r/Clojure about Svelte, and how its ideas relate to and can be translated to Clojurescript.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/bqh0z4/virtual_dom...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/bqh0z4/virtual_dom_is_pure_overhead/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Also try RE:DOM, very close to Svelte but RE:DOM does not need a compiler and is faster than Svelte:

[https://redom.js.org](https://redom.js.org)

[https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/master/we...](https://rawgit.com/krausest/js-framework- benchmark/master/webdriver-ts-results/table.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> As someone who has built a number of data products w/ React, I decided to give Svelte a try a few months ago. At this point I am using it on some internal projects to great success & ease and probably wouldn't go back to React for newer projects unless there was a compelling reason to (eg collaboration w/ other React devs). As a disclaimer, I admire the React community + devs and think React has made a lot of hard things much, much easier.

A few unvarnished takeaways from a data science / viz point of view that I was thinking of writing up, but will use HN as a sketchpad:

1\. I don't really miss the React 3rd party ecosystem as much as I thought I would. Since most of what I do is data viz / data presentations, I really just need a few d3 helper functions, and most other things I can build myself w/ svelte's affordances. The biggest downside, however, is that there aren't any good accessible UX component libraries for Svelte, so I have built my own. This all said, I'm productively code-homesteading and I love it. Animating component lifecycles, component style scoping, and state management are 1st- class citizens, so these pieces are pretty high-quality, usable, and thoughtfully built.

2\. my "time to first meaningful render" metric was at an all-time low with Svelte. Getting started on a new idea or project is far, far easier than w/ any React project I've ever done. Substantially less boilerplate means I can get much, much more done in the same amount of time. I feel this every time I jump back into the React projects I work on & maintain.

3\. as my apps have grown in complexity, I've found that Svelte really holds up beautifully. The style/layout/behavior colocation strategy keeps the cognitive overhead of working on all the parts of multiple components to a minimum. The performance gains of Svelte, even with complex components and interactions, feels magical. Bundle sizes are bizarrely small.

4\. as someone who feels CSS will absolutely outlive all of these frameworks, I think the design of Svelte really feels like the best of both worlds. And that's how it should be – css + markup should be first-class citizens.

5\. the testing story isn't fully there yet, so I would say to that end, proceed with caution. I typically try to compartmentalize JS logic from presentation as much as possible, but perhaps you don't.

6\. the reactivity parts shine everywhere and are fairly easy to reason about in all cases, but they REALLY shine when you're building complex visualizations.

7\. this is an important one to me – building something in Svelte really tickles the same part of the pleasure centers of the brain that JQuery did for a previous generation (and d3 did for early data scientists). You just SEE the thing work, effortlessly, at a low cognitive cost, and everything fits together so nicely. I often start svelte-powered experiments and end with a great, reusable component. I think there is a large group of engineers who remember the JQuery days and sat out the React era because it just seemed like way too much to do simple things. I think Svelte is especially for them.

In sum, really highly recommended to at least try it. I wanted to find evidence to discount Svelte, but haven't found any at this point, despite my best efforts. There is probably a certain class of dev that should be trying it – one without a ton of organizational constraints, probably. But if you do data science and want to level up your data presentation skills, you should be using Svelte imo.

<comment><USER29> I've been considering svelte for exactly this d3 datavis use case. Are any of your projects publicly available to explore and get a feel for? I'm new to front end and so far have been disappointed with the speed of plotly and dash, which as I understand it are written around react. I'd love to see an example of svelte performance in a more datavis use case.

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately not – they're all private, internal views at the moment. I do hope to clean up some of my components and write something about some of the cool workflow aspects I've been able to unlock.

In the meantime, I would recommend walking through the tutorials & examples. They're very well written and I go back to them regularly to try out different parts. Try just making a simple line chart! Now make six on one page! Now try to link the rollovers for all of them! You'll probably learn a ton doing just that.

<comment><USER30> as an aside, Rich made svelte, according to a podcast I was listening to, because he does dataviz for, currently the Times ( previously the Guardian ). So it should work well for that use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Svelte looks really cool. Has anyone compared it in-depth to imba[0]?

[0] [http://imba.io/](http://imba.io/)

<comment><USER32> I really like the demo video, you can select the code, scroll up and down, see different files. This is really neat!

<comment><USER31> Oh cool I didn't realize it was interactive. I'm pretty sure this is their scrimba platform[0], which is what they built imba for in the first place.

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

<comment><USER33> I also read that Imba can be used with other frameworks like React and Vue. That's why Scrimba has courses on those where you can edit code while learning.

Imba can also be used to make desktop applications it seems. The team behind it also released GitSpeak, a Github client that works really well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It does look great. I'm concerned though, few years ago I used to use rivets [1] for two-way data binding in html. It worked very well. Unfortunately, it's abandoned. Same fate as coffeescript, backbonejs, etc.

Now I primarily use react. Vue looks great, but I don't want to introduce yet another framework.

I could use some insights/view points from hn. I don't feel using/learning the now-abandoned frameworks is useless though — the things I built are still working. But good luck to anyone who'd want to maintain that codebase (unlikely in my case).

[1]: [http://rivetsjs.com/](http://rivetsjs.com/)

<comment><USER35> Someone forked Rivets and made TinyBind which seems to be maintained and has new features such as WC support.

[https://github.com/blikblum/tinybind](https://github.com/blikblum/tinybind)

I haven't used it though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Interesting that the custom element appears to just take a single JavaScript object as a parameter:

      <Board {game} />

In JSX this would be either:

      <Board game={game} />

or:

      <Board {...{game}} />

This is almost as ergonomic as JSX except for attributes like checked where the value is omitted. It might encourage some refactoring, compared with React, because the thought of putting attributes in a variable and adding them as a spread might occur more often when seeing an object being passed in.

At any rate, I recommend looking at the code example linked in the post, or watching the video. Otherwise the post is pretty low in information, as the top comment at the time of writing this suggested. [https://github.com/jesseskinner/svelte-tic-tac- toe](https://github.com/jesseskinner/svelte-tic-tac-toe)

<comment><USER37> Am I the only one who would rather write the following instead of JSX?

        Board.draw(game)

or

        drawBoard(game)

<comment><USER38> Well you might like Hyperscript or Elm, those are two approaches that work quite well using simple function calls.

The thing with JSX is introduces a syntax that is familiar to the rendered output (which is the status quo), and there's a relatively clear visual separation between the declarative and imperative parts; which is hard to enforce in pure JS.

<comment><USER37> The problem with JSX (and it's the same problem with all declarative languages) is you have no control over the control flow.

<comment><USER38> That's because JSX doesn't concern itself with control flow; it's not its job. Your framework has that job.

<comment><USER37> No, that's my job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If you want to get up to speed on Svelte quickly, read this! [https://objectcomputing.com/resources/publications/sett/july...](https://objectcomputing.com/resources/publications/sett/july-2019-web- dev-simplified-with-svelte)

</comment><comment><USER40> How would it scale for a bigger app ? Shipping a library with the app like react creates poor performance for small components for sure, but abstractions must become worth it beyond a certain scale no ? I guess the compiler could also create abstractions when it becomes worth using them ?

<comment><USER41> Rich Harris addresses scale in the Changelog podcast, and claims it to scale better than regular frameworks.

[https://changelog.com/news/a-ui-framework-without-the- framew...](https://changelog.com/news/a-ui-framework-without-the- framework-0PzO)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Man, I keep thinking "just keep on chugging with Choo", but I'm really tempted by Svelte.

( [https://choo.io](https://choo.io) )

</comment><comment><USER43> If you are getting a 404 trying to view the main Svelte site ([https://svelte.dev/](https://svelte.dev/)), there seems to be an intermittent issue with Google Cloud Run.

You can view the site directly at the uglier url: [https://svelte-website- mrf26sti4q-uc.a.run.app/](https://svelte-website-mrf26sti4q-uc.a.run.app/)

</comment><comment><USER44> It's kind of funny that the styling example is literally just plain-old CSS and HTML, not sure if that was intentional?

</comment><comment><USER45> I get a 500 error on the second page of the "getting started", so... nope, not the most beautiful I've seen.

<comment><USER7> Yep, having some problems this week with Google Cloud Run (which hosts the site). I guess that's what happens when you use a platform that's still in beta...

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Svelte is strikingly similar to Marko.js [1] which predates it by few good years I believe.

Sadly the latter is still under the radar despite bringing in many interesting innovations to the space: its server-side approach being one of my favorite features.

[1]: [https://markojs.com/](https://markojs.com/)

</comment><comment><USER47> This is not a web-framework. It is an frontend app framework for html/javascript

<comment> http-teapot This is not a car. It is an electricity-powered four-wheel vehicle. So yeah, it's a car.

This is not a PC. It is a Mac. So yeah, it's a personal computer.

A framework that powers the web, isn't it a web framework? It's just a very broad category that also includes backend framework.

<comment><USER47> Nah, it does not power the web in any way. It is a html/java script application framework.

Nginx powers the web. Chrome powers the web. Rails powers the web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Svelte is so great... so were react, angular, ember, meteor, and vue. I'm sorry, but I've got trouble seeing how having one more framework to learn is going to help any thing.

There's a webcomic of some sort to which I can't find the link, which talks about this. Some one is sick of the bloat of x framework/tool/whatever, and decides to build it better. He works hard, and finally version 1.0 is released to dramatic music. But there's a problem - it hits the real world and starts running into edge cases, bugs, and other things that can't be predicted in design and testing, necessarily. Features creep, and over time, it becomes just as bad as that which it sought to replace. Then, some bright young soul gets the idea that he can do it better...

This is not to discourage innovation. It doesn't appear it's been battle- tested like other frameworks, and I don't see many major operations on the list of users. If it ends up better, great, but I can't say I'm optimistic.

<comment><USER49> It's just more options. Svelte is new in that it actually compiles the components and logic into plain low-level JS code instead of having a "runtime".

It's something most of these frameworks should have already done by now considering they need build steps but maybe it needed a new project to make it happen. It's a brand new release though so it'll take more time for uptake, and by people who think the opposite of what you typed.

<comment><USER48> You're right that it's more options, but it's also one more box a "competent JS dev" is expected to tick. One of the best and worst things about the JS ecosystem is the plethora of choices available.

On compilation, nope. Riot.js did it first, and this is literally the entire premise of typescript (I know typescript is a different language, but I see little difference here as it can mix with JS between writing only some stuff in TS).

You're right, they probably should have done it, and I'm excited to see it. But I also don't see why they couldn't have submitted a PR to react/angular/ember/meteor/vue.

<comment><USER7> > But I also don't see why they couldn't have submitted a PR to > react/angular/ember/meteor/vue.

I see this sentiment a lot in open source. When I made Rollup — which is now used to build the most popular libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem, including some you just mentioned! — people asked why I didn't just submit a PR to webpack?

I understand why people ask that. But it just doesn't work like that. Very often, to take a step forward, you can't simply make incremental changes to an existing project — you need to create new foundations altogether. When Svelte 1 came out in 2016 I was already responsible for a different framework (Ractive), and it wasn't possible to make the changes I wanted there. If you can't do what you need to do by making a PR to _your own project_ , then imagining that you can do it in a PR to someone else's is a fantasy.

And it's not simply about adding some extra compiler smarts to existing frameworks. The whole point of Svelte 3 is to rethink the developer experience. It has radical opinions about _how we should be building apps_ , which I've written about in [https://svelte.dev/blog/svelte-3-rethinking- reactivity](https://svelte.dev/blog/svelte-3-rethinking-reactivity) and [https://svelte.dev/blog/write-less-code](https://svelte.dev/blog/write-less- code).

<comment><USER9> It's a shame that the site's down. Until then, you can (and I heartily recommend doing so) watch the "Rethinking reactivity" video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao)

<comment><USER50> You do realize that you replied to the very same person that's presenting in that video, right? :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Everyone got CSS user-select wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.malgol.com/the-importance-of-the-css-user-select-property/ <comment><USER2> Lol I hate when I select the wrong text, I will definitely start using the property more often

</comment><comment><USER3> Thai actually makes a lot of sense. Cant understand why none thought at this even big techs</comment>


Taking Online Courses with a Partner - <AUTHOR> https://www.infinity2o.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> My brother and I developed [https://www.infinity2o.com/](https://www.infinity2o.com/) to connect people to take online courses together. We give daily matches based on each person's interests and what each person is looking for in their online course partner. I'd love to hear your feedback!

</comment><comment><USER2> Why you think a question like "How many meals do you eat a day on average?" can help people find a learning buddy?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the premise is a good one, but I find the nature of the questions a barrier to signing up, to be honest.</comment>


Air France Crash Wreckage Found in Atlantic, Boosting Probe - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-03/parts-of-crashed-air-france-jet-found-in-ocean-by-investigators.html

<comment><AUTHOR> According to BEA the debris found includes the 2 engines of the Airbus and the debris site is relatively dense so they think they have found the main crash site of the Airbus. The debris site has a measurement of 500 by 300 meters.</comment>


Google's Cloud Loses Following Among CIOs, Survey Finds - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/06/googles-cloud-loses-following-among-cios-survey-finds/ <comment><USER2> Some quantitative data - we monitor Alexa and Fortune 500 marketshare for cloud services. This article is mostly accurate - Google has not taken much marketshare according to our stats. Currently, EC2 is 13% for Alexa 1k/10k and 11% Fortune 500. Rackspace is 5.5% Alexa 1k/10k and 19.4% Fortune 500. Google is under 1% for both, while Azure is between 1-2%. Our stats are available here:

[http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/12/compute-marketshare- ale...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/12/compute-marketshare-alexa- fortune-500.html)

[https://cloudharmony.com/cloudsquare#compare-aws:ec2-and- goo...](https://cloudharmony.com/cloudsquare#compare-aws:ec2-and- google:compute-and-rackspace:servers)

Edit: added blog link

<comment><USER3> 19.4% of Fortune 500 using Rackspace's cloud product sounds very high. How do you differentiate normal Rackspace customers from those using their cloud offering? I would assume they're all in the same data centers.

<comment><USER2> We aren't able to differentiate - Rackspace stats include both cloud and dedicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think Google's history of shutting down products would keep me from picking Google Cloud for a major project. If Google Cloud continues to lag behind the market, you have to think they will shut it down like Google Reader, Google Wave and a number of other products. Even if Amazon isn't perfect, I feel like AWS will be around for a long time.

<comment><USER5> I _think_ people were also annoyed by the GAE pricing change mess.

Also, amazon is known for good support, google is known for horrible support.

<comment><USER6> Amazon might be known for good support on the customer business, but I've not heard the same regarding AWS -- quite the opposite. If Google support were worse, it would have to just ignore you.

<comment><USER7> It think it varies based on your account. We were one of the companies that presented during the keynote at this year's re:Invent. We've also got an enterprise account. I'm not sure if either of these are a determining factor, but we get excellent support. Phone support is good and emails are answered in about an hour. They've also connected us with their engineers when support isn't able to resolve things.

On the whole, I think the only thing they could improve would be to reduce the siloing between different offerings. When dealing with an issue that spans, say, EC2 and Route 53, I would expect their support to talk to each other and present a unified response to the customer rather than require us to deal with two separate support reps. But this type of siloing goes beyond support and applies equally to the AWS product.

<comment><USER8> Yes the fact that you were inside the loop enough to be part of the presentation side of re:Invent means your experience is abnormal. You've got the right contacts and profile for them to brag about you.

Having said that, we pay for their 500$/mo support offering and the responses are pretty good. We're also split between AZ's etc as recommended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good. Compute engine is crazy fast because all of the hardware isn't over allocated. Go ahead and use Amazon, I hear good things. :-)

<comment><USER10> AWS performance seems better: [http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/07/comparing- cloud-compute...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2014/07/comparing-cloud- compute-services.html)

<comment><USER11> Cloud Harmony has done some more testing since then which covers some more configurations and you will see Google does quite well - especially if you normalize by price (not in the charts, but prices are public)

[https://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks/compute/storage#4k_Rand_...](https://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks/compute/storage#4k_Rand_IOPS)

[https://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks/compute/terasort](https://cloudharmony.com/benchmarks/compute/terasort)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I work with CIOs of major companies often. The biggest driver here from what I see is that people are more familiar with AWS. All along the chain of decision making, people have experience with AWS, and can validate it for use.

Not so for other cloud services. It becomes inevitable when every decision maker in your chain can validate one product, and has no experience with others.

<comment><USER13> That rings true for me. AWS has a huge amount of momentum behind it because people are already familiar with the product, thanks in part to its market position, but also due to the 12 months free trial that a lot of people [ab]use in their own time.

I will say Microsoft has been doing a lot to familiarise people with Azure, they've been giving it away to students and MSDN subscriptions like candy as well as offering trials in various shapes and sizes.

I dread to think how much Microsoft spends on Azure advertising, but considering there is now an NFL ad for it, likely a heck of a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It probably helps that AWS has some big and vocal clients. NFLX has probably helped AWS drive innovation and new tooling by providing use cases that most other platforms likely don't have. It also helps that NFLX is crazy vocal on the technical side about how they use AWS to it's fullest capabilities and how they build around "limitations". Makes others feel comfortable that the stack should be able to work for anyone.

I'm an Azure client and prefer azure personally.

</comment><comment><USER15> While the article was informative, it'd be a lot more interesting if it went into the reason people prefer AWS. Does anyone care to comment why they or their company decided to use AWS over competing products?

</comment><comment><USER16> The question was asked to CIO's to "name their preferred public cloud provider". It's not clear to me what preferred means here. I'd bet a large number of them still have a large amount of on-premise. Does preferred mean the vendor with the highest compute workload, or the one they would pick _if_ they were to move to the cloud?

I have to think that it would be the latter, because moving that much compute workload off of Google's Cloud between 2014 and 2015 would be a big effort.

</comment><comment><USER17> > "We attribute the Google losses to AWS winning the initial branding war over > Google Cloud," he said in an email. "Specifically the initial market share > lead triggers future market share gains."

what a depressingly ignorant and dismissive explanation! How about technical merit, no? All of us preferring to run real OSes rather than some awkward proprietary sandbox, it's all just our falling for "branding" huh?

<comment><USER18> > All of us preferring to run real OSes rather than some awkward proprietary > sandbox, it's all just our falling for "branding" huh?

The first part of your sentence sounds like you are confusing the whole of Google Cloud -- which includes an IaaS that runs "real OS's" (Google Compute Engine) -- with one of the older components of Google Cloud, the PaaS (AppEngine) that might reasonably be described as something like a "proprietary sandbox".

So, it seems like exactly the effect that was described with regard to perception and branding.

<comment><USER19> I would guess that this confusion is pretty common, too. Maybe it was a mistake to launch GAE before Compute. It'd be like AWS starting with Lambda for a few years, messing with pricing, then somewhat quietly launching a general-purpose compute PaaS.

Also, AWS has dozens of services. Does Google have the same building blocks? (Storage, caching, CDN, databases, load balancing, etc)

<comment><USER18> > Also, AWS has dozens of services.

As does Google Cloud

> Does Google have the same building blocks?

Not identical -- GCE has less separate products than AWSthe ones that are under the Google Cloud Services are listed on the Google Cloud homepage: [https://cloud.google.com](https://cloud.google.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is that chart suppose to say "VMware"? Squinting at it, it looks like "Wmware". Anyone have a link to an easier to read version?

<comment><USER21> nice wsj. I think its showing 'WMvare'

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I moved my company over to AWS before all the other options popped up. I did have a few back and forth conversations with someone from GCE late last year, but the end of the year is not really a great time to start a move like that. We are forced to use some other Google products and the lack of support, number of new "features" that aren't thought through, and their lack of ability to give answers to BASIC and SIMPLE question drives me crazy. Sometimes it feels like they're out to specifically screw us. We've cut our adwords budget significantly. The only nagging thing that tugs at my brain is that maybe we'd be considered a 'fast' internet site and get better search engine ranking if we were on GCE. That might make it worth it.

</comment><comment><USER22> The dominance of Amazon continues to amaze me. I thought that Google would win since this is a technology fight. In 20/20 hindsight, it's a price war, and that's in the DNA of Amazon.

<comment><USER23> Well, Amazon also has a 6 year head start. Compute Engine has only been generally available since December 2013: [http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/google- com...](http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/google-compute- engine-is-now-generally-available.html)

App Engine was released a long time ago, around the same time as AWS, but they aren't comparable products. It seems clear that the market chose the AWS technology since it was more compatible with existing code.

<comment><USER18> > App Engine was released a long time ago, around the same time as AWS

Two years later, actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm a bit of a Google fanboy however at work I haven't seriously considered moving to their cloud offering.

</comment><comment><USER25> prop.test(c(13, 8), c(152, 152)):

2-sample test for equality of proportions with continuity correction

data: c(13, 8) out of c(152, 152)

X-squared = 0.8184, df = 1, p-value = 0.3656

alternative hypothesis: two.sided

95 percent confidence interval: -0.03057673 0.09636621

So there's no evidence that there actually was a statistically significant change in usage of google's cloud.

</comment><comment><USER26> As they say... nobody ever got fired for buying AWS.</comment>


For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/19/life-earth-wealth-megarich-spending-power-environmental-damage <comment><USER2> There are over 7 billion people on the planet. That number needs to come way down if we want to step back from the brink of destroying the planet. The sooner people realize this, the more likely we can find a solution before we make the damage irreversible (to the extent that it isn't already, since extict species will never come back).

<comment><USER3> No, we obviously need 14 billion people on the planet so we can have double the number of climate engineers to kick the can down the road /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> People always need to put a single face on everything, a name to hate.

In public perception, wars are never the result of socioeconomic balances tipping. It is always a personal battle. Churchill, Hitler and Stalin. Bush and Bin Laden. We do not need to acknowledge the rotten core of the medical industry in the US, just arrest the bad guy - Shrikeli. Musk is Tesla. Gates is Microsoft.

And it could not possibly be our societal values causing climate change. It must be these guys I can count on one hand with their pompous jets flying everywhere, we think as we sit in our SUVs pondering whether Amazon will keep their promise to deliver the new single IOT lamp socket today...

</comment><comment><USER5> good lord. all that is old is new again</comment>


How I made Art Camp - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@noahbradley/how-i-made-art-camp-4cedd7bf9630 <comment><USER2> This idea of "better artist" and even "better girlfriend" (seriously, the linked article talks about a "better girlfriend"!) is very simplistic. So artists change over time, sometimes improving, sometimes going off the boil.

It's far from inconceivable that a good, critically-applauded "naive" artist would be turned into a pedestrian, cliché Dungeons & Dragons artist by this kind of course.

I don't think anyone goes into this Art Camp with any illusions but it would be good if Noah threw around the term artist a bit less and made it very explicit which skills he is talking about.

(I'm not sure about the romantic ideal of the artist as a unique individual, but I do feel the need to defend the idea that art should be personal and not about conforming to conventions, aesthetic or capitalistic.)

And the issue of subscriptions? The Wikipedia page has this to say in favour of the subscription model:

"The subscription model should align customer and vendor toward common goals, as both stand to benefit if the customer receives value from the subscription. The customer that receives value is more likely to renew the subscription and possibly at an increased rate. The customer that does not receive value will, in theory, return to the marketplace."

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not teaching people to do art like mine--I'm teaching them representational art as a whole. The fundamentals of those skills can be used to take your work in just about any direction you'd like. If someone doesn't want to do representational art, well they probably wouldn't sign up in the first place.

I'm not sure if you have much experience with the course, but I talk for hours during it on how to develop your own personal aesthetic and point of view in your work.

I am a huge proponent in individualistic art. The last thing I want to see is a bunch of people painting like me. Hell, I don't want that if only for the reason that I don't need the competition.

But doing master studies, basic drawing studies, plein air work, self portraits, photo studies, etc. will not sap the "individualism" out of someone's work. It'll just improve their technical competence.

Just a few thoughts. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great story, glad to hear it worked out. Would be good to see/read a little more detail on the analysis part - i.e., any email analytics, any refunds, how many hours you put into it.

Also, did you ever consider a monthly subscription, working with artists to release new lessons routinely?

 __Edit __Sorry - just thought of it - would recommend course referrals / testimonials on your site...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! And yeah, I considered many times to switch over to a subscription model. But I wasn't convinced that the numbers would actually net higher than what I was doing here. I've got a friend/"competitor" in the same space as me on a subscription model and we've exchanged numbers before. I don't know that one is better than the other.

And yes! It's on the list of things to do. Need to put those referrals on the site sometimes soon.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pilot jobs in San Fran? - <AUTHOR>

I realize this is a strange question for HN, however, the reasons behind it may elicit more help from the dev community than those my own industry. Plus, you guys are just plain smart and well connected.
I'm a pilot and flight instructor who has been learning to code. I want to move to the Bay Area to continue my education. Eventually, I'd like to find a junior developer position, or reach a level where I can offer my services as a freelancer. As I grow as a developer, I want to continue working in my current trade, which can offer a lot of down time - perfect fit for someone with a side project.
Any leads? I know all the airlines/big fleets. What you can help me with is individuals/companies/flight schools who need pilots, part-time included. <comment><USER2> Maybe you are taking a similar path that I did, good luck. (I went further getting ATP and working at an airline, which I regret a bit now I'm just CPL/CFI/CFII, I teach at a local flight school just to keep my licenses)

/r/flying is pretty active. If you are CFII you shouldn't have a problem getting a part-time classes, just find a school, I'm sure there are plenty near SF.

I wrote this:

"How to build aviation software and why I quit flying to do it"

[http://eduardo.intermeta.com.br/posts/2013/2/10/making- aviat...](http://eduardo.intermeta.com.br/posts/2013/2/10/making-aviation- sofware)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your post is fascinating. I've always wondered how avionics software compares non-certified tools/apps like Foreflight, especially Garmin. It all just looks so outdated compared to what's possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm certainly not an expert, but a quick question: Does it have to be SF ? If you just want to learn coding, have you considered working at a company that combines what you know (aviation, physics of flight) with what you want to learn (software development)?

First think that comes to mind is Microsoft (Flight Simulator), but they are probably strongly in the camp of "University degree required". Anyways, I hope the general idea / different POV is of some help

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it doesn't have to be SF. And of course I can learn on my own anywhere. I just think it'd be really motivational to be where it's all 'happening' for a while. Also, my industry (with some exceptions) seems late to adopt any new school of thought in this space. Outside of my own projects/ideas, I'd rather contribute where it counts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.jetsuite.com/careers>

<http://www.surfair.com/career_pilot.html>

Your passengers would all be Silicon Valley investors/founders and you'd have a PA system to pitch them with :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been following Surf Air since it was little more than an idea and a Twitter account. Awesome to see a new idea like this to aviation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would you be interested in trading services? I can teach you how to code, in exchange for flight instruction. I'm in SF.</comment>