Go Paperless in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.paperless2013.org <comment><USER2> Not joining.

I like paper, and I don't care if some think it is wasteful.

I like reading without a screen.

I like the feel in my hands.

It does not require batteries or electricity.

I can doodle and jot in the margins.

It spreads out on my work table as a kind of personal caching system.

It degrades gracefully, unlike a most digital file formats.

I would encourage anyone interested to find a copy of "The Myth of the Paperless office" by Abagail Sellen and Richard Harper [1] (No affiliate link below)

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Paperless-Office-Abigail- Sellen/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Paperless-Office-Abigail- Sellen/dp/026269283X)

<comment><USER3> I don't think going paperless is for everyone, and I even agree that paper just _feels_ better.

That said, I'm personally transitioning to mostly paperless for purely pragmatic reasons. I can't keep my papers organized, and I no longer want to be bothered to constantly store and move them. It doesn't help that I save a bunch of papers "just in case" that I end up never needing again.

I think I would be better off with a scanner and digital backups for everything. If I really need the information in paper format, I can just print it on-demand and not have drawers, folders, or bins lying around. Getting rid of all my old papers even has the added benefit of making every paper I do have that much more recent and important, which will (hopefully) lead to it being dealt with more promptly and efficiently rather than getting lost in some pile on my desk.

That said, I'm certainly not joining this. I'll reconsider when my plan eventually blows up in my face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this just a thinly veiled advertisement for HelloFax?

Whois information for paperless2013.org:

      Admin Name:Neal OMara
      Admin Organization:HelloFax
      Admin City:San Francisco
      Admin State/Province:CA
      Admin Postal Code:94109
      Admin Country:US
      Admin Email:firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER5> We're making no secret that we're driving this.

[http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/01/with-peer-pressure-and- acti...](http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/01/with-peer-pressure-and-actionable- advice-hellofax-aims-to-kill-paper-in-2013-for-good-this-time/)

We're also proud that while this was originally our idea, we've found great partners who agree this is a worthwhile cause: Google, Fujitsu, Manilla, Expensify and Xero

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why? To save trees/paper? Or to save the planet?

Where is the evidence to help me decide whether this pledge is worthwhile?

Is paper production a major polluter, and does it impact deforestation (I remember reading somewhere a while back that a lot of paper comes from managed woodland)?

If I replace my paper with these services (assuming a lot of others do too) am I contributing a meaningful carbon footprint?

I'm not saying this is a bad pledge, or one I won't take. But it seems to assume very readily that we agree using the internet instead of paper is a GOOD THING, without backing it up...

<comment><USER7> Joseph here, cofounder of HelloSign.

The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper a year. Multiply that by the working population and that's an enormous footprint. The unfortunate part is that using that much paper is completely unnecessary, as there are services that make paper use obsolete.

The problem with people going paperless isn't the technology, but the awareness that the technology exists. That's why we teamed up with Gogole Drive, Fujitsu, Expensify and others - to help people stop using paper for good.

<comment><USER8> You failed to provide the proof he asked for though. What he means is, assuming a majority of the paper production comes from managed woodland, making the destruction of habitats and so on a mute argument, how does that compare to having datacenters being built everywhere, and what is better?

<comment><USER9> The premise that paper requires less servers is odd, in my opinion. Documents come from servers anyway, the main difference is whether they go to your printer or your screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think it's a good idea to go paperless unless you can avoid dependence on services over which you have no control. These things have to be self- hostable.

</comment><comment><USER11> "e-signatures" are still a touchy subject in business. What can we do to help make them more acceptable and widespread? Is there any precedent that they are equal to a paper signature?

<comment><USER7> Joseph here, cofounder of HelloSign. e-Signatures are legally binding. It's more of a cultural attachment that keeps us using "wet signatures". Check out our legal page for more details: <http://www.hellosign.com/info/legal>

In terms of making it more widespread, it takes some work.

The way we're doing it is by combining e-signatures with other services and doing user education and cross pollination between the services. Our other product is HelloFax, which lets you send and receive faxes online.

But, I think we're getting closer to an inflection point as society is starting to use e-signatures more and more.

<comment><USER12> "Additionally, we encrypt all of your statically-stored user files and signature information in Amazon's S3 servers"

Why wouldn't you host those yourself? Aren't there concerns and operational risks involved when using Amazon?

<comment><USER13> It's difficult to weigh costs once you're at a static scale, but while bandwidth and storage is growing, cloud services tend to offer substantial savings. In this case, the cost benefits for S3 compared to owning your own servers are tremendous.

There are always concerns and risks involved with hosting personal data, but it's not fundamentally different based on cloud hosting compared to colocation (or even managing hardware at your own location). There's mild complexity because 3rd parties are involved, but this is quickly becoming the norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For the first time I've recently been seriously considering going paperless at home.

However, every great solution involves uploading my scans to online services.

This is something I'm not comfortable doing with my sensitive data (i.e. tax records).

Has anyone found or developed tools that can be run locally to organize my files? Something like evernote? I'd like to just scan and shred, and not have to fuss too much with naming files, manually organizing files, etc. A good pdf search interface is a must.

<comment><USER15> Kind of makes me wish that we had a sort of local server appliance that was zero administration but provided a safe place for all of our documents at "home".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I whish I could go paperless. I'm in high school, and let's admit it: my notebooks are a complete mess, and it's kind of annoying.

We get free netbooks in school, that we carry every day, and I though "Great, this year I'll take notes with the notebook and store them in the cloud".

But... nope, teachers don't allow you to do that, mainly because they think you are in Facebook (Duh, we don't even have internet!).

Seriously, my life would be much easier.

</comment><comment><USER17> I will not go paperless at least not for now, because I do not see how paper production is more polluting compared to server farms which use ton of electricity which has to be generated somehow and we still generate ton of electricity from some other color sources than green. Paper then again is easily recycled and more we recycle it the less we waste wood.

Then there is the business side of this. If average office worker prints 10,000 sheets of paper per year the paper would cost about 100 euros per year. The black laser casettes would cost about 400 euros per year. This comes down to 500 euros per year and this supports workers working in the ink and paper industry. If I really need that much paper I can always pay the price of it. When going completely paperless would put the cash on the hands of few founders and server administrators and would require those who I am in contact with to use the same or compatible services.

<comment><USER9> Server farms are still used to get the document to the printer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the grand scheme of things, going paperless is not really a significant tactic to mitigate climate change or other environmental impacts. The paper industry has one of the best environmental track records and paper is one of the only truly sustainable products in existence.

In contrast, computers, data centers, mobile phones, and communication networks are well on their way to becoming one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions on the planet. Heavy metals, lead, and other hazardous materials are also frequently present in electronic products.

Paper itself is one of the most recycled products. Its production often lends itself to easy use of renewable energy sources (like hydro power) and proper forest management provides a sustainable source of raw materials as well as a carbon-sink [1].

[1] [http://www.paperbecause.com/paper-is-sustainable/paper- truth...](http://www.paperbecause.com/paper-is-sustainable/paper-truth-or- fiction)

</comment><comment><USER19> Special-case counterpoint: Insisting on getting _paper_ bills from your cell phone service provider can make it easier to detect unauthorized third-party "cramming" charges. Being able to review the details of your bill when you open your mail can be useful if, like me, you're the sort who doesn't always keep up with the on-line version. I just switched back to paper billing for that reason; see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4994127>.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2013/01/go-paperless- in-2013...](http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2013/01/go-paperless-in-2013.html)

<comment><USER20> "Posted by Meredith Blackwell, Product __Marketing__ Manager"...

<comment><USER21> ... and your point is? This is exactly the sort of activity I'd expect a marketing manager to be involved with. "Marketing" isn't a dirty word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hope it's more than just ads from their partners.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can't recommend Doxie portable scanners enough. The centrepiece of my paperless workflow.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for this - I've been contemplating something similar for a while.

Out of curiosity:

A) Which model do you recommend / use?

B) How does it perform for scanning ~40 page documents in? I've been thinking about looking at a auto-feed scanner but curious about how this might perform instead...

<comment><USER23> I have the original Doxie (<http://www.getdoxie.com/product/doxie/index.html>). I haven't tried their newer models.

I use it mainly for 1-5 page documents and it works great except if the document is printed on _really_ poor paper or the lead edge is crumpled. You do occasionally have to re-scan a page if it doesn't feed properly or gets rotated halfway through feeding.

If you are scanning 40 page documents and can afford the extra space you might want to consider a scanner with an auto-feed as your rescan rate may be higher than mine! The software is relatively easy to use and allows you to re-order pages, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sure, sure, I'd love to go paperless too; just a few little details:

1) No, I will not store it on your server.

2) No, I will not run Windows or OSX to run your software.

3) I'd really like the source code.

Get back to me when you've solved those problems.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not for me.

I like paper. I like pens. I like to get away from my computer and phone. I like to scribble, sketch, doodle, draw and take time to discover thoughts.

Paper will always be in my toolbox.

</comment><comment><USER27> Don't forget your passwords.

In all seriousness, though, I wonder about how people store their personal documents. What is everyone's favorite search utility for their desktop?</comment>


Indian Prime Minister accused of spying on citizens using official app - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/indian-prime-minister-narendra-modi-accused-of-spying-on-citizens-using-official-smartphone-app/ar-BBKJqpr <comment><USER2> I can imagine the author of the original tweet grinning wide at the marvelous stupidity of the entire media world. Just a little inspection is enough to realize how ridiculous the whole controversy is.

The 'spying' here is nothing more than using an analytics service called Clevertap. I haven't come across many apps/websites that didn't do so, in one way or the other. It's a fucking industry. If tracking the activity of an app's users would amount to spying, then I guess entire fleet of third-party SaaS services would need to go (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Zendesk, Intercom).

<comment><USER3> >If tracking the activity of an app's users would amount to spying, then I guess entire fleet of third-party SaaS services would need to go

If you were to explain this current behaviour to people from around 25 years or so ago, the vast majority of them would view what is these days euphemistically described as analytics, as definitely being a form of spying. The fact that it has been turned into a large commercial industry does not change what the behaviour actually is. That the NKVD was a routine part of Soviet society didn't excuse them and the same reasoning will not excuse modern marketing culture either.

<comment><USER4> But people from around 25 years ago (and to this day) have always been accustomed to this "form of spying". If you walk into a store you are typically followed around by the store staff who are always there to help you in case you aren't able to find something you are looking for. Technically this is a "form of spying". But we do not protest. We instead label it "hospitality". Once you become a "returning visitor" to the store, the store staff get to know you really well and treat you like a VVIP. This is nothing but analytics in the real world. It just so happens that the information collected about you isn't as structured as the virtual world.

I guess by conflating multiple terminologies into one basket we are probably doing ourselves a bit of disservice.

<comment><USER3> >If you walk into a store you are typically followed around by the store staff who are always there to help you in case you aren't able to find something you are looking for. Technically this is a "form of spying". But we do not protest.

Two things. Firstly, it is an entirely fatuous argument to try and claim that overly attentive shop assistants are somewhere in the same ballpark as modern digital analytics. They are not even playing the same sport.

Secondly, please do not consider getting a job as a shop assistant here in the UK, as overly attentive shop assistants are one of the few things that we actually do protest bitterly about, almost to the same degree as inaccurate weather reports, or people not properly understanding queuing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meh. Getting hyped too much.

\- The app is actually not "official" as endorsed-by-the-government. This was always a election-canvassing application branded as "Narendra Modi" app when he was the candidate. This is maintained by the BJP (ruling party) alongside their other apps.

\- The app uses Clevertap, which is also used by lots of Indian companies, especially in the mobile world.

Nothing wrong or illegal here. For an application by a privately owned organization in India, there are no data residency requirements either afaik.

Eliott has tweeted about finding flaws in the INC app (opposition party) as well, but if they are similar, don't expect them to be changed.

<comment><USER6> Not official? I recall Modi urging his follers on his radio talk show to download his app on multiple occassions.

<comment><USER5> It is not official. Modi promotes it on his own, non-official capacity. This has gotten blurred over time, but the app is not a government application.

<comment><USER6> > Modi promotes it on his own, non-official capacity

Modi is the head of the Indian government. Non-official capacity in such a position does not compute.

Imagine Merkel having a shady side business after she's done being Chancellor for the day.

<comment><USER4> There is nothing "shady" about the app except for that it uses analytics just like all the other million apps out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is like every other Android app out there. Their biggest mistake was choosing a company outside India to do analytics for them and not having a good privacy policy. Apparently, the opposition would love to make this issue as selling citizen's data to foreign companies and the BJP have to pay for it now.

<comment><USER6> > This is like every other Android app out there.

Really? "asks users to provide access to as many as 22 personal features on their devices, "

[http://indianexpress.com/article/india/namo-app-asks-for- swe...](http://indianexpress.com/article/india/namo-app-asks-for-sweeping- access-camera-audio-among-22-inputs-facebook-data-leak-5111353/)

<comment><USER7> Use Analytics is a big business. As in, people make apps like battery saver or flashlight just so they can get millions of downloads, later track the other app usage and sell data.

Only here, they went little overboard with permissions like a flashlight. Like why the hell one would need it. I can see why other permissions are required though to use some of the app features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They really do not need the small scale app to do so, when they can easily control facebook both virtually and literally.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is news, reporting the remnants of fake news that was busted yesterday.

Sadly, its easy to unmask and bust fake news. But genuine news reporting based on fake news, will remain to be the scourge of the new age media

</comment><comment><USER10> Not sure how true the contents of the article are, however Modi was rather pally with Mark Zuckerberg during his time in India. Read into that what you will!

<comment><USER4> He is like that with every top dignitary visiting India. It's just diplomacy. Don't read too much into it.

Read this article for more such instances: [https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/modi-s-hug- diploma...](https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/modi-s-hug-diplomacy- abe-to-obama-all-get-pm-s-personal-touch/story-LH5XsgtNnwH8ZQFo72BqCI.html)

<comment><USER10> I think you are reading too little into it, especially considering the impact Facebook had on the US election.

<comment><USER4> Your comment was about Modi and Zuckerberg not Facebook and US election. Facebook had zero impact on Modi's election. It was anti-incumbency followed by a strong track record of Modi as Chief Minister for 3 terms that made the difference. On the contrary, Trump has zero track record and yet got elected to the highest office.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry, but are the parallels not obvious? Facebook is a tool used to influence people. Politicians need the ability to influence people. Ergo, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Modi would prefer to be a friend, rather than foe, of Facebook. Diplomacy aside, all I'm pointing out is that he has something to gain by having Facebook on his side (at least prior to recent events involving Facebook).

<comment><USER4> The gain isn't significant at all. At least in comparison to that of Donald Trump. Sure, Modi would prefer to be friends with everyone, including Facebook. That doesn't however automatically make him liable for spying on a billion plus Indians. That's stretching the argument too far. Just because Facebook was used as a tool to influence people in the US doesn't mean the same happened in India. Modi came to power purely because of the scam ridden and corrupt regime that existed previously and his track record of 3 terms as Chief Minister (spanning 15 years of real progress and development). Back then, Modi was a pariah in the US. He was denied visa by the US until he became the Prime Minister of India.

In fact, to make matters worse, Facebook's Free Basics service was outlawed by Modi Government. If he was a friend of Facebook, he would have enacted laws that helped Facebook. This happened after Zuckerberg's visit to India. Read more: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/08/india- fac...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/08/india-facebook- free-basics-net-neutrality-row)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bulk Email Sending - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for a solution like what Port25 offers and wondering if anyone here has found an alternative service/software to use. <comment><USER2> From my own experience, CampaignMonitor is pretty good. <http://www.campaignmonitor.com/>

Also checkout the archive [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#toc35) or use search <http://searchyc.com/></comment>


Ask HN: What is your email setup? - <AUTHOR> After seeing a past HN thread where someone lost access to their Gmail account, I am scared. I currently just use Gmail with no backup. Wondering if there are good suggestions on building a "real-world faults" tolerant email service. <comment><USER2> I point MX for my domains to a VM. Postfix dumps everything to a text file. Most would use Dovecot but I'm too lazy and dont care.

To read my mail, I use

      strings -a /var/spool/mail/nobody | more

When I am done reading my mail, I use

      > /var/spool/mail/nobody

</comment><comment><USER3> I have an email specifically for account recovery and alerts on any changes to my other email accounts. All except the recovery email have two factor. The recovery email also has a max length password.</comment>


The BSD family tree - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/share/misc/bsd-family-tree <comment><USER2> Here's a much bigger one that takes lots of Unix variants into account: [https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png](https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png) (from here [1]). Also available as a big PDF.

Edit: Updated with newest version.

[1] [https://www.levenez.com/unix/](https://www.levenez.com/unix/)

<comment><USER3> Wow, looking at the family tree above - I can't help but think how this has fractured the BSD development community.

Unlike Linux, with has a viral license which essentially forces people to work on the same code base - BSD doesn't, which from a technical standpoint causes way more forking and less contributions back to a main tree.

<comment><USER2> I don't think the situation is that different. Linux being the kernel, there are lots of "Linux distros", some of which are almost as different from each other as FreeBSD and NetBSD. For example, consider the many package managers (deb, rpm, Nix, etc.), init systems (SysV, Upstart, Systemd, etc.), graphical environments, etc.

The BSDs have a different philosophy where the kernel and userland go together as one package. Linux distros reuse the same kernel and rely on GNU for many tools, but are otherwise free to do their own thing, just like the BSDs.

I doubt the GPL is what really keeps Linux together. Rather, since the Linux kernel is developed separately from everything else, and is such a huge thing, there's little incentive to fork the kernel along with userland. You develop a new userland (as with Android) and keep the kernel.

<comment><USER4> It's not entirely accurate to say the Linux kernel wasn't forked. There are many distros that manage a separate kernel from the standard releases and backport individual changes, RHEL is an example of this.

Now it's not exactly accurate to call this a fork either b/c they do eventually catch up... but still, lots of non-standard kernels out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heh. Between NetBSD 1.4 and Darwin/Mac OS X there's an entry that just says "(?)".

It's probably pretty well-known that question mark is NeXTSTEP, which was built at NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple the first time around. NeXTSTEP was built around BSD mostly because of Avie Tevanian's involvement in CMU's Mach kernel project.

<comment><USER6> I was wondering about that; didn't realize it was NeXT. A friend of mine still has his original NeXT box for the short time he worked on it.

I was also surprised at the origins of DarwinBSD. I never really looked up the history and didn't realize it forked some of the code off FreeBSD.

It's interesting to note that the PS4 OS is also a forked FreeBSD variant as well.

<comment><USER7> Switch also forked

<comment><USER8> Still haven't seen anything showing this, including the license for the FreeBSD kernel can mean a lot of different things. Windows did/does ship with it, I wouldn't call it a fork.

<comment><USER9> If you mean the TCP/IP stack it was re-written from scratch on Vista.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is missing a lot of BSDs. Now granted some of them are dead, some inactive, some just missing. The ones I can think of off the top of my head: PC-BSD/TruOS, MirBSD/MirOS, Bitrig, HardenedBSD.

<comment><USER11> Most of those are just FreeBSD. Pulling from the FreeBSD tree for their base.

<comment><USER12> MirBSD and BitRig (which looks very dead?) are OpenBSD forks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's also [https://www.levenez.com/unix/](https://www.levenez.com/unix/)

</comment><comment><USER14> It is funny.. I was just combing through old BSDs earlier today. I'm giving an internal talk next week about some changes I've been making to mbufs, and I was trying to find out when mbufs were introduced. They've been around since before I wrote my first FreeBSD, Tru64, and BSDI drivers in the 90s.

The earliest I can find is 4.1c from 1983, but that looks more fully formed that I expected. And there is a fragment in a 2.9 from 1982, but I think that leaked in from 4.1.

<comment><USER15> 3BSD-4.2 sounds about right -

My thinking w/o references (enthusiast but was not 'there' at the time) is that this was introduced with either the 32Bit VM system, FFS implementation, or BSD network starck - probably the McCusick FFS papers [ed: are worth a read].

Really it's kind of nuts how 'usable' and 'current' a load of 4.3BSD on a VM load feels out of the box.

<comment><USER14> If you ever get a chance to hear Kirk talk about the history of BSD, I highly recommend it. He tells some great stories about the TCP bakeoff, the history of the VAX context switch code, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> SunOS should be in there too, not exactly sure where.

-Off NET/2 or Reno probably.-

Correction, off 4.0.something or earlier.

See wikipedia.

<comment><USER14> Along with DEC Ultrix, and (kind of OSF/1, Tru64, etc).

There were lots of other proprietary BSD based systems in the 80s as well.

<comment><USER17> Ultrix forked off BSD 4.2. It was the Unix I learned first, and working with it when the civilized world was working off BSD 4.3 variants made life really awkward.

<comment><USER14> Ultrix was my 2nd unix, after SunOS 4.1 on a massively over-committed Solbourne. I preferred Ultrix just because the machines were in a closed lab, and "faster" because there weren't 300 undergrads trying to compile their projects all at the same time on an overheating Solbourne...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is also [http://www.quicklycode.com/infographics_posters/unix- history...](http://www.quicklycode.com/infographics_posters/unix-history- poster)

</comment><comment><USER19> I love the BSDs. I just took a personal tour of the current state of affairs in BSD-land. I can't get WiFi to work with OpenBSD on an old Thinkpad T60 I recently got, so I've been trying all the other BSDs on it to see what works. A couple of them won't boot at all. WiFi works best with FreeBSD and HardenedBSD, which is unusual on laptops in my experience.

<comment><USER20> I've just had a similar experience with an old 32-bit CPU Acer Aspire One. I tried what modern 32-bit BSDs I had, including GhostBSD and OpenBSD. Only FreeBSD 10.3 drove the WiFi network adapter. Interestingly, FreeBSD 11 did not. So there's a regression of some sort in there, somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Someone should convert it to graphviz.

</comment><comment><USER22> "4.4BSD Lite2 -> OpenBSD 2.3"

What happened with the 4.4BSD lite to OpenBSD fork? The next OBSD is a parent of NetBSD.

<comment><USER23> The openbsd 2.3 label is duplicated to prevent too many lines.

<comment><USER22> thx @tedunangst probably should have duplicated the txt diagram with a proper diagram. A jump could be shown with a "<" or "(".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So what happened to NextBSD, has FreeBSD 12 essentially replaced it?

<comment><USER25> NextBSD was a fork of FreeBSD that used a microkernel and components from Darwin. It was not intended to replace FreeBSD. That said, it looks like the project died well before it was ready for production use.

<comment><USER26> > that used a microkernel

I though they just added Mach IPC ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> where's bitrig?

<comment><USER23> It's dead, Jim.</comment></comment>


Please Change 'Slave' terminology - <AUTHOR> http://trac.buildbot.net/ticket/2340 <comment><USER2> Rust should be renamed "Shiny New Metal"... Visual Basic should now be know as Visual Just-As-Good. C#... who wants a "C" when they deserve an "A"? A# it is. Short ints and Long ints are lenghtism; they have to be called EconoBytes and EnoughToShareBytes from now on. Queues must be eliminated, because some items get processed first. Everything should be processed in parallel.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really do question the sanity of some people.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another one: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust- buildbot/issues/2](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-buildbot/issues/2)

</comment><comment><USER4> Someone paid 10k for this change. I can sit around all day naming things that are more worth spending 10k on as a company then this.

</comment><comment><USER5> So are PC's no longer PC?

</comment><comment><USER6> the constant whining and complaining is very useful. this greatly contributes to our evolution as a species and it's very important to ... my brain hurts!

do these libtards ever stop?

it's getting annoying to us slaves who actually work.</comment>


The PowerPot - charge devices by boiling water - <AUTHOR> http://www.thepowerpot.com/

<comment><USER2> damn! is this for real</comment>


Interactive Map: Where Americans Are Moving - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-interactive-counties-map.html?preload=39099# <comment><USER2> Very interesting data but not a great interactive graphic. Instead of color to indicate direction maybe they could have used curved lines and arching over the strait line could be in and under could be out.

They don't even try to graph per capita income -- which naturally lends itself to red/black. Are poor people moving in or out? Are high wage earners? or everyone? It is not possible to tell unless you start clicking around.

For example, you click on Atlanta you see a mass of black lines heading from the northeast to Atlanta. But if hover over Middlesex county (Boston) you see the detail of 188 people leaving Boston with an average income of $38,700 and 151 people moving from Atlanta to Boston with per capita income of $174,100.

I'll take that trade any day.

I give the graphic a C+, great data, good first try, but re-cook it.

<comment><USER3> I'm thinking there is more to it than what you've outlined. If the 188 people are, on balance, younger, one would expect a lower per capita income. Which would make the trade a horrible one. Consider, 188 young hungry twenty to thirty five year old men and women, for 151 forty to fifty year old men and women. I think if I'm Atlanta, I'm comfortable with that trade.

I think the Southern cities are doing a good job attracting a more youthful demographic. Click on Harris County in Texas, (Houston). I think it is probably the 'blackest' on the map. Most of the people moving there have lower incomes. Yet at the same time they just elected an openly lesbian woman, with an adopted black daughter as mayor. I think there is a lot of evidence like this that massive numbers of young, hungry and educated people are probably moving in to Houston.

And yet.

I think the best places to move to, are probably the ones that everyone else is moving from. For instance, I would wager that the blacks and whites moving in to the Detroit area are of a higher economic quality than the blacks and whites moving out of the Detroit area.

Your material point is correct however. We need more information to make any determinations about whether what the map tells us is promising or troubling in economic terms. I would just expand the information you cited to include more than just income. In fact, I think it is more important to know age and educational level.

<comment><USER4> "For instance, I would wager that the blacks and whites moving in to the Detroit area are of a higher economic quality than the blacks and whites moving out of the Detroit area."

I couldn't get to the map (I'm just getting loading dots forever), but: As I sometimes have to tell people who don't live around here, while Detroit is every bit the sucking cesspool you've heard of, the greater Detroit metropolitan area is actually full of relatively upscale and nice places to live. It even has many businesses that aren't related to the automobile industry, though not enough. Detroit proper is physically huge, preventing this area from being called the greate Southfield/Novi metropolitan area. My guess is that virtually nobody is moving into Detroit itself, but that there are still some things in the same county and certainly in the surrounding counties that might see some people moving in. Net loss, of course, but there's always some people moving somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> \- Orange County, CA is pretty interesting. There is a lot of migration inwards from the East Coast/Upper Midwest (e.g. PA, MI), but lots of migration outwards throughout the country. [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration- moving-wealthy-in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving- wealthy-interactive-counties-map.html?preload=06059)]

\- Oakland County [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy- in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-interactive- counties-map.html?preload=26125)] (Ann Arbor, U of M, Slashdot) and Wayne County (Detroit) [link:[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving- wealthy-in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy- interactive-counties-map.html?preload=26163)] in Michigan have mass flight.

\- Multnomah County, OR [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving- wealthy-in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy- interactive-counties-map.html?preload=41051)] is a bunch of solid black lines from throughout the country. Everyone wants to be in Portland, but the Oregon unemployment numbers are comparable to Michigan, IIRC.

\- Polk County, FL [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving- wealthy-in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy- interactive-counties-map.html?preload=12105)] seems to have mass migration from the East Coast, while leaking people the the west.

\- Erie [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy- in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-interactive- counties-map.html?preload=36029)] (Buffalo, NY/Niagara Falls, NY) County in upstate New York seems to have seen a mass flight too.

[update] On re-reading my comments, you might take the numbers from Oakland County with a grain of salt. Ann Arbor _is_ a college town to a large university, so some of that flight may just be people taking jobs after graduating (or dropping out of university and moving home).

[update] Added links

<comment><USER6> > Multnomah County, OR is a bunch of solid black lines from throughout the > country. Everyone wants to be in Portland, but the Oregon unemployment > numbers are comparable to Michigan, IIRC.

Both of our recent hires moved here first, and found a job afterwards. Portland is seen as hip and comparatively inexpensive, so if you're going to be unemployed, might as well do it here.

<comment><USER5> > _Portland is seen as hip and comparatively inexpensive_

Portland doesn't seems about the same cost-of-living-wise to Toronto, ON. So I don't really see it as 'cheap.' (Maybe compared to NYC...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clicking randomly around the midwest is sort of amazing. I'm not sure if it's a lack of data for those areas, but almost no one migrates in or out.

<comment><USER8> I think that is the case for smaller counties everywhere. The most likely the town is to have a college the more moving. For instance check out Milwaukee which has three colleges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Atlanta is like a cannon, drawing in people from the eastern half of the US and spewing them out to the West Coast. (With a notable exception in southern CA.)

Seems like everyone is moving to Austin and no one is leaving.

<comment><USER10> Atlanta in theory: Warm weather, lots of opportunity, Big City living without the high price.

Atlanta in reality: Terrible weather, terrible traffic, terrible public transportation, mostly dull jobs and local commerce, incompetent public officials, not actually a Big City (more accurately, a sprawling collection of strip malls with some tall banks and hotels scattered about), devoid of interesting art, culture, history (Civil Rights movement excepted), architecture

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kinda weird to see myself as a statistic. My wife and I are two of fourteen people that moved from Santa Fe county to Santa Clara county in 2008. I want to find the others now :)

</comment><comment><USER12> No one else is concerned about the abuse of IRS data?

Apparently it's possible to do an end-run around "legally protected" census data via IRS data.

ps. I can see Microsoft's recruiting patterns from colleges with this map.

</comment><comment><USER13> What a terrible visualization! It tells you nothing until you click on it, and is very hard to read even after you've clicked.

The main map should color counties by net inward and outward migration so you can see highlights and broad regional patterns at a glance. Upon clicking a county, it should color the remaining counties by net inward and outward migration relative to the highlighted one.

</comment><comment><USER14> Click on Detroit.

<comment><USER15> Nice one! Detroiters should get the reference. Ahh, not surprised one bit. That place is where I was raised, but alas, I was a part of that mass exodus. Besides family (and some awesome Mexican food), I don't miss the city one bit.

There is NOTHING in Detroit. NOTHING! It's as depressing as it is telling. I feel this exodus is a vicious cycle that won't stop anytime soon. No one is there, hence no new money is being invested, thus more people move...ad infinitum.

The primary culture of the youth (read: thugs) isn't helping one bit either -- they tend to get more dangerous and erratic each year.

If you have any questions about growing up in Detroit, feel free to ask!

<comment><USER16> I'm from Michgan as well, and have a lot of family in the greater Detroit area. The sense of despair that most people in the area feel is just awful. After the auto plants started to close up, people just started packing up in hopes of finding work elsewhere. Some moved in-state, but most make the flight south and west (warmer weather, more jobs). I was recently in Dearborn for a wedding, and the number of empty & foreclosed houses is just staggering.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it's pretty wild. And Dearborn is one of the "better" areas. Some parts of the city look like scenes from a Mad Max film. Everything is either foreclosed, empty, or burned.

You know, someone with a little money in their pocket come buy up half of the Detroit area; however, what would they do with it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any sense of where to get the source data?

I wonder what the first principal eigenvector looks like.

<comment><USER18> <http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=212683,00.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you click on the more rural western Oklahoma counties, all the movement is just between adjacent rural counties. As someone who worked hard to break out of a small town, I find that a bit depressing - no one is "escaping" and no fresh ideas are entering.

</comment><comment><USER20> I noticed that about 200 people have moved from the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area where I live to Seattle. I often dream of that move. I spent ten days out there sailing and backpacking one summer. Nine sunny days, and it only rained on then tenth.

I'm wondering if anyone here has moved out to Seattle from somewhere similar to NC, and could tell me what their reaction was?

<comment><USER21> I have some friends from college who made such a move. They said it's ridiculously expensive, rainy all the time (duh), and it gets much hotter in the summer than anyone wants to admit, because it's hard to find a place with A/C.

Of course, they are loving it anyways, they are both employed by a publisher of roleplaying books, and they are both huge roleplaying nerds. I would have moved out there if I had the chance, but instead I got relocated to Montreal and I'm quite liking it here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> New Orleans is worth a look. Having visited last year and fallen in love with the city, it's encouraging to see people moving in.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is kind of fun. Check out counties holding military bases, particularly less populous counties like Garfield, OK or Lowndes, GA. Most of the movement in and out of those counties is related to the military. Though in the case of Lowndes there's also a university pulling people in from Atlanta.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting, but, agreed, not the greatest map.

Deschutes County, OR (Bend, basically): Californication.

Boulder, County, CO: a lot of people are going there, but those who leave appear headed for the pacific northwest.

Maricopa, County, AZ (Phoenix): wow... that's a lot of people.

<comment><USER25> Very interesting, I have lived in Boulder for years and can attest that it is a wonderful area (not _just_ Boulder the entire Denver/Boulder/Colorado Springs front range is beautiful) that is noticeably growing. It is also palpable, just anecdotally, that people who talk about moving almost entirely talk about northern California, Portland, and Seattle. If not the northwest, then Austin. Very cool to see these anecdotes confirmed by statistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Apparently no one is moving OUTSIDE of the US! :B

Guess that means I wasn't counted in this data.

</comment><comment><USER26> There seems to be a lot of movement, in general, out of the northeast, particularly to the southwest.

</comment><comment><USER27> People are moving to New York and Dallas.</comment>


Dear Jailbreak Community (part 2) - <AUTHOR> http://evasi0n.com/l2.html

<comment><USER2> It's extremely stupid and disappointing that this jailbreak was released before iOS 7.1.

<comment><USER3> the bugs were being patched in 7.1. they had to release.

<comment><USER4> The jailbreak works in 7.1b2 though, isn't that indicative of them _not_ being patched?

Leaks aside _geohot_ planned to burn these exploits on the release day of 7.1 by the looks of things (he just registered the domain for the new jailbreak the day before evasi0n7).

<comment><USER3> there is a lot of inside story that isn't public. Suffice to say, the bugs were DOA.

<comment><USER4> That's disappointing. I'm surprised they didn't pull the WWDC.app if they knew about it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The whole thing is disappointing all around. It was clear just from the outset that the TiaG application was intended for piracy, there's absolutely no reason for it to be included. For the reasons stated (Cydia is not in Chinese) they could have just offered patches with new translations. If people found the relationship between TiaG and kuaiyong (another piracy store) in a matter of minutes, I'm not sure why the _evad3rs_ didn't.

Now ultimately their jailbreak is being used for piracy by a company who paid not a dime for the exploit kit. I'd have been happier to see them take the money and donate the lump sum to EFF for similar.

<comment><USER5> Another problem for Cydia in China is it's server may blocked by the Great Firewall of China built by the gov. In IOS6, sometime I must use vpn to make Cydia proper functioning. Of cause, this is another story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How about official Cydia?

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I've read, you can update the Cydia to a newer, official version from within itself.

<comment><USER5> Sounds great.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists warned Zuck the FB theory of interaction would make people miserable - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2018/01/22/facebook-is-sad.html <comment><USER2> Why did Mark Zuckerberg take a moral stance about how people present themselves online? And why did he feel the need to enforce that stance? I thought Silicon Valley's mantra was, "We just build tools for people to express themselves how they want," but it seems more and more that they use the tools to enforce behavioral norms.

<comment><USER3> Only Zuck knows the real answer. But my guess is he's buying into his own hype. Look at the way he travels the world and poses with the needy for photos. I suspect he thinks of himself as a visionary, with visionary ideas to match. His stance on authenticity is a perfect way to spin his platform's antisocial design into something noble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The worst thing about Facebook is that it makes it difficult to discover new people, or at least users either don't trust the site, or the friend relationship is so binary and exclusive that it doesn't make people be more open.

You can't even organize public meetups based on interest and let people do things. It only starts with the friend relationship, but there is nothing that encourages people interacting with each other online before becoming friends.

I think zuck is advocating for people to be more honest, but the site is clearly not designed for discovery. Tinder works great for that.

</comment><comment><USER5> In practice people use different apps for different purposes, and isn't that a good thing? Why do it all in Facebook?

<comment><USER6> Because Facebook invested billions of dollars in making the most amount of people use Facebook, even people who previously didn't use computers at all. Not everyone is digitally literate.

In practice people buy from different countries for monetary reasons. Why buy all your food from you own country? (spoiler: bc u alredy liv in it and tis hard 2 liv in many countries @ once bc it takes work)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sidenote, is anyone else amused that boingboing became relevant again, if only briefly?

</comment><comment><USER8> Read the FB Manifesto.</comment>


'Swatting' suspect faces manslaughter charge in fatal shooting by police – CNN - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/13/us/swatting-suspect-kansas-police-shooting/index.html?sr=twCNN011318swatting-suspect-kansas-police-shooting0339PMVODtop <comment><USER2> It seems the police should also bear responsibility. Who was the officer who was pointing the gun at the guy with finger on the trigger? How did the department's failure to train the guy figure into it? How did the department's failure to vet the call figure into it?

<comment><USER3> I agree, but with the information he had lets not be quick to pull the trigger on him. The case needs to be heard there... it's life or death for many involved and we can't always blame the police. I do also agree that the person that asked for the kid to be swatted also deserve some type of punishment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That seems appropriate, although depraved indifference (2nd degree murder) would be ideal, it would be essentially impossible to prove to the necessary standard.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope they throw the book at him.</comment>


Substance.io launched — it's web-based document authoring and publishing - <AUTHOR> http://substance.io

<comment><USER3> The UI is visually pretty but confused me.

More critically, I'm still not sure what it does. Your "Learn more" blurb is way too long and put me to sleep before I reached the end of the first paragraph.

 _Write and annotate documents right in the browser._

Okay that part is clear, I guess. But where do the documents come from? Is this a CMS? Wiki? Some sort of community where I can also see other peoples documents? What problem are you solving? Who is your target audience? Why is all this not explained on your frontpage?

<comment><USER4> Yes, I'm a little confused too. So there's basic markup in a WYSIWYG editor, and...? Maybe a short video defining the problem and presenting this as the solution would help. Right now it feels like a lightweight version of a wiki.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure you can compare it to a Wiki/CMS in some way. Importantly Substance is a Semantic Editor, that means you're editing Content, not the visual representation. Documents are expressed as data (as far as possible).

<comment><USER4> I _think_ I get what you're working towards and will keep an eye on it. It will definitely attract more users and developers if you can highlight more use cases, and show where it differs from other platforms.

When I see 'semantic' in relation to the web, right now I am often disappointed because it often involves an incomplete vision of 'the web would be more useful if everything was tagged properly.' What I _want_ from a 'semantic' tool - and this is asking a great deal, almost science fiction - <USER2> a distributed ontology matcher with a basic ability to answer simple questions. This is a general challenge for the 'semantic web,' not just for you. So I hope you will keep exploring the possibilities.

Let me give you an extreme example. I navigate to a news page and see 'Breaking: important event takes place!' Apparently there are 3000 news stories about this important event. Obviously, I do not want to read all 3000, and that number is only a reflection of how many people consider the story interesting. 2900 of those stories will probably be identical, give or take a few words. On a true 'semantic web' I would get an abstraction of the information common to all the stories, and tools to help me find the very small number of stories with unusual additional information - while filtering out websites run by fanatics and crazies. So in a semantic editor, I would like to write in natural language, and have the computer extract simple ontological fragments for use as complex search input. As I write about a particular subject, the computer looks at what I am writing about, and a constantly evolving selection of relevant reference material is available in a side panel.

So if I begin writing about revolution in Egypt, I should begin to see more and more reference material about Egypt, history, political theory, and related subjects. I don't want to search for data; I want the computer to search out data continually as a background task, based on what I am writing about. You know those dense academic papers, where almost every sentence has a footnote even if it stating something very obvious and well-known (mainly in order for other readers to assess the quality of research)? A true semantic editor will narrow the gap between collection and composition.

I am not expecting to just have this delivered, of course :) Instead, I hope it provides some stimulating ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great pointers!

What I really want to include in the nearer future is entity extraction. That means that we could send the text-contents of a document to an entity- extraction service (like OpenCalais) in order to get back a list of entities that are mentioned in the text (that's what documentcloud.org is doing). By doing this, not only our documents could be tagged automatically, but also scenarios like the ones you described are made possible (given that entity- extraction can be performed fast enough). What do you think?

I may get back to you when I start working on it. It's on the queue for sure. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The way the site uses Embedded JS means it is completely un-crawlable for search engines. I imagine in the future a nice source of incoming traffic could be from long-tail referrals on whatever content is published, you might want to think about how googlebot crawls the site. [http://www.google.com/search?q=site:substance.io&hl=en&#...</a>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aware of that. I'm going to make use of Google AJAX crawling scheme. [http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.h...](http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source Code is at Github: <https://github.com/michael/substance>

This first release (0.1.0) is considered a Developer Preview. However given a webkit-based browser you should already be able to use it seriously.

</comment><comment><USER6> An interesting dev release. I can see a lot of potential for this product.

Specifically I would love lawyers to start using products like this for collaborative editing of contracts (which are very tightly structured anyway). Of course there would need to be some revision history with diffs, but I'm sure that will be added to this project in time.

I don't really like the global JS functions in the server code though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just a quick note: it took me forever to find the "Create an Account" call to action on the front page.

<comment><USER7> Similarly, the new document icon in the top right corner wasn't obvious to me either.

<comment><USER8> Same here

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I try to register (I would really like this to make it possible for me to work on my novel using my Android Tablet), but I keep getting an "Unknown Error".

</comment><comment><USER10> _Substance is released under the GPLv3. That means it's free for non- commercial use._

Someone please explain this to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Security concern: clicking "log in" (without a username or password) logged me in as a user called "Zyfon".

<comment><AUTHOR> That'd be terrible. Can't reproduce it though. Which browser were you using?

<comment><USER11> Safari 5. It's not happening any more, apparently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool.. very cool.. IMHO the the freedom from vendor and format lock-in is your greatest advantage

</comment><comment><USER13> this is awesome. thank you for spending time on the wysiwyg problem and double thank you for keeping it open source.

do you have a couch replication endpoint exposed through your api?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet. You mean exposing an endpoint that allows you to replicate documents a certain user owns? Like the idea!

There's already some synchronization/replication taking place but on a higher level. That's trough Data.Graph#sync (<https://github.com/michael/data>) which pushes data-nodes that have been modified to the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How to save as pdf?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a planned feature. We'll use LaTeX to render proper PDF's. We'll also add images along with other content-node types.

<comment><USER15> I think that's the most important feature, and would give your site an advantage to using a wiki. Providing/exposing 'semantic structure' in documents and separating style from structure is cool, but I don't think that's a problem that people are clamoring to have solved, anymore than it's already solved by various markup technologies.

A wiki that can exports its content as professional grade PDF files suitable for publishing would be awesome, but that's a major feature, and my humble advice would be to see if that's doable WELL before you do anything else.

I would actually be interested to know if anything already does that...

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem I see with markup, is that for-non technical people it's hard to understand and use. I think they would rather prefer a WYSIWYG-style. Wiki- style-markup isn't for everyone. So that's why I chose WYSIWYG editing, but with restricting it to just semantical annotations.

Regarding PDF. I totally see your point. And it has high priority. I got offered some help by Kevin Lynagh (<http://www.dirigibleflightcraft.com/index.html>) already. He'd help with implementing LaTeX/PDF export of Substance Documents. You're invited to join too :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> UX Epic fail. Stupid javascript urls. Seriously don't break basic web concepts.</comment>


Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC - <AUTHOR> https://limn.it/utopian-hacks/?doing_wp_cron=1498868053.3908839225769042968750 <comment><USER2> What a bunch of of vague, hand-wavey nonsense (the article, not necessarily the HARC lab, I couldn't make heads or tails of what they actually do). Covers up its lack of clear thinking with an attempt to sound profound and obfuscatory in every sentence, like many academic articles. Also full of weird typos and misspellings (e.g. "mid 1970ties", "most currently available imaginaries about technologies").

I love Bret Victor's talks, in them he shows real engineering work and highly original ideas demonstrated with beautiful working prototypes. So don't want to sound like I'm knocking him. But reading this article makes it sound like some fool is footing the bill for endless navel-gazing and philosophizing. Some kind of strange architecture astronaut convention ([https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let- architect...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture- astronauts-scare-you/))

It's continuing the ongoing lowering of my opinion of Alan Kay too; the more I hear about him the more he seems like a good bullshitter who happened to write a programming language back in the day. "Kay combined them with ideas about pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics by Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, and Jerome Bruner, and added further zest in form of the sassy media theoretical speculations of Marshall McLuhan." Wow, world changing stuff; if anyone knew what the hell it meant it'd probably have a big influence on the course of civilization.

"So Kay took all of these ideas, desires, technologies, and opportunities, and recombined them. The results were crucial contributions to a new and emerging sociotechnical imaginary, in many ways representing the computer as a digital medium, which we now have today." Again, sounds really revolutionary, and wonderfully vauge enough that you could say he predicted pretty much everything that happened in the last 30 years. I say: ideas are cheap, especially vague ones.

God bless the real engineers who make things work; photography and digital art were revolutionized with the availablility of programs like photoshop, not pseudo-philosphers bloviating about "representing the computer as a digital medium".

<comment><USER3> I never saw the source code of Photoshop but propably uses OOP...

<comment><USER4> Which was invented by some Norwegians in Simula 67, wasn't it?

<comment><USER3> Are companies like J.P. Morgan using Simula or Smalltalk?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The lab's list of projects: [http://harc.ycr.org/project/](http://harc.ycr.org/project/)

<comment><USER6> Of all the orgs to have a live demo, I would have guessed Bret Victor's lab to it. Still, looks pretty interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> They're rightfully waiting until they think things are ready to show. Danger of showing early is a recent memory in computing history (see Jobs / PARC visit)

<comment><USER7> From what I've heard of the Jobs/PARC visit I don't think I'd characterize it that way. In Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators" he says that Xerox had taken an ownership stake in Apple and some higher-ups decided to give them valuable tech.

Also, Alan Kay had a Quora answer on this:

[https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox- PARC-w...](https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-when- Steve-Jobs-visited)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right and my comment made it seem like everyone has some grudge or something. I think in general the PARC community was weary that the takeaways would be centered around how computers, GUI, etc. were great ways of doing old things better (accounting, reading text, etc) instead of being captivated by computing as a medium for thinking. This happened with print, as Alan has discussed in some of his talks. The first 100 years of print was used to print and distributed religious text and it took a while before ideas that could probably only sprout in the print medium were invented (physics, calculus, some philosophies, etc). To some degree, I think some people feel like we're still in the "use print for spreading religious text" phase (or the "film is a great way of recording & distributing plays" phase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Bret's talks outline the general philosophy, motivation, and framework for the lab's work:

\- Seeing Spaces: [https://vimeo.com/97903574](https://vimeo.com/97903574)

\- Humane Representation of Thought: [https://vimeo.com/115154289](https://vimeo.com/115154289)

</comment><comment><USER8> I support this and find it really cool. However, I'd love to see less hero worship and more evidence. On its face there is nothing wrong with all those Alan Kay photos, but my feeling is that it's symptomatic of how much of what's being pursued rests on appeal to authority and/or nostalgia.

To make this more concrete. Consider one of their projects ([http://harc.ycr.org/project/](http://harc.ycr.org/project/)), the Block- based programming: what's the evidence that this is a superior way for learning programming? What's the evidence that so-called computational thinking enhances cognitive ability or is transferrable to day-to-day thinking?

Furthermore, much of their computer-based education ideas are based on Seymour Papert's research and ideas which in turn was based on Piaget's theories on mental development. Those theories, however, have been thoroughly challenged and is all but outdated.

EDIT: this was the top comment and actively upvoted, now it seems that the mods have placed it at the end just before comments with negative points. I had heard of YC's sensitivity towards any criticism but this seems extreme. Whats the point discussions without criticism.

<comment><USER9> Got links for crits of Papert / Piaget and modern alternatives? Constructivism at least appears to be live and kicking in the MIT Media Lab hype world

Edit: also on computational thinking, I'm not sure that's what people are arguing for [http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/](http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/)

<comment><USER10> The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated, _Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step._

A famous counter-example is an abstract selection task which adults fail with high probability. Yet, when a structurally identical set of rules are given to ~9 years olds but couched in the language of _permission_ , the children are able to pass with high probability. Stating the rules in terms of what the individual has experience with (or altering the linguistic phrasing) significantly increases the probability of solving much more than adjusting the age. So we have that on one hand, people develop capacities sooner (and more unevenly) than his theory supposed and that on another, some stages of reasoning aren't ever reached.

amasad is wrong to imply that the field has not progressed beyond the ideas of Piaget. Although, people do often get the important parts of Papert's ideas wrong by focusing too much on the computer part of computer-based learning. The computer should be a means to an end, a tool to help the learner explore more possibilities, make the abstract more graspable and amplify one's ability to ask better questions.

<comment><USER11> Even if we assume that all of Piaget's theories about developmental timelines are bunk, how does that invalidate the concept of teaching constructively in a child-centered, problem-centered way? Those seem like mostly orthogonal concerns.

As for block-based programming: that seems like something we can test empirically, and indeed there's quite a bit of literature about it (which I have not read and am not familiar with, sorry).

<comment><USER10> I was directly replying to the asked question. But, it is not just the developmental timeline that was off. There's also its hypothesis of what children learn and how they reason or what they are capable of that is inaccurate.

Child centered, problem centered is vague. More practically, the big things are: you want material that's novel to the learner but also somewhat familiar (this is true, regardless of age). Children's attention is more distributed and worse at blocking out irrelevancies. Therefore, more complex tasks (such as math) should be presented in a way such that the signal meant to be learned can be extracted with minimal ambiguity (less extraneous information in presentation). Few other things have replicated.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for your replies, which intuitively make sense and appear to come from a knowledgeable background. As in my question I would really like to read the peer-reviewed / field leading work that you're basing your statements on, same as the comment I replied to. Or even just names of people / labs / journals to search.

<comment><USER12> Yes, please do provide some citations. This is interesting stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bret Victor also gave a presentation at the Santa Fe Institute but I haven't seen a recording or transcript of it.

[https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete- explaining...](https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete-explaining- and-understanding-dy)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah wasn't able to find a recording either :(

<comment><USER14> While I don't think there's a public recording of this version, BVic's talk with the same title "Words are Obsolete" was recorded in 2015[0]. I'm not sure if the demos were the same, but it's something.

[0]: [https://vimeo.com/114252897](https://vimeo.com/114252897)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're probably right actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the "don't let the prototype out of the lab too early" theme, it would be interesting to read an alternative history novel about a world where the Mother of All Demos never happened. And Von Neumann never spoke about his architecture. Etc.

What are some good examples of prototypes or even mediums in the sense discussed here that were "let out" at "just the right time" or "too late"?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely an interesting thought. To some degree, it's maybe impossible to avoid the filtering down / reductionism of a big vision, even if you wait until things are polished. I think the hope with the Mother of All Demos was to try to shift people's thinking about computing and try to change where efforts were directed. You could imagine researchers attracted to the vision, working on problems there, and eventually working with commercial partners (or doing it themselves) to solve some of the technical, scale, and other problems that occur when a research vision goes through the filter of reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Victor has indicated that his Realtalk group[0] at HARC is trying to release new research by the end of the year - so maybe we won't have to wait too long before learning a little more than this article provides.

[0][https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/](https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/)

<comment><USER16> I recently asked Brett:

"It's such a delight to introduce somebody to your work for the first time! I'm mentoring somebody at work in the ways of user interface design, and I just linked him to your classic "Magic Ink" article, and I am indulging myself by reading it again. You've written so much since then, that I have a lot of catching up to do. Any suggestions where I should start?"

He referred me to these two articles: "If you're looking for something of mine to read, I'm partial to this one and this one."

[http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/](http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/)

[http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/](http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/)

And here's a "secret internet video" (oops! ;) which Brett shared, "which doesn't really talk about what we're working towards but maybe gives some flavor of the material we're working with. (You might notice Chaim Gingold in a few shots -- the table with pinball etc. was his project.) Here's a vague description of the current system under development."

[http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech- teaser-2017-02-2...](http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech- teaser-2017-02-21.mov)

[https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/](https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/)

<comment><USER13> Video is gone :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> i was fortunate enough to get a tour of HARC from Götz

after the tour he asked me what i thought

i explained the place looked like my 'play room'

he pressed me, 'what does that look like?'

'an ideal, a sort of messy utopia'

</comment><comment><USER18> It's good to see that development of such projects with innovative ideas exists and can transform our whole life experience into something completely different like technologies from the 70s did.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is the first I had heard of Limn, and it looks like a really interesting magazine. What other great non-mainstream tech/design magazines are out there?

<comment><USER20> I thought so as well, I hope to see more answers to this post.

I don't know if it is mainstream or not, but idn magazine is a great design mage; see here: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.idnworld.com/mags/&ved=0ahUKEwiSksHvyprVAhVQ2GMKHemsDD4QFggnMAA&usg=AFQjCNGS18DhsPqdRHFrzBZdi- Kfx0jEqw).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think I found a new dream job.

<comment><AUTHOR> I heard from Alan that HARC is quite open and anybody can just drop by!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was confused about [and after 250 pages of thinking through a "reactive engine," it culminates in a "handbook" for an imaginary "Flex Machine": a first iteration of a set of ideas that culminated a few years later in Kay's vision for a "DynaBook" (1972)] since as far as I know the Flex was actually built and tested on normal users (who didn't like it, according to Alan).

</comment><comment><USER23> I was really confused by the repeated use of "imaginaries" in the piece, but a quick Google suggests it's a case of sociological jargon: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_\(sociology\))

</comment><comment><USER24> Not directly relevant to the article, but I love Bret's previous work in UX and data visualization[1].

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

</comment><comment><USER25> I love academics who describe the technical work of engineers. I think this type of translation work is totally needed.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not a comment on the content of the article, but I find it pretty obnoxious when an author uses a word like "hereodox" which has a much more commonly known nearly-exact synonym "unorthodox". It's hard to imagine any reason for that beyond "look at how clever of a writer I am".

<comment><USER27> Nearly-exact is definitely not exact. To my ear 'heterodox' connotes difference and pluralism while 'unorthodox' is more of a negation. (Of course other mileages may vary.) But different words always exist for a reason—if they didn't, one would have fallen out of use. Pretentiousness is not enough to keep a word alive!

<comment><USER28> I wonder if you can offer a pair of online dictionary definitions that illustrates what you see as the difference in meaning between the two words. (I bet you can't)

<comment><USER27> Look closely enough and you'll see that they all do. One meaning for 'heterodox' is 'holding unorthodox opinions'. That's an attribute of the person, not the opinion.

The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is etymology, and there the difference is plain. Hetero = different, dox = opinion, ortho = correct. So the distinction here is something like "diverse opinion" vs. "incorrect opinion", which to me seems clearly meaningful.

<comment><USER29> > The royal road to clarifying subtle differences in language, however, is > etymology

No, it's not. Etymology tells you where a word came from, not what it means (either in denotation or connotation) in current usage. It will often be completely misleading in trying to unpack subtle differences in meaning.

<comment><USER16> How is heterodoxophobia more nuanced than literally meaning being afraid of different opinions?

[http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2010/05/homodoxuals-and- hetero...](http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2010/05/homodoxuals-and- heterodoxuals-in-the-church.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Force beauty industry to stop BS'ing consumers - <AUTHOR> https://whatsinmyjar.com/
Consumers spend over 130 B usd annually on skincare products. That's a lot of hard-earned money. Many of these consumers feel insecure about their appearance (acne, first wrinkles, skin not as smooth as the butt of an Instagram influencer) and literally want to buy a "hope  in a jar". Exploiting insecure consumers with overblown marketing claims is just not nice, but beauty companies do it all the time. Some of them literally call their product a "Magic Cream".
Time we use some data and science to put an end to it. At What's In My Jar we developed an algorithm that evaluates skincare products based on whether or not the product works to deliver what it promises. We are on a mission to bring transparency into the market, helping people make more effective and economical skincare choices. Check us out and let us know what you think! https://whatsinmyjar.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here is a clickable link: [https://whatsinmyjar.com/](https://whatsinmyjar.com/)</comment>


God love Microsoft, they try so hard. - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSAXEVXvNz8

<comment><USER2> Are they wearing enough flair?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm sure they spontaneously decided to break out in song and dance to celebrate their great love for all things Microsoft.

This would be pitiful, no matter who did it.</comment>