Dear internet: You've been trolled - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/dear-internet-youve-been-trolled <comment><USER2> I wager the OP knows more about the Magna Carta than I do, but boy did he miss the point.

He says himself that the Magna Carta was written to restrain the king. That does not translate to not calling someone out for a transgression. For example, in America, if I witness you beating my child to death with a bat, you are still innocent until proven guilty...in the eyes of the court. But I have every right to call you a murderer and blare it across the land if i want

<comment><USER3> I think you mistake my point, or I missed you when I aimed it. My question is not whether the essay should make a factual statement about the existence of a web page that purports to be an essay submitted as coursework and more than it is about a fictitious accusation of murder.

My essay is about what we do when we encounter the accusation. I am not all that concerned about someone shouting "Jim Henson murdered Frank Oz." I am concerned with whether people hearing this cry repeat it and turn it into folklore ("Everybody knows Jim murdered Frank") that becomes the basis for punishment in practice ("Hire Jim? No way, I heard he's a killer").

<comment><USER4> I think I missed the point too, because this comment, your comments on the College Misery HN thread, and your other posts about Internet mobs (I'm having deja vu, I think you must have commented about this in the past) just come off as more clear headed and make much more sense than this blog post. I can only speak for myself, but I think it's partly that you have some thinly veiled support for people gaming the credentialism system and because I have a knee jerk reaction to plagiarism that's probably partly indoctrination and partly some moral sense of fairness.

Personally, I am really interested in hearing more of your thoughts about the credentialism issue (I apologize if you've blogged about it before and I've missed it). But I think that the issue of Internet lynch mobs is a different topic and getting these two topics with potentials for emotional reactions mixed up is what's confusing me.</comment></comment></comment>


Styled Components V5 Released - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/styled-components/announcing-styled-components-v5-beast-mode-389747abd987 <comment><AUTHOR> "50% faster server-side rendering, 22% faster client-side rendering, 31% smaller bundle size, RTL support and no breaking changes."

The last time I saw Styled Components come up on HN speed was mentioned as a big negative, but it seems that they've relentlessly pursued speed improvements since then. It also seems React Hooks helped them to do so.

I have started using Styled Components late last year and I find the developer experience to be amazing. It feels like how I should handle styling in a component based system.</comment>


Mailtrain.org, self-hosted open-source Mailchimp clone - <AUTHOR> http://mailtrain.org <comment><USER3> Also my Dada Mail Project is something I've been working on since _1999_. [http://dadamailproject.com](http://dadamailproject.com)

Self-hosted, works with Amazon SES. I have many clients that send many thousands of messages using the cheapest of Bluehost shared hosting accounts, when you also use Amazon SES as the mail service. (Things like Board of Realtors groups that post realty available to a discussion list)

<comment> the-dude Hi Justin

I have known your project for a very long time now.

Have you ever considered offering it as a SaaS ? Why not?

<comment><USER3> > Have you ever considered offering it as a SaaS ?

Sure, I've thought about it;

> Why not?

I'm probably at the limit of what I, as the sole developer of the project can do (or want to do) alone, while also performing my other tasks - such as my excellent product support for my clients.

To move to _also_ running a SaaS, I would need a highly motivated partner to help with the workload of development some of the additional parts of the business.

For now, I'm pretty happy with existing in the niche I've made for myself: mostly those individuals and small businesses who find a SaaS like MailChimp too expensive to use. Really - all you need for something like Dada Mail to get started is a shared hosting account - something "Joe's Italian Restaurant" down the street probably already has. If you want to move up, hooking up Amazon SES is a no brainer and solves most all of the problems with sending out messages to a mailing list.

I also enjoy the quality of life given to me knowing I don't have to make sure the service is running 24/7\. I live simply, and there's many projects and goals in my life that do not directly involve software.

<comment> the-dude Thank you for answering, can totally relate to the quality of life part. Good luck.

<comment><USER3> Thank you! And thanks for keeping tabs!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another alternative: SendGrid recently released a much less expensive product [1] which shares most features with MailChimp. Contact storage costs $20 per month for a typical list of 20,000 subscribers (for comparison, storing the same number of contacts at MailChimp would be $150/mo).

We handle deliverability issues ourselves, so you won't have to maintain the reputation of a self-hosted solution. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me - my email's in my profile.

[1] [https://sendgrid.com/solutions/email- marketing](https://sendgrid.com/solutions/email-marketing)

Disclosure: I'm a SendGrid engineer.

<comment><USER5> I'll never use sendgrid with the horrifically complicated pricing schemes, do it like mailgun

<comment><USER6> Mailgun restricts features unless you pay more money, which increases as your plan increases. I prefer SendGrid's model. They're just different pricing models.

<comment><USER5> No way, it's the other way around. Mailgun is free or pay per email, no restrictions. Sendgrid has convoluted plans and features.

<comment><USER6> Urgh, sorry. I forgot MailJet and MailGun are different. I was thinking of the wrong one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py my (poor) understanding of email SaaS was that staying off blacklists is the value add, not the server code. is that wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> In case of Mailtrain, Sendy, MailWizz et al. you do not send messages directly but through a paid relay, so the blacklisting is not an issue. The price is usually quite low, for example using Amazon SES costs about $100 for million messages. If the volume is low as well, then several providers have generous free tiers available (SparkPost offers 100k free messages/month), so it might not cost anything at all. SaaS providers offer convenience – you do not have to install, maintain or upgrade anything, "it just works" but in the end most of these use also a relay provider like Amazon SES to do the actual delivery

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From Github ([https://github.com/andris9/mailtrain](https://github.com/andris9/mailtrain)):

> Alpha-grade software. Might or might not work as expected. Awful code base, > needs refactoring. No tests. No documentation.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like most successful applications.

Fills a need. Everything else sucks.

<comment><USER9> Welcome to software development in 2016.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> HN, thanks for this thread. I was looking for a self-hosted email newsletter solution for ages, but couldn't really find good ones. The often claimed value proposition of _deliverabiliy_ of all the big names is a myth IMHO, at least in Germany. All the big brand names ALWAYS get put into my spam folder (GMX). Deliverability is more than _Gmail lets it pass_.

I used a Wordpress Plugin called MyMail for a while, but updating Wordpress is annoying and I'm always afraid that the plugin changes in some way that it breaks.

I will check out the suggested solutions here, but if anyone knows from the top of his head which satisfies these requirements, I'd really appreciate it:

        - self-hosted (obviously)
        - must be able to use any SMTP server
        - preferrably bounce handling via IMAP
        - double opt-in, which also can be disabled
        - basic API support (subscribe, unsubscribe)
        - one click unsubscribe
        - Autoresponder capabilities (nice would be: lets me set the specific time of delivery. Say: +1 day after signup at 11am)
        - reasonably fast UI

Not required:

        - multi-tenant
        - template builder
        - fancy templates (I will use a very basic email layout)
        - <USER2>
        - CRM capabilities

I tried Mautic ([https://www.mautic.org/](https://www.mautic.org/)) which looked promising, but the UI is so horribly slow, it annoyed me. I don't want to wait 5 seconds for every HTTP request to complete. Especially if I need to set up my email campaigns

<comment><USER11> Well, deliverability and being self-hosted might not go well together these days. There is a LOT you need to go in terms of setting up the relevant infrastructure; the newsletter software is just a tiny fragment of it. And even if your carefully crafted infrastructure works now, it can suddenly stop, just because some big e-mail hosting service decides they implement a major change (see e.g.: [http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article109/google-ipv6-smtp- res...](http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article109/google-ipv6-smtp- restrictions)).

<comment><USER10> See, I get your point, but my experience is different. All the transactional emails of my SaaS are sent out with PHP's mail() which is obviously the worst infrastructure setup you can get and only a fraction is marked as spam for my receivers.

Same is true for my contact form. A copy is sent to the receiver. This works with my providers SMTP server and again, not that many problems with deliverability.

In my limited experience, sending newsletters doesn't have to be a science project.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, but you aren't pumping out 250,000 emails from that domain every day, are you?

That's where the whole deliver ability lark comes in, and is why we offload non-transactional emails to the likes of bronto and adestra. One less thing to worry about.

<comment><USER10> Absolutely, my numbers are way lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know of an open source Mandrill clone, preferably self-hosted? Finding someone to do newsletters or simply doing via traditional mailing-list software is pretty easy, but finding an alternative for Mandrill is a bit harder.

We have maybe ten different email templates, in 7 different language. Mandrill makes that sort of easy, but their reason decision to require a Mailchimp account (which we don't need) has made us look for alternatives. We even considered building something in-house, but it seems like something someone else would already have done.

<comment><USER14> We're building a self-hosted service similar to Mandrill for bulk and transactional email on [https://highrisehq.com](https://highrisehq.com). Mandrill was the only service that offered unlimited sub-accounts each with their own reputation and quota. We relied on that to offer bulk email to our customers, and since there's no good alternative we need to build it in-house. In addition to sub-accounts & quota management, we needed open+click analytics, templates, and a fast RPC api. We also don't want an email provider going dark on us again, so it'll support sending from a pool of email providers. Mailgun is the one we're using first (it's been great so far) then likely SES. We're going to open source it at some point. It's written in Go with a Postgres backend so deployment is straight forward — should be able to get decent mileage off a single Heroku dyno. I look forward to sharing more soon!

<comment><USER15> This sounds amazing, and addresses a key use case we've had. Looking forward to seeing the repo one day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's this really great (paid) software that is orders of magnitude better than Sendy. [https://www.mailwizz.com/](https://www.mailwizz.com/)

Main differences: built using a PHP framework, has extensions support, works on SES and competitors and is cheaper.

<comment><USER17> It appears to have tons more features. Do you have any experience with it? If so, what is your use-case?

Thank you!

<comment><USER16> I'm still testing it and it looks very solid. After going through the cod for a few hours, I'm pleasantly surprised.

One money saving feature: you can setup SES and Sparkpost, for instance, and configure it to send more emails from Sparkpost than through SES, that way you can save money using free 100k emails/month plan from Sparkpost.

<comment><USER5> I wish I found that before sendy

<comment><USER16> Me too. The Mailwizz guys are really good at coding and structuring things, but their marketing skills are not so good. I only found about it by searching for mail templates on codecanyon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is really cool! If anyone is interested in easily making a CRM tool to do similar things around list management and bulk mailing (and want control on your environment/stack), I wrote a blogpost on it: [http://blog.varunarora.com/how-i-made-a-crm- in-3-hours/](http://blog.varunarora.com/how-i-made-a-crm-in-3-hours/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice idea, anyway why all sections are 'restricted content'?

<comment><AUTHOR> The page you see at mailtrain.org is what you get once you install and run the Mailtrain software from GitHub - it's not a homepage, it is an actual Mailtrain installation that I use to send out my newsletters

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Odoo also has an open source mailchimp clone: [https://www.odoo.com/page/email-marketing](https://www.odoo.com/page/email- marketing)

From the Call-to-actions on the website, to the mass mailing and statistics on emails. (with a good email template composer)

</comment><comment><USER21> Throwing my side project into the ring, for anyone looking for a SaaS alternative: [https://emailoctopus.com](https://emailoctopus.com)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can someone compare this to Sendy ?

<comment><USER23> I don't mean to slam the developers, but I use Sendy and have taken a peek under the hood. The code made me feel sick.

Functionality wise, it seems the same.

ninja edit: it made me sick because it was ugly, didn't feel secure, and it took me ages to make the changes I needed to make.

<comment><USER24> Probably the worst code I've ever seen, copy and paste gone crazy, buggy as hell in tracking where it is up to, just nasty and I really wanted to like it. Refund was no problem though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great to see new options for this, we are using a hacked up and customized sendy at the moment and it's pretty awful code to work with.

</comment><comment><USER26> I am the phpList community manager. Anyone used phpList before? We're Open Source (AGPL specifically).

We offer phpList as a hosted service on phpList.com. It's the same code (AGPL) but we deal with deliverability, updates etc. Our clients range from 300 mails a month (free) to high volume senders on VPS with millions of subscribers and mails :)

<comment><USER27> Yes I did, as self-hosted and for very low volume. Thank you for being part of this project. However, I stopped using it because of user-experience issues. Interface was not clear and efficient enough, especially when working with templates. Last point, design seemed a bit outdated.

<comment><USER26> There are UI design changes afoot, I believe. The big changes for self-hosted users recently are the new manual at www.phplist.org/manual and the new forums, discuss.phplist.org (using discourse, which I adore!)

I think for small volume it's always better value to use the .com service. Using self-hosted is a lot of work for small volumes. I always used .com for my small business (years before I worked for phpList too) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is interesting and I might have to give it a try.

I am at a point now with Ghostnote alone that my mailing list on mailchimp is costing me $150 a month.

The project is healthy profitable but its still maybe a $1K a year when all comes to all. Money I would rather spend on other things.

</comment><comment><USER29> templates?

I use sendy.co, but its WYSIWUG editor is not great compared to MailChimp -- that is the only real thing I think MailChimp has over sendy.co.

<comment><USER30> We use MailChimp to generate email templates, and then change the content as needed. There's also [http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email- templates.html](http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-templates.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am not a Node developer. Is there anything like this out there for Go?

</comment><comment><USER5> Woah maybe I can replace sendy but I use lamp

</comment><comment><USER32> has anyone tried to use any of these solutions for a large-ish email list ie more than 100k?

</comment><comment><USER33> andris9 you are awesome. I have sent probably hundreds of thousands of emails over nodemailer.

</comment><comment><USER34> GPL 8-(

<comment><USER35> GPL is a problem for libraries, not end-user products like this. For example, MySQL is GPL too.

<comment><USER36> But only for certain a definitions of "problem."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe I missed it, but now they just need to add an inbox so you can talk one- on-one with customers that want to reply.

<comment><USER30> Would that not be any mail client?</comment></comment>


Does this upgrade to Windows 10 prompt look suspicious? - <AUTHOR> https://i.imgur.com/9KMO6IZ.png <comment><USER2> Yes. Here's what the real one looks like:

[http://www2.pcmag.com/media/images/473538-windows-10-is- here...](http://www2.pcmag.com/media/images/473538-windows-10-is- here.jpg?thumb=y)</comment>


Students Allegedly Cheated Apple Out of Nearly $900k in Fake iPhone Scheme - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/04/05/710317470/two-students-allegedly-cheated-apple-out-of-nearly-900-000-in-fake-iphone-scheme <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR:

> _Scoop: An alleged scam ring based out of Virginia & Maryland would get > counterfeit iPhones from Hong Kong, set up mailboxes in Maryland and > Virginia, spoof the IMEI & serial number and submit them to @Apple for > repair replacement. _

source [https://twitter.com/SeamusHughes/status/1202409905719824384](https://twitter.com/SeamusHughes/status/1202409905719824384)</comment>


Moving to Valley From Other Countries. - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have a few questions about moving to the valley. I guess its just a matter decision for Native Americans, just like, How I moved to Chennai. India. 8 years before, from a small town. But, Its not the same for Foreign Nationals right?
I've been reading about US Visa online, It says information like, having blood relations in US will increase your chances, If you've never been to any other countries, then your chances are low, It all depends on the interviewing officer etc.
I'm attracted to the culture of silicon valley, and more importantly its track record. I'm sure there are many people from various other countries, reading this. Please share your experience moving to the valley. Not only Visa Related, also adapting to culture and all. May this discussion serve as a mythbuster.
I also have a few doubts (mostly by reading online), I'll list them here? Kindly help me out.
1) Shall I move to valley with just an idea and a prototype?
2) Should I have to visit other countries, to increase my chances of US Visa? or is it just a myth?
3) Being a poor guy, affect the chances?
4) Does, Having No Relatives in US, affect the chances?
Please, Feel Free to add your opinions as well, and share your experiences.
Cheers. <comment><USER2> It's a great town and an amazing climate for getting motivation & support for building your ideas. Move if you'd like to! But please don't go, as some people have, under the belief that you'll immediately stumble across a pile of money upon arriving. The funding climate just got a lot harsher, and even at its best you still need several months and a bit of good luck before you know enough about the community to even begin having the relevant funding conversations.

After our YC round, my first company moved ourselves from the valley to London. It's not as extreme, but you can get some of what the valley offers from London, Berlin, Israel, Amsterdam (app development), and others. I was just in Bulgaria, for example, and they had a decent scene. So does Spain.

If you're in the valley, you kind of can't avoid the startup community. In the other major cities, you have to make a bit of an effort, but you can still definitely build a support network and get in touch with investors when you're ready.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great Insight.. Thanks..

Its Not only about investors. I hope Valley has lot of talent and product guys, which may fuel us being the part of the network.</comment></comment>


Mozilla Hubs – 3D rooms for hanging out for work or play - <AUTHOR> https://hubs.mozilla.com <comment><USER2> This is so amazingly cool! I'm trying to get my team to adopt it while we are are all on lockdown due to SARS-CoV-2</comment>


Ask HN: Why is everything still so slow? - <AUTHOR> Despite greater processing power. <comment><USER2> It is similar to Jevons paradox in economy [0].

The cheaper or more efficient something is, the more it is acceptable to waste.

On a 8 bit microcontroller, you usually don't waste too much resources because you are really limited, on the other side of the spectrum you now have processing power on demand, so in a way it does not always make much sense to be as efficient as possible.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)</comment>


Tracking Cirrus: Is This the Silk Road 2.0 Mole? - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/tracking-cirrus-is-this-the-silk-road-20-mole

<comment><USER2> Why was Homeland Security involved in this? One of their charters[1] is to "Safeguard and Secure Cyberspace", which they state is:

      * analyze and reduces cyber threats and vulnerabilities;
      * distribute threat warnings; and
      * coordinate the response to cyber incidents to ensure that our computers, networks, and cyber systems remain safe.

None of that looks like "stop people from buying drugs".

[1] [http://www.dhs.gov/safeguard-and-secure- cyberspace](http://www.dhs.gov/safeguard-and-secure-cyberspace)

<comment><USER3> A friend of mine did contract SEO work for a company selling synthetic drug similar to marijuana (before the DEA made it illegal). But they kept selling it after it was made illegal and long after his online-marketing contract ended. But he was contacted by the DHS, specially ICE with questions about his prior involvement. Nothing came of it but this story shows that they do investigate drug matters.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_E...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement)

> ICE is the second largest criminal investigative agency in the U.S. > government, following the FBI.

> HSI Special Agents investigate a range of issues that threaten the national > security of the United States such as human rights violations, human > smuggling, art theft, human trafficking, drug smuggling, arms trafficking, > transnational gang investigations, financial crimes including money > laundering and bulk cash smuggling, trade-based money laundering (including > trade finance and Kimberley Process investigations), computer crimes, > including the production and transportation of child pornography via the > Internet, import/export enforcement issues, trafficking of counterfeit > pharmaceuticals and other merchandise, and international Cultural Property > and Antiquities crimes.

ICE basically investigates any sophisticated crimes and their mandate definitely covers drugs, especially drugs that are imported from overseas.

This is part of the reason why 90% of the time the patriot act has been invoked it has been for drug investigations and not terrorism related crimes. [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110908/02534215846/wasnt...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110908/02534215846/wasnt- patriot-act-supposed-to-be-about-stopping-terrorism.shtml)</comment></comment>


Perl 6 Released - <AUTHOR> https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/ <comment><USER3> Perl 6 sort of set itself up for a tremendous uphill battle. By taking so long to "firm up", in terms of specification (or the test suite, in this case), while Perl 5 had a period of neglect, it lost a whole bunch of its early momentum to other languages. Sometimes, former Perl programmers have passed through two or three other languages as their "primary" language since they last called Perl home (I know there are several formerly reasonably well-known Perl folks who are more known now for their involvement in JavaScript, Go, or Haskell, or Rust, etc.).

It would take a ridiculously advanced language to counter that turning of the tides. Luckily (or, I guess, not due to luck but because Perl 6 developers realized they had to deliver something amazing to justify the time lost in the wilderness), Perl 6 is a ridiculously advanced language.

I haven't started a new project in Perl in several years (though my primary projects, which have existed for 9-17 years, are in Perl), but I'm strongly considering making my next project a Perl 6 project. It looks like a really fun language. All the stuff I like about Perl, with almost none of the stuff I don't, plus some advanced stuff that I don't even know enough to know why I might want it. But, I know that Higher Order Perl for Perl 5 (which I actually read while I was mostly working in Python) was a lot of fun and made me a better programmer, so I assume Perl 6 and its new paradigms will be similarly eye-opening.

<comment><USER4> Happened to me, had to choose a language to write a web crawler in ended up with Python (this was 5 or 6 years ago.)

We got a contractor in who was a Perl guru, he wrote one of the popular web frameworks but even he couldn't put forwards a good case for using it over PHP.

And now in the company my brother works for (a cloud hosting provider) they are currently switching from Perl to Python.

<comment><USER5> Speaking as the primary author of a book in one of the popular perl web frameworks (who is having difficulty doing stuff other than perl because a. my skills in perl are too much in demand, and b. Because for most of my normal work I haven't found anything perl can't do as easily or easier than other tools yet) here's my semi-considered opinion.

Meh, all the dynamic languages are basically the same. They're all basically things that manpipulate strings and C pointers. For perl/python/ruby/js here's what I'd sort of recommend:

* Pick from your team's strength, unless:

* Lots of turnkey logic, code quality and debug tools are not a priority, and you want to be able to hire fast and cheap: PHP.

* Lots of turnkey logic, per-performance isn't a problem and you want some higher order programming capability: Ruby.

* You want to manage a java-like large team for not so trivial logic, and you prioritise uniformity over expressivity. Python. Also python is a good environment for academic work as it helps the academic programmers not shoot themselves in the foot so much and academic code is a mess. Which is why python is such a good extension language for other tools.

* Async greenfield stuff where you don't need to worry about external libraries much: javascript. Also the only game in town for web front ends (plus its transpiling friends). Javascript is like a syntatically impoverished perl in this regard.

* You've got a whole bunch of mess in business logic and/or systems logic that you need to encapsulate, and you've got a small highly capable team who want to prioritise expressivity over uniformity. Perl excels here. So does python, but it'll make you do even more horrible things papering over the mess.

Regarding the last point, I believe if it reaches a tipping point perl 6 will be a good thing for async, multicore and parsing related stuff, and should be long-term productive and reduce the requirement for having as highly capable and a disciplined team that is really a requirement for non-trivial perl5 code bases.

Also perl5 is second to none for programming language back compat. I had a decent sized non-trivial project I'd written for internal (research) purposes, then neglected for several years. Then I had to look at the running code again. I'd been through several minor OS upgrades, moved to a completely different OS _and_ gone through at least three major versions of perl. Aside from a couple of missing CPAN modules that I had forgotten about in the Makefile.PL, everything was fine out of the box.

<comment><USER6> I have a nagging feeling that server side JavaScript will soon become the new PHP. It is getting more and more popular among not-so-good programmers, and given its loose syntax I think it will lead to disastrous code. Not to mention that ECMA is working toward ADDING new feature to the language instead of deprecating some obscure ones, which would make the language easier to use.

Of course, PHP makers made their share of mistakes with their decisions - register_globals, safe_mode (which was not), inconsistent function naming in standard libs, myriad of weird bugs (like syntax error (still) throwing HTTP response 200),...

<comment><USER7> As a fan of node.js, I'm afraid you are probably right... and not just front end guys. Some of the most horrific JS code tends to come from (imho) "enterprise" C# and Java devs... there are some patterns you just do not need to do in a dynamic language environment... and only complicates things for no real gain.

There are some really beautiful patterns emerging in the JS community though. React (mercury and others), Redux, RxJS, Koa, etc... But it takes a different kind of discipline to break up modules, and write pure functions instead of relying on typical OO paradigms for systems development. I cringe every time I see a senseless/useless DI/IoC system in JS that adds nothing but indirection and complexity (looking at you Angular).

<comment><USER8> " I cringe every time I see a senseless/useless DI/IoC system in JS that adds nothing but indirection and complexity (looking at you Angular)."

Isn't it supposed to make testing easier? (Personally I never managed to get the Angular hype, but I am a Python dev mainly).

<comment><USER7> If you're doing node-style (cjs) modules, you can use something like proxyquire[1] with testing to inject dependencies without complicating your modules, or creating logical indirection. If the only reason you have DI is for testing in a scripted platform, you're probably doing something wrong.

You can write, compose and composite plain objects and pure functions in JS modules that can be tested very easily without resorting to complex DI systems (with naming disconnects even).

[1] [https://www.npmjs.com/package/proxyquire](https://www.npmjs.com/package/proxyquire)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is impossibly exciting. Most people don't realize it yet, but it's like a programming language hand grenade just went off in the world...little bits of the new paradigms in Perl 6 are going to start winding their way into languages of the future.

I first remember learning about rumors around the development of Perl 6 about the time I picked up Perl 5 for the first time. I had been doing a bunch of C and C++ code (and a smattering of Java) up to that point, but coding in Perl was like hitting the idea accelerator. At the time (programming resources on the Internet were few and far between) I didn't even know where to _look_ to find resources to do things in C++ that were quick one-off scripts in Perl. Need CGI? No problem. Mucking around with a database, here ya go.

I jettisoned C++ and dove heavily into Perl for years after that. I'm pretty sure that Perl made me a much worse programmer (it turns laziness into a kind of opiate), but a better conceptual developer -- I now had a much better idea of what computers could do, and didn't have to reinvent an entire civilization every time I wanted to do something (not a joke, where and when I worked, I was partially responsible for working on a pre-STL String library for C++, that's where we were in the world). Perl was really the first time I had encountered the productivity benefits a true high-level language could bring.

I've since abandoned Perl and have moved onto Python for day-to-day. There's lots of electrons spilled by many former Perlers who've made similar transitions. I've never really _liked_ Python in the same way I liked writing Perl. With Python I've always felt like I'm assembling Tinker Toys or an erector set into a thing. It's quick to build and it works in the end but there's not much passion in it. With Perl I always felt like I was writing poetry -- code just sort of fell out of me.

I thought about checking out Go, but there's something about the sort of terse opinion the language designers have about the language that's made me feel like the entire language is a premature optimization that's going to go stale quick.

Perl 6 feels like we've just entered a new evolutionary period, where we've been given all new tools, where the opinion is careful inclusionism. It's like being stuck writing couplets and haiku in Perl 5 and now we can write anything.

Congratulations Larry et. al. This has been a long time coming, and I hope this is an amazing start!

<comment><USER10> All this progression rings true, but also the initial attraction of Perl. Back in the late '90s I used Perl at a job where everyone else worked in C. This was in the days that programmers of compiled languages were skeptical of interpreted languages. One day a friend invited me by where he worked, where the sysadmin was a "real computer guy". The sysadmin turned out to be a man with long hair and a long gray beard. He was using a very thin Sony laptop with Linux and a command-line TTY (he said he'd never bothered to install X-Windows) and after he deployed a new release of the company's code using a single command and started nmap running on the internal network (he wanted to see who else was running a Unix), he asked me what sort of programming I did. I was a bit cowed, and apologetically said that I didn't really program, I only did scripting in Perl. He looked at me in the eye for the first time and said, "Perl is most bodaciously a real programming language."

Seeing Perl 6 release notes like "Use of EVAL now requires a declaration of 'use MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL'" and "Non-digit unicode characters with a numeric value (½ and such) can now be used for that numeric value" reminds me of the nerd coolness of Perl, so different from the straightforward sensible air of Python. I don't see many deep-hacker sysadmins these days, but I hope the excitement of Perl 6 can inspire some inefficiently marvelous coders...

<comment><USER7> Haven't looked at perl in quite a while... just seeing your comments on the release notes brings a smile to my eye... as opposed to JS not fixing the text strings to use UTF-8 from UCS16 as it might "break" something... as opposed to all the new and old code that behaves unexpectedly.

I always loved how simple it was to do simple things in perl... I've been hoping to find something I need go for, so I can actually dig into it... far more likely to find an excuse to use perl 6 sooner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > We will continue to ship monthly releases, which will continue to improve > performance and our user's experience.

Is that a Freudian slip? Do they really only have one user? :-)

<comment><USER12> Ugh, good catch. Looks like someone fixed it up already, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm really excited about Perl6, it is so jam packed with interesting novel features, that it serves as an amazing testbed for stretching the limits of what programming languages are capable of. I always feel that Ruby was a language that came out of Perl; a subset of it's features, carefully selected and implemented with the knowledge of what did not go too well with Perl. This might just happen again with Perl 6, judging from the exotic features it brings together.

Thanks Larry and co! So this Christmas it did happen :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Congrats! The new regex features sound exciting ( _" Dramatically reforms and sets a new standard in regex syntax, which scales up to full grammars – powerful enough to parse Perl 6 itself"_)

I really liked the post that precedes the submitted one, in which Perl 6 is described as a teenager being adopted into a family, "An Unexpectedly Long- expected Party" [https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/an- unexpectedly...](https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/an-unexpectedly- long-expected-party/)

<comment><USER15> And also interesting unicode features in the regexes... \d matches anything that is a digit in unicode for example. What if you only want ascii though, like for computer languages and maybe security?

EDIT: security as in, no similar-looking but different characters to confuse users etc...

<comment><USER16> Guess one can always do [0-9]+. Though I can't see why, for example, an arabic numeral pose a security problem. ISIS?

<comment><USER17> There are a number of security issues, mostly around using "look alike" Unicode characters in phishing/impersonation attacks. See, for example:

[http://unicode.org/reports/tr36/](http://unicode.org/reports/tr36/) [http://unicode.org/faq/security.html](http://unicode.org/faq/security.html) [https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/WEBER/BHUSA...](https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh- usa-09/WEBER/BHUSA09-Weber-UnicodeSecurityPreview-PAPER.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Learn X in Y Minutes[0] is a fresh and quick intro to Perl6. It looks jolly good, readable(!) and quite fun! I hope I get to work on a project in Perl6.

[0] [https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/perl6/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/perl6/)

<comment><USER19> First thing I read is:

        #`(
          Multiline comments use #` and a quoting construct.
          (), [], {}, 「」, etc, will work.
        )

This level of flexibility in how you make comments seems a bit... odd

<comment><USER20> Quoting is highly generalised in Perl 6. Comments happen to be more feature rich and dynamic than other languages. They aren't simply _ignored_ by the compiler but completely parsed and used in a variety of ways. The flexibility looks odd because it's meant more for quoted string interpolation, but reuses the same mechanism for comments. Generality of concepts is a common theme throughout Perl 6, if something looks round and spins it should be a wheel.

For example all of the literate style POD6 comments are accessible within a variable as a fully structured tree in the $=pod variable. The 'q' quoting context in the main language allows you to use any matched quote/bracket from unicode as the markers of the start and end of a string or regex, or comments as you've picked up on.

This is super helpful if you want all sorts of weird quotes and brackets inside of a string and still have it interpolated for variables for example.

        say q⧚This string has a "'weirdly quoted bit in'"!⧛;

Will print out:

        This string has a "'weirdly quoted bit in'"!

To see some examples of how extreme you can have these characters be from unicode check out [http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_matching_brackets.html](http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_matching_brackets.html)

<comment><USER21> As someone that has spend significant time in Perl5, why would they use something like `$=pod`? I get that the name starts with '=' just like the pod syntax, but that doesn't mean it _needs_ to be in the variable name. I would almost just rather that they have some sort of namespace just for 'special' variables like Python with their 'dunder' variables (i.e. double-underscore like __doc__).

<comment><USER3> I find it charming. It doesn't _need_ to be the way that particular special variable is done, but twigils are a thing in Perl 6, and I think this is a reasonable use of them.

You still have to check the docs for the dunder variables in Python. Having the same special character convention (like __var__) doesn't magically make me aware of what they all are and what they all mean. And, I've done enough Python programming to know it's a crapshoot to google for them (just as it's a crapshoot to google for sigils and twigils in Perl). You just have to know where to look for the right docs or know who to ask for where to look for the right docs (perldoc perlvar, in the case of Perl...I assume there's something similar for Perl 6, and I don't remember what it is for Python).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perl was probably the first language I did interesting stuff in (yay IRC-bots, who didn't write one in Perl) but I gradually moved on to other languages. I didn't keep up with it at all, only knew that Perl6 took forever. Then I read up on Perl6 and now I'm really excited about the language. One of the projects I want to work on involves building a DSL, most likely an external one. I was pretty set on using ANTLR4 for it but now I'm seriously thinking about Perl6 as that seems to be one of the strength of the language.

<comment><USER20> Guess what you can do both at the same time! :D There is already a module which converts an ANTLR4 grammar into a full Perl 6 grammar which then provides a ready made parser for you :) [https://github.com/drforr/perl6-ANTLR4](https://github.com/drforr/perl6-ANTLR4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Duke Nukem Forever and Perl 6 in my lifetime? Next thing you'll know we will have cold fusion.

<comment><USER24> NetHack 3.6 just recently came out too!

[http://www.nethack.org/v360/release.html](http://www.nethack.org/v360/release.html)

<comment><USER25> SuperTux 0.4.0

What a time to be alive!

[http://supertuxproject.org/](http://supertuxproject.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My first thought for Perl 6 killerapp: a html5/js build replacement for grunt, gulp and other such monstrosities.

<comment><USER27> You can write a replacement for gulp in Perl 6, but if it doesn't have the plugins, who will use it?

Grunt and gulp have huge plugin ecosystems, which is both a blessing (you can find ready-made plugins for a lot of tasks) and a curse (everything moves very rapidly, plugins get abandoned, blacklisted and superseded all the time - <USER2> you want to compile TypeScript files, half the blogposts will recommend gulp- tsc .. but wait, it's been blacklisted, you should use gulp-typescript instead ).

Grunt: ~5400 plugins: [http://gruntjs.com/plugins](http://gruntjs.com/plugins)

Gulp: ~2000 plugins: [http://gulpjs.com/plugins/](http://gulpjs.com/plugins/)

Gulp's list of blacklisted plugins: [https://github.com/gulpjs/plugins/blob/master/src/blackList....](https://github.com/gulpjs/plugins/blob/master/src/blackList.json)

<comment><USER28> I personally like the idea of using good old Make for that task. You don't need "huge plugin ecosystem", you just need executables to use it. And unlike many other systems it does incremental builds without any special machinery.

<comment><USER27> That's a valid approach, but "Good old Make" is only good if you are already familiar with it (and its quirks). If you're a new-ish web developer, "learning Make" and "learning Gulp" are two equally foreign tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> On behalf of a long time onlooker: Congratulations, Perl 6!

<comment><USER30> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can't say I'll be using Perl6 for my next project, but I'm glad it's here because it should push other languages forward in meaningful ways. I think the PL landscape has been missing something and Perl6 was it.

</comment><comment><USER32> On a side note, I love how welcoming all the language is around getting people to join the community. Off to the irc we go :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Perl was the very first language I learned. I was using it to parse incoming emails to insert records into a timetracking database, so i could log my time via email. loved it.

But ya know, 15 years is a long time. in fact i was around 16 at the time, and am 30 now, and remember talk about perl 6.

I'm a ruby guy now, and I don't see how I could ever go back to perl. Is perl 7 going to take another 15? or 30?

Despite whatever features came about; i should not need to wait half my life to get them. That I think reflects poorly on the perl culture, or its momentum. And it's not that perl 5 was without issues (though they were rare for me)

Maybe a revival will come about from this, and maybe a change of pace and approach; but as it stands the 15 years it took to release feels closer to failure than to a success, and to tie my code to such neglected foundations does not jive with me. Or maybe I just really like ruby now.

Honestly, I hope something good comes of it. Even if its just new features that other languages go on to adopt or take cues from.

<comment><USER34> IPv6 was over 20 years in the making. When will we get IPv7

Internetworking is clearly something of a failure.

<comment><USER35> Many people do think IPv6 is a failure - it's certainly not an unambiguous success. IPv4 has continued popularity in a way that perl5... doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I installed rakudo and played with it a little. However, the repl was horrible. Is there a repl that accepts multiline subroutines and if possible readline support?

<comment><USER30> I think you may want to install the module called Linenoise. If you have panda (Perl 6 module installer), just type panda install Linenoise and you should be all set. [https://github.com/hoelzro/p6-linenoise](https://github.com/hoelzro/p6-linenoise)

<comment><USER36> Yeah, that fixes the readline situation. Still, if has to type everything in one line for it to evaluate, the REPL isn't of much use is it?

<comment><USER30> No idea :) In my 16-year programming career I never used a REPL of any sort. Just pop up a temp file and edit it with $editor-of-choice? XD

<comment><USER3> I thought that way until I worked with iPython for a while (back when it was primarily a clever REPL, and didn't really have the "notebooks" feature at all, yet, I don't think...this was back when it was new). Having a really strong REPL when debugging is like having a rocket, when you're used to having a hot air balloon.

I've always been bothered by the weakness of Perl REPLs. It's only recently started to improve (in the past five years or so) for Perl 5, but there are some decent ones, though nothing even in the same league as iPython.

<comment><USER37> Well there's also a debugger for Rakudo. One that will even step through grammar/regex as they parse which is really nice. [https://github.com/jnthn/rakudo-debugger](https://github.com/jnthn/rakudo- debugger) and [https://github.com/jnthn/grammar- debugger](https://github.com/jnthn/grammar-debugger)

<comment><USER3> That looks really nice. And I like that it defaults to doing the right thing. I always have to read the docs when using gdb, as it happens so rarely that I forget the commands for doing things...and it definitely does not default to useful behaviors, certainly not just hitting "enter" to do the next obvious thing.

A debugger doesn't take the place of a good REPL, but it's a useful component of a good REPL.

<comment><USER37> There is a lot of shifting around on the #perl6 chat room in recent months to get Perl6 interacting with Jupyter aka the iPython notebook. Which means you'd probably be able to use iPython command line as a command line client, just without all the Python bells and whistles. If you're interested in seeing that through I'd make some noise in the chat room. Even just saying you'd want it will go a long way! Timotimo looks to be the person to hi5 as he already has some code [https://github.com/timo/iperl6kernel](https://github.com/timo/iperl6kernel)

<comment><USER3> Competent Jupyter integration would be amazing. I haven't had reason to work seriously in Python in many years, but iPython is just fantastic, so having that kind of capability for Perl 6 would make Perl 6 even more attractive for me. I think a lot of folks just don't realize how cool it is, until they actually work with it for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Variable names can contain dashes?

Then how do you know what this means:

        users=users-churn-rate*time

oh, i see ... they are prefixed with $. so it's:

        $users=$users-$churn-rate*$time

Hm... still a bit confusing. But ok. It can be avoided by avoiding dashes in variable names.

<comment><USER30> Something I see no one mentioned, dashes (and apostrophes) aren't the only neat thing you can use in term names. You can use other languages too. $контрольная-работа is a valid variable name.

<comment><USER8> That's something I wouldn't like to see in source code, as I wouldn't have a clue how to type it. How do Russians see that issue? (Is it Russian?)

<comment><USER30> I think you've missed the point: you can program in your native tongue. I think the expectation is a Russian company would not care whether _you_ can type their variable names :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This should be changed to the permalink: [https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/christmas-is- he...](https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/christmas-is-here/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Perl6 example:

sub Σ(@array_to_sum) { return [+] @array_to_sum; }

say Σ (1,2,3,4); # It will display 10

</comment><comment><USER41> Some of the operators use non ASCII characters. Here is how you enter them: [http://doc.perl6.org/language/unicode_entry](http://doc.perl6.org/language/unicode_entry)

No risk, no fun.

<comment><USER42> There are ASCII equivs for most, they're called 'Texas' operators.

<comment><USER41> Larry Wall is a linguist. I'm sure there has to be some reasoning behind making the language more complex. Do you know of a text by him explaining why there are two kind of writing the same operators? And why using non ASCII characters?

<comment><USER37> It's kind of obvious the reasoning behind it... The unicode is the mathematical or good choice for the operator character, but the majority of people have no idea how to type it. I have yet to see a keyboard with most of the unicode maths operators on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have a lot of fond memories of Perl from a decade or so ago, and would love to do something more than just installing and tinkering with Perl 6 and then forgetting all about it. I also conveniently have a little "weekend project" coming up where I can probably just choose whatever language seems most fun (and then rewrite it in something sensible later if it grows beyond "weekend" status).

If I chose Perl 6, what's a nice Sinatra-esque thing, and is there an ORM? And how do I deploy it and run it in production (copy it into cgi-bin?!)?

</comment><comment><USER44> The thing that excited me about Perl6 was Parrot ([http://parrot.org](http://parrot.org)), which is supposed to be this very ambitious VM targeting dynamic languages.

But unfortunately it seems that Perl6 is Rakudo and they've developed a Rakudo specific VM. Maybe that's best for Perl6 the language, but it also makes it less interesting for me.

<comment><USER42> Perl6 is actually ROAST, but Rakudo is the first compiler that approaches implementing it. Parrot was unfortunately discontinued but Rakudo will not be the only compiler (hopefully!)

<comment><USER45> > Rakudo will not be the only compiler (hopefully!)

You're correcting people, but sort of wrong yourself.

Rakudo is written in NQP and Perl 6 AFAIK, but NQP can be implemented for different VMs. A while back it worked on Parrot, MoarVM and JVM. I'd say keep Rakudo, but add more backends such as CLR/.NET, WebAssembly/LLVM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I like what I see. Now make it available at Godaddy, Namecheap and all hosting providers for it to dethrone PHP as the king of the web.

<comment><USER3> I think "king of the web" is gonna look a lot different in the future than it does today and did in the past. JavaScript will be, for the foreseeable future, the king of the web front end, and I suspect it'll also hold a strong role on the back end. It may even be unstoppable on both ends because of the incredible resources being thrown at it.

However, systems management, deployment, provisioning, data aggregation, log/event analysis, etc. on a large scale becomes more important by the day, and if there is an area where Perl is still quite popular, it is in those back end tasks. There are trendy tools in newer languages, but you'd be hard press to find very large deployments (at least on Linux or other UNIX) without a few hundred thousand lines of Perl running some elements.

Perl 6 with concurrency built-in, grammars and the most advanced regular expression engine in the world, seems very well-suited for that future. Being somewhat familiar for old school sysadmins who've always relied on Perl for their scripting tasks is a bonus (Python has made some inroads in that space in recent years, particularly with Red Hat and Ubuntu/Debian shipping many system utilities that are written in Python).

Anyway, on the web front, I think we need a reasonable database abstraction layer (e.g. Perl DBI/DBD), at the very least, before it gets elevated to "always available" on hosting providers. I'd say give it another year, and we'll have a pretty good Perl 6 web development ecosystem to work with.

<comment><USER37> Perl 6 already has its own DBI and even a Slang DSL for writing SQL directly in Perl 6 as a loop construct. [https://github.com/tony-o/perl6-slang- sql](https://github.com/tony-o/perl6-slang-sql)

<comment><USER3> Seems pretty immature. No interpolation (in either module), but I hadn't seen the SLang. That's a wonderful example of creating a DSL! But, probably not gonna be using it in production today.

<comment> tony-o Interpolation is on the list of stuff to do. Perl6 is just an afterwork hobby for me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> How many times is it going to be posted on HN that Perl 6 is released?!

<comment><USER20> Once? This is the only time there has been a release of a versioned specification for the ___language_ __compilers can target. That 's what has been in development for 15 years! The specification of the actual language. It's like the difference between JavaScript existing as a language for a while and then one day ECMAScript 1 was defined. Apart from Perl 6 was always about the evolution of the spec with various implementations showing the way.

The first major implementation of Perl 6 back in the early/mid 00s was Pugs written in Haskell where Perl 6 picked up a tonne of functional heritage both in the compiler at the time and the language spec. The more recent Rakudo compiler has a lead architect who often works in C# where the compiler and the language spec picked up and redefined a reactive programming concurrency model with lots of nice new syntax like the react/whenever block.

Rakudo Perl 6 and Pugs and the host of other early implementations have been around a while and released often when they were worked on, monthly in the case of Rakudo with the first publicised release in 2010. Rakudo is also releasing a version of the compiler compliant with the newly frozen and released specification.

<comment><USER21> I think that the parent to your post is referring to this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10793029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10793029)

which already made the front-page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Are there any good tutorials/introductions/blog posts/etc. on using Perl6 for language parsing/implementation?

<comment><USER49> For Perl6 proper, not that I'm aware of. For the NQP toolchain in which Rakudo Perl6 is implemented, there's [https://github.com/edumentab/rakudo-and-nqp- internals-course](https://github.com/edumentab/rakudo-and-nqp-internals- course)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Anyone have an idea of how perl6 performs? All the performance articles I've read are really old.

<comment><USER51> It has some native typed features that mean one can speed up numeric or raw byte/bit operations to be faster, sometimes a lot faster than, say, Perl 5, but it's generally a whole lot slower, 10x and even 100x slower wasn't uncommon a few months ago. Some users claim it's worth trying it to see how it works out for the sort of code a given user writes.

This release is about nailing down the language with a compiler that passes a test suite. Next comes a focus on improving what they have -- nailing bugs, speeding it up and expanding the test suite while making sure it continues to pass the test suite and keeps users' code running.

I'd expect some benchmarks to be published on #perl6 in the next few weeks.

<comment><USER50> Interesting, does poor performance hold true using JVM? I'd expect MoarVM to have some performance issues since its new.

Is the multi-vm approach anything more than a novelty or is this expected to be a feature, i.e. a common spec and intermediate layer with support for different backend VMs?

<comment><USER51> First of all, no one can yet run 6.c code on the JVM. Maybe the JVM backend will get there by Christmas 2016.

The JVM's JIT is pretty awesome once it gets well warmed up. MoarVM's JITing is much less impressive so far but it's early days.

The JVM will almost certainly always underperform relative to MoarVM in these two ways:

* Much poorer startup time (unless an evalserver "cheat" is used)

* Using much more RAM (I recall a report of something like 5x or so for typical code running on recent versions of the JVM backend compared with the MoarVM backend)

My understanding is that the multi VM approach is strategic for Perl 6, for the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, and for the underlying NQP compiler toolchain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> As if to confirm Perl's descent into obscurity they give the release a name that 95% of the people of the world can't read.

The cherry on top of the public relations disaster that the introduction of Perl6 has been...

</comment><comment><USER53> It's impressive how different the languages Perl (5 -> 6), PHP (5 -> 7; no 6) and Python (2 -> 3) developed in the last 10 years. And how their community reacted and their transition to newer releases.

</comment><comment><USER54> Didn't quite make it by Christmas

<comment><USER55> You might want to read the date on the article...

<comment><USER56> In about half of the countries in Europe, Christmas is generally taken to mean the Christmas Eve, i.e. the 24th.

<comment><USER49> Colloquially, sure. More properly, that's 'Christmas Eve', 'Heiligabend', ..., ie the day _before_ Christmas; the 'first day of Chrismas' ('erster Weihnachtsfeiertag') is the 25th.

So there :p

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Too little, too late, IMO. The world has moved to Ruby and Go for the web/cloud and Python for data analysis/scientific computing.

<comment><USER58> Stackoverflow was written in C# when the rest of the world had moved on to Ruby.

WhatsApp had clients written in Java against J2ME.

JaneStreet is (apparently) killing it with OCaml.

iOS apps were written in Objective-C when the rest of the world hardly even heard of that language.

This site is written in a niche dialect of Lisp.

<comment><USER59> The world is not a monoculture, yes. Not sure why that should mean people will start using this new version of a language that has been dormant for _fifteen_ years.

<comment><USER60> As you'll hear from any advocate, Perl 6 is fundamentally a new language, not just a new version of Perl 5; but, even if you want to think of it as a new version of Perl 5, then it's hardly true that Perl 5 has been dormant all this time. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#2000.E2.80.93present](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#2000.E2.80.93present) , for example.

<comment><USER59> I just don't see why that means people will use it. That's probably a negative, don't you think? The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already.

I'm glad it's finished and all, but this has just seemed like a slow-moving disaster to me.

<comment><USER60> > I just don't see why that means people will use it.

I wasn't arguing for or against that position, just responding to the claim that it (Perl 6) was a new version of a language that had been dormant for 15 years. In fact I don't know what to expect for Perl 6; as an old lover of Perl 5, who hasn't done any Perl programming for a while, I would love to see a modern successor, but I'm not sure that I totally disagree with the people who think that the name now has too many possibly negative connotations.

> The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and > people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from > already.

The same is true for any new language, though, whether or not it has 'Perl' in its name, and some of them do get adopted!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm fairly disappointed with this release. My read through of a tutorial in it went something like this:

* Oh you're sticking with that confusing % for hashes, @ for arrays then $ for everything else... maybe maybe classes have been sorted out though.

* Hmm, why is the syntax for defining a class totally different to defining functions and variables everywhere else

* Well they can't have made anything WORSE. Oh fields can have minuses in them?? Packages exist and you can define them but you're not supposed to anymore?

* Well at least you can't totally rewrite the language in some arcane way which means every bit of perl you come across is totally different and unreadable for 45min while you work out what the custom DSL does. looks at phasers, Meta operators, fix'es _sigh_

Great that this has finally been released, but it really doesn't solve the problems that Perl always had that it is TOO expressive and too customisable, meaning it'll always be vastly different project to project. On top of that it doesn't have the things that people are really excited about now, which is channels, selects and other things that make async easy. I think that this would have been an amazing release when Ruby was getting popular, but I think it's a few years too late.

<comment><USER37> Yeah I can tell you've now learnt enough of the language to judge it at all... Or perhaps not at all! [http://docs.perl6.org/type/Channel](http://docs.perl6.org/type/Channel) Though supplies with react/whenever is a lot more exciting than channels.</comment></comment>


A Beer Placed on the Gun of a Moving Tank Sits Without Spilling - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYI6gOc-3vQ <comment><USER2> This is either an ad or some feat of engineering we'd be delighted to see shared with us. However right now, it's the former.</comment>


How much stock to give a short term developer working in exchange for equity? - <AUTHOR>

I recently participated on a team with a developer at a hackathon. The person has their own freelance business, so unlikely to join fulltime later. They expressed interest in helping with my project on contract (which I can't afford) or equity basis. The help would be in terms of basic MVP to get going. The startup is very consumer/sales focused and not tech/software based.
I'm early stage with zero-funding, so I'd like to pay in equity, But as this is not about equity between fulltime cofounders, I'm not sure how to approach this. And this is not regular parttime either, it's more of a finite amount to be done upfront. Are there any good rules of thumb, proxies or templates to use in calculating equity-work exchange rate?
I am concerned about getting this right in order to prevent equity issues with potential employees or fulltime cofounders (I have none yet) and VC in future. <comment><USER2> If this person is going to be around less than a year, then nothing.

Otherwise, about 4-8% of a percent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing? This would be work for equity only. Just added a line to 2nd pgh stating this, in case it wasn't clear.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anybody else? More input pls!</comment>


Red flags in emails to angel investors - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/02/red-flags-in-emails-to-angel-investors.html <comment><USER2> Sounds like a high-maintenance angel investor.

"A related red flag is asking me a question or mentioning something that I've obviously addressed in a blog post."

This is a red flag for me from the other side. It comes off as out-of-touch to assume that because I want investment from you I will read through your entire blog. I'm sure there's quality information there but reading every post is not a high-value thing to do with my time as an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER3> Who said anything about reading every post? There is a search box. If you are asking a specific question to me I would expect at least a cursory search to see if I have written on that topic.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this seems like the angel-investing version of "RTFM", which is reasonable in some situations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I appreciate this may be the way the author likes it, but I wonder if they realize quite how asymmetric this is:

Don't make me leave my mail client, don't send me long emails, don't make me work to find your Twitter/LinkedIn, don't message me if you're not my target demographic _BUT_ don't get someone to make an introduction for you, make sure you've got your MVP demo-able, make sure you've read everything in my blog (and from the comments here, don't ask questions and expect a personal answer).

Given the primary thing you want from an angel is time (which is another way of saying that the most valuable trait of an angel is their experience), this seems like an odd way to market oneself.

<comment><USER6> Horseshit.

An angel is looking for people with hustle. Someone with hustle will find a way to email me. Not blast me on twitter (along with 35 other people all at the same time.)

"Make sure you have a working demo" is a pretty reasonable cutoff, don't you think?

As a known angel, you get inundated with requests; you have to develop a bunch of quick ways to throw out the majority of incoming traffic or you drown.

<comment><USER5> None of them seem unreasonable. My point was rather than the only thing the angel has going for them is the value of their time--the value of their money is identical across angels. To stress how little of this time is available ("don't send me long emails") to founders off the bat seems, to me, to be an undesirable quality I would want to hide from founders.

<comment><USER6> I think "don't send me long emails" is shorthand for "communicate clearly and crisply" - lots of people ramble and I can't be bothered to pick out the one important detail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like how on his angel investment page here <http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/angel.html> it says

      Not interested in [...] anything involving physical products.

and on the side he lists an investment in WakeMate.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you can connect the dots there.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what you mean? It's pretty obvious what this implies isn't it?

<comment><USER8> Most likely that getting WakeMate manufactured was a painful experience and he wants to avoid physical products now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have found that people are far more responsive on twitter, but the follow up email (after you have their attention) really needs to be special and RELEVANT.

Often this is a numbers game. Try lots of investors as each are at different stages (some have the readies, some may not be interested in your sector, etc)

</comment><comment><USER10> I love this list by Gabriel. I've seen everyone of those mistakes by my startup friends or myself when we were younger.

I just wish he accepted Canadians in his investment pool. Not that I'm even looking for investment or anything, but if I was I'd be nice having someone that actually gets machine learning and big data from the ground level.

It's worth a valuation significantly less (say half to a third) since the insights he would give and the types of connections he would have (and knowing the difference between which of whom to introduce since he gets the space) would be phenomenal.

</comment><comment><USER11> how exactly do you personalize an email to an angel investor.

Dropping blog posts etc just seems very superficial...and actually saying how they'd be the person to help you just makes you come off as needy.

Multiply that by 30-40 people, and it's no wonder it takes people months to raise funds.

<comment><USER3> It can be really simple. Ex 1: I see you invested in X, which is similar to what I'm doing for this reason, and so I'd love to get your insight. Ex 2: I read your post on X; we're having this issue now and I'd love to get your insight on this piece. Ex 3: Given your experience running X, I think you could help us with Y.

It doesn't have to be long or superficial, though that pre-supposes you do sincerely need help with Y. If you're just looking for money, then that may not be the case. But in that situation, I'm probably not the right angel investor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gabriel is a good guy: approach him.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's a decent list, however, it's a red flag if my Twitter account isn't up to date and or if it's non-existent?

Better spec that I own an iPhone and use Foursquare while you're making a list of obnoxious requirements. Uh oh, I don't even have a Pinterest account yet!

The proper response to an angel that red flags on something like that is: sorry, I'm too busy doing actual work to worry about whether my Twitter account is existent and up-to-date, I'm going to pass on allowing you to invest into my company.

<comment><USER3> For the record, I don't own an iPhone and don't have a Pinterest account either (though I'm guessing you were being snarky there). However, at the seed stage you're investing in people and a quick way to start finding out about people is through their online profiles. So no, you don't need those things, but it makes it quicker to learn about you. Also, on a higher level, if you're doing an Internet startup I would expect you would be trying out and engaging in various Internet services. If not Twitter, than something. That said, and as I linked to in the post ([http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/10/pitch-decks- are-...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/10/pitch-decks-are-missing- a-key-ingredient-history.html)), I think conveying personal history in one way or another is very important.

<comment><USER13> There's a big difference as a developer, between knowing all about Twitter, it's platform and APIs, having used Twitter accounts enough --- and worrying about whether I've got my personal Twitter account up-to-date.

I don't have the time to tweet several dozen times per day (what it would really take to learn anything meaningful about me @140 characters a shot). Period. It's not worth the time trade. Should I be tweeting so I can have a couple thousand followers (half of which are literally worthless)? Or should I be throwing that hour a day into my business?

I could give you a simple bio that would be far more concise and useful than what you could possibly extract from Twitter postings. And, you don't like wasting your time either: if you have to scan my Twitter posts to compile a picture of me, you're going to waste a huge amount of time I could save you with that simple bio.

<comment><USER14> I agree with your sentiments, but here's the difference: you could write _anything_ in a bio. And in a CV. That's why socially verifiable information is always preferred.

When trying to get an idea of what someone is like, flicking through their Twitter / LinkedIn / HN posts is far more informative and reliable (and quicker) than reading a bunch of prose they wrote about themselves.

<comment><USER13> Obviously you could write anything on a Twitter feed. People embellish the hell out of their LinkedIn profiles, just like they might a resume.

I don't believe Twitter qualifies as a valuable form of due diligence for an investor. Should Zuckerberg be worried about what Wall Street thinks of his Twitter account? One post in three years probably implies he just isn't with the times.

<https://twitter.com/#!/finkd>

It's not looking good for Zuck.

You know what's a lot more reliable than me tweeting about Whitney Houston's death? The product I create and show you. Brass tacks. The rest is a superficial sideshow.

<comment><USER14> Are you equating a cold-calling investment prospect with Mark Zuckerberg?

 _I don't believe Twitter qualifies as a valuable form of due diligence for an investor_

No disrespect, but you're belief is incorrect. Anything and everything about you online is used when doing DD. Of course, if your product is fucking awesome, then the fact that your Twitter stream is empty is irrelevant. But if your product _is_ fucking awesome, you aren't cold-calling VCs. VCs are cold- calling _you_.

<comment><USER15> > _"Anything and everything about you online is used when doing DD."_

Having what, for all intents and purposes, is an employer judge - or worse yet _misjudge_ \- me based on my interests, or the articles I read is precisely the reason I'm moving away the merger of my online/offline lives. I recently put my money where my mouth is and deleted my Facebook account.

> _"However, at the seed stage you're investing in people"_

This always sounds like horseshit to me. Can some one point to some good examples where this model has been truly successful? Why aren't VCs actively recruiting college campuses, then? It seems like you're missing out on a huge chunk of great candidates if you're always selecting "people" from a small subset who are seeking funding for their (possibly terrible) technology startup.

<comment><USER14> To see _some good examples where this model has been truly successful_ , see every successful VC fund and accelerator ( _especially_ YC), ever. Also, I totally agree re prospective employers, from an employee's POV. But don't make the mistake of conflating Investors with Employers. The two are very different beasts, looking for _very_ different attributes.

<comment><USER15> > _"To see some good examples where this model has been truly successful, see > every successful VC fund and accelerator (especially YC), ever"_

I don't know everything about these incubators, but are you telling me that these guys and gals apply and get into the programs without an idea for a startup? That isn't how I thought it worked. I think that's how people like to _think_ or _claim_ it works. But I'm not sure it's the reality.

And, if I tried hard, I could probably come up with an example or two where the opposite happened: VCs banked on the talent behind a company with a not- so-good idea, and it "failed".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Ancient City Emerges in a Remote Rain Forest - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/an-ancient-city-emerges-in-a-remote-rain-forest <comment><USER2> >because these sites were long known to local people, they had invariably been disturbed, if not badly looted.

No kidding. I had a Spanish teacher in high school from Peru who'd bring in artifacts he'd found in caves around his home town, his collection included a human skull he claimed was from an Andean civilization. It didn't dawn on me until years later how ludicrous it was that this man had kept this skull he'd found in a cave and then took it across the world to be handled by kids. It still had dirt inside of it!

Now I wonder how many laws and customs he'd broken, and whether it was a significant enough find that much was lost by him using it as a trophy.

<comment><USER3> This sort of thing almost justifies the "Indiana Jones" style of archaeology to me: if you _know_ that the location of a "historical site" of "great religious significance" just became public knowledge, then the clock is ticking before a bunch of idiot looters come and break all the walls and vases looking for gold, or take home random skulls to put on their desks.

So, _presuming_ you're an archaeologist and know how to quickly-and- efficiently extract and catalogue artifacts without damaging them; and _presuming_ the country that the site belongs to has no governmental body or NGO willing to protect the site; then you _may as well_ book the first plane ticket there, rush in, (carefully) pick up everything of value, box it all up and ship it to a museum—any museum—where it will be put under glass until the significance of the artifacts can be understood.

If the locals want their history, _their_ museum can get it back from _your_ museum. Until then, it'll at least be protected from ending up in some foreigner's Spanish class.

<comment><USER4> Major problem: Context is king in archaeology.

The context of an artifact is its position in the site relative to everything else, and it's incredibly important. A stone flake by itself tells you a little, but a stone flake next to a core by a fire with carbonized bones in it tells you a lot more about the people who lived there. This is why archaeological digs painstakingly record the position and orientation of everything they find, in addition to soil features, etc. that might reveal even more. If you see an artifact in a museum that is from an archaeological dig, there's a book in an archive somewhere that has a drawing of the level in which it was found that gives its orientation and position relative to a datum. You could return to the dig and place the artifact in precisely the same location that it was found in using this data.

Archaeology is an evolving discipline, and better ways of extracting additional information from digs with new methods are being found all the time. For this reason, most major digs do not cover 100% of the site. It's considered good practice to leave some of the site undisturbed so that future archaeologists can apply yet-to-be-invented techniques to the site to reveal more than is presently possible.

So, by scooping up artifacts indiana-jones style, you're destroying a huge part of the information that they might have revealed. Is it better than looters digging the place up? Perhaps, but only just barely. It's a highly destructive, unethical act. It's like justifying a smash-and-grab because there's a riot going on and you happen to be slightly more needy than most. There's a small chance that looters won't find the site or that a government will decide to protect it in time, and it's better to take that chance than it is to loot the place and ensure the site is destroyed.

<comment><USER5> Is there some kind of 3D radar that scans a few meters below surface level? Sounds like that would make the job of recording a lot easier.

<comment><USER4> Yes, ground penetrating radar/sonar/magnetic sensing all exist and are used, but they're not as good as you'd hope. They're mainly used to help figure out where to dig. There are all sorts of high-tech ways to record the position of artifacts as they're being dug up, but students and volunteers with pens, notebooks, and a little training are usually cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article badly needs pictures!

<comment><USER7> Preston's National Geographic article has pictures:

[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160209-honduras-l...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160209-honduras- lost-city-archaeology-discovery-jaguar-sculptures-photos/)

<comment><USER8> Thank you, that article badly needed pictures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> More cold water on our image of lost tribes in the rainforest living unchanged since the dawn of time.

Nearest we can tell, the uncontacted tribes are refugees from great civilizations who got wiped out by European diseases.

<comment><USER10> Certainly not all of them, but in certain areas it's quite possible that refugees have been mixing with local population, or even forming new tribes. New research data all indicates that there were some, for that time, huge cities (100+K population) in Amazon basin. It makes sense to presume that when epidemics started at least part of the population managed to escape into surrounding jungle, leaving those cities empty, similar how in Europe many cities have been completely deserted in the time of plague. Obviously, we know so little about this that it's all just a speculation.

<comment><USER11> This site is in Honduras, not the Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> UC Davis' CAVE VR environment was used to help find the cities in the LIDAR data: [http://doc-ok.org/?p=1204](http://doc-ok.org/?p=1204) .

</comment><comment><USER13> Their experience and description of the deep jungle just makes me think of Predator.

How the article just moved on to how disease wiped out so many people wasn't new news to me making me feel like the reality that it was so hard to navigate the city meant they didn't have a lot of content to write about from their nine days in the scariest point of jungle I've ever heard of.

</comment><comment><USER8> So, here is what I don't understand, why did they have to disturb it so much? Western Europeans did a lot of damage and being more careful would be very helpful.

Unless they were concerned about looters.

</comment><comment><USER14> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296058)

</comment><comment><USER15> HOLY SHIT.

So the spaniards were slaving people into plantations, where they'd die at a 90% rate from European disease, and then just round up more people for direct exposure?

That is worse than a concentration camp.</comment>


Open Source the Chevy Volt - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2009/04/15/bold-idea-for-reinventing-the-us-auto-industry-open-source-the-chevy-volt/

<comment><USER2> "... proposed that in exchange for the GM bailout we spin out the Chevy Volt into an open source electric car platform."

Counterintuitively, electric cars are not something that is a good idea in the near term. Why? The electrical grid does not have the capacity to absorb the additional demand.

California for example has rolling blackouts during the summertime, just to moderate the existing demand. Imagine adding tens of thousands, or more, of electric car recharges to that...

Widescale adoption of electric cars, even assuming they were otherwise acceptable to the public, will require a massive investment in electrical generation, the two practical energy sources being coal and nuclear, neither of which is a politically easy thing to pull off.

<comment><USER3> I heard mention of charging the cars at night from the unused base load, possibly meeting the demand during the day by taking some charge from parked cars.

Whether that's practical or not...</comment></comment>