Why 2.4GHz? Chasing wireless history - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/why2point4 <comment><USER3> I don't know the answer to why the 2.4GHz ISM band is at 2.4GHz, but I do know the answer as to why the 2.4GHz band was chosen over others. (I also know why the 61.5 GHZ ISM bad was chosen to be 61.5GHz.)

The choice of the 2.4GHz band needs to be seen in the context of 1995, when the first WLAN prototypes were built.

The lower limit was set by the desire to have the smallest antennas possible, to allow WLAN equipped devices to be portable. The higher the frequency, the smaller the wavelength, the smaller the antenna.

The upper limit was set by what was technically possible in 1995. The desire was to use cheap CMOS technology to build WLANs. In 1995, it was just possible to build a 2.4GHz radio in CMOS and research was in progress to build a 5GHz radio.

Consequently the first WLANs came out at 2.4GHz. Since then, WLANs have remained at that frequency for compatibility reasons (Metcalfe's law). 802.11a was defined to be 5GHz, because 802.11a came out after 802.11b and by then a 5GHz radio was possible in CMOS. Due to the dominance of 2.4GHz, 802.11g was later defined to be 802.11a at 2.4GHz, to take advantage of readily available 2.4GHz RF components, and allow 802.11a rates without having to have a dual- band radio.

61.5GHz was chosen for ISM because it is heavily attenuated by oxygen the atmosphere. This makes it unsuitable for long-range communications, but great for short range, since the high attenuation provides a degree of isolation between networks.

<comment><USER4> Your post is full of errors.

CMOS radio didn't exist in 1995.

802.11a didn't come out 'after' 802.11b. 802.11a and 802.11b were ratified on the SAME DAY.

802.11g is a bit more than "802.11a in 2.4GHz".

<comment><USER3> I'm looking at this from the point of view of the technology, rather than the standards, as that's where I was involved. From a technology point of view, 802.11b (particularly its 1 and 2Mbps modes) was developed before 802.11a, and so is "older". I know this, because I had the design for the world's first 802.11a modem on my computer's screen, and one of the professors had earlier bought an instance of a DSSS WLAN (essentially 802.11b) to see how it performed.

Granted the early "802.11b" radios might not have been CMOS. Their frequency was limited by what was technically possible in a consumer product though. I can't remember exactly what was in that "802.11b" WLAN. The 802.11a band was definitely set by what was possible in CMOS. The CMOS radio itself might not have existed in 1995, but planning was in progress and we had a pretty good idea of what was possible.

<comment><USER4> 802.11b was CCK modulation (and to a lessor extent PBCC, but that didn't take- off).

DSSS wasn't 802.11b, it was 802.11 (or half of it, the other PHY at that point was FHSS). 802.11b's 1Mbps and 2Mbps modes were DSSS, and pre-existed 802.11b. These (and the FHSS PHY) were all part of the 1997 standard. 802.11b and 802.11a came along in September of 1999.

Who is 'we'? Because you don't seem to know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER3> "we" = the authors of this paper:

<http://www.sss-mag.com/pdf/97_mmlan.pdf>

Percival is an inventor on one of the fundamental WLAN patents (recently in the news):

<http://www.google.com/patents/US5487069>

Skellern and Weste were the founders of Radiata Communications, which was first to market with 802.11a, before being bought by Cisco.

[http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/75649/cisco_acquires...](http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/75649/cisco_acquires_taste_radiata/)

I'm one of the other authors. Maybe I'm wrong, in that the written history tells it differently, but I'm recalling what was said around the meeting table and across the office partition. I might be a bit loose with the terminology, but to me it's not packaged up neatly into standards, as it was a non-linear development process when I was dealing with it. \--- Edit: fix URL + name

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Given that the FCC is funded by the taxpayers I find it frustrating that the FCC document archive is sitting behind a paywall-esque system. Is there a good reason for this?

With all the money it costs to physically store and maintain the documents, I would imagine that they could instead scan and index them, and then put them up online and make them available to taxpayers for free, since we (the taxpayers) have effectively already paid for it, and continue to pay for it continually.

How did the BCPI become the sole contractor to have access to these documents? How can I find out how this came to be?

<http://bcpiweb.com/fcc.php>:

> Our office is inside of the FCC building and we have full complete access to > FCC files,

> FCC divisions, FCC bureaus and FCC archives! We are the official contractor > given top

> priority by the Federal Government in handling FCC documents to benefit the > public.

<sarcasm>Yes, what a boon for the public.</sarcasm>

FWIW, I hate being so negative about this. But as is often the case with governmental affairs, this seems like total bullshit.

<comment><USER6> _document archive is sitting behind a paywall-esque system. Is there a good reason for this?_

Traditionally the reason is it requires somebody to go find the physical copy, scan it, and send it to you.

 _I would imagine that they could instead scan and index them, and then put them up online_

Physical archival, once archived, is pretty low-maintenance. They _could_ scan and index them, but that costs something. Yes, the information in the documents has already been paid for, but transferring that information has not.

 _< sarcasm>Yes, what a boon for the public.</sarcasm>_

Well, at least you can get access if you need it. Compared to zero access, I'd say that's a boon. Also a good first step.

<comment><USER7> They should have the policy that once someone requests a document it is made public (just the document, no the request). Bootstrap the digital index with the most interesting documents as suggested by public demand.

<comment><USER8> I don't know why these documents have been scanned, but this is where I've gotten all the online references so far. And no, there is no index :(

These can only be found by crawling through the top level directory, which I only found through Google. It's just not a priority for the FCC.

[http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/Databases/docum...](http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/Databases/documents_collection/scandoc/)

[http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/OSEC/library/legislative_h...](http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/OSEC/library/legislative_histories/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, to be precise, it's 2.4GHz and 902-928MHz, so, for completeness, you'll want to chase down both of them. (I spend a _lot_ of time on 902-928 MHz at 1 Watt. )

</comment><comment><USER10> It should be somehow connected to the width of roman roads, I'm pretty sure of it. But the connection is not an obvious one: "speed of light / 2.4 gHz / (56 1/2 inch) = 0.087041".

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it really true that microwaves would work on that whole range of frequencies? I thought there was a water resonance at 2.4 GHz that they were designed to excite.

<comment><USER12> A myth! See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Principles> \- second paragraph.

<comment><USER13> I feel totally stupid for not knowing this. That's counteracted by what I now know is possible, though:

"Additionally, microwaves can melt certain types of rocks, producing small quantities of synthetic lava"

I know what I'm making for Thanksgiving.

<comment><USER13> It also led me to find this:

<http://amasci.com/weird/microwave/voltage2.html>

Teaser: the title is "UNWISE MICROWAVE OVEN EXPERIMENTS"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would say that a lot of the rationale would come from:

1) Availability of the 2.4GHz band in other established countries 2) Propagation characteristics of 2.4GHz (this would also explain why the 900MHz ISM band exists given the better coverage) being relatively well known at the time 3) Separation, at least originally, from heavily populated bands at the time

Note that the $500 funding goal would only allow for 10 hours of discovery (exc. email & per-page costs), which may not be a lot if the investigator needs to find meeting minutes, memos and communications with other regulatory bodies from over half a century ago.

<comment><USER8> At the time there was very little going on that high up in the band, it seems that the US rep at the ITU Atlantic City conference was pushing for it to be a worldwide standard because of the possibility that the then fridge sized ovens (raytheon radarrange) would be used on ships, which would of course travel to other regulatory domains.

I don't think propagation was a factor at the time, as there doesn't seem to be anything special about that frequency. The S-band is also around there which works fine for long distance.

You're right, 500 won't go very far, but I was sceptical that anyone would care enough for it to get going at all! Great to see the response so far though. Happy to answer any questions - <USER2>

<comment><USER8> I explain my take on the documents I've found so far, and the band's eventual rise to Wi-Fi fame a little better here, though I'll have to dig out the references page a little later <http://www.skynet.ie/~teslacut/appendixA.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good luck with your search!

Out of interest, have you tried approaching the University to see if they have funds available to help you out? That would be my first port of call - $500USD isn't much to them.

<comment><USER8> It certainly crossed my mind, but given financial constraints at the moment I didn't think they would jump on the idea. Also, this is a complete side topic for my real research, so I shouldn't even be doing it. It's tweaked some interest now though so they certainly might be more amenable, if nothing for the good PR.

<comment><USER14> They're making a big song and dance about being poor, but Universities still have tons of cash sloshing about :)

Fair point though if it's not something explicitly connected with your research - but good thinking about the publicity aspect of it :)

Best of luck with it all - please forgive my non-donation, I'm a student too and, as you know, it's feast or famine and this is the back end of a semester ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This wired article _seems_ to explain it:

<http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/09/wireless-explainer/2/>

</comment><comment><USER16> I always assumed those were set aside as unlicensed spectrum and that was why so many things existed along those bands. Probably also some propagation characteristics?

<comment><USER17> I think the Indiegogo is to find out _why_ 2.4ghz was chosen over other possible bands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My guess would be that it has something to do with design considerations for early cavity magnetrons, which generate the radio waves for microwave ovens.

</comment><comment><USER19> Some speculations:

I suspect FCC simply allowed Raytheon to use whatever frequency its "Radarange" oven used. After all, Raytheon was the main radar producer for the US military. Presumably the military had a strong influence on FCC. Remember, it all happened in 1947, just 2 years after World War II.

<http://www.raytheon.com/ourcompany/history/leadership/>

<comment><USER8> Indeed, I strongly suspect the answer will be something along these lines. I have tried to research the operating frequency of the radarange, but have come up empty. If you click the 'contact us' link on the page you've referenced, you find this section:

Academic Research Assistance

We do not entertain requests for academic research assistance. Our web site is rich in both historic company information and current product material. Explore the links from our home page, Our Company, History, and search engine.

Which is disappointing, but perhaps I can reach an ex employee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I always thought it was some balance of range vs bandwidth, some nonsense about lower frequencies having larger range but having lower peak data carrying capacity, and higher bandwidths having less range but more data.

Which still wouldn't explain why we didn't use low bands for cellular (all the time at least, hello 900mhz) and high bands for wifi.

</comment><comment><USER21> We had 2.4 GHz systems working in 1992. They were crude frequency hoppers, but they worked and were designed to take advantage of the FCC rules for the unlicensed ISM bands. The first WLANs that were similar to what we have today with APs and mobile clients were in the late 80s

</comment><comment><USER22> It's crazy that everyone is using 2.4Ghz for Wi-Fi. My flat is swamped with 2.4Ghz WiFi all conflicting with each other for the 3 non-overlapping channels and the much larger 5Ghz range is completely unused.

<comment><USER8> Really? That sort of thing actually is part of my research. Could you possibly forward a screenshot of what it looks like? Netstumbler or the OS's wifi control panel. If you could also describe the urban environment (apartments or houses, how many occupants, etc) that would be amazing. Thank you!

<comment><USER23> Lots of networks is pretty common everywhere I look. In commercial buildings with lots of tenants it is even worse. I live in suburbia (detached houses) and can see between 5 and 10 networks depending on which corner of the house I am in. Only my own AP was on 5GHz, but discovered someone else has finally started using that range too. It also looks like several of my neighbours turn their wifi off when they are not at home!

If you want to collect this kind of data, then an easy way is to ask Android users to run "Wifi Analyzer" and use the Share menu to send you the results. It is a glob of XML but includes all the necessary details.

<comment><USER22> A lot of phones don't support 5Ghz though - so you would have to account for that in your results.

<comment><USER23> It is surprising to me just how many devices shipped today do. Quite why they do it I don't understand since I never see it mentioned in feature lists.

<comment><USER22> All Apple's laptops have for quite a while, however with the iPhone they still didn't have 5 Ghz on the 4s and only added it on the 5 - not that Apple let you run a WiFi analyzer on it anyway.

<comment><USER23> The Android Wifi Analyzer app shows what access points are detected and their signal strengths, channel usage, encryption etc. It is not a traffic sniffer - some screenshots at [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.farproc.wi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.farproc.wifi.analyzer) I couldn't find anything similar in the app store. I did find several apps that scan your local network (eg Fing).

No one mentions 5GHz in their specs. You can't tell from Google's Nexus pages which devices support it. Apple's older pages (eg Mac Mini) similarly don't say anything but newer pages (eg iPhone 5 and iPad) do. For any vendor about the only clue is they sometimes mention 802.11a support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> found this article interesting: [http://ca.gizmodo.com/5629814/giz-explains- why-everything-wi...](http://ca.gizmodo.com/5629814/giz-explains-why- everything-wireless-is-24ghz)

<comment><USER8> It's a good read, and one of my starting points, but I had already seen some official archival material that contradicted several of the article's claims. There aren't too many references given that can be chased down either.

<comment><USER25> Have you reached out to the ARRL or the equivalent International Amateur Radio Union organization for your country?

There may be an old ham out there who _remembers_ why 2.4GHz was reserved for ISM use.

edit: fixed typo, thanks lutusp

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the suggestion, I hadn't, but I know that some friends of that sort of person have forwarded it on, so I'm trying to get in touch. Will certainly update everyone if that turns up something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ah American democracy - freedom and knowledge for all, who can afford it.

</comment><comment><USER27> To give everyone cancer...

Ask yourself next time your pocket vibrates.</comment>


The new C standards are worth it - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/2016/09/14/the-new-c-standards-are-worth-it/ <comment><USER2> The new C standards are okay. I am not a fan of the quasi-generics spec and implementations. If C had a robust generics specification it would be just fantastic. Most of my personal C++ code looks like C with some generic implementations via templates where applicable, because I find it easier to reason about and quite sufficient for most use cases.</comment>


New Evidence: There is No Science-Education Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114608/stem-funding-dwarfs-humanities-only-one-crisis

<comment><USER2> If you've ever worked as a bench technician in a Bio/Genetics/Testing lab you know that the hours are totally ridiculous and/or unstructured (expected to work weekends without much notice or the like). Also you are expected to make just a touch above minimum wage (take home) as a salary while working much more than 40 hours a week. (Post-docs and Grad Students are also expected to work for similar low pay and extreme hours but this is more to further their career.)

I'd say that this part of the article describes more or less exactly why the Science workforce is in such a bad shape (at least in the States):

 _Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit_

There are very few who even bother to make it to "the top" where the actual salaries are because to get there involves getting stepped on, scooped (or outright left off papers), and generally used/abused. At a certain point most people burn out or just say screw it and move on to a different career.

What you end up getting are a lot of people who had good intentions, loved the idea of a STEM job, and/or idealistic beginnings, and then were destroyed by the reality of working in Science.

<comment><USER3> Isn't a bench technician kind of the lowest rung on the ladder? I was under the impression that once you had a Ph.D., salary for say, a Scientist at Genentech, paid pretty well.

<comment><USER2> Getting to the 'Ph.D' as opposed to just 'post doc' is exactly the struggle I described. You have to make it through that whole cluster f'ck and get enough (good) publications for your Ph.D to mean a damn thing.

If it doesn't... Congrats 'Doctor' you make 50k a year after working in the field for 10 years (plus all the schooling you had to pay for)!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When will these articles learn that the fact that we are graduating enough STEM students, but still have a shortage of those who can fill the jobs, is a symptom of the science education crisis. No one would argue we aren't graduating enough students (or lawyers, etc). We still have a general education crisis, and a severe legal education crisis.

<comment><USER5> We have a legal education crisis?

<comment><USER6> You know, I actually think we do.

I understand your response (there are so many law school graduates), but think about it - there's a huge number of unemployed or underemployed lawyers, legal costs remain sky-high, and most Americans can't afford a lawyer for very basic needs.

We force all lawyers to graduate from college without acquiring any particular background that is strictly necessary for the study of law, then force them to go through three years of very expensive graduate school, and in spite of that, many of them are almost completely incapable of practicing law or even finding reasonable employment when they graduate. It's a 7 year education path that results in an unemployable person while a substantial need for affordable services goes unmet.

<comment><USER5> It's a strange market, but it makes sense if you consider two points, neither of which is really related to education:

1) Legal services is a product that's hard to mass produce because each job is idiosyncratic. Plumbers and mechanics, jobs which have similar characteristics, charge $80-100/hour. Nearly everyone fits in one of a dozen sizes of shoe that can be cheaply manufactured in China, but every landlord- tenant dispute is slightly different.

2) At nearly every level, there is a limited supply of experienced lawyers (this is true for plumbers and mechanics and also consultants and bankers). Compare with management consulting. The field has zero educational or certification requirements, as far as I know, but McKinsey doesn't charge less per hour than a high-end law firm. Corporate clients in particular don't want to hire professionals that don't have prior, real-world experience with corporate matters. There are a limited set of opportunities to work on a real litigation or real merger, and so there is a limited supply of professionals with the desired experience.

The educational system can't really remedy either problem. There are schools that put a huge emphasis on clinical, real world education, and yet firms and clients still focus most of their recruiting on schools that offer classes like Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology Language and Law: [http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes- for-...](http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes-for-spring- semester).

<comment><USER6> I agree that it makes a certain amount of sense at the upper level. My guess is that eliminating the requirement of a 3 year law degree at the state bar level would have almost no effect on yale law school graduates. Your analogy to management consulting is an apt one - genuinely (top 3) elite MBA programs aren't legally required for anything, but they are in demand. That said, I think you could knock that third year off yale law school with no discernible loss of quality, and in the absence of a government-enforced 7 year educational requirements, I do think that you would see the emergence of a tier of very elite lawyers who haven't done the 3 year JD as well.

Another big question is the effect this has on the lower end of the scale. We're talking about the daily grind of law, divorces, child custody cases, drunk driving charges, and so forth. My guess is that a lot of people dealing with these issues would benefit simply from having access to a highly literate person who can research things for them without getting threatened with charges of "practicing law without a license".

I don't think that these needs are well met by requiring someone to major in (I'll go with Obama here) "art history" for four years simply because they have to get a BA before they can go to law school, followed by three years of very expensive graduate education. A much shorter course in law, with perhaps some apprenticing, might yield lawyers who can afford to charge much less (then again, many of these folks have so little money that there really is no difference between $20 an hour and $700 an hour, they can't pay it).

I've heard cynics say that state bars are mainly concerned with preventing paralegals from hawking cheap wills in strip malls, providing assistance with immigration forms, that kind of thing. I'll admit I don't really know, I'm not involved in this sort of thing. I read about a case a while back (I really wish I could give you a link, it was an interesting article) where a judge did issue an injunction against a woman who had a law degree from another country who was providing immigration council in texas. The judge went out of his way to mention that her work was of high quality, but she clearly hadn't done her 4 years of art history + three years of JD, so she wasn't allowed to take the bar exam an was ordered to stop (like, you will be imprisoned if you keep offering these services).

<comment><USER5> I would support letting anyone with a college degree take the bar exam. That said, I don't think it would make a big impact. At the low end, the sporadic nature of legal work makes it difficult to charge much less than lawyers already do. If you're doing divorces, child custody, DUI, etc, it's very hard to fill 40 billable hours a week because any given matter is so small. You spend most of your time just finding work or waiting for work. If your utilization is 50%, then a billable rate of $50 per hour translates to probably $20 per hour worked when accounting for overhead, or less than you can make working at Costco. If your utilization is 35%, you have to charge $100 per hour to beat working at Costco. To make this work,bayou have to drive volume, taking on very large numbers of cases and closing them quickly, which requires expensive advertising.

At the high end, I do think you'd see a class of non-JD lawyers, probably MBA's. However, I don't think you'd have larger supply and thus lower prices. Supply is already quite elastic. The Chicago market used to hire about 1,000 new lawyers at large firms per year, and is probably down to 350 today. The elasticity of the supply comes from firms going more or less deeply into the class at the schools from which they hire. If you open the pool up to say MBAs at U Chicago and Northwestern, what happens? The job market becomes more competitive, but supply doesn't change. At the end of the day, there are only so many M&A deals happening in Chicago and only so many lawyers are needed to work on them. Indeed, the trend has been in the opposite direction. Over the last decade, technology and an intervening recession have reduced the need for entry level lawyers to perform say due diligence. However, rates have gone up over the decade and have held steady even after the recession, because the reduction in entry level positions has resulted in a reduced supply in the ranks of experienced lawyers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The truth of the matter has always been "There is a shortage of STEM majors willing to work for the wages we'd like to pay them."

Pumping up the idea of the "STEM Crisis" is just a way to inflate supply.

<comment><USER8> > Pumping up the idea of the "STEM Crisis" is just a way to inflate supply.

Perhaps, but this should be seen in the larger context of a general glut of supply of high-skilled AND low-skilled workers. The truth is, it isn't just STEM where oversupplied & underpaid workers exist. Humanity is becoming more efficient at everything, and there is less work to go around. White collar is the new Blue Collar, it's just that no one acts like it. Economists have acknowledged this[1], but of course haven't proposed real solutions. The real solutions are: (A) White collar Unionizes against an ever shrinking management, or (B) we come up with some kind of shared work program, where we finally start towards the goal of 100% unemployment for humanity. But no one of any power really wants to talk about that. A psychological phase change will be needed for that to happen.

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21586581-economi...](http://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21586581-economist-asks-provocative-questions-about-future-social- mobility-american?zid=297&ah=3ae0fe266c7447d8a0c7ade5547d62ca)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Top tech companies end up paying more for H1-B engineers than US engineers. Not only that but they have to pay for legal fees and wait for the legal process to take place. Why would they go through this if there were good US candidates available? Also tech salaries for entry level engineers at top tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox etc.) have increased by about _50%_ in the last 4 years.

<comment><USER10> Presumably the answer is because those H1B individuals do more for the same amount of investment (where we must quantify everything involved in the competitive hunt for talent).

The problem comes when these individuals are more valuable not because equivalent talent wasn't available but because they're slave-like workhorses without flexibility or options.

H1B offers companies power of employees that they simply cannot wield over American employees, period. This is especially popular in some industries. Look at the IT work force here in midtown Manhattan for example.

It's complicated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recommend this read on the topic.

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stam...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> We have a science _capability_ crisis. It has little to do with formal education. It's an issue of leadership, especially in top organizational roles.

There _is_ a lack of competent, available workers for low- and mid-level roles (if you've ever been on an interview loop, you've seen how uninspiring the general ability level is) but that's more an artifact of decades-long discouragement and organizational failure than an intrinsic problem of the people. Knowledge is spotty and hard to find. Formal education, on the other hand, is really easy to find in NYC or Silicon Valley or Boston. There are zillions of people with PhDs from prestigious schools (but many of those aren't any good).

All of this is dangerous in the long term, because after a decade of terrible leadership, competent people tend to leave for greener pastures, or burn out and lose motivation to do anything more than follow orders.

The fact that we fall short of where we should be in STEM is entirely an artifact of the (mostly terrible) organizations we build and the roles those define. It's not the teachers' fault at all, nor can it be fixed by throwing more resources at education without fixing the larger (and probably unfixable) society.

<comment><USER13> Why must the capability already exist?

With so many specializations, isn't it partly a company's duty to train?

<comment><USER14> Let's say you were a company CEO or head of HR, and decided to hire untrained people and then train them. How would you handle the following:

1) The reality that life is uncertain, and the company might be bankrupt a year from now. There's no sure thing in life, even huge companies disappear. If training a new employee would only pay off in several years, would you still do it?

2) At-will employment, where the employee could stick around for the training, then quit as soon as that's done. I think forcing the employee to stay for N months/years after that is a raw deal.

3) The fact that that employee isn't contributing as much to the company, but you're still paying him/her market wages. Would you offer them lower pay during the training period?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One question I think is worth considering: if the quality of STEM education increased, wouldn't that increase the number of vacancies in STEM jobs per year? Theoretically, more qualified people -> better research -> new companies -> new job opportunities.</comment>


Europe's hottest startup capitals - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/09/european-startups

<comment><USER2> Poorly researched filler piece. For example, the article on Barcelona failed to mention ANY of the truly interesting startups, like Privalia, ExperienceOn, Letsbonus, Groupalia, and all the companies seeded by Grupo Intercom.

</comment><comment><USER3> These articles are of very unequal depth. 2 pages for Paris, and only a list of startups for Amsterdam. Not even a mention of recentlylaunched new york times-featured appsterdam: [http://www.nytimes.com/external/venturebeat/2011/06/27/27ven...](http://www.nytimes.com/external/venturebeat/2011/06/27/27venturebeat- appsterdam-a-haven-for-indie-app-makers-89100.html)

Nice to read about less popular cities though (Tallinn, Helsinki).

<comment><USER4> The reason for the unequal depth is that the article was originally written for the print magazine - if you see the design of the magazine, you will see that they have a few featured cities with longer articles and others in brief. Obviously limited on page count.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was looking into moving to Tallinn as an expat. This just sealed the deal. Any Estonian hackers on here?

<comment><USER6> You're welcome! Have a look at what we do on our startup scene: <http://garage48.org/> (events + startup co-working hub) <http://startupleadersclub.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/occtallinn>

<comment><USER7> Sounds interesting!

I'm unable to find a more subtle way to ask this, so I'll be blunt. (pardon! :)

How is the English literacy in Estonia and in Tallinn in particular? Of course, if someone expects to live somewhere s/he should be expected to learn the local language and customs, but if you're there for only a month or two then it's challenging.

<comment><USER8> You'll be fine in English in Tallinn as you would in any other Nordic capital. Fluent younger/tech circles, ok to get by anywhere from food stores to hospitals.

<comment><USER7> Tänan!

Any recommended local sites for gauging rent prices? What's the common website in Estonia for apartment rentals?

(I did look in Google, but in my experience it's best to ask a local for the defacto leader in rentals)

<comment><USER9> <http://city24.ee/> and <http://www.kv.ee/>

<comment><USER10> dittoing these sites.

If the grand-parent wants to be central, try Vanalinn (the old town), Kesklinn (city centre), and Kadriorg.

Also remember that many buildings don't have elevators.

<comment><USER7> Thanks!

Actually that's a very good question that I need to add to my list ("what's considered city center?").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Throwing in a Swiss boot - <http://startupchart.ch/> \- of course Switzerland is a country, not a capital. But then so is Sweden...

</comment><comment><USER12> Lisbon, the West Coast of Europe.

Better beaches, better food and better wines than the other West Coast.

Plus: better trams and a better bridge.

Perfect geographic location, halfway between Europe and US.

\-- MV

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.crowdcube.com/> looks interesting for the UK: "equity-based crowdfunding". However, it doesn't look like there is a great deal of activity.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the great things in the article is choosing both Helsinki and Tallinn, neighboring cities with just 50 miles apart. That region is really buzzing with startup activity.

</comment><comment><USER14> Tallinn and Helsinki truly booming! Garage48 Tartu (<http://garage48.org/events>) is on next weekend and after that Steve Blank is visiting Finland for a week (www.steveblank.fi). Truly great stuff happening here!

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish there was more depth to these articles - it could have been a very interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER16> London?

<comment><USER17> Probably omitted on purpose for reasons unknown.

<comment><USER18> Likely because its a UK website - showing cities on mainland Europe.

<comment><USER11> ...so it's "top 10 locations I'd rather be right now"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dublin?

</comment><comment><USER20> > Europe's hottest startup capitals: Sweden

Come and visit the wonderful town of Sweden ...

<comment><USER21> Well, Barcelona is not the capital of Spain..

<comment><USER22> It's the capital of Catalonia, who many people in Spain would not mind to see as an independent republic :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Someone should let Wired know that Tel Aviv is as European as Damascus and Beirut.

<comment><USER24> And that Sweden isn't a city (so it can't be a European capital.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Israel is not in Europe. Why is it on the list?

<comment><USER26> It's culturally closer to Europe than to its Muslim neighbors. Israel competes in the Eurovision song contest and in the European soccer confederation.

<comment><USER27> If you are going to use that standard then the UK is in North America as it's culturally closer to US/Canada than France/Germany.

<comment><USER26> I know British people who don't think the UK is part of Europe. British discourse often refers to "the continent" as something distinct from Britain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> You're really pushing it if you're classing Moscow and Tel Aviv as "European" cities...

<comment><USER4> Israel is thought of European because its football team is aligned with UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) and also it participates in the Eurovision song contest, so a lot of Europeans, myself included, definitely see Israel as quasi-European

<comment><USER29> Israel is fairly European in a lot of aspects except when it comes to its occupation of the Palestinian territories and its denial of rights to the inhabitants of those territories. Israel's behavior with regards to the West Bank is so bad that it being referred to more and more as an apartheid situation:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_analog...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_analogy)

<comment><USER26> This is the third time I've seen you try and start a flamewar over Israel. Please knock that shit off.

<comment><USER29> I made three posts in quick succession with regards to Israel, each time I kept it short and sweet and what I said was directly relevant to the posts I was responding to.

#1. Two postings I responded where saying in effect that culturally Israel is similar to Europe, one of them was yours. I said that is true, except when it comes to its occupation. With regards to the occupation, its is related human rights issues, Israel is very unlike modern Europe. That is a completely true observation and it was appropriate in the context I posted it.

#2. A third response was with regards to someone else saying that Israel played in the European league because it wanted to avoid matches with Syria and Iran, but the actual reason is that Israel viewed very negatively by the majority of its neighbors in the Arab world primarily because of its treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. It isn't just about Syria and Iran, but rather about Jordan, Egypt and basically every other state in the region. Again that is a completely true observation and appropriate in the context.

<comment><USER26> As far as human rights go, I think you've forgotten that Yugoslavia is part of Europe. There are also parallels with Northern Ireland.

And as far as Israel's relations with the Arab countries, it has more to do with anti-Semitism. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is no worse--and in many respects better--than that of Jordan and Egypt.

EDIT: Before you think of responding to this and disagreeing with me, keep in mind--this is exactly how every Israel flamewar everywhere else on the internet ever starts.

We're all decently informed people here, well aware of the situation in the Middle East. It's sufficient to point out that Israel maintains relationships with European countries due to its strained relations with its Arab neighbors. It does no good to drag out your own opinions of who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Saying "Israel doesn't get along with other countries in the Middle East so they play football matches against European countries" makes a valid point. Saying "Israel doesn't get along with other countries in the Middle East because Israel practices apartheid", or for that matter saying "Israel doesn't get along with other countries in the Middle East because the Arabs are anti-Semitic zealots" is flamebait and doesn't belong on Hacker News.

<comment><USER29> You just detailed in your response why I am wrong and you are right and then you finish it off saying that if I do something similar but with opinions that differ from yours, I will be breaking the rules. It is really hard to know how to respond to a comment like that except to back away slowly.

<comment><USER26> Hm, that's not what I meant, but I can see why you read it that way. I'm sorry for being unclear. Hopefully I can clarify what I meant a little.

I don't think your claims about Israel are helpful for two reasons.

One is because neither of your claims are statements of fact. Your first claim was:

 _With regards to the occupation, its is related human rights issues, Israel is very unlike modern Europe._

First, it's a matter of opinion--and rather heated debate--that Israel is responsible for any human rights issues related to the Palestinians. Some would say that Israel is only doing what they need to in order to defend themselves. Secondly, modern Europe has faced several human rights issues of its own. There was considerable violence against civilians during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, as well as human rights issues in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Granting for the sake of argument that Israel has human rights issues, they're not unlike Europe in that respect.

Your second claim was:

 _Israel viewed very negatively by the majority of its neighbors in the Arab world primarily because of its treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories_

This is speculative, and again there is another side to the story. Israel's Arab neighbors invaded or planned to invade Israel on two separate occasions before Israel even occupied the Palestinian territories. One of the reasons Israel even occupies those territories--which used to belong to Jordan and Egypt--is because Jordan and Egypt have refused to take the territories back.

So, the first reason your claims aren't helpful is because both of your claims are highly controversial claims, far from the "true observations" you claim them to be. The second reason your claims aren't helpful is because a lot of people (yourself included, by all appearances) have very strong emotions about the situation in Israel and the occupied territories, and bringing up these controversies only conjures up all kinds of strong emotions and threatens to start irrelevant, tangential arguments. It's bad form to start arguments about Israel in unrelated threads for the same reason it's bad form to compare people to the Nazis. Or, as the guidelines say,

 _Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them._

<comment><USER29> Just to be clear, I'm purposely not responding to the content of your message.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a paid Distributed Computing service? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a service that offers small payments for distributed computing like Folding@home, but for all things computer intensive (rendering, complex caluclations, etc)?
Think Amazon's cloud services but in reverse, you get paid for the computing power your computer provides.
If not, what negatives are there to be considered for a service like this?
The fact it's a big engineering challenge and people would try to fake computing cycles to receive more money have already been considered.
I'm asking HN, because I'm interested to see other's thoughts and who all is interested, Thanks. <comment><USER2> There were a couple of these companies (the most prominent being <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Devices>), but they went out of business because the market value of idle CPU time was less than the companies' overhead costs; they couldn't afford to pay anything.

You could think of Bitcoin as paying for your GPU power, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_fo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, but the idea is to outsource the computing power to clients for a given amount of money. Users are then paid small amounts of money for returned computing power from their inactive home PC. This would give more incentive for users to utilize these services, instead of the mere 527,880 active computers for BOINC. This would also provide a more affordable solution to owning/maintaining data centers.

I notice that the BOINC wiki mentions that users are attributed credits. "BOINC Credit System helps volunteers keep track of how much CPU time they have donated to various distributed computing projects." -<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOINC_Credit_System>

<comment><USER3> Right. Its a very interesting technical project but I`m at a loss for who your customers would be. I suppose the same people that use BOINC...? Because most companies that would need that level of power already have the infrastructure (then there is security...)

This is one market that would require some research. Again though, very attractive technically...you just need to find people willing to pay.

Could you build a reliable, fast enough web server on this? So that your master receives a request and hands it off to a node in the network which parses and responds to the client? THAT would work and could actually compete with Google Apps and AWS without their costs!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, there's a lot of research required for a project like this, so much so that I don't think one person could cover all the bases. Another reason I turned to HN.

Like you mentioned before, most of the bigger companies that need this level of power already have it. But the real question we need to ask is, do they want it? Does a cheaper price, less maintenance and greater amounts of power qualify for a transition to third-party cloud-computing? Or would security and the ability to fix any in-house issues out-weigh those?

As far as the server configuration, that's not my specific expertise, so that I'm not sure, but that sounds like a viable solution.

I think I'm going to write up an article on posterous about this, I'm interested to see how many people I can get interested in a project like this, in order to determine if I should dedicate any time to it.

I'll go into more details, such as specifications, features, issues and what the project hopes to solve. I'll post it as a "Show HN" when I get it finished, I'll also reply to to this comment so you know when it's up.

Also, sorry for the delayed response, in the middle of a flight to HK.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to distribute jobs to multiple workers (servers) - <AUTHOR>

Situation: I have lot of large file conversions from many customers which needs to be executed. Currently, I have a dashboard created which POSTs to a remote server. The endpoint on the remote server will shell execute a python script to launch file conversion. When it finishes, the python script will POST back to the server running dashboard.
I've been looking at solutions like https://github.com/irmen/Pyro4 but I can't help but feel like I'm reinventing the wheel here. What I would need is a way to launch long running tasks on a cluster of remote worker servers that would be aware of load balancing.
What task management framework is suitable for my case? <comment><USER2> The most basic approach is to have the post go to the load balancer endpoint, and have a cluster of identical servers run the python script. You could also have the post add the job to a queue (e.g. Amazon SQS, RabbitMQ, etc). Then your cluster of servers can pluck items off the queue as needed.</comment>


Ask HN: Good masters programmes for 'smart-ups' / late-20s career advice - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,
After doing an undergrad in maths and working for a handful of web startups in my 20s -- I've learned a lot about software engineering and growing businesses in the process but am nevertheless hankering after a tech job where I can get a little  more leverage out of more specialised quantitative and comp-sci skills.
It occurred to me to investigate a taught masters in (say) machine learning or computational statistics as a way into this kind of work -- both as a refresher for the relevant skills, but also as a way to meet people doing interesting things and potentially find good co-founders for a data-driven start-up, or connections with existing ventures.
I'm sure I'm not the only one with this kind of experience, so thought I would ask HN: What were your experiences with technology-related post-grad programmes?
Anyone meet a co-founder there? anyone drop out? find the skills you learned an advantage at a start-up or, at the other end of the spectrum, when applying to Google etc?
Are there any programmes which you'd recommend as having an environment particularly conducive to hooking up with co-founders, jobs, funding, commercially viable research spin-offs etc, as well as solid teaching? While I can guess the big names, I'd be particularly interested to hear about experiences, especially in the UK but elsewhere too.
Alternatively: anyone think this is a crazy idea and I should try and teach myself, start hobby projects and look for a job at (say) a larger outfit where I can pick up and start to use more of these skills on the job.
Cheers, sorry a lot of questions there! <comment><AUTHOR> (Incidentally, does anyone know if one needs to do anything special to post these threads to the 'ask' section?)

<comment><USER2> Just use the "submit" link above and don't include a URL: <http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html></comment></comment>


Corvus – Low-Level Lisp for LLVM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eudoxia0/corvus <comment><USER2> > Please don't post this on Hacker News yet.

[https://github.com/eudoxia0/corvus#status](https://github.com/eudoxia0/corvus#status)

Funny :)

<comment><USER3> The author may have some good reasons not to want any publicity at this stage.

On the other hand, it is hosted on a public Github repo. This is not the place to publish your work if you want to avoid attention.

<comment><USER2> Someone just opened an issue:

[https://github.com/eudoxia0/corvus/issues/7](https://github.com/eudoxia0/corvus/issues/7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion of Hylas-LISP: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6633286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6633286)

</comment><comment><USER4> > The era of dynamic languages is over. There is currently a 'race to the > bottom'

LuaJIT

<comment><USER5> touché</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Migrating from Recurly to Stripe Billing - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
I switched my consumer SaaS business (15k+ subscribers) from Stripe + Paypal to Recurly (with Stripe + Paypal as the payment gateways) 2 years ago in order to better manage our billing and consolidate reporting. I haven't been impressed, for a few reasons:
1. Recurly is expensive. It's nearly our largest software line item. 2. Recurly checkout/customization is limited - we're losing many customers in the checkout process and Stripe checkout looks very good (especially on mobile) 3. Recurly reporting isn't great
I am considering moving back to the Stripe billing + Paypal as a fallback option. We will lose some reporting capabilities, but save money and ideally have a better checkout experience.
My fear is losing customer subscription data during the migration, along with the development time needed to complete the project. I'm also not fully sure if Stripe billing will meet our needs (discount codes, free trials). Recurly also oversells their dunning management and credit card retries, but I'm quite sure Stripe does the same thing.
Does anyone have experience migrating from Recurly, Chargebee or a similar billing management service to Stripe billing?
Thanks :) <comment><USER2> PM on Stripe Billing here! Happy to help with any of your questions re: migration or Billing functionality.</comment>


Google Reader - we're back to flipping channels - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/reader/play/#item/new/0 <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182081>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> is this type of interface on its way to becoming a standard? is passive viewing making a comeback, is this human nature?

</comment><comment><USER3> so... StumbleUpon?</comment>


OVH launches dual octo-core cpu, 128 GB ECC ram server for 199€/mo/no setup-fee - <AUTHOR> http://www.ovh.ie/dedicated_servers/mini-hg-128g.xml

<comment><USER2> It's not such a low price for 128GB RAM considering you can buy cheap 1U server with Intel C602 chipset and get up to 768 GB RAM.</comment>


Supreme Court to Consider Google Appeal of Oracle Win in Copyright Case - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-to-consider-google-appeal-of-oracle-win-in-java-copyright-case-11573845080?mod=rsswn <comment><AUTHOR> Here we go - the insanely maximalist interpretation of copyright law by the Federal Circuit, with its concomitant ludicrously restrictive idea of fair use, now goes to the Supremes. The DoJ had actually argued against the idea of the High Court's taking up of this appeal (on grounds that this case was not the proper one for the Court to use to clarify these issues). I couldn't disagree more. The Federal Circuit Court has been positively adamant in its rigid views, right down to second-guessing how the jury rendered the key facts, and the case therefore is a very compelling one for a better assessment to be made by justices who are not so fixated in their views as the Federal Circuit has been. This area of the law is critical to the whole idea of inter- operability going forward and it is welcome to see that the Court will be deciding it sometime this term.

My prior comment at the time of the Federal Circuit decision: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064289)

</comment><comment><USER2> _YAHOO!!!!!_

This is very good news. I can't think of another ruling more in need of overturning, at least not in the tech/IP area.

And, for the Supreme Court to consider it, at least four judges have to vote to hear it. That means that almost a majority thinks that Google at least might be right.</comment>


macOS Big Sur Brings Back Startup Chime - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-brings-back-startup-chime/ <comment><USER2> When the feature people discuss about a new OS release is whether or not it makes a noise at startup, methinks we've veered off on a very strange timeline. Of course that's not the only clue...</comment>


Rust 1.1 Stable, the Community Subteam, and RustCamp - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/06/25/Rust-1.1.html <comment><USER2> The 1.1 release came out a day earlier than I expected, I suppose we're releasing on Thursdays now. :P Note that 1.1 is a relatively small release, since, due to launching the train release model, it was in development for just three weeks prior to 1.0 (rather than the usual six weeks that all subsequent releases will have spent in development), and during that time we were all understandably in a tizzy preparing for a post-stability world. :)

However, despite that short and distracted development window, we still managed to squeeze out compiler performance improvements that should result in 30% faster compiles for crates in the wild. You can expect even more progress on the compilation speed front for 1.2, due to be released August 6, along with a slew of stabilized and much-demanded stdlib APIs.

Let me also mention that tickets have just gone on sale for the first official Rust conference, a small one-day event in Berkeley: [http://rustcamp.com/](http://rustcamp.com/) We'll be using the experience from this proto-conference as a guide for larger events in the future, so even if you can't go we'd love to get your feedback as to what you'd like to see from a Rust conference.

<comment><USER3> If I wasn't going to be on vacation during that conference, I would be strongly tempted to go, and I haven't written a line of rust. I get excited about every rust submission I see on HN though, and greedily gobble up as much information as I can. I can't help it, Rust just excites me.

So, whatever you guys are doing, WRT marketing, you are doing _something_ right.

<comment><USER4> What I like about rust is how I think it will go together really well with a language like idris. The idea is, whatever rust cannot guarantee an idris-to- rust transpiler can. People should have a much easier time making solid low- level code in the future.

<comment><USER5> Idris is already more safe than Rust. What would this give you?

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately safety is not the only concern. Idris' tooling is severely limited. There are very few executables written in Idris (and even fewer that aren't bit-rotted), the build tooling and package management are very simple, the runtime is heavily optimized, concurrent or parallel (like GHC's) and the single-threaded performance is far from Rust's.

I want to be clear that I'm not hating on Idris I love the goals of the project and am probably one of the few people outside the core contributors who has written a backend for the compiler, but you can't really compare a production quality compiler with a full time team of 10 or so to a research compiler worked on by researchers (who have different goals) and volunteers.

Edit: To clarify for this reason I could see why it would be cool to be able to write some critical code in Idris and extract to Rust where you could get performance and tooling for the rest of your application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm happy things are moving along, but I would still like to see the documentation be more polished. I still don't know how to write a task queue (ie queue of closures) that executors can concurrently read and run from.

I don't feel like the docs empower me enough to write multi threaded code comfortably without the borrow checker spitting at me. Is it just me, or does anyone else feel this way?

<comment><AUTHOR> When you start documenting a language from scratch, you have to start at the beginning. A language is a huge project as well. The current book is about ~250 pages when rendered as a PDF. I've finally gotten to the point where the basics of almost everything have been documented, and am starting to move on to more intermediate style things.

In addition, we've only had a stable Rust for six weeks: there just hasn't been enough time to write more advanced things. Nobody wants to invest in stuff while things are still changing. As an example of this, I know there's an O'Reilly book coming out in the fall which covers advanced topics exclusively.

A basic task pool isn't too many lines of code: [https://github.com/rust- lang/threadpool/blob/master/src/lib....](https://github.com/rust- lang/threadpool/blob/master/src/lib.rs) Hopefully that can help for that case, though obviously, this isn't just a comment about threadpools :)

<comment><USER8> I love the rust docs, but I do agree that the intermediate/advanced stuff is missing. I won't feel like I truly understand until I can implement a bunch of different datastructures, and it turns out that that is exactly the kind of code that throws up lifetime issues that as a beginning rust programmer I'm not really prepared to deal with.

I'd love a 'learn to write rust with datastructures' style intermediate tutorial.

<comment><USER9> You may also be interested in this post[1] by nrc for a couple of strategies for implementing graphs. And this companion[2] by Niko Matsakis.

[1] [https://github.com/nrc/r4cppp/blob/master/graphs/README.md](https://github.com/nrc/r4cppp/blob/master/graphs/README.md) [2] [http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2015/04/06/mode...](http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2015/04/06/modeling- graphs-in-rust-using-vector-indices/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope the Rust team also starts prioritizing compiler crashes.

I started using Rust exclusively for hobby projects after the 1.0 release, to force myself to learn the language, but I found myself running into compiler panics on nearly a daily basis.

Admittedly, the code the compiler tended to crash on was very macro-heavy, but a goal of rust is safe macros. (And even if the macro-expanded code was invalid, the compiler should just report an error, not crash).

There are currently 207 open issues regarding ICE (Internal Compiler Error): [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/labels/I-ICE](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/labels/I-ICE)

<comment><USER11> I've seen this complaint about the Rust compiler a number of times now, here and at other sites. Isn't one of the main selling points of Rust that it's supposed to make it much harder to write code that crashes? It is my understanding that the Rust compiler is mostly written in Rust. While maybe these ICEs aren't traditional segfaults that can be exploited, they're still unexpected crashes none the less! The software stops working without warning. If the best Rust experts around have so much trouble avoiding those kinds of crashes, then how is an average Rust user, or even a complete beginner like me, supposed to write Rust code that's any less susceptible to crashing?

<comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: don't underestimate the power of technical debt.

Longer answer: The Rust compiler was written in Rust before the Rust language was even what it was today. As one particular example, the AST used to be garbage collected! And when you have a codebase that's 320,000 lines long, you don't update the entire codebase to the latest idiom, because if you did, you'd never actually ship the language.

Basically no other Rust program will ever have to contend with this kind of situation. As such, while I can sympathize with this line of argument, I don't think it's representative.

EDIT: I previously had 750,000 but it's actually 323,326 LOC as of right now. Whoops!

<comment><USER11> Legacy code and inexperience with new technologies are not problems that are unique to Rust and the Rust compiler. And presumably Rust will continue to evolve, will it not? If my team starts a large, multi-year project using Rust 1.1 today, does Rust offer anything that will help us avoid the sorts of crashes that the Rust compiler suffers from?

<comment><USER12> Just to expand on what Steve said.

An evolving language is one thing. Pre-1.0 was more like many stages of violent metamorphasis. Some changes to the language required changing almost every line of code in the tree. Normal technical debt is when you find an old approach doesn't work any more and you need to fix it. Much of rustc's technical debt is from things like features disappearing from underneath it, or things designed before the features that you would use now even existed.

Looking at rustc as a regular large Rust project is unfair. A new project can at least assume that the features you are using today will exist tomorrow and design with that in mind. Your designs may become obsolete due to new features, but you aren't going to have to pick between a hacky workaround and a redesign/rewrite of 1000's of lines of code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Have there been documentation improvements? For instance [http://doc.rust- lang.org/nightly/std/str/](http://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/str/) is still quite obscure: it talks about the traits returned by certain methods, but there isn't an obvious way to get to the documentation for those methods, if you'd like to know how .lines() is different from .lines_any(), for example. Compare with [https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str](https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str) where all the methods are listed, along with what they do.

<comment><USER14> You probably want this page for str:

[http://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/primitive.str.html](http://doc.rust- lang.org/nightly/std/primitive.str.html)

It's unfortunate that most of the links navigate you to the less useful doc.

<comment><USER15> I'm getting bizarre rendering errors in chrome for whatever character prefixes "self" in all those (I assume &?)

<comment><USER2> People were hitting that a few months ago, is this the first time that you've visited the docs in a while? In their case it was due to a problem with the page's font file itself, and it may be that your browser still has that version of the font cached. Maybe try a force-refresh?

<comment><USER15> Hmmm. Force refresh did nothing. It's possible I have Source Code Pro like the other commenter suggests. Dunno

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm glad to see Rust's progress. I'm still very interested in Rust, and incrementally learning the language. I do appreciate the documentation, IMO the developers have done a tremendous job in that respect.

One question though. When is Cargo going to be available on FreeBSD (and other BSD's)? I think these platforms are significant in the server space where Rust would be highly relevant. Having Rust usable there would likely augment uptake of the language.

<comment><USER17> I've heard progress on this front recently (it's mostly about the automation infrastructure), and I might expect official nightlies of both rustc and cargo for FreeBSD by the end of summer.

Don't hold me to that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What exactly does MSVC support entail? For example, will one be able to debug Rust programs with WinDbg or the Visual Studio debugger? IIUC, that would require LLVM to output PDB files.

<comment><USER19> In addition to not interacting with the GNU toolchain at all (through MinGW), MSVC support will indeed enable native Windows debug info (as you mentioned) so native tools can be used to debug Rust code. Note that this isn't 100% implemented yet, but it's coming soon! Additionally you'll get interoperation with MSVC-compiled libraries. Libraries compiled with MinGW don't interoperate well with MSVC (and vice versa), so this enables Rust code to link against an MSVC-compiled native library.

<comment><USER20> Will MinGW still be supported, or will that be dropped?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no plan to drop it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Impressed daily by the amount of stuff being done to advance Rust as an incredibly useful language.

</comment><comment><USER22> OOh and there's a rust podcast out as well. You can find it in the new section of hacker news.

<comment><USER23> Just providing the direct link [http://rustyrad.io/](http://rustyrad.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So I assume 1.x.x won't break features from 1.0? Is Rust using proper semantic versioning?

<comment><USER25> Rust core team has taken the approach of breakage without major version increments being acceptable as long as they deem the breakage "minor" (based on crates.io and companies they have close relationships to).

<comment><USER2> Qualifying with "close relationships to" is misleading, as _every_ company using Rust is welcome to sign up to receive new versions of the compiler to run against their codebases to test for regressions. See the email address in my profile if you'd like to add your company to our list!

<comment><USER25> OK -- replace "close relationships to" to "have emailed kibwen at his gmail address to get on a list".

If I could go back and edit I would -- but it has been too long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Given Steve Klabnik's recent actions to suppress people who hold political opinions he does not like, I have a considerable amount of trepidation knowing he has a leadership position in the community sub-team.

<comment><USER2> Would you like to cite a source?

<comment><USER26> [https://gist.github.com/steveklabnik/7cd3267a631c4847c34d](https://gist.github.com/steveklabnik/7cd3267a631c4847c34d)

amongst more

It is especially troubling to have a community leader who equates speech with violence, even "hate" speech, which in that gist is clearly demonstrated to be completely subjective.

<comment><USER27> That is troubling, but I don't see how that equates to him "suppressing" anyone, if all he's done is voice his own opinions about those people. I haven't really followed the story, but was Steve part of the group that demanded Curtis be removed from StrageLoop?

<comment><USER28> Worse even.

[https://archive.is/BtDaA](https://archive.is/BtDaA)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't going to respond to this thread at all, but since you went to the trouble of using 100% of your comments on this account to post in this thread, and you're spreading this shenanigans, I'll copy what I said over at Lobste.rs:

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

[This link] takes a thing I said on Twitter and uses it to say something I don't mean.

My twitter reply re: violence is based on the tweet it's replying to: general activity by groups who call themselves 'antifa'. I thought my parent was making a false equivalence, but rather than arguing with them about this false equivalence, I decided to just say 'cool' and bow out, hence my response. I believe "antifa are just as violent as the fascists" is wrong on multiple levels, but I don't really care to get into it here, to be honest.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>--

... and I still don't. That's all I'll be saying here about this.

<comment><USER29> Dude, you explicitly said you're "100% okay with [violence] personally"

You then said, "the only things fascists respond to is violence. Ignoring them or letting them attack you doesn't help."

You then linked to a Woody Allen video where he confidentially states a Nazi march in NYC should be attacked with "bricks and bats" rather than taking a civilized approach against them.

You explicitly endorsed violence against political groups you dislike several times, don't try to pretend like you didn't now..

<comment><USER30> I'd be suspcious of anyone who wasn't ok with violence against Nazis...

<comment><USER28> Of course "Nazi" being anyone who doesn't go along with your bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> While I find Rust interesting, how exactly will Rust deal with a 900lb gorilla that's about to get released from a cage?

Opensource Swift is only few months away and it already has a much bigger user base and is backed by the biggest company in tech. Rust & Swift share many common traits and kinda look alike as well.

Why should anyone pick Rust over Swift when Swift will be able to do everything Rust can do and is also positioned as a systems programming language? And Swift will also be a full-stack programming language and you will be able to program apps and backends with it.

I feel like Rust is about to get killed. And killed quickly.

<comment><USER2> Swift is an applications programming language where the runtime is non- optional (at least AFAICT) and memory is managed dynamically. It will be competing with .Net and Java, not with C and C++ (though, as ever, there are surely plenty of C++ projects that don't actually need C++'s level of control and could benefit from a rewrite in Swift).

Swift isn't going to penetrate to the bottom of the stack with pervasive reference counting. You'd either have to start managing memory manually (as per C) or implement a borrow checker (as per Rust), and even then your entire ecosystem is still going to use reference counting pervasively due to the language's defaults. One of the benefits of Rust defaulting to linear types and borrowed references is that it creates an entire package ecosystem where dynamic memory management is the exception, not the rule.

For the record, I think Swift is super fantastic as a language and I'm thrilled that it's going open-source. I think the two languages will work swimmingly together. :)

<comment><USER31> >Swift is an applications programming language where the runtime is non- optional (at least AFAICT) and memory is managed dynamically.

No, it's optional if you don't need to interact with Obj-C frameworks (ie. Cocoa). And memory is not managed dynamically. Swift uses ARC.

Like I said, I just don't see Rust sticking around for long. Swift will suck all the developers out of it since you'll be able to actually get a job programming in Swift.

<comment><USER2> We'll need to see how useful Swift is without Cocoa (still waiting for details on what's actually being open-sourced), but GCD is a runtime component as well. And as Manish has said, ARC is dynamic memory management, just like shared_ptr in C++ and Rc in Rust, though pervasive and implicit. If you'd like to convince me that Swift is suitable as a systems programming language, then you'll first have to show me an example of Swift code that can be compiled into a standalone binary that can be called from C, and then describe how many features of the language and standard library this disables. After that you can demonstrate how to run Swift code on a memory-constrained platform that doesn't allow dynamic memory allocation whatsoever.

If anything, Rust is the only modern language that's _not_ threatened by Swift, by virtue of existing at a level of the stack that's so low as to be out of Swift's reach. I agree that Swift is going to be huge, but you're mistaken as to who its competitors are. :P

<comment><USER32> C++14 _isn 't_ a modern language? Aw, you killed a dream there :P</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google+ opens to teens, launches youth safety features - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871/posts/hvXAqqHTkZe

<comment><USER3> Finally. Google+ without teenagers made it very weak against other social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Teenagers love social networks, they are their most avid users, Google+ should have accepted teenagers much sooner.

</comment><comment><USER4> So now instead of college kids complaining about an influx of teenagers (Facebook), we can have technology enthusiasts complaining about an influx of teenagers! The "what's hot" section has less of a tech bias than it used to already, but I wonder what it will look like in a month.

<comment><USER5> The what's hot section is just as lazy and useless as Twitter trending topics. I almost never find globally hot topics hot. Twitter occasionally has some semi-relevant content there, but Google+ hot topics are dominated by funny pictures and gifs. I can only see this problem growing further as a result of these changes.

<comment><USER6> This seems like a problem that is just asking to be solved. I've thought of this before: Just like you can use Location to affect what topics are hot for you, if they could determine a way to select area of interest to filter them it might prove useful once again.

I'm sure it isn't a trivial thing to solve; but not impossible.

<comment><USER7> Google may already have determined your interests via their Ad profiling. They got me pretty spot-on, you can see what they've pinned you down as liking at <http://www.google.com/ads/preferences>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, because teens would never lie about their age to get around stupid restrictions.

<comment><USER9> It's a legal wording of an implicit social contract. When Google says, "you can't use our service if you are under 18", they mean, "you can't blame us for showing your kid porn".

It's the same reason illegal drugs are illegal. When you overdose, the government doesn't have to spend any money investigating why you got contaminated drugs.

<comment><USER10> Actually, that's not the case at all.

Illegal drugs are huge money makers for lots of people, countries and organizations (both selling them AND fighting against them).

Although, the initial historical reason they got illegal in the first places is because of some moral-style campaigns and a lot of ill-informed medical opinions (along with a few correct ones).

<comment><USER11> Please ignore drug related thread de-railings. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If Google wants Google+ to actually become a serious contender, they need to make it friendly for mobile.

1\. Make it compatible with iPad. I generally don't even try to follow links to Google+ when I'm on my iPad, as if the page has anything more than a handful of comments, it will almost surely run the browser out of memory and cause it to exit.

2\. Make their mobile app understand Google+ URLs. I wanted to read a Google+ link that was submitted to HN yesterday, so I actually clicked it in the hope it hadn't gotten too big. It had. After pointlessly trying four times, I copied the link, and then I went and downloaded their Google+ app, opened it...and discovered it had no way that I could find to give it a link to a Google+ page and have it display it!

<comment><USER13> Re: point #2, IIRC on iOS devices this isn't possible. I believe that Apple allows third parties to register pseudo-protocols ("myapp://<content-id>"), but doesn't allow apps to receive links for certain patterns of HTTP URLs.

<comment><USER12> I was a bit unclear. I wasn't complaining that the Google+ app could not somehow intercept my attempt to open a Google+ URL.

My complaint is that I had copied the URL, and wanted to paste it into the Google+ app, and have it display the content. That is something under the control of the app.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, but any requirement of the form "copy X and paste it into Y" cannot reasonably be considered as a "required to be a serious contender" feature for a mobile OS. Only the most serious of users have any clue how to do editing at the level of clipboard functionality.

And regardless: can you do that with Facebook app? I don't see how with the Android app in front of me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More importantly, this finally means that Google+'s Big Push into Japan - their collaboration with J-pop megagroup AKB48 - can be completed, as before most of the members were too young for their own accounts (man, giving over 100 girls Nexus Ss can't be that cheap...)

<https://plus.google.com/117147321771860727748>

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder what this could mean for using Google+ in the classroom – perhaps teachers could post links in a circle exclusively for the students in their class, and allow students to comment and discuss those links. Also, on a hangout, students could more easily collaborate on group projects, especially if they use Google Docs.

</comment><comment><USER16> Most teens don't care about privacy, what they want is to be wherever all of their friends are (i.e. Facebook.) G+ probably isn't that place yet, but maybe one day...

</comment><comment><USER17> They are so totally afraid of Facebook-World taking over the Internet. It is as if nothing else exist on the Internet besides Google and Facebook. What a terrible days these are to be on the net.

<comment><USER18> But you do understand that this fear is legitimate? Facebook is the only company that currently can challenge Google in ad serving and knows EVERYTHING about it's users ? There is nothing weird in fact that google wants to fight back.

<comment><USER17> Well, they have all the rights to fight-back, but is that good for the users?

Between Google, Facebook and Apple, our lives on the Internet is pretty much owned by these corporations, and then you have government getting uncomfortable.

<comment><USER18> I believe it is - Seeing that I completly ditched facebook for g+, it was with benefit for me. I don't know anything about you, but I have all my android phone contacts backed up in separate file, I use gmail, but I'm not really mail dependant - I would run my own mailbox if the need would arise. Except search I don't really think I would notice if Google or Facebook or any other Internet giant disappear tommorow(ok, i know long term effects - but short term my life would go on)- social sites are just a nice addition, but I would do perfectly fine without them - just as I did before they appeared ;-) But if you are concerned about your life being owned by corporation think about improving your ways so you don't have to worry about issues like this. I would hate to live in a world and use internet where one company has monopoly to everything, best way to archive that is just not getting yourself too dependant on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The September that never ended.

</comment><comment><USER19> Google now encouraging teens to share personal information online - <USER2> officially becomes asymptotic to the creepy line.

<comment><USER20> Teens are humans. Iff encouraging humans to share personal information online was creepy before, it's creepy now. All this changes is that they're not unfairly discriminating.

Well, they're still unfairly discriminating against those under 13, but congress is forcing their hand on that one.</comment></comment>


Arduino-based curtain automation - <AUTHOR> http://www.jwz.org/curtain/

<comment><USER2> "Then at some some point while trying to debug it, John accidentally touched the multimeter's leads to something he shouldn't have, and suddenly my keyboard didn't work any more."

I'd really like to know what the hell they did.</comment>


Morale at Twitter Plummets as Jack Dorsey Warms to a Sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/10/morale-at-twitter-plummets-as-jack-dorsey-warms-to-a-sale <comment><AUTHOR> Uncertainty about an acquisition is common, but employees simply not showing up to work is surprising. Is the environment that toxic?

Ending with Dorsey's recent all-hands email[1] seems rather empty in context, as it makes no mention of the acquisition.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12683633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12683633)</comment>