The Haskell community is being split [New haskell-lang.org] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/haskell-lang/haskell-lang/blob/master/static/markdown/announcements.md <comment><AUTHOR> I don't know much about this drama, but here's my perception from the outside.

There has been a long-standing fight between the Haskell.org committee and the developers of Stack, regarding what should be the "default" option to install Haskell to be displayed on the homepage. Many Haskellers think Stack is a strictly better tool, but the Haskell.org committee thinks that the Haskell Platform is still worth mentioning on the homepage. The Stack team could not convince the committee for months.

In the end, the Stack team decided to create a new Haskell community, haskell- lang.org. One of the Stack developers who had contributed to the original haskell.org even said "I don't approve of the current haskell.org, nor your use of my design".[1] It seems that they are trying to replace the Haskell community in the same way how Stack replaced Cabal. This also includes a GitHub organization, an IRC channel, and even a subreddit (/r/haskell_lang).

[1] [https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell- community/2016-Ap...](https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell- community/2016-April/000100.html)

<comment><USER2> _" In the end, the Stack team decided to create a new Haskell community, haskell-lang.org."_

Sounds like they're creating a new _web site_. Whether that leads to the creation of a viable new community depends on how many Haskell users can be convinced to embrace the new web site.

<comment><USER3> Yeah this is something that has divided the Haskell community. I am still learning Haskell and not sure which tool to use.

Sort of like C++ there are different tools to use for it as well. It comes down to having a standard both tools use to make sure that code compiles the same on both of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> haskell-lang.org is redirecting to haskell.org</comment>


World's Greatest Extra - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdEBu7ODVk8 <comment><USER2> First this seemed unreal, then probable.... and then I was able to find him... Jesse Heiman

<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1035503/></comment>


Idaho Teachers Fight a Reliance on Computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/technology/idaho-teachers-fight-a-reliance-on-computers.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> I went to public school in Coeur d'Alene and I currently live in Post Falls. I can say that we need more tech in the classroom. There is not enough of a local push for moving things forward, people are mystified by computers and very few over the age of 35 here know anything more than using it for the web or checking emails, things are better than they were but it is even hard to find a mechanic that doesn't say they "hate these new computerized cars" (even though it is old tech by my standards).

The elementary schools here when I went to school in my opinion were moderate. I have more memories of teachers trying to correct my poor handwriting or chastising me for reading ahead of the rest of the class in my books than I do of anyone actually trying to figure out what I was interested in. By middle school my standardized test scores (Iowa tests) put me in the 95-99th percentile in the nation (I took the SAT's in the 7th grade because of it)...by my junior year in high school the vice principal said to me "...why don't you just drop out? You don't want to be here and we don't want you here" That principal was Steve Casey...winner of many awards for education in the area. That is just an example of the system up here.

I approve of the pay by performance idea for teachers and I think tech should be funded before athletics since that is what truly will push innovation and bring us out of the recession that we are in.</comment>


Archive.today and archive.is redirecting to GitHub for Brave users - <AUTHOR> archive.today and archive.is redirecting to Github for Brave users
Anyone know why?
Redirect is to:
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/10219
"[Desktop] Tranferring domain between accounts does not work #10219" <comment><USER2> Looks like a new way to draw attention to a bug report instead of trying to go viral on Twitter, Reddit or HN to reach developers.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's the website that also returns wrong responses to the cloudfare DNS 184.108.40.206

You should stop using Brave and archive.is IMHO</comment>


The Long, Remarkable History of the GIF - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the-gif-is-dead-long-live-the-gif/ <comment><USER3> It's honestly something I've become quite bitter about. I find the resurgence of the gif has significantly reduced my enjoyment of browsing websites like reddit. Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator.

When it's appropriate I have no problem with a video. But if posting a video it should really be in its original form. Uploading to Youtube or even just using a <video> tag lets the viewer decide if they want to listen to audio, and what resolution to watch in. It's pretty rare that I'd choose to watch in no sound and at the lowest resolution possible. Not to mention the absurd amount of data gifs download.

The recent trend of converting videos into gifs _back_ into videos (websites like gfycat) make even less sense. All you're doing is damaging the quality of the video. To what end?

Even articles that are posted are now scattered with gifs. Why? I guess because it's trendy. But it makes it incredibly difficult to focus on the text. The article above is a good (and likely self-aware) example, but this one from Atom also stuck out for me.

[http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block- decorations...](http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block- decorations.html)

Terribly nauseating.

So that's my rant. Frankly I'd welcome a browser extension to block animated gifs online and hide reddit posts than only link to them.

<comment><USER4> To me, a gif (at its best) is effectively a _quote from_ a video—a short sample of a film or TV show that can be embedded into an article as an example to be discussed, serving the same purpose that a blockquote serves.

Ideally, such things should—rather than being copied and cut into shape—be _transcluded_ , effectively fancy links to an original that include time- slicing metadata. But making transclusion an easy or default behavior has been a losing battle for text since the web was created; I don't expect changing the medium being embedded will change how people think about things.

<comment><USER5> Ted Nelson would be so proud.

The atomicity of the internet - sealed documents at URLs - is really regrettable. A much more powerful design (although admittedly more complicated) would have been a "turtles all the way down", IPFS-style approach where any asset could be transcluded or linked _into_. But I don't think we'll ever see it.

<comment><USER6> Mediawiki (the thing behind Wikipedia) actually lets you transclude whole pages and it's also the way its templates work. It's pretty cool because you can also have options to not include certain info inside <noinclude> tags and some templates such as for episode lists even show less information when transcluding. Oh and you can also transclude specific sections IIRC.

By linked into, are you saying by URL? I notice that archive.is actually adds its own links to the side like a ruler. I think the status quo of linking only to headers is okay, but maybe you're envisioning something like linking to specific words in sentences. That would be great for quoting but the HTML would probably look/load horribly. Maybe there could be a system that let you link to offsets so it wouldn't need actual anchors in the source, but those could break with a simple addition of a word at the beginning. It's an interesting problem for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure everyone is missing the point here.

GIF isn't about optimization. It isn't about the best technology. It isn't about anything that we care about as engineers.

It's about what is easy for users to create.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

GIF is easy.

It doesn't matter if it sucks. It doesn't matter if it's not optimal. It's easy.

<comment><USER8> And there's my problem with how people kill GIF. It's never easy.

I right click on a Twitter 'GIF', I can't save it. I go to developer tools, they did a bunch of JavaScript fuckery just so I couldn't save it. Okay, I find a third party tool and save it anyway as a .mp4 file. Stupid.

I right click on an Imgur link, it saves a webpage. Okay, replace .gifv with .webm - oh, it redirects me to gifv. Last time I had to save something from Imgur, I had to use curl of all things to do it. It's ridiculous.

GIF is simple. You upload the file as an image, something everybody mastered doing, and it will play, no questions asked. Videos are hard. Everybody wants to re-encode them in different formats, everybody has to include a fancy player in an iframe. You have to check for browsers since you can't solely use mp4 because of patent whatever, and can't solely use webm because Apple hates Google that much.

GIF, the file format, is bad. 256 colors, file size, etc. But everything people are trying to replace it with is even worse.

<comment><USER9> Your examples are poor.

Twitter is a massive pile of JavaScript garbage - it's just as difficult to download a still image off it (I have a bookmarklet for the task).

On imgur I can just right-click on an animation and select "Download Video..." and I get the mp4. Just as simple as images.

<comment><USER10> Could you share the Twitter bookmarklet with us please? It sounds very useful.

<comment><USER9> It's very simple:

       javascript:location.href=$('.media-image')%5B0%5D.src

This navigates to the picture currently in the lightbox (so you might have to click on it in the tweet to zoom it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the article Battilana is quoted as saying: "Even browsers today don't have a good alternative to GIF unless you want a very sophisticated and still patent-covered video like MPEG-2 or MPEG-4."

But we have WebM, works on Chrome, Firefox, Opera and on IE with components [https://www.webmproject.org/ie/](https://www.webmproject.org/ie/) \- is that not good enough?

No mention of the Animated extention to PNG, which Firefox, Safari and Opera do support. Chrome has an add-on for it but I don't know about IE. You wonder if the image is smaller when it's a silent video or when it's a APNG, probably it's the same with animated GIF, the movie format is more efficient then the animated image format.

Perhaps someone can make a proxy plugin that converts all animated gifs on the fly to webm and all gifs to png. You never have to see these GIFs again, another SaaS subscription model

<comment><USER12> One of animated gif's strengths are the promise of being silent. When users see GIF, they have the promise of a bite size animation, that loops and is silent. It is very hard to teach users a new name for that.

webm doesn't promise to be silent, which is why we are seeing this gifv container format, which does promise to be silent.

You need out-of-box support by Safari and Chrome to cover enough users. Preferably IE in the mix. This is why all the big gif sites use both gif and gifv.

<comment><USER13> _> When users see GIF, they have the promise of a bite size animation_

This isn't always true. Many, _many_ GIFs I see around now are longer, if not full length clips and/or at obscenely un-optimized resolutions/sizes. Due to the ease of video to GIF conversion tools like Imgur, etc users have no reason not to clip longer and larger potions of videos for GIF conversion.

 _> webm doesn't promise to be silent_

This isn't really such a problem with a change of a browser preference or use an addon. Part of this is also the responsibility of the site to auto mute if it offers embedding for that purpose.

At some point though there needs to be more user awareness and push for the better alternatives all around so the experience doesn't devolve further into posting 10-100MB GIFs of video clips (I see this on a daily basis) just because Imgur or GfyCat spat it out and their posting platform only encourages/supports raw GIFs. There also needs to be more hosts that allow direct video clip uploads to support this.

Edit: brevity.

<comment><USER12> > Many, many GIFs I see around now are longer, if not full length clips and/or > at obscenely un-optimized resolutions/sizes

Which is why I wrote that the length promise can be broken.

> This isn't really such a problem with a change of a browser preference or > use an Haddon.

Yes, it is such a problem. If you promise the user that the clip is silent, you also promise the user that it can be consumed in silence. Yes you can click a youtube link while keeping your computer on silence, but guess what, chances are the video is made for consumption with audio.

> and their posting platform only encourages/supports raw GIFs.

All the gif purveyors support webm. It is typically called gifv, because users recognise the gif word and believe all the promises I mentioned. But there isn't an alternative as ubiquitous as animated GIF.

<comment><USER13> _> Which is why I wrote that the length promise can be broken._

I didn't see this in your comment but was responding to the expectation that GIFs are 'bite size'. I would honestly love for them to be that but it's regularly not the case.

 _> Yes, it is such a problem. If you promise the user that the clip is silent, you also promise the user that it can be consumed in silence. Yes you can click a youtube link while keeping your computer on silence, but guess what, chances are the video is made for consumption with audio._

It's still the responsibility of the user/site as video clips have different purposes. If the purpose of the embedding is a 'clip' rather than video the site can mute it (or a pseudo-container format like GIFV, like you mentioned). Some hosts disable audio encoding, others mute them by default (eg: Vine), but I still don't believe that GIFs being the incredibly poorly optimized, 256 color limited bloated format it is should 'win' merely because videos can have sound. There needs to be the concept of a generic 'clip' upload/post to differentiate from a regular video upload, GIFV is one such solution. Users expect Youtube videos to have audio, they mightn't for a short clip, which is why it would be great to see sites adapt and continue to be more conscious of this.

 _> All the gif purveyors support webm. It is typically called gifv, because users recognise the gif word and believe all the promises I mentioned. But there isn't an alternative as ubiquitous as animated GIF._

By posting platform I mean every site/app a user will post on that either encourages or only supports the use of GIFs over video clips. Yes Imgur and Gfycat will auto encode GIFs to VPx/h.264 however only GfyCat supports direct video uploads, on Imgur you can't upload a video clip directly. With only GIF uploads supported by most hosts it fuels the cycle of users, clip creators, sites (blogs, forums, etc), and even browser compatibility sticking to GIFs as the primary clip format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great read, but the initial description of the inefficiencies in gif are off. They touch on it a bit at the end but make it vague so I'll explain it here (because I love gif because it's a hillarious mess).

Gif is actually a mosaic format. It defines a canvas on which you can render a series of images. By adding a (per image) delay between images, you can make an animation. All this data comes as a stream of blocks. Most are images, but some are extensions. The "NETSCAPE 2.0" extension is what makes gifs loop.

Nothing at all says an image needs to fill the whole canvas, and the format for rendering a new image specifies what should happen to the existing pixels. It also can specify a colour to be interpretted as transparent. Gif is also a palletized format, and you can actually abuse this to get more than 256 colours -- each subimage can have its own palette.

By picking "leave all the pixels there" as the transition format, you can do non-iframes by overlaying only pixels that have changed. You can also apply many small deltas "at once" with 0-second delays to optimize this further (think: only changing the corners of the image). You can then of course "stick" pixels to a single color of they don't change by much to avoid re- encoding them.

The end result of all these tricks is a pretty dramatic compression as one would expect from a "real" video format. It's not _great_ but it's a lot better than the naive encoding described at the start of the article.

If you find a real gif that's "live action" and decode the individual frames, you will very likely see all these optimizations in action!

Note however that much of this is underspecified! The only reason your animated gifs work is because everyone vaguely agrees on an interpretation of certain things which are honestly quite ambiguous. Firefox's testsuite has a pile of ambiguous gifs which will render messed up in different image viewer applications!

Edit: this one is super cool to watch in delta-only mode (don't have that version on hand anymore): [https://github.com/Gankro/gif- rs/blob/master/data/cat-jump.g...](https://github.com/Gankro/gif- rs/blob/master/data/cat-jump.gif)

<comment><USER15> Do you have a recommendation for an encoder that will make sure to apply all of these optimizations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is web browsers developers fault: Chrome developers actively resisting APNG support [1], while Firefox developers actively resisting WebP support for years [2] and [3].

[1] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1171](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1171)

[2] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600919](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600919)

[3] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=856375)

<comment><USER17> The resistance is all but disappeared. No doubt we'll see APNG is Chrome, and WebP in Firefox within a year or so.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but looks like it's too late - WebM and MP4 taking over by now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That was a nice lengthy read. While the GIF format itself is a bit outdated, I hope the artform of excerpting video/animation into a silent, short-loop never goes out of style.

Is it impossible to turn back GIF adoption? What if someone makes the equivalent of Steve Jobs's declaration against Flash? To me, Flash was far more vital to the very operation of web services. Then again, processing GIFs doesn't require near the same complexity or security risks as Flash did.

<comment><USER12> I think the gifv container format will mostly kill animated gifs in a few years. It promises the silent, looped animations, maintains name recognition, but has good compression.

<comment><USER19> the conversation with the imgur ceo was my favorite part of this piece. for those interested:

> GIFV is not actually a distinct file format, but it is an MP4 or WebM video > that is presented via a HTML 5 video element or an Adobe Flash element with > options set so as to make it work similarly to an animated GIF (i.e. endless > loop with no video controls visible

> > [http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/GIFV](http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/GIFV)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Actually animated PNGs exist: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Animated...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Animated_PNG_example_bouncing_beach_ball.png) (though it maybe works only in firefox, idk)

<comment><USER21> APNGs were popular in video slot machines in the late 2000s. I found it intriguing that it was the technology of choice because it seemed so obscure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The author is wrong about gifs encoding full frames. Properly encoded gifs only store the pixels that change in each frame. His own example with the dog shows this [http://i.imgur.com/wISu3An.png](http://i.imgur.com/wISu3An.png)

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.gif](https://news.ycombinator.com/y18.gif)

<comment><USER24> What is the point of that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The limitations of a medium drive creativity, and there is an expectation when publishing a video of a certain quality. Not so with gifs, the format lowers the bar for people to be creative overcoming many expectations of quality.

</comment><comment><USER26> While this article excells on the technical aspects of the GIF format, it misses out on the significance of the GIF art renaissance of ca 2011 to 2014, which was most likely initiated by tumblr's arbitrary file size limits.

Here is a primer on that:

[https://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-brief-history-of- animate...](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-brief-history-of-animated-gif- art-part-three-88928)

<comment><USER17> The article is completely wrong about technical aspects of animated GIFs:

> Unlike GIFs, video files don't actually contain every frame of animation you > see

> As a GIF, it takes up more than 60 MB because every single frame needs to be > stored as a complete image.

This is ridiculous. See [http://www.drdobbs.com/optimizing-gif- animations/184412988](http://www.drdobbs.com/optimizing-gif- animations/184412988)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can someone point me to how I show full quality animations on an iOS device? I've seen some canvas style spritr sheet solutions but those feel bulky for when I just want a looping animation.

WebM has been awesome for animations on desktop but they don't work properly on iOS: won't animate inline.

<comment><USER28> As of iOS 10 autoplay and playsinline on a video element will do what you want as long as the video has no audio track or is muted. No webm of course

<comment><USER27> Ooh good to know. Thank you. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I know we are supposed to be commenting on the article, but why is this headline "* is dead, long live *" so overused[1] on hackernews. It is so tiring.

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22is%20dead%20Long%20live%22&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22is%20dead%20Long%20live%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER30> Yep--new title is far superior. Actually made me read the article, whereas the old one put me off

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's painful to read the article with fonts/colors/videos came out everywhere. Is there a better and practical format on the way to replace gif since it's dead?

I use gif once a while and feel it does its job pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER32> Never liked gifs.

In particular those "joke"/shock gifs that pretend to be a still image.

One of the first things i go looking for in a new browser install is some way to stop gifs from animating.

</comment><comment><USER33> I had an incredibly hard time concentrating on the article with all the GIF's (or videos, I suppose) looping on the page. Down with the GIF!

</comment><comment><USER34> Great article. Gets the tone and level of detail exactly right for talking about something like this to a wide audience.

</comment><comment><USER35> I can google image search gifs, but can't google image search webms.

</comment><comment><USER36> GIF is an excellent example of how constraints facilitate creativity.

</comment><comment><USER37> To me, GIF = slow loading animation.

</comment><comment><USER38> Animation!

</comment><comment><USER39> Please somebody provide a TLDR.

The content is too long and the title too click-baity for me to invest time in reading without what I'm getting myself into.

<comment> ju-st There's an app for that! [http://smmry.com/http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/...](http://smmry.com/http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the- gif-is-dead-long-live-the-gif/)

<comment><USER40> Sadly that worked pretty poorly. While Giphy was mentioned it was more of a tangent - relating to the overall lifetime of the gif format, its pros and cons.

The article is a lengthy article about the history of the .gif format - <USER2> recent trend of converting it to a video or video-like format - and this being centered around the ability to _share_ the .gif itself.

This is due to many sites (Twitter, Facebook) making it difficult to save a .gif to share later. You need to share the Twitter or FB link instead (which is what they want...). Giphy was mentioned as a way to share .gifs easily, but it has its own limitations (eg: no pornography).

It was something that was thought of as a "gimmick" but turned out to be popular. Mostly due to browsers not having good inline video support outside of Flash. I also, in large, blame tooling and discoverability of that tooling for easily creating webm, mp4, or other video formated. For example - if I want to record 8 seconds of a video to turn into a .gif, I can do so easily with an online tool nowadays! If I want that same 8 seconds as a .webm, I now need to find a way to download the source file, trim it down to the 8 seconds I want, save it as an .mp4, then use my .mp4 to .webm converting software to finally have the .webm I wanted. Most people will opt for the shorter/easier .gif conversion.

<comment><USER41> There actually are online webm converters, just like there are for gif.

And if you decide to do it yourself, I don't understand why you'd need to go through an mp4 intermediate. With ffmpeg you can trim and encode your clip to webm with a single command and a couple switches. Or if you want an easy GUI tool, there's always WebM for Gits ([https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter](https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter) )

<comment><USER40> That's the actual tool I use! Proper link is now found here, by the way: [https://gitgud.io/nixx/WebMConverter](https://gitgud.io/nixx/WebMConverter)

 _> And if you decide to do it yourself, I don't understand why you'd need to go through an mp4 intermediate._

Screen recording. Although I use a tool that simply records as a .webm ( [https://github.com/thetarkus/WebMCam](https://github.com/thetarkus/WebMCam) ) Most people aren't going to be installing random Github projects to meet their needs. I doubt many people even know what Github is outside of the tech niche. :P So they record with some other desktop recorder that outputs as a .gif or .mp4/.m4a and then would need to convert from there.

Also Imgur's .gifv wrapper seems to be more widely known than .webm. Which is unfortunate but is the case due to Imgur's popularity.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Los Angeles Is Having a Loud Economic Boom - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloombergquint.com/view/los-angeles-economic-boom-outpaces-u-s-cities <comment><USER2> Now if they only could add more housing to the market ! And remove more housing regulations! Build build ! I don't want LA to end up like SF!</comment>


Python Module of the Week - <AUTHOR> http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/index.html

<comment><USER2> Is there anything new to the site? Or why is it up here?

</comment><comment><USER3> If you'd prefer the material in print, Doug has written The Python Standard Library by Example.

<http://www.doughellmann.com/books/byexample/>

</comment><comment><USER4> In slightly similar news, the second issue of Golang-Weekly is out:

[https://groups.google.com/d/topic/golang- weekly/uDITHQVeKdY/...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/golang- weekly/uDITHQVeKdY/discussion)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there something similar for Ruby gems?

</comment><comment><USER6> ironically, the last time this site was updated was about 2 months ago....</comment>


Results of the 2016 Nim Community Survey - <AUTHOR> http://nim-lang.org/news/2016_09_03_nim_community_survey_results.html?ref=hn <comment><USER2> The analysis notes that full-time users of Nim are tend to be working on very large projects. Any chance you were able to get examples of such projects? Even if they're closed source it would be interesting to know who is using Nim for serious business and in what specific ways.</comment>


Ask HN: How tolerable is infrastructure to skilled worker availability? - <AUTHOR> Looking at reports this morning about delivery drivers showing up to work sick, I started to wonder how much tolerance various parts of our infrastructure have to fluctuations in the worker pool.<p>If we constrain the question to only consider the maintenance aspect of power plants, water systems, undersea cables, satellite control, etc... what level of tolerance is there to worker shortages? It seems unlikely that any one of these would have any sort of equivalent to a operational manual that a layman could use. <comment><USER2> Not that complicated to keep things running. Lots of stuff is redundant, designed to be idiot proof and automated.

But more importantly, if you look at the way things are breaking down in different countries, the failures aren't happening all at once across every province/district/county simultaneously. So there is always going to be some crew from the neighboring town or city you can pull in.

When things breakdown over a large region at once eg 2003 Northeast blackout then expect a delay but even then you can see Hospitals and critical services kept running.</comment>


Reddit Redesign: A Year Later - <AUTHOR> https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com <comment><USER2> When they say one year later, that's how long it took the new bloated design to load, right?

</comment><comment><USER3> 12% of users are going out of their way to go to the old.reddit.com domain.

I myself use a chrome extension to take care of switching but I do wonder what this means giving how many millions of users prefer the old site design.

<comment><USER4> Presumably it's much higher than 12% for regular users too, imagine if the didn't keep old.reddit.com and went all in like digg?

Can we stop pretending 'UX experts' know more about user interface design than programmers now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I go out of my way to avoid the new UI.

I'm a long term user.

The UI is worse than MySpace purple green blink tag style because the number of clicks and scrolls to view comment on mobile web New Reddit is unnecessarily high.

<comment><USER6> Same here - I hate how inefficient the UI is in terms of space . Infinite scroll is something that I'd not even wish on my worst enemy - click a link and come back and now you've got to wade through pages again!

Unrelated - same goes for GIthub explore page :(.</comment></comment>


Erik Meijer's suggestions for further reading in functional programming - <AUTHOR> http://kanak.kshetri.com/camping/?p=94

<comment><USER2> I expected Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki to be on this list. I would recommend it but more importantly I've seen many people who know a lot more about functional programming recommend it. It is probably a bit more useful for the average programmer than many of the books listed here.

<comment><USER3> I read Okasaki's PhD thesis by the same name, which he expanded into the book. Very well written, concise, full of useful theoretical information. The book expands into some data structures not covered in the thesis because the treatment would not have been original.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great list if you want to do a deep dive into the area of FP. If you just want to learn some Haskell, and also want to use a book, I recommend a combination of two.

Check out Real World Haskell in print of free on the web. It deals with the practicalities of getting started and has lots of examples to show you how to write idiomatic Haskell and tackles realistic examples.

Hutton's book (recommended by Meijer) is also great. #1 it's thin. #2, it is cleverly organized and teaches you some deep concepts without a big fuss. By the time you hear about monads they will seem like an obvious convenience, nothing scary.

The two books complement each other well.

<comment><USER5> Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (<http://learnyouahaskell.com/>) is another good resource for learning the language. It's a bit lighter weight than Real World Haskell, and doesn't have the breadth of practical examples, but I think it makes up for that by being more consistently interesting. I went through LYAH first and then Real World Haskell, and although the latter was very informative and useful, I found it to be painfully dull in certain parts (particularly the chapters that discuss the building of a JSON parser).

<comment><USER6> I agree on Real World Haskell. I couldn't put my finger on anything that was 'wrong' or 'bad' about the book, but just got bored with it and stopped reading halfway through.

<comment><USER7> The Barcode Recognition in Chapter 12 was fairly interesting. Anyone have some good beginning machine vision resources, Haskell or otherwise?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always loved Learn you a Haskell for Greater good.

<http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters>

The blog has been slowly been updated for some time now. I especially like it's treatment of zippers, a concept that took me longer to learn than I'd like to admit:(

</comment><comment><USER9> For a more gentle start for those less familiar with functional programming (like myself) I can recommend "Higher Order Perl" by Mark Jason Dominus (also available for free online). The book discusses functional programming techniques in Perl. It has some really _practical_ examples, which make some of the advantages of functional programming very clear. I also find it nicely explains a lot of functional programming concepts, which helps when reading those Haskell texts.</comment>


Demand Accountability of Prosecutorial Abuse in Case of Aaron Swartz - <AUTHOR> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/16-5 please sign the two petitions in this article in support of Aaron Swartz <comment><AUTHOR> Please sign the two petitions asking the White House to hold the prosecution accountable.</comment>


Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu (1978) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu <comment><USER2> My dad was a linotype operator before WW2, his dad was blind and during the depression as the oldest he had to leave school at 15 to support the family (this was in NZ)

Skilled lino operators were the programmers of their days, in short supply, they were paid really well (for the time) and could quit, travel for a while and find a job almost anywhere.

When dad signed up for WW2 he was almost immediately seconded to a HQ company, men who could type were as scarce as hen's teeth, too valuable - he was shot at occasionally but they generally weren't sent right to the front line, mostly one row back - people had to be paid, orders had to be intelligible

<comment><USER2> BTW if you ever get to see a linotype machine operating in a tech museum get someone to show you - especially look at how the type molds are mechanically sorted after use, how automatic line justification is done - see how a line of type (hence the name) is cast in molten type metal - it's absolutely brilliant and completely mechanical machinery

Dad could read type backwards, it was part of the job, he still worked for the newspaper after getting an accounting degree after coming back from the war, I spent a summer working there, got to see a full hot-metal system working before computers came along and made lots of people redundant (used to be a reporter's copy was checked by 3-4 people: lino operator, reader, copy holder, sub editor) now it's just spellcheck ... and before the evening paper was essentially killed by TV

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 07:54 - A pure-mechanical teletypewriter (Baudot/Hughes style, with a piano keyboard) is controlling the typesetting apparatus automatically, reading characters from a paper tape. The characters are encoded in ITA-2, a revised version of the original 1870 Baudot code. It's how a real /dev/tty looks like, and what we used before EBCDIC and ASCII. Digital communication in the Victorian era.

24:35 - PDP-11. a quick flash among a lot of other computers. Only a single row of the keys on the front panel was showed, but I can't be wrong - you know just from its color.

<comment><USER4>
        ___________
        | ooo .   |
        | ooo .   |
        | ooo .o  |
        |  o  .   |
        |  oo .o  |
        |  o  .   |
        | oo  .o o|
        | ooo .oo |
        | oo  .  o|
        | oo o.   |
        |    o. o |
        ___________

<comment><USER5> That "baudot" code looks like it's 7 bits wide (4 bits to the left of the feed holes represented by "." and 3 bits to the right)

Were there extra spaces inserted somewhere?

<comment><USER4> It's meant to be an homage (programage?) to /usr/games/ppt but my memories could easily have suffered bitrot.

There was an extra newline.

(according to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code) AT&T used post-1963 encodings)

<comment><USER5> Oh right, it's just ASCII.

I initially thought that it was a 5-bit Baudot code until I realised that it didn't make much sense in any 5-bit encoding.

I was trying to work out how an editor would've screwed up the formatting without breaking the vertical line on the right which probably why I was so confused.

I'm amused to see that ppt(6) is still kicking around in OpenBSD (in the "games" base installation package) and is probably still sitting quietly on many machines today (have Apple removed it from OS X?).

<comment><USER4> yes, they have :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worked with some former hot-metal compositors from a daily newspaper. They had taken their savings when they were made redundant and started up a computerized compositing firm just as desktop publishing was taking off. There was an art to composition and layout and these guys were experts. They made book for a while (pun intended).

Nowadays we have lost the artistry and elegance of knowledgable compositing and layout. Algorithms automate us 80% of the way there and we swim in a sea of crap with few people aware of it because it looks, well, okay if you prefer to excel at mediocrity.

<comment><USER5> For those uninitiated to the artistry and elegance of careful compositing and layout, do you have any examples?

It seems to be fairly easy to find exemplar typesetting on the internet (probably due, at least in part, to the phenomenal effort that has been poured into TeX/LaTeX and their ilk) but it's hard to find much that is considered to be a good representation of what careful human composition and layout can produce.

The only example that I could think of would be many of the books by Edward Tufte but I think much of that compositing has/was automated and "just" guided by a particular style that the author wanted to achieve.

The algorithmic approach to replacing human judgement has definitely resulted in a sort of race-to-the-bottom simply due to the economics (think about how few eyes would review a story before "print" today versus when this video was shot) so I wonder what sort of skill might've been lost and how it might be able to be recovered.

<comment><USER7> > For those uninitiated to the artistry and elegance of careful compositing > and layout, do you have any examples?

I often see both the examples of the older "pretty" typesetting and the examples of older "just make it fast" practically "no" typesetting texts (e.g. the material typed on the cheap typewriter and additionally "fixed" with the hand). The last I've seen, at the moment on HN first page is:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203)

Printed in 1975, I don't believe it's "desktop publishing" and even if it at the first sight it looks like a bland Word document made with Times New Roman or whatever, I believe I see some differences, e.g. in the tables? See the plus sign there. I'm not an expert in typography though.

For more interesting examples, look at the stuff printed e.g. 300, 200 or 100 years ago. I believe I always see the interesting examples of care of details or simply somehow "prettier" use of typefaces or something that looks differently -- it's hard to me to explain what, but that simply disappeared since.

<comment><USER8> When I bought my first e-reader, I loaded it with free PDFs of old book scans from the internet archive that I searched for keywords of interest (science, machining, novels, etc). Since the works out of copyright are all a hundred years old or more, I ended up reading through volumes and volumes of old books about blacksmithing, precision metalwork, life in the countryside, and all sorts of other things.

One thing I was struck by (for the PDF versions) was that the typesetting were sometimes absolutely gorgeous, and often used fonts I'd never seen before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was a great watch. I fully understand why they aren't used any more, but what a mechanical delight! Watching people work at the smooth speed of practiced efficiency is a joy to see, too.

(Couldn't help but notice how black with lead everyone's fingers were as well.)

[edit] I am impressed with the printer's comments at 14:10 re: the inevitability of computers

</comment><comment><USER10> Useful context about the film, from the New York Times's in-house historian: [https://www.nytimes.com/times- insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewe...](https://www.nytimes.com/times- insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewell-etaoin-shrdlu/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I really like listening to the worker talk about computers at 14:28. He conveyed much of the same thoughts we still have about computers and automation.

<comment><USER3> Transcript:

\- Over 49 years, being a member of the composable, a senior member of the priority list, the No. 1 man on the priority list. "How do you feel this change?" "Well I feel that... They call it progress, I would like to stay the way it was, keep the machine running." "How long have you worked here?" "49 years." "How old are you?" "75 and half." "Are you retiring tonight?" "Yes." "This is the last time?" "Yes." "Let's have a drink, buddy!"

\- This worker chalks up his sentiments: End of an era, it was good while it lasted. Crying won't help.

\- "I find it very sad. I planned the new stuff, the new processes, and all, but I've been printed it out for 26 years. I've been in this place, 6 years for apprenticeship, 20 years journeyman, and these words that aren't just tossed around. They've always to us. I hate to say it, it's inevitable that we're gonna go into computers. All the knowledge I've acquired over these 26 years, it's all locked up in a little box now called the computer. And I think probably most jobs are gonna end up the same way." "Is computer a good idea in general?" "Oh there's no doubt about it, it's gonna benefit everybody, eventually, how long will take? I don't know."

\- "When is this operation gonna closed up?" "It closes up in the morning." "How do you feel about it?" "Another intervention. I knew there are new process for moving into. Well I think of these machines plus another $100,000 a piece to be junked [...]"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My favourite quote:

"I hate to say it. It's inevitable that we're going to go onto computers. All the knowledge I've acquired over these 26 years is all kept in a little box now called a computer, and I think probably, most jobs are going to end up the same way.

Do you think computers are a good idea in general?

Oh, there's no doubt about it. They're going to benefit everybody eventually."

</comment><comment><USER13> If you liked this, be sure to check out the 2012 documentary 'Linotype: The Film', featuring Carl Schlesinger and footage from 'Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu'. One of my all-time favorite documentaries!

[https://linotypefilm.com/](https://linotypefilm.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> In high school I was in a computer tech class. In the second semester each of us were assigned one of the labs in the school. I was sent to the journalism room where the school paper was made. It was a fascinating and formative experience.

It was my responsibility to generate the CMYK output and FTP it to the printers. It was an awesome responsibility to be the last pair of eyes on the pages before we released them to the world, regardless of the technology.

It was just a goofy student paper in a small Idaho town. I can only imagine how it would feel to be responsible for the front page of the New York Times!

</comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16904770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16904770)

The link submitted then ([https://vimeo.com/127605643](https://vimeo.com/127605643)) was to a slightly different version of the film on Vimeo as part of the "Linotype: The Film" collection:

[https://vimeo.com/134626010](https://vimeo.com/134626010)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm old enough to have learned how to set type by hand, in a composing stick, in a high school shop class. We printed stationary, cards, etc, as part of the assignments. And I still remember the ordering of the letters in the "California Job Case." We took a field trip out to Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, to see their hot-type machines (and probably breathed in a lot of lead!)

</comment><comment><USER17> The video shows some photo plates embedded into pages alongside the text plates made from lead. Does anyone know what type of machines created those?

<comment><USER18> I can't find a picture of the particular machine but it'sa form of relief printing using etched metal.

[https://printedpicture.artgallery.yale.edu/photography- ink-r...](https://printedpicture.artgallery.yale.edu/photography-ink-relief- and-intaglio-printing)

<comment><USER4> My brief stint in journalism was after hot metal but before full computerisation. We typeset by keyboarding into a machine that produced column-wide printed output. Afterwards, to do layout, 'Cut' was done with a blade, and 'Paste' was literal. (in this vid, too: 25:32)

Never saw how the actual back-end printing was done, but we did cadge used printing plates from the big paper downtown when we needed thin aluminium sheet for other hacks.

Are 24:32 cordwood modules?

25:13 the days when storage was dangerous if it fell on you (now it's probably riskier that you might choke on it).

<comment><USER18> It was probably offset printing. The plates were etched metal positives from film negatives. A soft intermediate picks up an even layer of ink from the plate and deposits it on wet paper. The paper is then oven dried. (IIRC, it has been a long time)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember seeing linotypes in operation at a Hirschfeld Printing in Denver, which is now out of business. They were fascinating to watch. On the other hand, if you happened to choose, oh, ten-point Spartan, then discovered that it looked a bit small, you had to have the whole item reset. And wrapping lines around illustrations was not simple.

But they were great in their day.

</comment><comment><USER20> Today I learned that this name was actually an inside joke/reference in Godel, Escher, Bach: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu)

I definitely didn't understand at the time I read, but it's so much easier to research stuff like this now.

<comment><USER21> It was also an inside joke in _Mad_ Magazine. I had initially thought it was Yiddish or a Don Martinism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Apparently the Saguache Crescent in Colorado is (as of this video in 2016) still using the linotype, the last known newspaper in the US to do so: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNa9XRoNRUM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNa9XRoNRUM)

</comment><comment><USER23> Everytime I see Etaioin Shrdlu I remember of Nethack (there's a scroll in the game named like it - the effects are specific to every game since nethack randomizes everything, tho).

Btw I cannot recommend NetHack enough if you're into Roguelikes.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm in love with those terminals. Reminds me a bit of the Corona portable PC or the Epson QX-10, but more elegant and balanced.

And, also, available on multiple sizes. Those things must have been very expensive.

</comment><comment><USER25> An absolutely amazing film.

Hot metal typesetting is fantastic stuff.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's 1978, not 1980.

<comment><USER27> IMDB has it as 1980. Why do you say 1978? If you're right, we must change it!

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2238777/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2238777/)

<comment><USER14> The publication year is cited on the archive.org page. It is indeed 1978.

Maybe some difference between publication and release date?

The description starts with "On July 2, 1978, the last hot lead edition of the New York Times rolled off the presses."

<comment><USER27> Ok, 1978 it is. I wonder why it seemed like 1980?

<comment><USER14> IMDB definitely says _released_ in 1980 but I can't find any other reference to that year.

Everywhere else online says _filmed_ in 1978, including the Times website itself: [https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...](https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewell- etaoin-shrdlu.html)

I'm gonna tell myself they filmed it in 1978 and released it to the public in 1980.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> When I saw the title I thought the video was going to be about Terry Winograd's SHRDLU natural language understanding program [https://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/](https://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/)

Then I was wondering if there were any videos about the SHRDLU program. There is one very poor quality screen capture video on youtube showing SHRDLU in operation. I stumbled on another fairly short video (2:13) of Terry Winograd discussing his career as a technologist working in AI. I think it's an interesting alternate view of technology and its effect on people. The video is here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW5la8ZZJCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW5la8ZZJCE)

<comment><USER27> SHRDLU, sans Etaoin, has been discussed on HN too:

2017 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14351485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14351485)

2014 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219409)

... though maybe not as much as one might have expected.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you want in a text editor? - <AUTHOR> I'm making a simple open-source text editor (Qt5 wrapper around pandoc, markdown) intended more for journalists, academics and students than web developers -- so it has things like reference support and easy adaption of different citation styles baked in, accurate wordcounts, a distraction free mode, etc. Themes and previewing, as well as pdf creation without tex are already included, and pandoc means almost any output format is trivially easy to implement.<p>But what features would you like to see added to this list? Draft has its Hemingway mode, for example. What's missing from text editors you think you'd really like? <comment><USER2> I don't want to discourage you, but Emacs will beat you in pretty much any respect. It has org mode, which can generate html, latex, markdown etc. from a very intelligent and easy to use outline mode plus a ton of other features (literal programming, calendar, tables). It pretty much blows any other personal information management system out of the water. You could view the google talk by its creator for more information.

Auctex mode for latex editing, with in buffer preview of formulas and you are a few keystrokes away from compiling and previewing in an external viewer aswell. It also has distraction free mode, as you can fullscreen it and remove all chrome you don't want.

I think you would need to work really long and hard to get something substantially better than emacs as a tool. That being said there still will be people who pay money for inferior products if it has enough flashy features.

<comment><USER3> Emacs is awesome, and I totally love it. I've used it for more than 20 years. But, it's too complicated even for most programmers, and it's way too complicated for the majority of non-programmers. I can't handle maintaining my .emacs file anymore, and for me sublime is easier to use, even if it is less "powerful".

As much as I still love emacs, it's not a reason to be discouraged. I might even suggest it's a reason to be encouraged. I would absolutely _love_ to see something that actually competes with emacs on functionality and generality, while also being modern and usable, and without having to be a programmer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For academics, you can pry Latex from their cold dead hands, so better include a Latex mode. Personally, I like emacs and I think that modes, aka the plug-in architecture has really a lot of merit, so try to expose as much as possible of the documents to a plug-in api. ( That one only becomes important when your project is very successful, but perhaps it is good thing to keep in mind.)

One thing I would like to see in emacs is something similar to scrivener's corkboard, basically a virtual corkboard were you can place index cards and group them together.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome; but what do you reckon the best way to implement a corkboard is when it's entirely possible that you're dealing with individual documents, not Scrivener's groups of them? (Sorry, that sounds snarky; it's a genuine question; one global corkboard, per folder, or what?)

<comment><USER4> Sorry for the late answer, just seen your reply.

Again I am thinking about emacs, there you could have multiple cork boards, with multiple Windows. So basically, you open a cork board view, which in the background has a cork board buffer. And in principle you can then open a second cork board window to the same buffer, so that you can lock at two different places at once.

As for how to implement it, I am not sure, my crazy first idea would be as a clip board on steroids. So you mark some text and a index card with the text appears in the cork board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Different colour themes. I find it a lot easier working with light text on a dark background, others may differ in their preference. The Scratch editor written by the elementaryOS guys has some very nice themes, Gedit for the Gnome DE is not bad either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Diffs! Ability to see, track, and rollback a document's changes. With a nice side by side interface, of course, not raw display of a diff format.

</comment><comment><USER6> Toggleable tree view for navigating, opening, closing, creating, and deleting files. You also mentioned previewing, but it'd be nice if you could have toggleable split screen mode for live previews (or wysiwyg mode). Last would be a way for contributors to write extensions to add additional features.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got the split screen live preview already; tree view sounds a very useful addition, though.

Extensions are also a good plan; the interesting thing is that many of them end up being routed to pandoc, so they can be done with document metadata in any case. For others, one easy thing to do might be to rewrite some of the bits in C++ in PyQt, then have the possibility of importing classes that inherit from the originals and override functions. Does that make sense, do you think?

<comment><USER6> I've never written any software that had an extension system so I can't comment on whether or not it's a good design. My guess is that so long as the system is well documented, then it can work. Hopefully someone better qualified can address this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You already have competition in the form of ReText:

[https://github.com/retext-project/retext](https://github.com/retext- project/retext)

(Unless that's the project?)

However, there are some things that ReText does poorly, like syncing between the output window and the input text:

[https://github.com/retext- project/retext/issues/108](https://github.com/retext- project/retext/issues/108)

and some things ReText doesn't really do at all, such as autocompletion of citation labels, checking URLs to see if they are 404, or proper syntax highlighting in math mode.

Those kind of features tend to require doing difficult things like parsing the input, which is why most text editors don't bother.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, ReText is not the project. But it has quite different goals. I'm actually an academic in the humanities (though lots of my work uses digital tools). I got so thoroughly sick of marking essays with shoddy referencing and inconsistent formatting that it seemed like there must be people who could use things like your example of auto-completing citations; that isn't the purpose of retext at all, and its goals are much more to help people who know what they're doing.

ReText is also not very cross-platform, in practice for Linux only, although it's possible to install on a Mac with effort. It might be more justifiable to work on improving it, but the maintainer isn't interested in pandoc support, which, first makes citations very difficult, and second, means submission either to academic journals or university tools like Turnitin is more complex then it needs to be.

Then there's just little things -- like quoting verse in Markdown, which requires two spaces at the end of each line. That's easy enough to make happen automagically, but it's a feature that would _never_ be used by a typical ReText user, or someone using Mou or MacDown, so they're unlikely to want to support it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the ideas of your text editor, that is for writers other than developers.

I would like the features of editing math equations, ways to draw simple pictures etc except for simple Markdown support.

</comment><comment><USER9> 1\. Because stories are long, it should have multiple views for the same file. SO that writers can recap what they have written much earlier without losing their current context.

2\. Quick find for "Markers" / sections of the writing, so that one can easily scroll up to Chapter 1.2, say.

3\. Multi-cursor like Sublime Text to edit multiple mentions of the same name, say

4\. Spell-check, it is rudimentary.

</comment><comment><USER10> > intended more for journalists, academics and students than web developers

Have you asked somewhere else? Seems like you'd get a bias of things developers want here

</comment><comment><USER11> Versioning with diffs would be nice—maybe autosaves for recovery as well as user-indicated "draft" points to point out major revisions.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hi! I am interested in this. Do you have an email?

</comment><comment><USER13> emacs

</comment><comment><USER14> Continuing my streak of posts regarding preference which likely apply nearly only to me[1], I will gladly take on this question! As with the others, I should reiterate that I am a niche user and that the things I want will likely not be wanted by everyone else.

1\. Terminal-only (^Z is still something I want/need)

2\. _Not_ ncurses (as much as I like ncurses and what it did for TUIs, it's got too many pain points and short-comings to make sense lately).

3\. Configurable/Extensible/Scriptable through the host language or _one_ DSL (i.e., allowing a ton of different languages for plugins (I'm looking at you vim, ಠ_ಠ) is a SadTime™). Given this and (2), I would be tempted to say I'd prefer this editor to be written in Haskell and use Brick[2]; there is at least one editor that attempts this [3].

4\. Incredibly stripped-down core functionality with officially maintained extensions for likely-to-be-wanted features (e.g., syntax highlighting). This is not because I don't want syntax highlighting (I definitely do), but rather the recognition that one size does not fit all and that making the whole system as configurable as possible is often a huge win. Note, this cannot be done at the expense of performance (which is why I would be tempted to say that accomplishing this sensibly would require (3) be accomplished through the host language (and that it would add another strong argument for Haskell)).

5\. Modal (One of vim's greatest triumphs is the brilliance and simplicity of function in modal editing—yes, it's a very odd concept when you're starting out, but it's irreplacable once you get used to it)

6\. Asynchronous (One of vim's greatest failings is an interface that is completely incapable of dealing with asynchronicity)[4]

7\. Some or all of what Gary Bernhardt mentions in "A Whole New World"[5] (great talk anyway if you haven't seen it). Particularly, layers and a flexible auditor.

\---

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10072796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10072796)

[2] [https://github.com/jtdaugherty/brick](https://github.com/jtdaugherty/brick)

[3] [https://github.com/yi-editor/yi](https://github.com/yi-editor/yi)

[4] [http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better- than-v...](http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-vim/)

[5] [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new- world](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world)

</comment><comment><USER15> vim

<comment><USER16> As an Evil user, I concur. Perhaps it could be implemented through a plug-in architecture, with some LISP-like interface.. :)

<comment><USER12> Spacemacs</comment></comment></comment>


PHP 5.5 released and other things PHP related - <AUTHOR> http://www.phpweekly.com/archive/2013-06-20.html

<comment> iso8859-1 Changelog here: [https://github.com/php/php- src/blob/php-5.5.0/NEWS](https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/php-5.5.0/NEWS)

Highlights:

* Opcode cache ([https://wiki.php.net/rfc/optimizerplus](https://wiki.php.net/rfc/optimizerplus))

* Generators and coroutines ([https://wiki.php.net/rfc/generators](https://wiki.php.net/rfc/generators))

* "finally" keyword

* Constant array/string dereferencing

* Optimized access to temporary and compiled VM variables. 8% less memory reads.

* Dropped Windows XP and 2003 support.

<comment><USER2> I've never used Optimizer+ so I might have to compare it with my nginx/php5-fpm/apc buildouts.

I understand compiling bytecode to memory but I still wish there was a way to write files bytecode files back to the disk in a similar fashion to python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ww also have a modern framework for php. Everyone should try [http://laravel.com/](http://laravel.com/) , such a fresh air into php development.

<comment><USER4> Silex is better , i hate all these static classes everywhere. That's the only reason i'm not using Laravel "Core" . Eloquent is nice though.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, every new framework nowadays seems to be based on Symfony2 which appears to be kind of slow.

Is there any small (relatively new) PHP framework that isn't based on Symfony2?

<comment><USER6> 4bytes is crazy fast: [https://github.com/donutdan4114/4bytes- framework](https://github.com/donutdan4114/4bytes-framework)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you need a control panel for the nifty new Zend Opcache in PHP 5.5, please steal my ugly hack and improve it: [https://gist.github.com/ck- on/4959032](https://gist.github.com/ck-on/4959032)

<comment><USER8> You should put this into a regular repository so that people can send pull requests.

<comment><USER9> > All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, > forkable and usable as a git repository.

<comment><USER10> But they do not (yet?) support pull requests, so you end up with a number of disparate forks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the latest PHP weekly. With PHP 5.5 just being released today we cover this and other news related to PHP.

<comment><AUTHOR> One other thing - Send us announcements, blog posts, news etc and we'll include them

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One step closer to launching mysql_query into the sun.

<comment><USER12> why is mysql query bad? as someone who knows sql, I've always loathed over abstracted mechanisms for db calls.

its also been a while since I've done web dev.

<comment><USER13> The old php mysql_* functions have become notorious for their vulnerability to SQL injection[1].

In no small part because novice developers also have a tendency to build queries directly out of $_GET parameters.

While PDO and parameterized queries aren't a silver bullet, simple strings as queries are just a nightmare to do properly.[2]

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60174/how-to-prevent- sql-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60174/how-to-prevent-sql- injection-in-php) [2] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4dJ7hdA8fs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4dJ7hdA8fs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Signed up 2 weeks ago. Keep up the good work

<comment><USER15> Same here, pretty good advanced in-depth content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >open changelog

>ctrl+f "PSR"

>0 results

Into the trash it goes.

<comment><USER17> Wow, PSR-2 (Coding Style Guide) seems fairly extreme (existentially, not in it's specifics which I haven't looked at) for PHP.

Part of me thinks it's odd, considering I never felt all that much freedom to change how I expressed things in PHP (at least not in the slightest compared to Perl).

Another part of me thinks that enough amateur programmers use PHP that some style guide may benefit them greatly. Then again, if people don't come to a better style through experience (or at least an explanation of the benefits or what mistakes it helps prevent) then is it really as useful?

<comment><USER18> The purpose of the PSRs is to help support and foster collaboration between members of the Framework Interoperability Group (the people who draft and publish the PSRs: consists of medium-to-large PHP projects including Symfony, Amazon, Drupal, Joomla, etc.). Having a common coding standard makes it much easier to publish code as part of other PSRs as questions like "tabs or spaces?" don't have to get rehashed every time a new PSR is drafted.

That's to say PSR-2 is not intended to a be a "best practices" type of thing: it's actually just the result of a survey of member projects at the time with each part chosen because that's what the majority of them did, even if it was just a simple majority or there were member projects were with the majority on, say, tabs vs. spaces but not, say, indentation size. Some of the FIG member projects have adopted it, but several haven't and don't intend to. It's useful if you don't have any other coding standard available, but easily ignored with no loss of interoperability with the other PSRs if you do.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the explanation, that makes more sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Valley's Young Guns- Behind the Scenes- Myths, Fears, and Hopes - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/12286036/the_baby_billionaires_of_silicon_valley Really great look into venture capital, the mythos of entrepreneurs, and is generally a great article. <comment> daniel-cussen "Julie Supan, senior director of marketing at YouTube, is quick to separate the guys from the other startups. 'We're don't see ourselves as Web 2.0,' she says. 'We're Web 3.0!'"

Tacky.

</comment><comment><USER2> Had to stop reading. Too hagiographic. Facebook is a myspace clone. STOP. Firefox is mozilla minus some cruft. STOP. Youtube had been done a thousand times before. STOP. It's obvious that they all did _something_ right but let's not pretend that they are all Edisons and Teslas.

<comment><USER3> Yes, and a thousand people invented different flying machines. So why do we remember the Wright Brothers? Because they made it work.

(Not that YouTube is the pinnacle of 21st century innovation -- but it's important to note that, unlike their predecessors, YouTube was executed quite well.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> seems a little (a lot!) self serving. They have money to buy whatever they want, but yet - seem to be a tad empty.</comment>


Viber Replaces MongoDB with Couchbase - <AUTHOR> http://www.couchbase.com/presentations/couchbase-tlv-2014-couchbase-at-viber <comment><USER2> My eyes hurt from reading so much PRese. Look, every organization from from Solution A to Solution B in due course-- and that is a PR Story. But for it to be useful programmers, there has to be some amount of quantitative data to support the decision ;a video embed doesn't count. Surely Couchbase folks can do better than this to catch our attention.

<comment><USER3> The video does provide some quantitative data and the slides underneath do as well. I'd prefer a proper article, but it's not that bad.

Companies seem to be jumping off mongodb left and right, with the only ones sticking to it being small ones with lower replication requirements - the kind of situation that pgsql etc deals with far better. Mongodb seems to be the worst of both worlds - a lack of scalability and a lack of per-node rich joins and similar.

<comment><USER4> MongoDB solves the problem of developer time being expensive. It's simple to use and understands JSON data.

Once you grow past it you know where the problems in your data are and can optimize accordingly.

<comment><USER5> > MongoDB solves the problem of developer time being expensive.

I don't know about this argument. I am involved with a project to build a rare diseases database, and it might get moderately big (maybe ~1Tb). Somewhere on a related project a MySQL server crashed, so the guys building this new system have jumped right on the NoSQL bandwagon (despite the fact we clearly have relational data). 6 months ago, it was all Mongo DB. Last week it was Tokyo Cabinet.

I am currently benchmarking Postgres (they seem not to have done that). I think I could achieve similar functionality in two weeks what these guys have taken 6 months to do using all the NoSQL solutions they have had tried (and needed to learn).

When you have mature frameworks like Rails or Django that take a lot of the grunt work out of traditional RDMBS systems, I don't think it really is correct to say that Mongo DB saves developer time. In Certain areas, yes, but think there is a bigger picture to take into account.

<comment><USER4> "When you have mature frameworks like Rails or Django that take a lot of the grunt work out of traditional RDMBS systems, I don't think it really is correct to say that Mongo DB saves developer time."

Depends. Sometimes Django ORM is great. Sometimes, it is _awful_ (yes, sometimes the models have crazy links between them, this is the most frequent cause of problems)

Sure, if your data is relational, go for a RDBMS. But sometimes it isn't.

And yes, if they're taking 6 months to do something in MongoDB there's something wrong with what/how they're trying to do it.

<comment><USER5> They are choosing NoSQL hype for relational data. That's what they are doing wrong.

<comment><USER4> You can have relations in MongoDB of course, however they are not as in an Relational DB.

The problem is that they get the "MongoDB == no relations" literally and are trying to put a round peg in a square hole.

I personally find it hilarious when someone is hitting their head in the desk with the "no relations" thing, as if it's a huge sin to have a id (or other information) of an item in another table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't entirely know what Viber does, but given how very different MongoDB and Couchbase are, I think they made a terrible choice of using MongoDB in the first place. You can't fault MongoDB for that. Viber announcing this change is more of an admission that their architects/engineers made a bad choice than it is a slight against MongoDB.

Also, I don't like MongoDB very much and almost always find another more suitable database (both SQL and NoSQL) for the projects that I have worked on.

<comment><USER7> Viber allows you to make voice and video calls aswell. In my country, texting is not popular, voice calling is, so Viber is the must have app.

As an added bonus, it works flawlessly from overseas as well, so you can call anyone else that's using Viber for free.

<comment><USER8> Do you mind to disclose your country or continent where Viber (or video chat) is popular.

I can only speak of myself, in central Europe Skype (voice, video) and WhatsApp (group chat) are popular. Facebook is increasingly used by elder population and shunt by younger generations.

As I avoid WhatsApps (it sucks IMHO ..no Web and Tablet support, shady company), I would welcome any competitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is anyone else using Couchbase? I'm evaluating it for a project with a mobile component and Couchbase Mobile with its automatic syncing seems like a great solution. Would love to hear peoples thoughts.

<comment><USER10> Cloudant also has this mobile sync capability, they just released recently. They are also compatible with CouchDB (which Couchbase I think is not).

<comment><USER11> +1 for Cloudant - there are some truly top-notch folks over there.

Of course there are smart people at Couchbase too, I'd just suggest giving Cloudant some serious consideration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In related news, Viber manages to bootstrap their startup all the way to billions of messages and talking minutes per month with MongoDB.

Sounds like Mongo was a great choice and they're just growing up.

</comment><comment><USER13> Couchbase and MongoDB are both excellent databases and have their place. I work with a MongoDB implementation that has over 12.75 billion records, adds over a billion records per year, and runs in a high availability, high read environment. [http://jaihirsch.github.io/straw-in-a- haystack//mongodb/2014...](http://jaihirsch.github.io/straw-in-a- haystack//mongodb/2014/01/06/mongodb-legacy-migration/)

Know your problem domain, do your research, benchmark, test multiple solutions, and don't be afraid to reengineer. That is how you scale.

</comment><comment><USER14> They picked the wrong product in first place. MongoDB and Couchbase are two different databases.</comment>


99 Bottles of Beer, written in pretty much every language available to mankind - <AUTHOR> http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out Javascript: <http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language- javascript-1948.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> Shakespeare is still probably my favorite language in that list.</comment>


MTN Nigeria Stunned by Unprecedented $5.2B Fine - tefo-mohapi https://soundcloud.com/african-tech-round-up/atru29-mtn-nigeria-stunned <comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good to me, they have ripped this country enough

<comment> tefo-mohapi Why do you say that?</comment></comment>


YouTube coming to iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.last100.com/2007/06/20/youtube-coming-to-iphone/ <comment><USER2> The iPhone isn't going to support flash?

<comment><USER3> No Flash support on the iPhone.

Its a very closed box for developers. Apple is shooting themselves in the foot IMHO.

The LG Prada (iPhone clone) supports Flash lite 2.1. In fact, the entire UI is built on it.

<comment><USER4> The Prada costs more though, doesn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder how well videos are going to stream over EDGE?</comment>


Why is my homedir wide open? - <AUTHOR>

Why does the default mode of adduser is to create a home directory that is wide open for anyone to change into?<p>I'm curious how that decision was made. <comment><USER2> Unix started out at universities. Most students and teachers would have things they wanted to share with each other, and the filesystem was the most efficient way of doing so (remember this was well before the web, before even finger). So most users would have at least some public files, and since you only have one home dir this meant the home dir had to be public (it wouldn't make sense to put a public dir inside a private one - rather, you'd have a (or several) private subdirs for anything you wanted to keep private).

As for why it's still like that, it's just never been worth the cost of changing it. Since we now have forty years' worth of shell scripts etc. built on those semantics it would be pretty much impossible to change the default now. On a modern graphical linux most users aside from old unix diehards will use the system's UI with its own interface, so it's unlikely to cause problems for many people.

(To answer your literal question about "how the decision was made", most likely Kerrigan or Ritchie thought about it for a couple of seconds and then coded it that way. That's how most of unix's "design decisions" happened)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you create a file in your home directory that you give permission to anyone to read or write to, having a+x on your home directory will actually allow them to read/write the file if they know the full path to it.

This behavior is useful on subdirs, too; for example, a shell account I used in the past had <http://server.example.com/~username/> mapped to /home/username/public_html, and since the webserver ran under a user that didn't have root permissions, making /home/username a+x allowed the webserver user to access the files that I wanted to share over the web (assuming I had public_html chmodded properly, of course).

So it's less about cd and more about direct file and/or directory access for purposes of widely-accessible files.

</comment><comment><USER4> This isn't the case on any of my machines. What kind of system are you on ?</comment>


Ask HN: Please review the advertising page for an iPhone game I made w/ a friend - <AUTHOR>

http://onehotgaming.com/perilcanyon
Hey everybody, thanks for taking the time to look at this.
A little background: a friend from college and I put together this game over the last few weeks, based on a project for a class we took together our senior year. This is entirely a side project, but since we put a lot of work into making the game, we want to put enough work into selling it so we have at least a shot of making it successful. Since we're very much novices at this sort of thing, we'd really appreciate some advice from the HN community.
This is our advertising page (for submitting to review sites, etc.). Basically we want it to be the landing page for any potential customers.
Some specific things I'd like feedback on:

  1) How is the game description copy?
     (Is it too verbose? Should it be a bulleted list?)
  2) Does the color scheme/layout work?
  3) How's the video?
 Related: any tips for good iPhone game review sites to pitch this to?
Tangentially related: can anyone recommend a decent A/B testing tool for Django? <comment><USER2> 1\. You can afford to cut the second sentence in the first paragraph. Like so.

"Take control of an F-22 fighter jet as you hurtle down a narrow, winding canyon. Using the accelerometer, dodge obstacles and avoid the ever-narrower canyon walls."

As opposed to:

"Take control of an F-22 fighter jet as you hurtle down a narrow, winding canyon. You have good cover down in the canton's depths, but your enemies with their missiles are in hot pursuit, hoping you fly too high and give them a clear shot. Using the accelerometer, dodge obstacles and avoid the ever- narrower canyon walls"

You can trim the paragraph down without losing all that much.

On the second paragraph, I'd take out the jargon and make the first sentence simpler. The second sentence is pretty good, and does a good job of closing the description.

2\. The color scheme's layout is a bit unclear, because of a lack of alignment and visual guides. The #CCD color is a little soft, and doesn't have enough contrast with the black to be clear. I'd like it if it was just black and white for the color choice. I understand the call-to-action button should be prominent, but there are other ways to highlight a call-to-action than the gray button with white colored font.

I'd lose the beveled type with drop shadow over an embossed rounded rectangle though. The logos could use a little work, that whole header could some work, I'm not gonna lie.

3\. The video could look better if you hosted it from within your site, and used more and varied shots to make it more exciting than gameplay over song". Think of how videogame commercials are usually put together. Especially the ones produced for your target market.

I haven't played the game yet, but congratulations on releasing it! Best of luck and I hope to see a sequel!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The first thing that jumps out is the Peril Canyon logo, you need to refine it. Compare with the style of your Download button.

I'd like to see the video use more screen space for the actual gameplay, perhaps move the iPhone frame out in the HTML background. The YouTube interface that comes up makes the spacing to the Download button look a bit naff too.

The lighting on the plane in the video is weird. In a canyon I would expect everything to be lit from the top by the sun with plenty of ambient light. It actually appears to be lit from behind and is almost black when facing up.

The copy mentions upgrades and unlocking things, can you use some images from the game to tease us with those?

The game actually looks kind of fun, congratulations!

<comment><AUTHOR> The plane does have very little ambient lighting, it's pretty much all specular. The idea was that this would help make it look more "steath fighter- like", but thanks for the feedback that it's not accomplishing that particularly well.

I'll have to think about what to do with the video. Video editing is kinda a big time sink, but I definitely like the idea of putting the iPhone frame around it to make the screen bigger.

Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Mm I see what you were going for with the lighting, a solid black plane would stick out like a sore thumb in a light brown canyon though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I were you, I would just spend some money and get a professional template like <http://templatic.com/cms-themes/iphone-app> which is specially for you to sell apps. (It's a wordpress theme)

This particular theme may not suite your genre of app, but I'm sure on the internet there are many. Also as for promotion, maybe you would like to contact freeappaday.com which does promotion - but you would have to offer your app free for a few days.

</comment><comment><USER5> Instead of worrying about this ad copy you'd be better off wrangling up as many credit cards as possible to try to pump it into the top selling apps so people can actually find it after launch day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do people do that? It seems like it'd get expensive pretty fast.

<comment><USER5> They most certainly do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hm. Seems I'm not offering enough incentive for more people to care about reviewing my stuff. Maybe if there were an actual playable game involved that people could try out?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://onehotgaming.com/perilcanyon></comment>


GoDaddy tells the Daily Stormer to move their domain for TOS violation - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/GoDaddy/status/896935462622957573 <comment><USER2> I've never heard of Daily Stormer before now. I have no idea who they are, what their beliefs are (although I can fathom a guess), or anything else about them. As someone who supports "online rights", however, I certainly believe that this web site should have equal access to publish content online. To believe otherwise -- regardless of the content -- is censorship and I am 100% against that. It is a very slippery slope.

For anyone looking for a host, you might consider NearlyFreeSpeech.NET [0]. Their Terms and Conditions of Service ("TACOS") [1] are pretty basic and straightforward.

[0]: [https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net)

[1]: [https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/terms](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/terms)

<comment><USER3> Free speech != hate speech

<comment><USER4> There's no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. GoDaddy here, however, is probably free to deny service but not free to take their US TLD away from them.

There is probably an interesting discussion about US TLD's here, though, and property rights inherent to them. On any other TLD, the domain would have probably been seized long ago. But, given the climate, it's clear that this discussion is not going to happen.

<comment><USER5> .com is a gTLD and does not belong to the US.

<comment><USER4> >does not belong to the US

It's a US-based TLD, the authority being Verisign. The point is that GoDaddy can tell them to take it elsewhere, but as far as the registry is concerned it's not going to be seized and it's not going to be revoked. Not unless you have a court order. And, lacking any real criminality, there's really shaky first amendment/jurisdiction issues. Not even getting into [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It seems quite weird to see praise being heaped upon GoDaddy. People sure do have short memories nowadays.

I see lots of anger/disgust towards Cloudflare on the twitters too. In the past, they've refused to do any censoring. Will this change their minds?

<comment><USER6> > It seems quite weird to see praise being heaped upon GoDaddy. People sure do > have short memories nowadays.

What, they did other things in the past, so this thing they did is also wrong? Weird logic.

(Former GoDaddy employee)

<comment><USER2> > _What, they did other things in the past, so this thing they did is also > wrong? Weird logic._

Of course not, but in the not-so-distant past, there were widespread calls to boycott GoDaddy (as I'm sure you're aware).

(Former GoDaddy customer)

<comment><USER7> That was due to thr then CEO pisting a photo of himself and an elephant(endangered species) he had killed. That CEO has since been sacked

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This has nothing to do with free speech, or net neutrality.

This is a private business who reserves the right not to serve anyone.

A hypothetical christian registrar might refuse to do business with an abortion clinic. Many refuse to do business with ISIS.

You're allowed to say whatever you want, but you don't have a right to do it on my privately-held platform.

<comment><USER9> Sure, this might be a private business and they might be free not to deliver certain content but this does not exempt them from criticism. Just like they are free not to map the address to the ip of that site so are people free to criticise them for this kind of censorship.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry, did I stifle your right to criticize them? Criticize away! And it's my right to criticize your criticism ;).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess Net Neutrality dying in few weeks will send controversial content into darknets. If you wonder why ISP/Registrars/Clouds/Hosters weren't capable of "moderating/filter" content before, its because Net Neutrality regulations restricting them to something like a road owner. A road owner can't inspect trucks and demand certain cars off the road, only collect tolls. Without Net Neutrality this concept goes out the window.

<comment><USER11> Apparently you haven't read a ToS/AUP before, choosing GoDaddy for anything the least bit controversial was a mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They were kicked off for calling a murder victim "a 32-year old, fat, childless slut" after she was run down by a car at one of their rallies this weekend.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hope they have to pay through the nose to spread that kind of garbage ideology online.

</comment><comment><USER14> A slippery slope.

</comment><comment><USER15> With the experiment of GAB I wonder if moves like this will just push the extremists onto their own internet.

<comment><USER16> What is GAB?

<comment><USER17> From [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_\(social_network\))

Gab is an Austin, Texas-based[1] social networking service that allows its users, called "Gabbers," to read and write short messages of up to 300 characters called "gabs". The site also offers limited multimedia functionality. Gab describes its mission as "to put people and free speech first" by limiting censorship to filtering options made available to Gabbers.[5]

<comment><USER18> What an odd service offering - it sounds very much like "Twitter except we don't ban anyone". If that's the main differentiator, wouldn't one expect all their early adopters to be people who are either banned from twitter or want to follow people banned from twitter?

<comment><USER17> I don't like the idea that so much of our communication is under the centralized control of social network sites like Twitter and Facebook. I would prefer if the gab enthusiasts had adopted gnu social, but as things are I am glad that SN sites are being made which are committed to the moral principle of free speech.

It's possible that gab's early adopters include people who value free speech as a principle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems that Anonymous has taken over the site.

</comment><comment><USER9> They wouldn't have to deal with that if they used tor/i2p instead.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why wait 24 hours?

<comment><USER4> It allows them to look good and not be roped into an ICANN/property dispute shitstorm inherent to .com and related US TLD's, I imagine. They're just going to transfer the domain. Weev probably has something to say about it.</comment></comment>