Addictive Personality? You Might be a Leader - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24addicts.html

<comment><USER2> I dont want to sound too hard, but I have an intuition that this is just a load of hogwash. The author racks his brain and comes up with a few examples of addicts who run big companies.

What about all the big companies run by non-addicts (the majority)?

What about all the addicts who don't run big companies (the majority)?

These things need to be addressed before I'll start to buy the argument. And this comment coming from a habitual risk-taking leader himself.

<comment><USER3> > What about all the big companies run by non-addicts (the majority)

Sure, but the real question is whether "addicts" are over-represented amongst successful CEOs more than the general population.

<comment><USER3> Looks like I should explain myself:

If there was no association between having an "addictive personality" and being a successful CEO, we would expect "addictives" to be CEOs just as often as non-addictives. If being an addictive helps with being a successful CEO, we'd expect a higher concentration of addictives amongst the population of successful CEOs.

The grandparent is presenting a argument a much stronger straw-man: that the _majority_ of successful CEOs have addictive personalities. The original post does not make that claim.

<comment><USER4> That isn't how statistics work. If 10% of people are "addicts", and 20% of CEOs are "addicts", it's fair to say that there is correlation - despite the fact that there are still five times as many non-addict CEOs.

edit: Think this is actually the point you're trying to make, though I think you didn't quite nail it.

<comment><USER3> I mis-spoke when I wrote "expect 'addictives' to be CEOs just as often as non- addictives". I meant to write "expect to find 'addictives' amongst the population of CEOs at the same rate at which they occur in the general popluation" or something.

Would've been easier to write it out with math. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I definitely feel that in my life. The urge to create things, to grow, to change myself, the condescendence at anyone who is satisfied with current situation. It's like someone is itching my brain, it feels very similar to craving nicotine, or caffeine, or just mind-altering substances. It's like someone is shouting at me "common, this sucks, now go do something" even when everything is seemingly awesome.

<comment><USER6> You have said in two sentences what I have struggled to express for many years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And here's Malcolm Gladwell making the argument that successful people are _less_ likely to take risks:

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/18/100118fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/18/100118fa_fact_gladwell)

Reality is reality. If you take risks, you open yourself up to failures, but the potential upside might be greater as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> _The risk-taking, novelty-seeking and obsessive personality traits often found in addicts can be harnessed to make them very effective in the workplace. For many leaders, it's not the case that they succeed in spite of their addiction; rather, the same brain wiring and chemistry that make them addicts also confer on them behavioral traits that serve them well._

This is ridiculous in some ways. Yes, certain personality traits predispose you to certain things. But environment also plays a role. I imagine most leaders suffer from something I would call "bored gifted kid syndrome". And if they find a means to be adequately engaged, it goes away and stops being a "personality problem".

In fact, framing it as "addictive personality" helps create problems by vilifying them in a way that seems inescapable -- like "you were born defective". My oldest son is profoundly gifted and was prone to "addictive" behaviors (not drugs or alcohol, but video games and such) and when we figured out how to meet his needs for mental stimulation adequately, he went from behaving like your typical grumpy, socially defective addict to being one of the calmest people I know. I never told him he was "defective". I didn't frame it that way. And it helped him find his way out of what often ends up being a psychological trap.

Edit: There is a book that addresses the social aspect of creating addicts by imposing expectations that it is out of their hands -- for example, cultures that blame alcoholism on the alcohol have higher rates of it than cultures that hold the individual responsible. Title: "The Truth About Addiction and Recovery". One wife of an alcoholic who tried to hand me my head for recommending this book then went on to talk about "dry drunks" (people who remain "addicted" to alcohol while not drinking for years at a time) and that the real problem with alcoholism was all the "isms" (by that I think she meant beliefs?) not the alcohol per se. She was on such a tear, I didn't bother to point out that her remarks supported mine rather than refuting them.

EDIT: Since comment scores are not visible, I will note that this is being upvoted, downvoted, upvoted, downvoted. I would be curious as to what is so seemingly controversial. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER9> "Cultures that blame alcoholism on the alcohol have higher rates of it than cultures that hold the individual responsible."

I don't think either of those options squares with the science, e.g. [http://www.nijc.org/pdfs/Subject%20Matter%20Articles/Drugs%2...](http://www.nijc.org/pdfs/Subject%20Matter%20Articles/Drugs%20and%20Alc/ACE%20Study%20-%20OriginsofAddiction.pdf)

And also the science about genetic differences in the way people process alcohol and experience pleasure also contradicts that dichotomy.

<comment><USER10> I only know of one experiment on this: < <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park> >. It concluded that morphine addiction in ordinary rats is not just influenced by their environment, but pretty much determined by it.

I'd be interested to hear how much that can be changed by breeding the rats selectively. Until you know that, I won't believe anything you say about genetic influences on addiction. It seems that no one has tried to find out. So I assume that Addiction Studies (or whatever it's called) has very little to do with science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this the reason why doctors give people with ADHD amphetamines? So that they would feel content leading their somewhat mundane lives?

</comment><comment><USER12> The article is mostly about addictive personality and the connections between addictive personality and innovation or success aren't really well drawn. Moreover, their anecdata suffers from the problem that people who are in a high stress environment may exhibit addiction-like behaviors which are are actually self-medication for stress.

</comment><comment><USER13> Rediscovering sublimation? Again? ^_^

It is said thousands years ago - control your emotions or be controlled by emotions. Freud emphasized that energy bounded to some emotions and mental states can be redirected, transformed, controlled.

General Taosist example is a river overflowed with monsoon water. It sweeps out everything when uncontrolled, but if people have built some dams and walls in advance, then all flooding waters will run into more-or-less controlled way.

So, if one can control himself why not use ones obsessions instead of being used by them?

<comment><USER14> "Freud emphasized that energy bounded to some emotions and mental states can be redirected, transformed, controlled. General Taosist example is a river overflowed with monsoon water."

Freud was a pseudoscientific hack, and Taoism. while a nice philosophy, is not empirical science either. You've fallen far short of any decent standard of evidence here.

<comment><USER13> I have no time and intention to launch into a big discussion about scientific approach to mental states and their relation to the bodily ones. What I can tell for sure - describing and studying them scientifically in separation from other dynamic processes is deeply flawed approach.

You can, for example, find tons of studies about so-called 'attention window' or 'working memory span', but they didn't even mention that those characteristics could be dramatically reduced under stress or any other state of overload. There are a dozen variables on which it depends on, from the time of day to a noise level.

And, of course, calling Freudian works a hack is a little bit naive. Yes, you could call his Interpretation of dreams a hack, but he developed and extended a more general theory of mental dynamics, which, ironically, was known for aeons in the East.

<comment><USER14> _You can, for example, find tons of studies about so-called 'attention window' or 'working memory span', but they didn't even mention that those characteristics could be dramatically reduced under stress or any other state of overload._

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=working+memory+under+str...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=working+memory+under+stress&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C48)

 _Yes, you could call his Interpretation of dreams a hack, but he developed and extended a more general theory of mental dynamics, which, ironically, was known for aeons in the East._

Which, by the way, is all scientifically unsubstantiated bullshit until you show me some properly documented and controlled experiments demonstrating otherwise.

<comment><USER13> _Which, by the way, is all scientifically unsubstantiated bullshit_ this statement is too bold to continue any reasonable discussion. ^_^

Freud was extended and popularized the theory of unconscious mental dynamics which need not to be explained to any educated person. It covers almost anything from cognitive tasks and linguistics to somatic processes.

Secondly, he developed theory of therapist-patient relationships which was extended after him to anything from propaganda and advertisements to NLP and other influental techniques.

Of course, unconsciousness was known since Upanishads, but Freud was popularisator.

<comment><USER14> I'm not saying that Freud was unimportant in the history of ideas or anything; I'm saying there's no concrete evidence any of his theories have any predictive value over the actual behavior of human beings.

You see, I can afford to be categorically dismissive of Freud, Taoism, the Upanishads, and Miss Cleo because of a far more important development in the history of ideas: empiricism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the title I would have thought the article would be about personality spreading among people, not about the personality of addicts.

</comment><comment><USER16> what is the claim here? that some great leaders were addicts, so addiction is a trait of a great leader? please. it is interesting to note that some can simultaneously battle substance addiction and lead productive lives, but nothing in this article even remotely resembles proof of causation.

that said, i can believe that the greatest thinkers and inventors in human history are those that were completely obsessed (addicted?) with what they were doing. people can become addicted to pursuing their vision, and in this sense the article has some merit. not well communicated however.

<comment><USER16> show me a neurological study comparing passion/obsession with substance addiction!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That applies to everyone. Everyone will be, is likely to be later, or most likely IS addicted to something: caffeine? their lovers? orgasms? money/credit? shopping? chocolate? unhealthy floury carbs? cheese? power over underlings?

if any of these are hard to go without in their current consumed amounts, they're addictions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that's because how brain receptors work for anyone. Still, author is talking about people that are LESS satisfied than the norm, so they always need more (like addicts).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Findka – Personalized recommendations for any type of content - <AUTHOR> https://findka.com <comment><AUTHOR> (Reposting with permission from dang)

Hi, OP here. I started working on recommender systems in 2016 during my undergrad, specifically doing music recommendation (I was dissatisfied with the quality of Pandora/Spotify recommendations). I spent about five months in 2019 trying to make a music startup based on that. However, during that time I realized that there would probably be more value in having a really good general-purpose/cross-domain recommender system. i.e. if you're looking for something specific, use Google, and if you're not looking for something specific, use Findka. That's the vision anyway.[1][2]

More specifically, the benefits I see from cross-domain recommendation are:

\- More data per user => better recommendations.

\- More potential users => (eventually) better recommendations. For example, to get users for a podcast recommender, you have to find people who like podcasts above a certain threshold. With Findka, anyone who's interested in getting recommendations for at least one content type is a potential user. (And even people who aren't above that threshold for podcasts might appreciate an occasional podcast recommendation).

\- Lots of potential applications. I'm particularly interested with trying to use Findka for social networking (opt-in of course). Data from Findka could be useful for dating, job opportunities, forming online communities, etc. This is more long-term, but I also think Findka data could be useful for search.[3]

The algorithm currently is dead simple. Just collaborative filtering without explicitly taking into account content type. So it's naively cross-domain. Since the data set is still small, there's no need for matrix factorization. I recompute the whole matrix every hour and store it in memory. See [4] for the implementation (it only took 30 LOC). That's a little out-of-date but the general approach hasn't changed.

For the tech stack, I'm using a Clojure web framework + deployment solution that I made.[5] It's like a self-hosted version of Firebase (I'm running it on DigitalOcean).

[1] [https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/6/24/search- dis...](https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/6/24/search-dis..).

[2] [https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2...](https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2..).

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23449754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23449754)

[4] [https://findka.com/blog/rec-sys- in-30-lines/](https://findka.com/blog/rec-sys-in-30-lines/)

[5] [https://findka.com/biff/](https://findka.com/biff/)</comment>


At What Point Should You Start to Freak Out About Climate Change? (video) - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/5575658/bill-mckibben-climate-change-falter/?xid=tcoshare <comment><USER2> How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Climate Change</comment>


Purple Reign – The unmaking of a Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/purple-reign <comment><USER2> Is it just me or is this writing style basically unreadable? KISS.

<comment><USER3> Came here to point out just this. This article is a great example of convoluted syntax and flagrant wordiness.

I mean, come on:

>All this had come rushing back because once upon a time, I had lived through it too, in my late, unlamented career as an online news executive in that labyrinth of high-octane managerial passive-aggression known as Yahoo News.

This is about as ugly as English journalese gets. And it is also stupid because the implication is that this person should have been interning as a copywriter instead of wending his way through that high-octane managerial labyrinth of passive-aggressive knowledge that once upon a time was Yahoo News, natch.

My takeaway is that Yahoo News failed because it was run by amateurs.</comment></comment>


JSON Configurable Personal Site - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/christophior/JSONConfigurablePersonalSite <comment><USER2> Great to see a fellow PayPal Austinite on HN Chris! For a lot of people really quick and easy way to have a personal site up and running. Couple suggestions, possibly add system requirements and deploy instructions (possibly deploy to heroku/or deploy to digitalocean button) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just saw this, thanks for the suggestions Avi! I'm currently messing around with it, I was already looking into one click deploy. I recall some time prior that Github unveiled a one click deploy button so I was going to try and integrate that into the repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You know you could do this as a Jekyll site, right? And then you wouldn't even need to install Jekyll, you could just put everything on GitHub and it would render it for you. Then you could let people fork and modify the links and they would have their own sites too, without even downloading anything.

Doing these with a backend is not fun at all: it is too easy to program (you know that with a node server you could do way more than a "JSON configurable personal site"), but it also consumes too much resources to run. So if you could do it without a backend, why not?

<comment><AUTHOR> Never used Jekyll before, thanks for the heads up. I'll look into it.

<comment><USER3> It is not that I like Jekyll, but that GitHub pages supports it -- and compiles its sites on every deploy --, so it works well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do we know what's behind this on the server? Is this a Node.js thing? (perhaps obvious to many, but I'm not down with the server-side js scripting and templating lingo.)

Creating a site from a json file sounds good. I defintely want to play with that, but what is required on server?

<comment><USER2> The site is a node app, so you would need node and npm (the package manager for node) on your system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate editing JSON by hand. Why not YAML?

<comment><USER6> I can give you my own reasons. I avoid YAML because it's not simple like JSON.

Just look at the YAML spec - [http://www.yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html](http://www.yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html)

compared to JSON - [http://json.org/](http://json.org/)

and JSON is already everywhere (as a built-in library, a known mime type, etc). I have to go out of my way in order to use YAML.

I guess the other reason is that I never trust projects with names like "Yet Another..." because I feel like it conveys a lack of craftsmanship. Looking at that YAML spec again today, it looks like every feature was thrown into it with little to no discrimination.

<comment><USER7> The parts you generally use and the length of the spec are entirely different things. This argument is always silly.

<comment><USER6> There's no need to be rude about it. Your first statement would have sufficed to make your point.

Anyway, I didn't say that I don't use it because of the length of the spec. I said I don't use it because it's orders of magnitude more complex than JSON and I used the spec as an example of that. A bigger spec means a bigger parser and a higher probability that other people will not limit themselves to the parts that "you generally use".

To that, I added that JSON is everywhere already and YAML isn't. My point about the name seems a little silly, but my intuition has served me well over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand why we should use JSON to configure a server, when a much more powerful language exists: Javascript.

For example, instead of hardcoding some setting in JSON, a Javascript configuration file could perform queries before configuring, or it could install callback functions as part of the configuration.

<comment><USER9> > I don't understand why we should use JSON to configure a server, when a much > more powerful language exists: Javascript.

 _Because_ it's more powerful. More powerful, in many cases, is a worse thing. Executable imperative code isn't as flexible as a data file because all you can really do with it is execute it and take the output, rather than process it as you see fit.

See:

Rule of Least Power – [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power)

Principle of Least Power – [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrincipleOfLeastPower](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrincipleOfLeastPower)

<comment><USER8> These articles are phrased as if they are facts. However, they are just some opinions that some people feel are useful.

Take for instance the idea of the "semantic web", where information is stored neatly into proper html tags. It has turned out that this is not a very useful approach to storing information, and nowadays big search engines use machine learning techniques instead to extract the information.</comment></comment></comment>


From Thomas Pynchon, a novel of the dot-com era and the end of history - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/09/thomas_pynchon_s_bleeding_edge_reviewed.single.html

<comment><USER2> A new Pynchon is huge news. And contrary to what some posters here seem to believe, he's not hard to understand, other than certain passages in "Gravity's Rainbow" in which even he apparently doesn't remember what he was talking about. I think a lot of people are simply thrown by his constantly shifting perspectives from one character to another and his weird humour. Plus he has a technical background so he throws a lot of offhand engineering references in there.

I recommend starting with "The Crying of Lot 49", then "V." Both are amazing and both were written when he was quite young (20s). "V." in particular is a stupendous debut novel. I've read it twice and both times I felt a sort of buzz that lasted for a few days, a sure sign I've read something meaningful in some sense (to me, anyway).

<comment><USER3> Pynchon writes two distinct types of novels. V., Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day are is big (literally) complexly plotted novels that frequently involve hundreds of characters and huge forces of history. They are my favorites, but they require serious commitment and even then can be difficult to read (I've never actually gotten through Mason & Dixon.)

He also writes smaller stories that generally focus on a single primary plot with a clear main character driving the story. These are The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice, and from the sound of the review, Bleeding Edge. These don't capture his insane manic complexity except in tiny flashes, but they are far easier to acclimate yourself to Pynchon.

I do think of his "simpler" novels, The Crying of Lot 49 gives the best taste of Pynchon's common obsessions. I enjoyed Inherent Vice and Vineland, but Lot 49 is much more finely polished.

<comment><USER4> The Crying of Lot 49 is also good to start with because it's only 150 pages or so.

His collection of short stories, Slow Learner, has some gems in it. I really liked the second story, Low-lands, the last time I read it.

Around 20 years ago, when I was in college, I collected as much of his non- book stuff as I could and put it on a web page. Oddly, it seems it has survived: [http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/index.html](http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/index.html)

My favorite piece there is the article for Aerospace Safety, from when Pynchon worked at Boeing: [http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/together.html](http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/together.html)

<comment><USER5> My favorite from Slow Learner was "Under the Rose", which he later turned into a chapter of V. I loved the absurdism, steampunk-ish bits, and theme of history as chaotic. They're all pretty good, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The review is like a thesaurus full of pretense took acid, gorged at a buffet and then purged on a Scrabble board. Hopefully the book is better.

<comment><USER7> That's Pynchon. You're describing Pynchon. At least some of the time, and FWIW the reviewer definitely seems to get him & his style.

The 8th paragraph in there is an excerpt from the new book, you'll notice it is 3 sentences, and the 3rd sentence begins about 10-15% of the way in and the 2nd sentence is a mere 8 words. This is typical and there are times where you will stop and take 5+ minutes to review and unpack and digest a single sentence of his when he's really digging his heels in. The payoff however can be absolutely immense.

<comment><USER8> If you're into the long sentences thing, try Laszlo Krasznahorkai: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Melancholy-Resistance-Laszlo- Krasz...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Melancholy-Resistance-Laszlo- Krasznahorkai/dp/0811215040) , [http://www.amazon.com/Satantango-L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3-Krasznahor...](http://www.amazon.com/Satantango-L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3-Krasznahorkai/dp/0811217345)

Sometimes sentences span pages. Each chapter is a single paragraph.

The movie adaptations are fantastic too.

<comment><USER9> Or Faulkner. Where the sentences span entire generations and a single moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a big fan of Mason & Dixon, which was the most difficult fun I've had reading a book in English. Gravity's Rainbow was also great fun. If you're a Buckaroo Banzai fan, and why wouldn't you be, you can thank Pynchon for the defense contractor Yoyodyne, which was appropriated from his novel V.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is that article actually in English? I couldn't understand a damn thing the author was trying to say.

 _"...like a black pearl from an oyster unfathomable by any other diver into our eternal souls."_

What?

<comment><USER12> Welcome to modern literature. If you can understand what they are saying, then it isn't any good. It's like abstract art applied to words.

<comment><USER13> Except that the current vogue in modern literature is hyper-realist memoiristic writing which eschews the Moderist approach of purpled prose in favor of more intimate relations between characters without overbearing literary flourishes e.g. Jonathan Franzen

<comment><USER14> You sound like you know what you're talking about, and I really like Franzen. What other authors can you recommend?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Boss your leisure and have fun regardless of your busy schedule - <AUTHOR> http://funtoole.strikingly.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Need feedback: Would you sign up for this service? If not, what would you change to agree?</comment>


Ask HN: Any Mexican hackers out there? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there, I am starting my startup in Mexico so I was wondering if there are any Mexican hackers out there? Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'm not in Mexico, but it's good to see tech startups in countries other than the US and Europe. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Check <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74054>

Mexican living in Ciudad de Mexico, Im not a practicing hacker though, just very interested in ideas and programming, throw me a line losdosplebitos at gmail.

</comment><comment><USER4> How about the Gnome guy?</comment>


Programming computer animation in 1964 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5mFhDIJfNA <comment><USER2> Interesting. I always thought the first animation ever was Kitty (a cat) by Konstantinov in 1968 on the BESM systems:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O4mm3hXNgA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O4mm3hXNgA)

But if this correct it would actually predate the Kitty animation. Are the computing history/pioneer claims on most of the web wrong? (do a search for Sergey Lebedev and Konstantinov and Kitty and you get claims everywhere that it was the first ever animation ...)

<comment><USER3> It looks like there are even earlier ones than this current one. There is one here from 1963:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RocLdMyUG-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RocLdMyUG-4)

and this wikipedia page lists a Swedish animation from 1961:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_animation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_animation_in_film_and_television)

<comment><USER4> > a Swedish animation from 1961:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhNT501DsJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhNT501DsJI)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember seeing the first computer animations in the 60's. There was something magical and exciting about it. No one will ever experience that culture shift again, as we are all jaded by cumulative accomplishments.

<comment><USER6> Growing up in the 80's and 90's I thought the same thing about video game graphics. How could this stuff get any better? Whenever I get too satisfied about how far things have come in always remind myself of that. At some point computer graphics will be so realistic we won't be able to distinguish it from reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting how much simpler and higher-level this is, compared to other (newer) interfaces for drawing to the screen.

</comment><comment><USER8> So good. It never ceases to amaze me what could be done in such constrained systems (I guess it'll always look like that in retrospect).

For anyone who has never seen it, Sketchpad, from the 60s:

[https://youtu.be/USyoT_Ha_bA?t=3m47s](https://youtu.be/USyoT_Ha_bA?t=3m47s)

Edit: With commentary from Alan Kay! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI)

</comment><comment><USER9> computer animation history buffs will have already noted the earlier works, few as pretty as john whitney's kerrison predictor animations [https://youtu.be/ZrKgyY5aDvA](https://youtu.be/ZrKgyY5aDvA) which he explains here [https://youtu.be/5eMSPtm6u5Y](https://youtu.be/5eMSPtm6u5Y)

</comment><comment><USER10> I love the simplicity of the algorithms too - they looks so nice on a vector- esque display! I had to test out that PLYGN function: [http://mrspeaker.github.io/old-anims/](http://mrspeaker.github.io/old-anims/)

</comment><comment><USER11> The very first draw call I guess.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you not like about your job? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 1\. our company doesn't have a good culture and discipline to write good document. too many things are passed down from mouth to ear, if you are lucky to find someone to teach you. more often, you have to debug to understand code. and I'm talking about millions of lines of device driver code.

2\. we still use very old c99 and pre c++11 standard. on the surface, the reason is because we want to support very old linux distros which don't have new c runtime. but I think the real reason is because the team is in control of old stubborn engineers who have great nostalgia feeling for the c language.

3\. I don't think my daily experience is very rewarding as I spend most of my hours digging other people's code, as there is no document. and in the end of the day, the knowledge I gained was simply some old rules/designs set by previous engineers. I don't think this is real domain knowledge and certainly not very useful outside the company. just because someone joined the company few years before me, his decisions have become things I have to learn and follow.

4\. most of my work is maintenance work, making sure others don't introduce bugs and fixing bugs. not too much new ideas or projects, as this is a very established and stabilized area.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everything</comment>


Drinking While Jurying - <AUTHOR> https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/04/16/drinking-while-jurying#.yxOeTeK4R <comment><USER2> It seems like a sensible line would be, not being under the influence while in court. Additionally not being hungover in court. If you are drinking or hungover you are unable to properly focus on your tasks as a juror.

Additionally limiting discussions of the case with other jurors while drinking seems like a good idea. The Ouija board seems highly inappropriate, since I believe jurors are instructed to not use outside research or experiences in rendering a verdict.

Outside of that these are adults, and the should not lose all agency because they've been picked to serve on a jury.

<comment><USER3> Why moralize though? I'd rather have a brilliant, fair-minded, functioning alcoholic on a jury than a teetotaling nincompoop.

Being on a substance isn't in and of itself a good marker of whether someone is capable of holding their position.

Arguably lack of sleep might be as bad or worse as being drunk. But culturally we don't moralize about the former.

<comment><USER4> It's really interesting to see which attributes we consider to be a failing. Being drunk is considered much worse than being tired even at a similar level of effect.

The one that I really love is how being unintelligent is often considered to be a failing, but only to a point. When someone does something stupid and there's a bad consequence, it's often met with "that's what they deserve, what an idiot!" But there's a sharp cutoff (officially at an IQ of 69 or below) where it ceases to be a moral failing and becomes a handicap worthy of sympathy.

<comment><USER3> Super insightful comment. We have an imperfect system, but what I think _is_ good about it is that jurors are evaluated on their capacity to fairly and impartially decide a case. It sidesteps the need to base the qualification on metrics like IQ, or level of intoxication, etc, and places it in the hands of the lawyers and judges. Imperfect, and there are ways that lawyers exploit it, but IMHO it's ultimately more fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very anecdotal, but I find it interesting that all cases resulted in a conviction. I'd wager that a drinking jury tends to exhibit a reduced amount of empathy, resulting in more guilty convictions than you'd otherwise find.

<comment><USER6> After 14 weeks? I'd side on which ever side was going to prevail with my vote. I think I'd just want it to be over and get back to repairing the damage to my life that 14 weeks on a jury inflicted.

<comment><USER7> While I can understand your sentiment, but that is a really horrible use of one of your most powerful rights as a citizen. It may not change the course of history, but it certainly can change the course of another human being's life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "concluded there was a real danger that what occurred during this misguided ouija session may have influenced some jurors."

I get the feel a whole article could be done on "Regina v. Young (Court of Appeal of England and Wales, 1994)". I somehow think the drinking was just the beginning of a series of problems.

<comment><USER9> > _I get the feel a whole article could be done on "Regina v. Young (Court of > Appeal of England and Wales, 1994)"._

I'm eagerly awaiting the horror movie version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if the same applies to sleep deprivation. Some people don't really do well at the hours required of jury service, one wonders if they are making an important decision with the right level of mental capacity in that case.

<comment><USER11> Arguably deliberating while being drink deprived could result in hasty judgement. Stress, like sleep deprivation, is bound to affect your decision making abilities. Everything in moderation, of course.

<comment><USER12> I hope you mean sleep deprived!

<comment><USER13> Arguably, he could be drink deprived. An alcoholic, forbidden from drinking while on a jury, would be under a lot of physical stress if we assume he or she is capable of abstaining for the duration of a trial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Let's not forget that, many historical (political, war,...) moments in mankind, were heavily influenced by alcohol, or other influencing attributes.

I just want to say that it's more part of life then one assumes. If someone is on Prozac (hey is that okay then?) or someone has a hangover? Or someone who hasn't slept much? Or someone who is on a fast?

There is no normality. The norms of society is the goal, or the barometer, but basically we're all just trying to get by.

</comment><comment><USER15> Juries are one of those things you can write a good book about or have one of those tearful movies where the _normal folk_ come through to make justice prevail in face of an evil prosecutor and police.

But the reality isn't that rosy. The sample size is far too small, and worst of all, juries amplify biases in the system. It's like inverting a matrix, great for a math proof but you never do that in practice.

Just take this writeup on a case in Britain:

[http://www.cyclinguk.org/blog/duncandollimore/mason- verdict](http://www.cyclinguk.org/blog/duncandollimore/mason-verdict)

She just straight rammed into the cyclist from behind. No braking, didn't even stop. But a jury of very likely overwhelmingly drivers have no problem to acquit when there is even the slightest hint of "hey, this could be something that might happen to me!".

</comment><comment><USER16> Readable for at least this line:

"Summary: This case may well be the benchmark for jury bacchanalia."

<comment><USER16> Edit: 5-4 w/dissent from Justice Marshall

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What in the world does this have to do with hacking news?

<comment><USER18> From the HN guidelines:

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

Also:

 _Please don 't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its 'flag' link._</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I want to sell a $18000 domain name, are there any brokers interested? - <AUTHOR> That is the automatic price suggestion of SEDO, the real price could be different. Important to know that it is a one word name and the gTLD extension was introduced in 2014, the date when I registered. It was supposed to be my personal project and that is why I paid a premium price during Early Auction. The idea is not dead after almost 4 years but I'm slow at programming doing another project. There are a few sites who are smaller than SEDO and who try to make a profit by helping people to sell domains and I want to find them. <comment><USER2> Going into Bitcoin instead?</comment>


Computer Science: the 8th Highest Paid College Major - <AUTHOR> http://www.facts.fm/the-32-college-degrees-with-the-highest-starting-and-mid-career-salaries-in-2014/25/

<comment><USER2> Those numbers are meaningless.

I make more right out of college than the purported "mid career" number. But when you put it into context (San Francisco cost of living, etc) it starts to make a bit more sense.

<comment><USER3> They are a bad indicator for trying to determine what your salary would be. But I wouldn't say meaningless.

<comment><USER4> Insofar as people reading it would extrapolate from those numbers to some kind of quality of life / envisioned financial security, out of context I do think they are meaningless. As the parent said, at least location / cost of living needs to be factored in.

That being said, it's probably worth noting for younger folks that ALL of the top fields, in terms of expected compensation, are all STEM fields (mostly engineering). This is coming from one who majored in English, but made the move to the software field, sooo..... maybe eventual field of expertise is more important than "major" anyway. There's nothing to say a particular major locks you into a career path. On the other hand, I probably would have been hard-pressed to transition into something like nuclear engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I seriously doubt the numbers here. CS majors start at $60k? That's what I started at 12 years ago and that was the height of the dom-com bust. I've managed software engineers at a couple different companies so I have a small sample of data, but they all start at $100k for a college hire. (and I'm not in the bay area, so no bay area cost-of-living adjustment)

<comment><USER6> Where?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are the other 7? I can't figure out how to navigate the site from my iPad...

<comment><USER8> Almost everything above is some sort of engineering:

1) Petroleum Engineering

2) Actuarial Mathematics

3) Nuclear Engineering

4) Chemical Engineering

5) Aerospace Engineering

6) Computer Engineering

7) Electrical Engineering

(on web at least you have to click the little arrows on the sides of the images, not sure on iPad)</comment></comment>


Of backdoors and bad-codes - How linux kernel & D-Link routers were backdoored - <AUTHOR> http://arjunsreedharan.org/post/67970413047/of-backdoors-and-bad-codes

<comment><USER2> bad codes</comment>


Five Chinese Children Get Lab-Made Ears Grown from Their Own Cells - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/five-chinese-children-get-lab-made-ears-grown-from-thei-1822531529 <comment><USER2> I suppose making them pointy, like an elf, or with other custom, vanity shapes, was not in the scope of the initial research, but maybe soon...

</comment><comment><USER3> This is incredible. What a time to be alive!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great! I hope we can regrow teeth in the somewhat near future.

</comment><comment><USER5> Man I love living in the future. In 60 years we can hopefully regrow bodies</comment>


Irony Alert: Disney About 'Overzealous Copyright Holders' - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180815/01040040434/irony-alert-disney-yes-disney-whines-about-overzealous-copyright-holders.shtml <comment><USER2> Disney has a long history of screwing other copyright holders over.

The song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was stolen from Zulu musician Solomon Linda. His estate fought Disney for years for compensation.

Most of their stories are based on public domain fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm.

<comment><USER3> The brothers Grimm just wrote them down, old ladies told the stories. So they were in the public domain long before the Grimm brothers got involved. I still have the original German edition of the book somewhere in storage, the engravings with some of the stories gave me the shudders as a young child, and the stories are pretty grisly too.

<comment><USER4> Incredibly grim stories... the harshest one I recall is _Wie Kinder Schlachtens miteinander gespielt haben_ or "Children Played Butcher Together" and it's exactly as it sounds. From the second part of the tale...

 _A man once slaughtered a pig while his children were looking on. When they started playing in the afternoon, one child said to the other: "You be the little pig, and I'll be the butcher," whereupon he took an open blade and thrust it into his brother's neck. Their mother, who was upstairs in a room bathing the youngest child in a tub, heard the cries of her other child, quickly ran downstairs, and when she saw what had happened, drew the knife out of the child's neck, and in a rage, thrust it into the heart of the child who had been the butcher. She then rushed back to the house to see what her other child was doing in the tub, but in the meantime it had drowned in the bath. The woman was so horrified that she fell into a state of utter despair, refused to be consoled by the servants, and hanged herself. When her husband returned home from the fields and saw this, he was so distraught that he died shortly thereafter._

<comment><USER3> Nice coincidence that we use the word 'grim' in English in that particular way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Few things in American law are more reprehensible than the retroactive extension of rights that only exist as an incentive to create.

</comment><comment><USER6> I propose Banksy (Or another artist who can charge top dollar) create a series of images. These would go from regular mouse and slowly each one would be slightly more anthropomorphic and closer to Micky Mouse but never exact. Each would be sold for $300k to cover the copyright infringement fine and lawyer fees for the piece. Each one is sold only once so is a single instance of infringement possibly. See which ones Disney can win and which they can't.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hopefully they'll cite all of Disney's past legal cases and use them against Disney in court for extra irony.

</comment><comment><USER8> I still don't get the "Mickey mouse" theory of copyright law.

Mickey Mouse remains a trademark. Trademarks don't expire.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER9> [http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-232](http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-232)

This my preferred theory as to why copyright keeps getting extended. Take that as you will. Makes more sense than the alternatives. Especially considering that most works aren't actively published anymore, and their authors are dead.

<comment><USER10> Had never heard of SCP before: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation)

At least it's a more reasonable explanation than "reality."</comment></comment></comment>


The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense of Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katherinemiller/the-2010s-have-broken-our-sense-of-time <comment><USER2> I want to read this article, but I can't handle there being some sort of ridiculous rapidly-flashing GIF on the screen at almost all times. Reader Mode doesn't work properly and loses a lot of the text.

If I want to get through it, I'll probably have to adblock all the images or copy-paste the text out into a document or something.

<comment><USER3> It may be intentional. Not just the pictures, but the essay itself I found disorienting, jumping around and repeating. Perhaps I'm being generous, but I feel the style reinforces the thesis that the way we consume content in the last decade 'melts' our perception of time.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I think it's by design as well. It's actually a pretty interesting effect.

If it's giving the above commenter the exact feeling of frustration that the author intends of the 2010's without the reader understanding why, is the unconcious transmission of the article's message a success of the author?</comment></comment></comment>


LThe tiny bug that can turn common elements into 24 carat GOLD - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2212807/21st-Century-alchemy-The-tiny-bug-turn-common-elements-24-carat-GOLD.html?ITO=1490 <comment><USER2> it does not turn "elements" into gold, but a gold compound; lame title, guys.</comment>


It's just that great, happy days are here - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dialmedirect-your-solution-to-all-things-contacts/x/8774948

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW0_D83NLfQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW0_D83NLfQ)</comment>


Evaluating D for games - <AUTHOR> http://maikklein.github.io/2015/01/11/Evaluating-D-for-games/

<comment><USER2> @nogc is still a new addition to the language and phobos is not fully flagged with it. D devs are working on a solution to reduce gc dependence, it's just not quite there yet. There are gc-less stdlibs here if you want to avoid phobos: [http://wiki.dlang.org/Libraries_and_Frameworks#Alternative_s...](http://wiki.dlang.org/Libraries_and_Frameworks#Alternative_standard_libraries_.2F_runtimes)

For game programming you should consider data oriented design. It really helps avoid the gc and makes your code faster and (imo) simpler.

Btw: [http://forum.dlang.org/](http://forum.dlang.org/) is a great place to learn about ongoing development or to ask questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> For what it is worth, my understanding is that andralex et al are re- engineering the dlang GC: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2g03af/ds_garba...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2g03af/ds_garbage_collector_problem/ckent8c)

<comment><USER4> There's a fair amount of recent work on both improving the GC and making it less used. We'll continue that work this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This line also makes me sad

> Stopping all other threads than the thread currently trying to allocate GC > memory

This doesn't need to be the case, and is one of the strengths of garbage collected languages, IMO. Garbage collection can be performed by another cpu asynchronously, essentially making it free.</comment>


Ten years of A List Apart - <AUTHOR> http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tenyears

<comment><USER2> A big congratulations to ALA and a thanks. They are one of the resources that originally got me interested in design and I have been learning from them ever since.</comment>


Private.Center – Private Social Network - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1290418671/privatecenter-private-social-network <comment><USER2> I feel like it's been clearly demonstrated that the average consumer does not care about privacy.</comment>


Five Corrections to The New York Times - <AUTHOR> https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/five-corrections-new-york-times <comment><USER2> Seeing an informed rebuttle like this always reminds me of the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect as illustrated by Michael Crichton:

"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. . . In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

<comment><USER3> I had to google to see what M. Gell-Mann had to do with this ... and it turns out he has nothing to do with it. Crichton just used his name to name an effect.

Is there a better name for this though? from behavioral sciences or psychology?

<comment><USER4> Gell-Mann and Crichton are friends (acquaintances?) who have different expertises and notice different wrong stories in the paper. The parent quote is missing the reference to Gell-Mann, it goes "You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business." I think the name is pretty good as is?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have not read through the whole article yet, but it seems strange and it is unfortunate that this Harvard published request for corrections has no links at the start to the paper in question[1], the nytimes article[2], or David Reich's response he sent to the nytimes[3]. Here are some links.

[1]Skoglund et al. (2016) paper "Genomic insights into the peopling of the Southwest Pacific.", doi: 10.1038/nature19844, [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27698418](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27698418)

[2]"Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps?", [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna- pale...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna- paleogenomics.html)

[3]Never printed by the nytimes, but it would have been nice if he had linked to a personal copy.

<comment><USER6> Mostly agree, but is this really sensible to consider this "Harvard published"? This is just a Harvard PI putting up a letter on his own personal website, albeit one he probably had assistance setting up.

<comment><USER5> I did not notice that it was just his personal site. I just looked at the HN URL. If HN had given the full address (reich.hms.harvard.edu) it's less likely I would have made that mistake. Better stated would have been "published by a Harvard Medical Researcher on his website". It is a pretty polished piece and if he was hoping it gets picked up by someone (like HN), then adding links would have been more professional and make the piece more creditable and useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In person, David Reich is an extremely thoughtful and kind guy. I have no reason to doubt his version of events. Population genetics is a remarkably subtle field, and it's not surprising that a journalist would understand it 95% correctly, with the missing 5% being devastating for their article.

<comment><USER8> you should always be skeptical, even of nice experts. But in this case, he backed up his arguments with fairly good data (some of this stuff is still in open disagreement when he claims it's fact) so anybody in competent in the field (like a fact checker) could verify his claims. But make no mistake: this was a carefully written rebuttal by a master of the scientific arts, designed to maximize impact and make the Times look like they were unfair to him.

<comment><USER6> > by a master of the scientific arts, designed to maximize impact and make the > Times look like they were unfair to him.

As opposed to the journalists who wrote the initial article, who are not masters of their own profession and do not have incentives besides impartially reporting the truth?

Is anyone under the impression that when someone believes they have been falsely represented by a major news outlet and issue a rebuttal that they are trying to maximize impact and make it look like -- i.e., show -- that the outlet was unfair to them?

<comment><USER9> >... do not have incentives besides impartially reporting the truth?

That's a very big assumption and a rather naïve view of modern journalism. Impartially reporting the truth is what we like to think journalists do, but it isn't safe to suggest that's what they actually do.

<comment><USER10> The negative qualifiers in that sentence mean exactly the opposite, due to the "As opposed to" prelude, which is meant to show exasperation.

I think a sarcasm is not the right word to describe this. What is it called? Not quite irony either...

<comment><USER11> Facetious is the word you're looking for. He made the comment in jest, not to be taken seriously

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does the US not have a Press Complaint Authority? In Denmark, we have Pressenævnet[0] which handles complaints against media outlets.

If an article is found to be at fault, the publishing outlet will be required to publish a retraction/correction/apology, depending on the offence. During the review, the outlet can make their case against the complaint.

Does the US not have something similar? Because these complaints sound like the perfect fit for something like this.

[0] [https://www.pressenaevnet.dk/](https://www.pressenaevnet.dk/)

<comment><USER13> I certainly hope we don't.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the press, including the freedom to make mistakes and even outright lie. There is no godlike authority that can tell truth from fiction without fail, and having government censors telling people what they can say (especially w.r.t. political speech) would invert the relationship between the people and their government, making government the master instead of the servant.

Instead, we rely on an educated readership to identify bias and mistakes and call them out, as has been done here. People get the journalism they deserve. To the extent we're failing to teach our children critical thinking skills, we're putting our democracy at risk.

The NY Times and other resources currently considered "credible" have earned that credibility from the people not through government permission but by generally providing a useful service to its consumers, despite all the mistakes they make and biases they present.

The NY Times in particular has unfortunately been burning through that hard- earned credibility capital at an alarming rate, even long before the current last few years, with the result that there are large portions of the country that no longer trust it like they did, with good reason. More recently they have taken the bait proffered by Trump and his ilk and lowered themselves to his level, spinning most articles I've seen with more political or oppositional bias than in the past.

I can only hope this is a cyclical phenomenon, where the citizenry/readership becomes ignorant of the related history and its challenges, simply because we've lived through a period where the battles were won and we could take such things for granted. Just like our predecessors, this generation is going to painfully relearn that everything printed (or typed) should be taken with a grain of salt and cross-checked against multiple sources.

<comment><USER14> >The NY Times and other resources currently considered "credible"

Yea, but...

>The NY Times in particular has unfortunately been burning through that hard- earned credibility capital at an alarming rate

Ah, never mind you got it.

>More recently they have taken the bait proffered by Trump

How this isn't being observed by more people is stunning. 100% of the time, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo are running what they think is an effective awareness and information campaign - and is in reality going to cause scandal fatigue and hurt their credibility. Everyone complains about his Twitter... stop airing every single one of his tweets. In another two years, the country won't be on fire, and statistically Trump has a good chance at re-election.

All the media pearl clutching, faux-rage, and surface depth "activism" aren't helping... well, it's not helping them anyhow.

<comment><USER15> > 100% of the time, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo are running what they think is an > effective awareness and information campaign - and is in reality going to > cause scandal fatigue and hurt their credibility. Everyone complains about > his Twitter... stop airing every single one of his tweets.

But right now it's good for those sweet clicks. They have an audience who loves to get worked up about Trump, just as there's an audience that loves to get worked up about the kind of people who get worked up about Trump. They have their own content, too.

<comment><USER16> You will likely be interested in this recent New Yorker article which considers this topic.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/does- journalis...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/does-journalism- have-a-future)

And accompanying interview with Jill Abramson.

[https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker- interview/how-...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker- interview/how-journalism-survives-an-interview-with-jill-abramson)

But, basically... yes, what you said. And newspapers mostly lack any credible business plan ideas that don't rely on this.

There is currently no real demonstrated business model to sustainably pay for good journalism. Some are hoping they can at least fund good journalism with clickbait and sponsored content... ugh.

<comment><USER14> I agree with both of you, and pose this question... do you think they have more desire to see Trump not win again because of their integrity - or want Trump to win because it's extremely good for business?

<comment><USER16> Oh, I'm pretty sure political topics will continue being clickbait for quite some time whether Trump wins or not.

I think most of those who work at the NYT would like Trump not to be president, and most of those who work at Fox News would like him to be president.

_Covering_ Trump is good for business for both of them though. And if Trump is out, there will be some other topics that are either way too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18960718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18960718)

<comment><USER18> To be clear, the link you posted is a discussion on the previous letter sent to a more general audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand that people are still surprised that articles, particularly about complex issues, mess things up or gets facts wrong. I think a journalist context switches a lot (even in the same field) and it's hard to get everything right. I don't read news as facts, more like indications that something have happened and if it's sounds interesting I do some reasearch about it or check reports or follow numbers on my own. I never assume that news reporters gets the whole story. It perplexes me when people scream "fake news" or something. "Fake news" doesn't exist because the opposite doesn't either. When we talk about news, Plato got it right.

<comment><USER20> It's not that mistakes happen, it's that retractions are usually hidden and do not contain the same level of effort to educate the reader as the initial incorrect reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This seems to be in reply to: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna- pale...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna- paleogenomics.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> can someonepost the link to the main article in question?

<comment><USER23> Maybe this- [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna- pale...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna- paleogenomics.html) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Edit: I was looking at a corrected article. Ignore this post.

I don't know a whole lot about this, but I do know that if you write something to show that you were misrepresented in an article you need to be extremely careful to not misrepresent the article.

He says:

>The article wrongly states that in 2015 my colleagues I argued that the population of Europe was "almost entirely" replaced by people from the Eastern Europe Steppe

When the article says:

>Almost entirely replaced existing commmunities [snip] in Central and Northern Europe.

<comment><USER25> " Correction: Jan. 25, 2019 An earlier version of this article misstated the number of peer reviewers who evaluated the 2016 Nature paper "Genomic Insights Into the Peopling of the Southwest Pacific" before publication. It was four, not three; a fourth reviewer was added to evaluate the paper after the original submission was revised. The article also misstated the geographical area where migrants from the steppes of eastern Ukraine and southern Russia significantly replaced existing communities of hunter-gatherers and early farmers, as reported in an academic paper on the migration. It was Central and Northern Europe, not the entire continent. "

<comment><USER24> Whoops! Fooled by the edit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article's title says "New York Times", but the article itself says "New York Times Magazine". They're completely different publications...

<comment><USER27> I think completely different publications is a bit exaggerated. According to wiki:

"The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors."

I also was curious as to how supplement was defined within the context of publishing and again according to wiki:

"A supplement is a publication that has a role secondary to that of another preceding or concurrent publication. A follow-on publication complements its predecessor, either by bringing it up to date (e.g. the Index Catalogue), or by otherwise enhancing the predecessor's coverage of a particular topic or subject matter, as in the Tosefta."

In my opinion the difference is insignificant.

<comment><USER28> They don't seem to share staff though, at least not on the editor level, compare: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/admin/the-new- york-...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/admin/the-new-york-times- masthead.html) and [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/magazine/masthead.html](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/magazine/masthead.html)

There's also the obvious difference that one is a newspaper and the other is a magazine; I think it's just a bit unclear what is being meant when they claimed they are "different publications".</comment></comment></comment>


Last Days of Reality: Facebook profiling, machine learning, augmented reality - <AUTHOR> http://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-last-days-of-reality/ <comment><USER2> Exceptional, factual, frightening story. Everyone who uses social media needs to read this. It is a wake up call for us all and hopefully a call to action for some...

</comment><comment><USER3> All of the references in the article were published here [https://markpesce.com/meanjin/](https://markpesce.com/meanjin/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice. Terrifying.</comment>


Canadian McDonald's table redirects visitors to Wes Bos Twitter account - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/wesbos/status/1232283184299155458 <comment><AUTHOR> Apparently each table in the London, Ontario McDonald's has an NFC chip. So someone reprogrammed one to go to Wes Bos twitter account and another to go to Pornhub, yikes!</comment>


9th Circuit says users can sue Facebook over unlawful use of facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.aclu-il.org/en/press-releases/federal-court-rules-facebook-users-can-sue-company-over-unlawful-use-face-recognition <comment><USER2> _In an opinion by Judge Ikuta, the court "concludes that the development of a face template using facial-recognition technology without consent (as alleged here) invades an individual's private affairs and concrete interests." As the court explained, "the facial-recognition technology at issue here can obtain information that is 'detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled,' which would be almost impossible without such technology."_

Possessing a picture of someone's face is OK, but creating a model that represents that face is not OK if that model can be compared to another picture to categorize it.

Possessing a picture of someones face is OK, and having a human create a mental model that represents that face is OK as well even if that can be compared to another picture to categorize it.

The argument seems to center around how easy/hard or expensive/cheap the process is.

<comment><USER3> The argument to me centers around the same terrible "but do it on a computer" sentiment that's been brandished to outlaw things that would otherwise be perfectly legal in meatspace. But something about doing normal things electronically is scary, and since it's easy to ban, that's the hammer we have.

Other examples include:

* Trading card game booster packs vs. video game loot boxes

* Taking notes about people who visit your physical store vs. taking notes about people who browse to your website

That said - I do realize I'm in the minority opinion here re: GDPR, etc. But the inconsistency really disturbs me, I don't agree with a ban on facial recognition: who is to tell someone what they can and can't do with a bucket of bits? What about other automated recognition for content moderation - surely automatically detecting nudity is OK by the law? But what if those recognition models wind up doing some form of emergent facial recognition via unsupervised learning? How could someone even verify that?

<comment><USER4> Let's make a short thought experiment... imagine Superman just came to earth and has perfect memory and the possibility trace your (and everyone else's) every footstep with his superhuman hearing and vision. Would that require new laws to deal with him or would you simply carry on as is because "it's Superman! He won't do evil..."?

It's not "but do it on a computer" rather it's "but when it becomes unprecedented"...

We are facing a completely new type of society where these types of entities are very likely to exist, we need to figure out how to deal with this.

<comment><USER3> You're correct that the technology is unprecedented.

But, there's a lot of unprecedented technology invented every day. And for the most part we do just carry on as usual. That's part of what made the original internet such a beautiful place - we didn't try to waterlog it with proactive legislation because of potential bad things that could happen. Instead, that freedom created the wonderful ecosystem we have today.

The (US) law eventually reacted, but for the most part did so in a measured and reasonable fashion to form things like DMCA and CFAA.

Conversely, it's my opinion that _proactive_ lawmaking leads to disastrous and overly broad, unenforceable, and burdensome laws like SOPA and CALEA. And I see this kind of ban on facial recognition to be firmly in the _proactive_ category.

<comment><USER4> I guess the main difference between now and then is that we are starting to have an idea of what is going to be possible and already see "dark uses" of technology happening (e.g., surveillance in china) whereas beforehand we were clueless about those things.

I think that rejecting proactive legislation per se is a dangerous attitude. For example, see climate change. Proactive legislation could have made us avoid all of the discussions we are now working through during crunch time...

If we have reasonable evidence that there is a high likelihood of us creating worlds that we don't want to live in, we should take reasonable action proactively to avoid those scenarios.

Thus, I agree with you that not all unprecedented technologies need to be proactively legislated but as soon as there is reasonable evidence for possible negative consequences we should start reasonable processes to avoid those consequences. There is no black or white situation here, we need to have evidence based discussions and work our way through this collectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This case is about whether they can be held accountable; it has already been established that they knowingly violated the law. The law says that the aggrieved party can sue for $1000 to $5000 per violation, and Facebook violated the law millions of times.

<comment><USER6> _The law says that the aggrieved party can sue for $1000 to $5000 per violation, and Facebook violated the law millions of times._

Move over, mesothelioma TV commercials. We have a new target for the bottom- feeding lawyers.

<comment><USER7> Good. Maybe they can extract a fee from FB that will actually hurt them.

<comment><USER8> Legal industry reporting calls the underlying matter a "$30 billion class action lawsuit," so it'll be interesting to see how that matter proceeds now that Facebook has lost its first dispute against standing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google photos is tracking my face and anyone else whose photos I have taken from my phone and I cannot turn this off. They enable a "search photos by people" feature. I find this creepy and ominous. I never asked for this.

Can I sue them for them to stop?

<comment><USER10> You can choose to turn off this feature in settings: [https://photos.google.com/settings](https://photos.google.com/settings)

Screenshot of the relevant settings: [https://i.imgur.com/Xg4wkPV.png](https://i.imgur.com/Xg4wkPV.png)

According to their relevant help page about it ([https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6128838?co=GENIE.Pl...](https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6128838?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en)), turning the setting off also deletes:

\- Face groups in your account

\- Face models used to create those face groups

\- Face labels you created

<comment><USER9> Thank you, this works!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why just users? Surely people who _haven 't_ signed up to Facebook, but have their photos uploaded by someone else and subsequently analysed, should be included?

</comment><comment><USER12> How would this apply in a situation wherein a person uploads a picture of a minor that they are not the legal guardian for? Could that person sue the uploader of the photo for damages of having to go after Facebook? If situations like that are feasible under this then I would expect K-12 school districts to implement swift measure to ban all teachers from taking pictures of students as to avoid putting themselves in the middle. I find it egregious public schools don't have better policy on banning social media uploads of minors since it's such a gray area right now.

<comment><USER13> When my kid was in elementary school we were expected to sign a "students in media" waiver that basically let them use the pictures they took of the children however they wanted. I don't know if it was required but it was heavily pushed and included with a packet of about a thousand things to sign, most of which were required.

I never signed it. I just included the unsigned piece of paper (among others I disagreed with) in amongst the pile of papers I turned in to them. Nothing ever came of not signing but I suspect I could sue them now.

<comment><USER14> Honestly, I think this practice is horrible. Kids don't deserved to be plastered all over Facebook by their school. It's deeply uncomfortable.

<comment><USER15> it's cultural, too - there are many super popular apps for obscuring your kids face in Japan (or amongst japanese baseball players in the US, if you want to find some easy examples)

<comment><USER16> What's the Japanese baseball player reference here?

<comment><USER17> Probably they're Japanese players bought by us teams and so bring their families over. They're not immigrants and will likely go home and they're culturally Japanese, so I expect they practice Japanese norms on social media like obscuring their children's faces when posting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ok well at risk of being cease and desisted again by FB, in addition to them doing facial recognition - they take pictures and track every vehicle that drives by their HQ and report all those license plates back to Menlo Park.

Its an invasion of privacy of all cars and drivers in the vicinity and should be illegal.

Fuck facebook.

</comment><comment> dfeojm-zlib One or more US federal agencies place innocent people who happen to work in a sensitive industry on one or more types of watch list that they scrape associated metadata and facial recognition to detect an association with suspicious people/criminals/persons of interest. I know this for a fact because one of my friends at a big name malware forensics got a call from his manager that the government noticed he was tagged in a picture at a conference after-party with someone who was on a "baddies" watchlist.

</comment><comment><USER19> 2009: Are you smart enough to be a Facebook engineer?

2019: Are you scummy enough to be a Facebook engineer?

<comment><USER20> This is so true. The way they are acting I feel like with people inclining towards "ethical" side of the spectrum leaving facebook and the culture is going to shift more and more into unethical.

<comment><USER21> honest question: do you think there was a moment in the history of facebook in which it was ethical, excluding the very beginning period?

<comment><USER22> The very beginning? Doesn't the famous Zuck quote put even that into the scummy period?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> here comes the lawsuit settlement: $147 Million for the lawyers, $5 million for the state and $3 million total for the users that spend 10 hours filling forms.

In other words, this is ineffective. I hope EU cripples them, not even $5B FTC fines scare them.

</comment><comment><USER24> This only appears to apply in Illinois, unfortunately.

<comment> munk-a It's sad it's so limited, but it might spread!

<comment><USER25> It appears limited according to the article because of an existing statute found in Illinois law.

Does anyone know if other states have similar laws? Wonder what type of momentum would have to manifest for other state legislatures to get a similar bill into committee for debate

<comment><USER26> A related effort is restricting what state and local gov can do with facial recognition. The cities of San Francisco, CA and Somerville, MA have passed ordinances, and NYC is considering it (as if the NYPD cares) but city bans obviously have major limitations.

It looks to me like momentum on facial recognition is building now. Call your state reps, tell your friends, find folks who feel the same way and make some noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 9th Circuit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had it right initially but got confused because Illinois isn't 9th circuit. But Facebook is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I find this sort of litigiousness to be bullshit because it incentivizes signing up for Facebook. I can't be party to some lawsuit against Facebook if I don't have an account ("users").

I deleted my Facebook a few years ago, so if some class-action suit comes out for people who were users in 2018+, where's my payout? How is such a system fair to people who had the sense to either delete before whatever time horizon is used in a case or people who never created an account? None of these people who could win the lottery in court suffered a real loss.

<comment> matt-tingen Why do you feel entitled to a payout for an event in which you were not involved and for which you experienced no damages?

<comment><USER28> I don't. I don't think anyone is entitled to a payout, as Facebook users did not pay Facebook causing some sort of breach of contract. They are owed nothing IMO.

Yet the legal system gives people an incentive here to sign up for free services so they can one day reap the rewards when Free Service X slips up and breaks State Law Y. Admittedly, the rewards will be small. But nonetheless, it is an incentive and aggregated across society it isn't nothing.

This sort of litigious behavior just slides us further and further into a culture of dishonesty and makes a mockery of the justice system.

Also, let me be more specific given there's another thread on here about this. What makes _anyone_ think they're entitled to _" $5,000"_ for signing up for a free service and uploading their photos to it? This is absurd. Please explain specifically how running a facial recognition algorithm on person's photos is equivalent to "$5,000" worth of damages. Where did that number come from? Why not $1 or $1,000,000?

<comment><USER29> Maybe Free Service X should avoid breaking State Law Y.

<comment><USER28> Maybe people should stop using Facebook.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How SWARM INTELLIGENCE enables groups to make predictions that beat the odds - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0512/Smarter-as-a-group-How-swarm-intelligence-picked-Derby-winners <comment><USER2> I'm starting to think that this event, while clearly atypical ( i don't think they'll hit the Preakness Superfecta) represents the second most impressive thing to happen in AI this year behind Alpha Go.</comment>


Ask HN: Any way to access gmail IMAP through openid/oauth? - <AUTHOR>

Been scouring through google trying to find an answer to this. I suspect to access a user's email through IMAP one currently needs the credentials..<p>I've seen a few ways to get at contacts and such through openid/oauth but not email IMAP access. <comment><AUTHOR> Yep.. I think I've verified it is currently impossible to access IMAP without asking for user credentials.

It would be nice to though. I can see all kinds of use cases for web apps integrating with gmail and other email providers in this way - without having to ask the user for their login/password.

</comment><comment><USER2> In general, OpenID/OAuth don't do well with non-browser clients and don't do non-HTTP protocols at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah got that. This actually is for a web app as ironic as that sounds.

I wondered if IMAP could be authenticated using openid/oauth without having to make the user fork over their credentials.</comment></comment>


Show HN: So I'm building a new social network called JellyChip - <AUTHOR> http://www.jellychip.com

<comment><USER2> Your home page looks terrific. Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mgav, appreciate it. If you fancy give the site a whirl and let me know what you think. It's been a year in the making but it's out in the open now and ready to do some social good!</comment></comment>


How Facebook Really Stacks Up Against Pre-IPO Google - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/05/facebook-pre-ipo-google/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> It will be more interesting if we can get data on when monetization began for both google and facebook and how they compare since then</comment>


Show HN: ulisesrmzroche.github.io | marketing page - <AUTHOR>

http://ulisesrmzroche.github.io
Hi ya'll,
I just shipped the MVP of the marketing page for a web dev  consulting business I'm trying to start up. Would greatly appreciate any/all feedback before I start work on v2. Thanks for your time! <comment><USER2> Just a couple of thoughts.

If you're aiming for small, non-tech-savvy local businesses, I suggest shortening both the headline and the paragraphs. Say less, and address their pain points directly ("My web apps will save you money. Here's how.")

Also, small business owners will likely not know what Github, AngelList, coderwall and such mean. You need to provide cases studies (perhaps with screenshots) and explain what you did, and how it increased revenue or saved money for your employers.

Lastly, are you tracking clicks on the Call To Action? How many visits are coming from your surrounding area? How can you increase that number?

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the critique!

I launched v2 last night taking into consideration the feedback I got here.

I decided to aim for tech-savvy startups and web design shops instead. I'm catching more leads this way.

Next up, instead of the picture, I'm going to make an ember.js screencast explaining its convention over configuration design pattern and why this is going to be great for your business (see Ruby on Rails). I figured that will give keep the layout, and provide more value right off the bat, hopefully getting people to read on.

What do you think?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do ya'll think the serif font worked? The goal is to enhance readability for the body-copy. It's straying away from convention (non-serif), but I want to take advantage of the ligatures to get people to keep reading that body-copy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable Link: [http://ulisesrmzroche.github.io](http://ulisesrmzroche.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER3> What is your goal with this website?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's supposed to catch leads. I'm trying to get people to click on the "Let's Talk" button and contact me to talk some more about their project.

Do you think I should make the promise more obvious? I was afraid I was not being specific enough.

<comment><USER3> OK, I get that you want to generate leads. What I mean is what are you trying to express to the end user?

I get the idea that you built it with Ember and that you have some experience on the development side (because I'm a developer and viewed source), but the site doesn't seem to show off your capabilities.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to do code and marketing for local businesses, and coaching in project management. No hi-tech startups for now. The tech stack would be my advantage right now, I think, among all the other small web shops.

Problem is that I don't have a freelance portfolio, so most of my projects actually belong to other people. I put my angel list profile as a pseudo- resume.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The rise of functional programming and the decline of Angular 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolksoftware.com/the-rise-of-functional-programming-and-the-death-of-angularjs <comment><USER2> Bullshit. The "decline" of angular hasn't happened, and if it happens it will have nothing to do with OOP and everything to do with its extreme complexity (build system, dependency injection, view directives, on and on).

I know "functional programming" is pretty (popular|trendy), and rightfully so. It's pretty awesome. But it's not a panacea. And it's not helpful to talk about OOP and FP as if they are mutually exclusive let alone opposites.

One of the most important principles in programming is to use appropriate abstractions. _All UIs are state machines. Classes are state machines. Any attempt to make your UI as stateless as possible is just inviting leaky abstractions._

<comment><USER3> > The "decline" of angular hasn't happened

Not the decline but I guess before migration to 2.0 a lot of Users will reevaluate if they will use 2.0. I doubt that only a few already migrated to Angular 2.

Tooling gets better but in Angular 1 there are a lot of ways to create a project and minify it etc. On Angular 2 a lot of documentation is still missing. We have a big angular 1 app but I'm not sure if we will migrate to 2.0. I also think that once an Application get's really large it's painful to use a framework that isn't tailored to your needs anyway.

<comment><USER4> At my job we have a large angular application, and several smaller react + redux + flavor of the month.

We will never move to angular 2, not because it's not a good idea, but because we don't need it.

One of the most expensive lessons of these framework wars (in my opinion) is that the vast majority of problems don't need them or warrant the complexity.

Angular everywhere is the wrong approach, just as react everywhere is wrong.

Now if only I could convince the front-end engineers that their static form and homepage doesn't need react + redux + Babel + webpack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So this article is basically saying. I am opinionated about how we should Design. Angular 2.0 is opinionated in the you should design. We think that Angular 2.0 way of design sucks, for anecdotal reasons. Thus Angular is going to fail.

This just seems to be hyperbolic.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well angular 2 is mostly written the same way every time you want to build something and is connected through a custom html tag. This allows you to not deal with js that is built 100 different ways for a 100 different reasons. Not just that but file structure is exactly the same always. Basically angular1 was just a step up from JavaScript which seemed nice but really with not much reusability. Plus since you can build components inside components, you don't have to worry about implementation into a project. With RC5s new modules, you don't have to worry about importing into those components. So basically you can easily implement the app into any project with the same components and the same way always. Basically once you make one, you don't have to rewrite it. They even have their own CSS files, and use life cycle hooks so you can have different components fire off at different render times or events. It is basically the jquery of data. Also with easy observables, server side rendering, and simple data binding, you really can do anything. Angular 2 and 1 are night and day

</comment><comment><USER7> OOP and FP are not mutually exclusive.

Inheritance over composition, Internal class state, Imperative state mutations

Only the last one is important. Internal state can exist in FP its just either immutable or private. I think even hardcore OOP people encourage composition over inheritance as much as possible and class based inheritance is not anti- thetical to FP (see scala)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm really hoping that Aurelia starts getting more attention, and becomes an accepted next move from Angular.js 1.

People have already mentioned some of the practical problems with Angular 2. OOP vs. functional styles is an interesting debate, but Angular 2, React and Ember each have more basic issues than that, around things like onboarding new developers, project setup, usability, and support. All three have different, but big, deal-breakers for me.

</comment><comment><USER9> The only useful feature of Angular is ng-table. For everything else there's Bootstrap + D3.

<comment><USER10> I also love ${TOOLKIT_IM_ACCUSTOMED_TO}! It's very good and does all things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This fits with my view of the world</comment>


Windows Task Manager Runs Doom (896 Cores) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSoCmAoIMOU&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> This seems to be fake: [https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/hsryyn/windows_ta...](https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/hsryyn/windows_task_manager_runs_doom_896_cores/fyclcpx/)

<comment><USER3> Yup. This one was thoroughly debunked. @winocm on Twitter actually did render a video in Task Manager though: [https://twitter.com/winocm/status/1276037359503466497](https://twitter.com/winocm/status/1276037359503466497)</comment></comment>


IBM 704 Manual of Operation - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/images/manuals/IBM_704/IBM_704.html

<comment><USER2> Some other manuals for the 704 are at <http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/704/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Very nice. Thank you for the link. For those who do not know, the IBM 704 was the first hardware target for Lisp. It motivated the quirky `car` and `cdr` names.</comment></comment>


Racket: John Carmack's VRScript Samples (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jb55/vrscript-samples <comment><USER2> For anyone interested in how I gathered these: I noticed a versioning pattern from the snippets he was sharing online. I started poking around and tried to put together a git history of changes by guessing version filenames on oculus' s3 bucket.

So if you do `git log --reverse -p c9bd14f361cc4e537425f6d634367415059ad5e3..HEAD` you can see a snapshot of some of his vrscript development

<comment><USER3> Do we know if he or the other oculus team members are still using racket?

<comment><USER4> If I remember correctly, Facebook told him to drop Racket and use JavaScript instead.

<comment><USER5> That's not just sad, it is really strange. Seems enterprise would never learn from the mistakes of the past. Javascript is new Java - it's getting bigger every year, its syntax almost confusing and often feels inconsistent, sometimes it doubtlessly does utterly stupid things.

Most experienced developers dislike the language. Beginner developers also find it confusing. Days of low barrier entry to JS are long gone.

Clojurescript, Elm, ReasonML, Purescript, etc. there are multiple better options. Yet instead of embracing PLs that can fix many of the drawbacks, big enterprise keeps insisting on it. Sigh...

<comment><USER6> > That's not just sad, it is really strange

Doesn't seem strange at all for a company pushing a technology for mass adoption to choose one of the most common languages which possibly has the most eyes in the world on its performance metrics, keep in mind VR has to hit framerates up to 90fps.

<comment><USER5> Facebook has already made that mistake with PHP. They are still paying the hefty price for that. Language popularity at a given time doesn't guarantee a higher ROI in the future. For the next couple of decades, CS experts will be debating over languages that optimized for programmer's productivity, optimized for performance and languages that offer correctness (probably via type systems and other mechanisms). Javascript today doesn't fit any of these categories, and although it is quickly evolving, it still hasn't shifted towards any of those sides. It has become more performant than initially, but yet not fast enough (e.g.: for native apps). Sadly the story is old, happened many times - happened to Joe Armstrong and Erlang at Ericson, that happened at MIT when they switched from Scheme to Python. It happens whenever companies ignore their engineers and arguments they make, but eagerly listen to their Marketing and Sales teams.

Honestly, I would love to see faces of those stupid imbeciles who after hearing all John Carmack's arguments that tool X is making him very productive, later tell him that he cannot use that tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Racket is the language used in the project, I think it should rather be "John Carmack's VRScript Samples in Racket" for the title.

</comment><comment><USER8> can see his office here: [https://s3.amazonaws.com/o.oculuscdn.com/v/test/social/avata...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/o.oculuscdn.com/v/test/social/avatars/office_john.JPG)

<comment><USER9> What does it say on the wall?

<comment><USER10> OTOY - "Render the Metaverse" JULY 2015

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He also did a live coding demo showing off this VR scripting concept. Having such a fast iteration cycle is very compelling. Hopefully at least some Javascript version of this will exist, even though this seems like a perfect application for a Lisp.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs)

I wish he did live coding. Jonathan Blow's Twitch channel (naysayer88) is very compelling. Carmack's would be as well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> related:

live coding session from Oculus Connect 2 (in 2015): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs)

previous discussions on the live coding session:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11056973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11056973) (2016)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279385) (2015)

</comment><comment><USER12> I initially read the title as "John Carmack's VBScript Samples" and I was very perplexed as to when would have John Carmack ever had to mess around with that...

</comment><comment><USER13> They are switching to JS from Racket, which is a shame. It would be great if one could just do

#lang javascript

and use the same stuff. Truffle/Graal is a much better and complete and performant alternative to Racket now for implementing languages. You write a normal AST interpreter and add annotations for optimizations.

</comment><comment><USER14> Trying to explore gamedev in Racket myself so cool to see the matrix related stuff in [https://github.com/jb55/vrscript- samples/blob/master/vr.rkt](https://github.com/jb55/vrscript- samples/blob/master/vr.rkt)

</comment><comment><USER15> What was the general idea / purpose behind these scripts? I never thought I'd be interested in looking at Racket again after my undergrad at NEU.

<comment><USER16> John wanted racket to be the main scripting language for vr apps that are lightweight and don't need a lot of horsepower. [https://youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs)</comment></comment>


Show HN: ZenUML.com makes drawing sequence diagram easier and faster - <AUTHOR> https://www.zenuml.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> ZenUML has just been featured on [https://modeling-languages.com/zenuml- drawing-sequence-diagr...](https://modeling-languages.com/zenuml-drawing- sequence-diagram-easier-faster/) (the No 1 independent blog on modeling and MDE).</comment>


Stuart Ellman: Not Everyone Gets a Trophy - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/everyone-deserves-a-trophy-2010-4

<comment><USER2> I really hate the political correctness of business relationships. It forces people to read between the lines to try to figure out what is really going on.

The author seems to feel there is little upside to being straightforward with people and alot of potential downside. I think if you're truthful without being a jerk about it people will generally appreciate it. Those who don't are probably not the kind of people who whose opinions will greatly hurt your reputation anyways. Shouldn't better communication always lead to better chances of success?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not familiar with the environment, but I generally agree. I'd much rather a VC express that he thinks I'm wasting my time than give a noncommital non- answer.

There's a more nefarious reason for the so-called "political correctness", although this may not apply to the OP. VCs never want to say no; it's easier to be noncommittal.</comment></comment>