iPhone Future - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/iphone-future-7ce9c2e4fad4#.u85p7kmhu <comment><USER3> After a series of Android devices, my first iPhone was the 6 Plus. The main reasons for me switching over were: 1\. Ridiculously reliable battery. (People who have used both platforms will mostly agree, I think.) 2\. 6 Plus was the first iPhone that did not seem tiny to me. 3\. I really wanted to use it myself for a while and form my own opinions.

A year and a half of use later, my thoughts: 1\. Totally awesome battery experience. 2\. It's good, stable, reliable but it gets so... boring.

My next phone, whenever it is, is probably going to be the largest Nexus device available.

On a side note, it is so great to read a series of comments about iOS and Android that does not degenerate into a trolling competition.

<comment><USER4> FWIW battery life on my Nexus 6p has been very good and also consistent. Nexus is definitely the way to go if you want an Android phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a seven year iPhone owner I'm bored by it!

Why isn't it water proof yet? Why hasn't Apple released a wireless charging feature? Why haven't they come up with something freaking amazing..iWatch no one wants that. Apple TV with Apple cable TV service people might want that but why haven't they bought Dish who has sling TV or made similar purchases?

I don't think I'm the only bored iPhone owner?

<comment><USER6> I couldn't agree with you more. I'm bored. The thing is I like the simplicity of iPhones and I have been using them for past 7 years as well. Now it got to a point where small incremental features were not doing anything for me. I switched to Nexus 6P recently. It is one hell of a phone. So many features, so much customization! The access to file system (not root) is one thing that I would not be able to live without anymore. Having directories to put files and music in is so simple and similar to using a Mac/PC. I do miss iMessage and FaceTime though. If the rumor about WWDC bringing iMessage to Android is true I don't see a reason to go back to the iPhone.

<comment><USER4> I can't figure out why Apple has neglected their stock keyboard for so long. They _finally_ added autosuggestions but their keyboard still lags far behind third party offerings in speed, feature set, and flexibility. And third party keyboards are still so buggy on iOS as to be almost unusable. About 90% of my use of a smart phone is messaging in some form so this is a big deal.

And iMessage is buggy enough that I long ago switched to WhatsApp and haven't looked back. Apple makes great hardware but their software is increasingly falling behind the competition.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, iOS is the only platform which has a default keyboard that lets me use typographically appropriate characters, such as actual smart quotes ("" '), real ellipsis (…), and the correct hyphens (- – —).

This has been true since at least iOS 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > particularly when compared to the company's competitors whose reliance on an > increasingly fragmented Android macrocosm isn't likely to lead to a > polished, reliable experience.

I would know why he says that Android fragmentation is increasing and what he means with fragmentatoin

<comment><USER9> What percentage of the market is running Marshmellow? How many are even 5.0+? That's one serious indicator of fragmentation alone (there's a lot more), and trends don't show it improving.

Edit:

Here's a link to some numbers from Google [0]. Per their own chart, ~55% of Android users are running a 3 year old or older OS.

[0] [https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html#Pl...](https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html#Platform)

<comment><USER10> The average consumer doesn't know or care if there phone is on 4.0 or 4.1 or whatever. They care if their phone works well and integrates well with the services they care about. There isn't much sign that Apple is going to overtake Android in the ways that matter anytime soon, regardless of which exact version your are running.

<comment><USER9> They care when the app the want to install doesn't run and they can't upgrade their phone. I know that's been a factor for many who have switched back to iOS that I know.

Furthermore, I made ZERO claims iOS would overtake Android (very likely never will, in fact I'd bet on it never happening), I answered a question re: fragmentation. I also responded factually with a link to an unarguable source (so the down voters prove their hater mentality denying facts, but alas).

<comment><USER11> There hasn't really been a major issue with app compatibility since 2.3. Even so, all but 2.3% of android phones are running 4.x or above.

[http://www.statista.com/statistics/271774/](http://www.statista.com/statistics/271774/)

<comment><USER12> If you are stuck targeting Android API version 14 _forever_ , that is a problem. It means Google can never introduce anything new that people can actually use without alienating a portion of the userbase.

Albeit, that was also a perceived huge issue four years ago with 2.3 and version 9, and today all those 2.3 devices are mostly gone.

But in the same way the mhz race was a limited time thing, and after that personal computer sales slowed drastically because the year over year improvements have been much more minute, Google cannot just assume that the planned obsolesce of contract phones will force users to change hardware to keep pace with the OS. A lot of the 4.x era Android devices will be "good enough" for many people in the same way Core 2 was "good enough" for most casual PC users.

And we have seen the fallout of that. Users do not care if their Windows XP is catastrophically insecure when no longer updated, they keep using it until disaster strikes. And the same is bound to happen to all these Android phones that stop getting updates.

I don't think I've ever seen greater technical debt than the accumulated mess of Android device drivers and the OEM habit of forking the kernel and violating the GPL to stick proprietary blobs in and then freeze the kernel, which means every device is on a forced obsolescence cycle whenever their kernel can no longer work with the latest Android requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >After letting Samsung and others take the lead in large screen smartphones (5.5" or larger phablets), Apple Finally introduced its own large iPhone 6 Plus in September 2014.

What an ignorant comment. Samsung pioneered the large screen smartphone. They took the risk when everyone was mocking the size of their phones as if they were jokes. Once the market proved them correct everyone else rushed in - including Apple. To belittle this accomplishment speaks to this person's bias towards Apple.

Apple never let Samsung take the lead in large screen smartphones - <USER2> they did what they usually do - wait for another player to create the market and then move in on it.

<comment><USER14> I think your description of what happened is exactly what is meant by "letting Samsung and others take the lead" \-- Apple let itself be surpassed, in that it could have done otherwise, but didn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I switched back from Android for the 6s because I was tired of fragmentation and terrible battery life. I gave up a lot, customizations, amazing tweaks, workflows, etc. I miss Android. There are so many things I can't do on iOS and it frustrates me.

Siri is no comparison to Google now. (You make some sacrifices here)

Using iTunes to manage everything from apps to music is a buzzkill.

Homekit is a bag of hurt.

You are stuck with the default apps. Want to use Gmail or Outlook? Chrome? Google Maps or Nokia Maps? Too bad.

I'm putting up with these compromises because at the time the 810 wasn't performing well and on Android smaller screens means lower performance.

<comment><USER16> > You are stuck with the default apps. Want to use Gmail or Outlook? Chrome? > Google Maps or Nokia Maps? Too bad.

I'm confused. What do you mean by this?

<comment><USER15> If ask siri to route me somewhere it only opens Apple Maps. Same for clicking on an email link.

Tap a URL and it opens Safari every time.

<comment><USER16> Ah, gotcha. Does the Google app allow more custom integration?

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-app-search-made- just/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-app-search-made- just/id284815942)

<comment><USER15> They are hard links in iOS, nothing you can do to change the default apps unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> He says that he sees other phones acting as a gateway to iPhones but I seem to see the reverse happening. I have seen a number of users getting frustrated with the lack of options in the iPhone market and moving on to other devices more tailored to their personal needs. The "generic" iPhone is what they bought first until they found more appealing devices that suited their specific desires better. I know very few people who've gone from Android to iPhone, especially in the last couple years.

<comment><USER18> Your anecdotal experiences definitely don't match my anecdotal experiences.

I think we need to be careful with these kinds of stories.

<comment><USER9> I've seen a number of the transitions he saw a couple years ago, but an almost equal number coming back now. Many I know that switched, are now coming back, realizing that "cute customizations don't offset the fact things just work better on iOS" (not looking to get in a debate, just repeating what they said).

<comment><USER18> I personally switched from an iPhone 4S to an HTC One M7 for the bigger screen size, but I switched back after less than 6 months because I couldn't get over the lack of consistency in the Android experience. There were duplicate apps with different design styles, multiple text messaging apps, etc. I found I had more choices in general on Android, but it was rare to find an option that I was completely satisfied with.

If I decide to go back to Android, I would only get a Nexus device with stock Android. That may fix the majority of my complaints with Android.

<comment><USER9> I really like my Nexus 6P (GoogleFi edition). It's a great phone all around. Better than my 6S, no, but it's definitely a very good quality phone and one I'd recommend if someone hated iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _the iPhone will surely not go the way of the iPod. Apple's "pocket computer" is more likely to follow the trajectory of the Macintosh: It will continue to take a significant but slowly growing share of the market, while pocketing a large share of the profits._

Apple's market share continues to slide, as his own graph shows. If he expects Apple's market share to _grow_ he should explain why. So far all the indicators point the other way.

<comment><USER9> Are we looking at the same article?

1) he shows no graph depicting anything to do with market share, let alone one showing it sliding. There's two graphs, one showing a dip in sales volume, another showing a dip in overall smartphone buying.

2) he did explain why he thought that, near the end of the article

<comment><USER4> iPhone sales are slowing, Android sales are not:

[http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/02/meeker-2016-internet- tre...](http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/02/meeker-2016-internet-trends/)

So market share is declining.

The reasons he gives for Apple's market share to _increase_ are not new. They have been losing ground despite the conditions he describes. If we wants to argue that Apple is going to reverse this trend he needs to give new reasons.

<comment><USER9> Apple was a very successful company selling Macs, with their low market share, I personally feel the same can be said with iOS too. Apple has proven you don't need majority market share to still have a controlling position in the market.

<comment><USER4> That may be but that's not the claim made in the original article. He claimed that iOS market share would _increase_ , which hasn't been the case for a while now, so it demands some justification.

<comment><USER9> He did offer justification. While I may not agree with it completely (and it sounds like you don't either), our disagreement doesn't negate his own personal opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Now that paid apps are almost dead, what would Apple actually lose by opening up the platform a little? I mean the app store model mostly. It's high degree of restriction seems like it's holding the platform back and keeping it from eating more market share from desktop.

Of course maybe that's not something they want. Apple still sells laptops and desktops and a more open iOS could eat into Mac.

<comment><USER6> Paid apps are far from dead. I buy apps all the time. I bought a watch face for Pebble half hour ago. Developers need to feed their families and I see buying quality apps very similar to buying good coffee or food.

<comment><USER4> You are an outlier:

[http://www.recode.net/2016/6/8/11883518/app-boom-over- snapch...](http://www.recode.net/2016/6/8/11883518/app-boom-over-snapchat- uber)

All the indie iOS devs I know gave up long ago and took regular jobs writing apps for companies that give the app away for free as part of some larger business model.</comment></comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg has to go. Here are 25 reasons why - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/08/mark-zuckerberg-has-to-go <comment><USER2> FB is a disgusting company and the fastest way to make Zuck go away is to delete your account entirely. Even that requires their permission and intervention!

<comment><USER3> Worst thing ever happened to internet</comment></comment>


Two New Subatomic Particles Found Using Large Hadron Collider - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2014-11-lhcb-baryon-particles.html#inlRlv

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8630418](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8630418) (Submitted 15 hours earlier)</comment>


Neural Redis: simple to use neural network data structure module for Redis - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antirez/neural-redis <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Right! Did not thought about posting it as a Show HN. Next time for a project like that I'll do :-) Thanks.</comment></comment>


Ventilator Stockpiling and Availability in the US [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/resources/COVID-19/200214-VentilatorAvailability-factsheet.pdf <comment><USER2> 62,000 in the country. Half are meant for kids and babies. Only 8900 in national stockpile. If the potential peak numbers are as bad I've seen, it sounds like they could use an extra 8900 per major metro.</comment>


Show HN: Easy text to speech-fast/realistic text to voice, no subscription req'd - <AUTHOR> https://www.easytts.com/home.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN - we made [https://easytts.com](https://easytts.com) to help us convert text to voice primarily for the voice tracks for our demo videos. Most of the sites out there sound like robots or require you to sign up for a subscription. We make it easy to convert text to voice for a couple bucks, no account required. We'll be improving

\- quality of voices

\- output speed

\- inputs (we already support text in Google Docs and Google Sheets, more are coming)

\- outputs formats and destinations

Open to feedback, please let us know what you think!</comment>


JuliaCon 2020 Goes Online - <AUTHOR> https://www.juliabloggers.com/newsletter-june-2020/ <comment><USER2> I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand JuliaCon is always quite an amazing event and it's the only place I get to see a number of wonderful people that I usually only interact with online. On the other hand I'm told there's been a few thousand registrations already, so maybe this will make JuliaCon more accessible to a much wider audience, which has always been a goal. We've had live streams and recordings in past years, but I'll be interested to see how things are different with an entirely virtual event.

<comment><USER3> Given the huge level of interest in the online event this year, I am quite sure that we'll try to have more of an online component going forward, even as we move to physical events.

<comment><USER4> As someone who keeps saying "maybe I'll attend JuliaCon next year", I'm happy I'll be able to attend the virtual event this year, but I also really hope I get to attend a physical event in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> JuliaCon 2019 had some amazing talks [0]. Some highlights:

\- The Unreasonable Dispatch of Multiple Dispatch (Stefan Karpinski)

\- Gen: A General-Purpose Programming System

\- Geometric Algebra using Grassman.jl

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP8iPy9hna6StY9tIJIUN...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP8iPy9hna6StY9tIJIUN3F_co9A0zh0H)

<comment><USER6> Did you mean "unreasonable effectiveness"? :P

I just watched that talk the other day, and boy is it insightful. Julia has cracked a fairly magical combination of features. I fully expect it to replace Python over the next 10 years.

Direct link to "Unreasonable Effectiveness": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc9HwsxE1OY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc9HwsxE1OY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Direct link to Juliacon event page: [https://juliacon.org](https://juliacon.org)</comment>


Before the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/1348/ <comment><USER2> Imagine all the things not invented yet that would make the Internet seem boring. Like Star Trek style holodecks for example.

<comment><USER3> Now imagine those things with internet access.

<comment><USER2> I bet if I spent a ton of time in a holodeck, I'd still mostly be checking my favorite websites.</comment></comment></comment>


Lawsuit Claim: Students' Lecture Notes Infringe on Professor's Copyright - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/prof-sues-note.html

<comment><USER2> The question is whether it is more effort for a lazy professor to _sue_ someone or to write tests designed to flunk students who buy those notes.

I know which one I would do, and it doesn't involve any lawyers.</comment>


Engineering of a Swedish quantum computer set to start - <AUTHOR> http://www.chalmers.se/en/news/Pages/Engineering-of-a-Swedish-quantum-computer-set-to-start.aspx <comment><USER2> Let the 'Quantum Finnkampen' begin.

[http://www.aalto.fi/en/about/for_media/press_releases/2017-1...](http://www.aalto.fi/en/about/for_media/press_releases/2017-10-10/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Japan, too:

[https://asia.nikkei.com/Japan-Update/Japan-enters-quantum- co...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Japan-Update/Japan-enters-quantum-computing- race-and-offers-free-test-drive)</comment>


Yann LeCun vs. Christopher Manning on Need for Priors in Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.abigailsee.com/2018/02/21/deep-learning-structure-and-innate-priors.html <comment><USER2> >> Over the last few decades, innate priors have gone out of fashion, and today Deep Learning research prizes closely-supervised end-to-end learning (supported by big-data and big-compute) as the dominant paradigm.

I don't get why deep learning researchers are so hung up on learning _everything_ from scratch. The tendency for ever more compute and data is just unsustainable. For problems like natural language, where distinct evens may be infinite, you can keep throwing data at the problem and you'll _never_ make a dent to it. There are problems that grow at a pace that cannot be matched by _any_ computer, no matter how powerful.

What's more, as a civilisation we have nothing if not knowledge about the world. We have been accumulating it for thousands of years. It's what makes the difference between an intelligent human and an _educated_ intelligent human. And it's a big difference. So, if we have all this background knowledge, why not use it, and make our lives easier?

<comment><USER3> [Deleted]

<comment><USER4> > it's gone out of fashion because it's been beaten extremely convincingly by > methods that learned everything from scratch, in every single task

Totally false. By every single task you probably mean "every deep learning success story" which would be tautological.

There are tons of tasks where deep learning doesn't quite work yet and you still have to hand-craft your features.

Example from my domain: Try learning a classifier for malware which uses just raw binaries on input.

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that work on deep learning for malware classification is pretty early. Having said that, my understanding is that they are getting closer.

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f1c8/7533e628fd374b9e98f1e1...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f1c8/7533e628fd374b9e98f1e1ccc18a0e8f195d.pdf)

[https://devblogs.nvidia.com/malware-detection-neural- network...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/malware-detection-neural-networks/)

<comment><USER4> Results in this field usually look way better than they would be in a production environment.

Regarding articles you mentioned:

Using ROC curve for evaluation in this case is a red-flag because it doesn't take the data imbalance into account. Precision-Recall curve is way more suitable. You can have great AUC on the ROC curve but precision can be near zero in highly imbalanced problems such as malware detection. Precision is the probability that a positive detection is a true positive. Which is usually the measure you are most interested in.

The problem is that precision changes if you change the class priors. Because of that, the results are always very dataset specific.

With that said, I do not say that machine learning or neural networks do not work on this task. It just doesn't work in the end-to-end manner where you just feed raw binaries as input to some generic architecture as we can do with images in some tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >As an example (28:57), he described how the human brain does not have any innate convolutional structure – but it doesn't need to, because as an effective unsupervised learner, the brain can learn the same low-level image features (e.g. oriented edge detectors) as a ConvNet, even without the convolutional weight-sharing constraint.

I think the first part of the sentence should be that the brain doesn't have an innate weight sharing (like is stated in the end of the sentence), not that it is not convolutional. I believe the convolutional structure is actually copied from the visual cortex (but with no weight sharing as far as we know)

<comment><USER7> Convolutions are mathematically defined by application of the same kernel at each possible position. If that kernel has finite support, you also get locality. The visual cortex has locality, but without weight-sharing between functionally identical neurons, it's not convolutional.

<comment><USER8> The visual cortex neurons have not only locality, but also they learn/recognize similar features. This was the original inspiration for the conv nets: it was a way to learn efficient local features and apply them to the whole image. To me it seems that cortex neurons and the initial layers of conv nets do similar work, but with constraints of their implementations: biological neurons cannot share weights, and for artificial neurons it is more efficient to learn and compute dense convolution.

<comment><USER9> Disclaimer: I'm learning deep learning mainly from HN comments and just want to provoke more insights. I have no idea what weight sharing is or how kernels are represented in networks, but I do know that e.g. a blur filter or edge filter is represented as convolution matrix.

It is dangerously confusing to reapply the neural-net-terminology to neuronal- nets isn't it? The weight of a kernel of biological neurons, what is that supposed to mean?

If you haven't stopped reading yet, please consider: in case, as I have to assume, you mean there is a specific ensemble of neurons that represents a kernel of given weights corresponding to exactly one area of retina, then isn't sharing between "pixels" achieved simply by the eye's jittering?

For better or worse, assume I'm the adversary in a GAN and ignore me if it doesn't make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just started watching the video so they may mention this but one thing I find fascinating is that some recent work suggests that the optimization algorithm (usually stochastic gradient descent) or complexity of the loss surface (ie having lots of local minima that are almost as good as the global maxima) may actually be seen to induce a kind of regularization prior.

Ie these seemingly really complex models are actually biased to find simpler solutions that generalize well in a way that turns out to often work better then trying to explicitly learn a simple model.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone point to any reference where models depart from "closely-supervised end-to-end learning"?

In the article, LeCun & Manning argue this paradigm has some limitations, and I do agree. I'm thinking the field will evolve to systems becoming a combination of probabilistic logic-based engines (which represent formal causal reasoning) plus lots of deep models (which represent intuition, hypothesis generation and specialized tasks like vision).

<comment><USER3> "Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation", [https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11041](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11041)</comment></comment>


55 New Features in JDK 9 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMMzG8I23lY <comment><USER2> Watching this, I am actually getting excited about Java 9.</comment>


Show HN: Clutter Free – Chrome extension to prevent duplicate tabs - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clutter-free-prevent-dupl/iipjdmnoigaobkamfhnojmglcdbnfaaf

<comment><AUTHOR> A simple chrome extension I made after not finding anything that suited the need. Key issue addressed, that wasn't working with other similar extensions, was that they didn't address duplicate tabs across multiple windows. Intend to leave it simple, still craving for feedback on must-have features and bugs.</comment>


Show HN: Bizarre retro web browser built with web components - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/retro-browso/lifdagkckljnbmmocldpabhlbokilhkp <comment><AUTHOR> Source : [https://github.com/dosaygo/retro- browser](https://github.com/dosaygo/retro-browser)

<comment><AUTHOR> Removed repo because I chose.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are PHP's equivalents to Python's top tools? - <AUTHOR> I have been a happy Python user for years and super thankful for the plethora of good tools in the Python environment. However I sometimes have to use some PHP and still feel like I'm in the 90ies when it comes to the tools I use. I skimmed through Josh Lockhart's Modern PHP, but still I have not found many alternatives to the tools I love.
I'm sure, however, that these exist. So, what are the closest best practice equivalents, for...
- Creating separate dev environments using `Virtualenv`? - Installing packages in these envs using `pip`? How can I use composer in that workflow? - Enabling persistence in a super simple way using `dataset`? - Handling requests using `requests`? - Creating beautiful command line interfaces using `click`? - Getting an overview of good practices via http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/?
Probably you can come up with even more great workflow tools in Python and their equivalent in PHP. <comment><AUTHOR> I did some more research and might have find a few good PHP equivalents:

\- guzzle for HTTP request handling - [http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/latest/](http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/latest/)

\- Virtphp for virtual environments - [https://github.com/virtphp/virtphp](https://github.com/virtphp/virtphp)

\- Composer for dependency management - [https://getcomposer.org/](https://getcomposer.org/)

\- PHP-cli-tools for CLI building, see the example: [https://github.com/wp- cli/php-cli-tools/blob/master/examples...](https://github.com/wp-cli/php-cli- tools/blob/master/examples/arguments.php)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing your research.</comment></comment>


Mast fire probe amid 5G coronavirus claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-52164358 <comment><USER2> There are tons of gullible people out there. Twitter for instance is rife with accounts that spread this nonsense around as though it is gospel. Social media has been weaponized to get people to distrust anything they see or read online, alternatively to believe nonsense to the point that the real news starts to feel like nonsense too.

This is the flip side of the coin, universal access to information and universal capability to generate information is a power that comes with a lot of responsibility and so far we are failing at that.

Similar things are happening here on HN, there are accounts whose sole purpose it seems to be to derail any normal conversation or to bait others in to crossing the rules so they can be eliminated resulting in a lower signal:noise ratio.

It's up to all of us to call this nonsense out and to relentlessly aim to stop it from spreading because at some level this is a fight with consequences reaching much further than just out little fora and comment sections of blogs. It is a war for mindshare of bogus ideas vs ideas with a basis in fact, the final prize is the votes of the gullible and to paralyze societies to be able to respond to crisis, man made or natural.

The funny thing is that as soon as you go down that rabbit hole far enough the conspiracy theories end up being peddled by the ones who are _actually_ conspiring. See for instance pizzagate.

<comment><USER3> [https://euvsdisinfo.eu/](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/) official site of European External Action Service that tracks and responds Russian Federation's ongoing disinformation campaigns.

It's just amazing how much of all disinformation you can be tracked back to Russian sources. Russian disinformation is not trying to create consistent counter-narrative to the West. They just throw out stuff wildly to sow confusion, doubt and distrust. You can see people in HN who have been caught into this net of disinformation and start parroting same narrative.

Throwing coronavirus disinfo at the wall to see what sticks [https://euvsdisinfo.eu/throwing-coronavirus-disinfo-at- the-w...](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/throwing-coronavirus-disinfo-at-the-wall-to- see-what-sticks/)

<comment><USER4> I wonder what the Russians are hoping to achieve apart from annoying everyone?

<comment><USER5> Introducing chaos and disrupting the internal cohesion of their adversaries:

> _Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United > States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro- > American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into > internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, > social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – > extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal > political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to > support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]_

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics)

<comment><USER4> Ah that explains quite a lot thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to be somehow in the middle regarding "is X dangerous" discussions because while probably generally not an issue for large majority people, there is probably a small .% of people who are legitimately oversensitive to various stuff (like, say, some people are allergic to certain foods). And it sucks to be the ignored "edge case" person and not be able to do anything about it (think any time your bug report was rejected).

However I came across this thread that made me realize, many people come up with claims out of thin air (perhaps not even being malicious, just doing fake correlations etc.):

[https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1245814828079427585](https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1245814828079427585)

> an anecode that was told to me when I visited the operations centre of a > large French mobile phone operator a few years ago.

(after installation of new tower)

> everyone who can see the tower, calls the mayor and says they have headaches

> the mayor demands to know what we're going to do to make the headaches stop.

> And we say, well, we haven't switched the mast on yet.

<comment><USER2> I had a house up for sale for a long time. One day a man and his wife from Amsterdam came to view it. They brought with them a little box. The lady was allergic to 'radiation', and the box would tell her if this house was the one or not. She walked to-and-fro with the box pointing it all all kinds of bits mumbling to herself, and then walked out into the garden. After two hours of this she came back to us and said that it was all very nice but it wouldn't do, just too much radiation.

I asked her if I could look at the box. It was a field-strength meter with a built in amplifier hooked up to a variety of possible antennae, an open dipole and a small loop. She didn't understand the first thing about electromagnetic waves (polarization, for instance). The thing was set to its most sensitive setting amplifying the crap out of any background noise and picked up all kinds of interesting sources, one of which was _the sun_ , essentially turning it into a complex detector for something you didn't need a field-strength meter for in the first place: to tell you where our life giving star is in the sky.

I pointed this out to her and she went to sit in the car in a huff while her husband hung around for a bit. Apparently they'd been seeing 100's of houses and none of them ever were good enough.

Meanwhile, they lived in Amsterdam, right opposite of the microwave support tower next to RAI, a spot so bad that whenever I would pass it my cellphone would spontaneously reboot because of the strength of the electrical field.

I never knew if she was serious or whether she imagined the whole thing or was just looking for a way to get some quality time with her husband. But I highly doubt she ever found a house that was good enough short of a mountain cave.

But that house, about 300 meters away from the German border was about as isolated from anything radiation related you're going to find in Western Europe and if she wasn't making it up then for the life of me I do not understand what mechanism would underpin that sort of sensitivity.

<comment><USER7> I had an "electrosensitive" housemate at university - no phones allowed, and she'd go around unplugging everything, even taking the batteries out of wall clocks - and would microwave herself a meal twice daily, nose pressed to the glass of the door. She wouldn't be told that the microwave was a much greater emitter of EM radiation than anything else around her - said the frequency was in tune with the human body, which was why it made such nutritious food, and was why she liked to be close to it while it ran for its "positive energy".

We don't keep in touch.

<comment><USER2> Missed opportunity, I never thought of asking her if she had a microwave oven. Apparently their whole apartment had been covered in copper mesh, but they still had a regular electrical system and were looking at the kitchen appliances as well so I assumed they wanted to keep those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every time this whole conspiracy theory comes up in my circles, I ponder on the means by which it might be true, even though it (probably) isn't.

<tinfoil> Perhaps there are microwave frequencies which are conducive to agitating bacterial/microbial/viral activity - I could imagine a scenario, though I have no idea of the science/math involved, where the structures of the targeted vector are 'assisted' by remote stimulation.

Like, you can give flagellum a little 'kick' in the thrashing-around frequencies, which make it more violent against cell-wall structures, and so on.

Think, magnetohydrodynamics at pico scale.

Were such a thing feasible, I'm quite sure DARPA discovered it decades ago. _That 's what its for, right?_

Either way, there is a way to approach this subject which doesn't encourage hand-waving and woohoo thinking, but I'm not capable of it. I'm sure there are ways that microwaves can be applied against biological targets that we, the non-scanning-electron-microscope-using general public, probably don't quite get, just yet, has been weaponised ..

</tinfoil>

<comment><USER9> > every time (conspiracy) comes up I ponder on the means by which it might be > true

Wrong. [1]

Try to falsify.

"Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, whereby the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proved or disproved." [0]

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory)

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability)

<comment><USER8> Sure there are scientific ways to go about things. But the idea that there is 'safe thought' and 'dangerous thought' is just plain batshit lunacy. A lot of amazing stuff we take for granted today started off with "hmm.. I wonder if <x> is possible somehow" ..

Nobody is being paid to conjecture "what if there _were_ a way to do it.." unless, they actually are.

<comment><USER9> > But the idea that there is 'safe thought' and 'dangerous thought' is just > plain batshit lunacy.

No one said that...

And it would be clearly false: It can be dangerous to be wrong, such as thinking that drinking concentrated bleach will somehow cure you from a disease. Or, you know, destroying infrastructure based on unsubstantiated fears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is inevitable that in such an atmosphere unlikely targets are picked as scapegoats. If it stops at 5G antennas I guess we can consider ourselves fortunate.

<comment><USER11> Also a bunch of young people forced sitting at home

<comment><USER12> In my (unfortunately much greater than I would like) experience of people engaged with 5G conspiracies, they are not generally young.

<comment><USER11> You're right, but even these older people are not the ones who would be starting fires. They are usually the ones motivating the younger ones.

<comment><USER13> > these older people are not the ones who would be starting fires

Are you basing this off of something other than conjecture?

<comment><USER11> Yes. Older people who would do that usually are already a part of some sort of organised crime ring.

Younger however have a higher tendency of working for the idea (just the same way as younger people tend to work for startups).

Or are you go tell me that younger people are statistically wiser than older ones?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another smaller HN discussion on a related article from yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778815)

</comment><comment><USER15> RT.com has run a story calling these 5G coronavirus links "baseless conspiracy theories" [0]. In another story they say the same thing, and talk about "expert scientific studies repeatedly concluding that the high-speed communications system does not pose a threat to humans" [-1].

This is interesting because RT.com in 2018 and 2019 was one of the major source of baseless anti-5G health stories. Examples:

• 5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1]

• Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2]

• How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3]

• Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4]

• 'Totally insane': Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5]

RT.com videos on YouTube average over 1 million viewers per day, which is higher than any actual news outlet, and their claims are then repeated by many blogs and social media sites and other websites and then others pick it up from there, often losing the attribution to RT.com along the way so [6].

I wonder what caused RT.com's apparent flip on 5G?

[-1] [https://www.rt.com/sport/484967-coronavirus-5g-amir- khan/](https://www.rt.com/sport/484967-coronavirus-5g-amir-khan/)

[0] [https://www.rt.com/uk/484877-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies- moc...](https://www.rt.com/uk/484877-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies-mocked/)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg)

[5] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8)

[6] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone- safety-h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety- health-russia.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm surprised there's enough flammable material on a mast to set it on fire. Antenna radomes and wire insulation maybe?

<comment><USER2> Lots of foam inside HF coax, outer mantle will burn, paint will burn, electronics will burn very nicely and the are a lot of plastics that would sustain a fire. Nasty stuff coming off that too when burning (dioxins).

<comment><USER16> Surprised they don't put all that in some sort of conduit though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How is anyone supposed to read the text on this page on a mobile device when the ads above the current scroll location keep loading and unloading with random heights that suddenly shift all the text on the page up and down by a large amount every few seconds?

<comment><USER18> Firefox + uBlock Origin?

[https://www.mozilla.org](https://www.mozilla.org)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ublock- origin/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This pandemic is certainly providing lots of opportunity for behavioral and social studies.

</comment><comment><USER20> this is the way I'm looking at it, someone please correct me if I don't grasp the situation.

definitions:

• "ionising radiation" broadly refers to particles (alpha/beta particles; cosmic rays) and EM radiation types that are sufficiently energetic to directly or indirectly (respectively) displace electrons in the atomic structure of matter they pass through. there is no single definition of what counts as ionising radiation when it comes to human cells. it's normally said to be around 10eV – 30eV, but we'll come up with a catch-all definition for argument's sake later. we want to avoid ionisation of DNA, white blood cells, that sort of thing.

• _f_ = _v_ / _λ_ (Hz)

• _c_ = 3 × 10⁸ (m/s)

• _h_ = 6.62607015 × 10⁻³⁴ (J⋅s)

• _E_ = _hf_ = _hc_ / _λ_ (eV)

___________

premises:

• EM rays of high frequency have proportionately high photon energy

• ionisation by EM radiation requires higher photon energy

• the lowest threshold for ionisation of an atom of any element is caesium, at 3.9eV (low end ultraviolet)

• the lowest energy EM radiation that can affect, damage or ionise bare DNA in a vaccuum will be greater than 3.9eV (or 3900meV) [1][2][3]

• the highest frequency _officially proposed_ for 5G to date is 86 GHz (λ ≈ 3.5 × 10⁻³m) [4]

• an 86GHz microwave would have photon energy of 3.6×10⁻⁴eV (or 0.36meV)

      (8.6 × 10⁻¹⁰) × (6.62607004 × 10⁻³⁴) ≈ 5.7 × 10⁻²³J ≈ 0.00036eV

• 0.36meV is a lot less energy than 3900meV

___________

conclusion:

EM radiation in proposed 5G range is unable to ionise — and very unlikely to cause any damage to — organic molecules like DNA in a vacuum, without even contemplating absorption/attenuation or the fact that the vast majority of 5G is going to be even lower freq than 86 GHz.

this is just ionisation we're talking about here, i.e. the shredding of your cells by penetrative, energetic radiation. 5G will not be used at anywhere near the kind of wattage as your microwave oven puts out. even if you put yourself in a microwave, yes you get cooked but this is because you absorb the EM radiation and it induces kinetic energy in you, as it would a bowl of porridge. similarly, if you sit yourself in front of a radar you'll probably feel pretty damn hot as well.

___________

I've seen some crazy people yelling about how 5G is almost the same frequency as crowd-dispersal microwave weapons use — but again, this weaponised form is a focused BEAM. if you use enough visible light you can cook yourself as well. incidentally, even with 5G masts all over the place (and they will be because it has a shorter effective range than 4G LTE) you won't be subjected to anywhere near the wattage a microwave oven or a military radar put out.

if low energy EM waves damage DNA, your immune system, or cause anything related to cancer, it is not by any known physical mechanism [5]

interestingly enough, I caught this on wikipedia:

      An international appeal to the European Union made on
      September 13, 2017 garnered over 180 signatures from
      scientists representing 35 countries. They cite unproven
      concerns over the 10 to 20 billion connections to the 5G
      network and the subsequent increase in RF-EMF exposure
      affecting the global populace constantly. The appeal
      also references the International Agency for Research on
      Cancer's (IARC) conclusion in 2011 that frequencies
      30 kHz – 300 GHz are possibly carcinogenic in humans.

this seems like something that will blow up in paranoid people's minds, and will make purveyors of fake news lick their lips, but consider that the entry on the list cited is

 _" radiofrequency electromagnetic fields such as, but not limited to, those associated with wireless phones"_

so not just 5G at all, but also your granddad's radio, your 3G burner phone, your bluetooth headphones, your kid's remote-controlled car, your drone, etc.

the spectacular list of "possibly carcinogenic things" in question [6] includes _aloe vera_ and the _occupation of carpentry /joinery_. hey, maybe electromagnetic radiation causes cancer — but then again, so does interacting with pretty much everything else on the planet!

also haven't we been using mm-λ waves in radars for ~50 years now? not seen any super mutants yet.

_______________

[1]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20415/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20415/)

[2]: [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Folkard,%20M.,%...](http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Folkard,%20M.,%20Int.%20J.%20Radiat.%20Biol.,%20Vol.76%202000.pdf)

[3]: [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Prise,%20K.M.,%...](http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Prise,%20K.M.,%20Int.%20J.%20Radiat.%20Biol%20Vol.%2076,%20No.%207,2000.pdf)

[4]: [https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5...](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5G-update-08022017.pdf)

[5]: [https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes- prevention/risk/r...](https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes- prevention/risk/radiation/electromagnetic-fields-fact-sheet)

[6]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_Agents_-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_Agents_- _Possibly_carcinogenic_to_humans)

<comment><USER15> > "ionising radiation" broadly refers to particles (alpha/beta particles; > cosmic rays) and EM radiation types that are sufficiently energetic to > directly or indirectly (respectively) displace electrons in the atomic > structure of matter they pass through

"Detach" would be better than "displace" there.

<comment><USER20> Thanks! You're right, displace was definitely the wrong word. Unfortunately can't edit now.

If that's all I'm wrong about, I'm happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's the story with 5G mast torching? Is it entirely in paranoid territory (eg. 5G causing infections) or is it based on a rational cause (5G causing health issues due to density, or that ubiquitous 5G critically helps mass surveillance due to low-cost, always-on receivers)?

<comment><USER13> > rational cause

> 5G causing health issues due to density

There's no link between health problems and 5G networks at this time. The UK has actually tested radiation levels in the field [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580)</comment></comment>


Building A Better Build: Our Transition From Ant To SBT - <AUTHOR> http://codeascraft.com/2014/09/30/building-a-better-build-our-transition-from-ant-to-sbt/

<comment><USER2> It's taken me a while to understand all the hieroglyphics, but it really is a solid build system. Take a look at a complex example of cross compiling for scala.js, a single code base, with shared classes [1], for multiple versions of Scala.

My biggest complaint early on, was the Ivy resolver. Maven "pom" style packages didn't work too well. I also know there was talk of using gradle's resolution system, which was rewrote long ago. Not sure if that went anywhere.

I think the IDE story will simplify, and work better, when sbt supports sbt- server. The work is being done here [2]. However, it is much better in IDEA 14 and the newest Scala plugin.

[1] [https://github.com/w3c/banana- rdf/blob/master/project/build....](https://github.com/w3c/banana- rdf/blob/master/project/build.scala)

[2] [https://github.com/sbt/sbt-remote-control](https://github.com/sbt/sbt- remote-control)

<comment><USER3> I agree. SBT has a steep learning curve, though fortunately the 0.13.x branch is much simpler than it was in the past.

Lots of great stuff has been done with SBT plugins as well. I have an SBT project that will spin up multiple JVMs for distributed integration testing, build and push Docker images tagged with the current git branch, spin up external services under test and more. Once you get the hang of it, these things fall in place easily.

Also, Typesafe has really improved SBT's documentation over the past year. Plus a lot of the odder syntax choices have been replaced in favor of := instead.

<comment><USER2> Totally agree on first point, especially since 0.13.5.

Yeah I think native-packager is great [1].

I wish they didn't bork the template of the docs, it looks terrible. The content is better though for sure [2].

[1] [https://github.com/sbt/sbt-native-packager](https://github.com/sbt/sbt- native-packager)

[2] [http://www.scala-sbt.org/0.13/docs/index.html](http://www.scala- sbt.org/0.13/docs/index.html)

<comment><USER4> I've just spent the last couple of years investing my time in Gradle.

I'm in a position where I've become productive with the tool. But as is the way of the freelance software guy (or gal) the decisions that influence the tech. stack are not in your control.

So I'm being pushed to use the Play! Framework for micro services style arch. Which I'm happy enough about but afaik that means I'm tied into SBT.

Could you guys give advice for smoothing the learning curve to Sbt? Any hints/time sucks/resources appreciated

<comment><USER5> In [http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/revolutionary_new_gra...](http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/revolutionary_new_gradle_features_on_the_2014_roadmap) , the Gradle founder writes "what is ultimately needed is a fundamental solution within Gradle that eliminates the overhead in the IDE-to-Gradle communication". That solution would be to enable any JVM language to be used with Gradle, not just Groovy. Then you wouldn't be tied to SBT as you then could use Scala to configure Gradle.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Latest FBI Claim of Disrupted Terror Plot Deserves Much Scrutiny and Skepticism - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/16/latest-fbi-boast-disrupting-terror-u-s-plot-deserves-scrutiny-skepticism/

<comment><USER2> Can't remember the precise details but there was another instance of this somewhere here in Cleveland... Ah, here it is: [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-fbi- entrapment...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-fbi-entrapment- is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-hook-20120515)</comment>


Reactor: a project to examine the performance of the R language - <AUTHOR> http://r.cs.purdue.edu/

<comment><USER2> I was recently profiling some R code for a friend, and this is a useful summary. They don't show the data on their website, but their white paper ([http://r.cs.purdue.edu/pub/ecoop12.pdf](http://r.cs.purdue.edu/pub/ecoop12.pdf)) shows the times for R vs Python vs C for some of the code on a popular language bencmark: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/)

Summarizing the summary of their summary of things that probably shouldn't be summarized:

On average across their tests, Python is 1/50th the speed of C, and R is 1/500th.

R frequently uses 100x to 1000x more heap memory than C.

R code size (number of lines ignoring comments) is usually about 1/2 that of C, which is about the same as Python.

As a second set of data, the site for [http://julialang.org/](http://julialang.org/) has some timing comparisons for some similar programs. On their tests, Julia comes out about 1-1.5x slower than of C (frequently equal), Python 3x-30x slower (usually in the middle), and R 4x-500x slower (fairly even distribution).</comment>


Mars Simulation Project - <AUTHOR> https://mars-sim.sourceforge.io/ <comment><USER2> Why do people have the stupid "grey text on grey background" settings?

[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/StupidGreyOnGrey.png](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/StupidGreyOnGrey.png)

Completely unreadable.</comment>


Backfire : Save css changes made in firebug - <AUTHOR> http://blog.handcraft.com/2010/08/backfire-save-css-changes-made-in-firebug/

<comment><USER2> Why I don't like this kind of solution (yet):

I like to mess around in my CSS loads, trying different combinations, _trying whether a property has an actual effect on the appearance/flow of the page_ , etc.

I like to then make changes that have been throughly tested inside vim, :w, CMD-TAB, CMD-SHIFT-R.

By separating experimentation and editing, I know exactly what is added to my CSS, without having to think about whether or not all in-browser changes are truly necessary for my purpose. I bet use of these kinds of extensions by inexperienced web-designers (togglers we might call them) will lead to extremely ugly and bloated stylesheets.

<comment><USER3> Unless you accidentally close or reload the browser window (or there's a power failure). This has happened to me more times than I care to remember.

<comment><USER2> I create a "task" (you can do this with any todo app, but I use taskwarrior) for every change I make to my css, ie: "more appropriate top margin @ index". Then I solve exactly that problem, change the selectors/properties I need in my stylesheet, and review the solution (to see if other rules are affected or overwritten).

define problem -> solve problem -> refine solution -> commit/save changes.

might sounds slow, but really isn't, and keeps things clean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can already do this in Chrome without doing anything (in Google fashion, though, the UI isn't very intuitive).

Check Paul Irish's Chrome Dev Tools talk from JSConf 2011 for that and other tips.

<comment><USER5> For the lazy: [http://paulirish.com/2011/a-re-introduction-to-the-chrome- de...](http://paulirish.com/2011/a-re-introduction-to-the-chrome-developer- tools/)

(edit: around the 8:30 mark)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want to save the changes on the client side for when you're debugging, try the Stylebot Chrome extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oiaejidbmkiecgbjei...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha)

The up side: You can immediately use it with any of your sites. No setting up required. The down side: It works on top of your existing CSS and you'll still need to copy/paste the CSS into your live version.

</comment><comment><USER7> In case anyone han't come across CSSEdit before, you can pull in a page, live edit and it reloads the stylesheet on every keystroke. Features autocomplete and has a pretty decent inspector

</comment><comment><USER8> too bad it doesn't help if you are doing any kind of server side css processing. sass, less, or even just combining css into a single file.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is a similar tool called <http://code.google.com/p/css-x-fire/> which allows you to take the firebug changes and then selectivly apply then into PHP Storm IDE.</comment>


The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story/ <comment><USER2> very good!</comment>


Ask HN: What course should a CTO do? - <AUTHOR> As a technical co-founder/programmer who's beginning to build the team (about 4-5 people now).
Feel like need to transition from programmer to software engineer /  CTO.
I can choose which course(s) to do - looking for suggestions.
Ideally it'd be 2-10 day course(s), anywhere in world is OK. <comment><USER2> In addition to the other suggestions in the thread:

* meta: learn to know yourself if you don't already. It's half the battle. I took an MBTI course that was tremendously helpful; well-done career counseling can also help in that it can make you understand your intrinsic motivations, and from there figure out what you need to be happy.

* security training. These come in two flavors, operational and normative (usually some flavor of iso 27k). If you come from a dev background you'll probably already have some operational knowledge (owasp top 10, sysadmin hygiene, etc) but it's always worthwhile to strengthen it especially in areas that may be new to you (infra hardening, managing a fleet of PCs for non-technical users, etc). Normative might seem like bullshit at first but when well done is helpful to structure the way you think about security (like, what assets are you trying to protect, from whom, and at what cost)

* business training might come in handy to hold your own in meetings. At least be comfortable with how a business case works and what your company's BC is. This will allow you to have more productive discussions with the PM and understand, from a business perspective, which features you should focus on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I made the transition a few years ago, and wished this article had been written back then - it contains 90% of what I needed to know. Hopefully it will help you too, even though it's not a formal course.

[https://github.com/webflow/leadership/blob/master/tech_lead....](https://github.com/webflow/leadership/blob/master/tech_lead.md)

</comment><comment><USER4> I will recommend you to focus more on task management and architectural design. Your team expects guidance on what to build with clear expectations. I think the book Ben Horowitz, "the hard thing about hard things" has a good chapter on team leadership and defining expectattion this will help to be a better CTO.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd read managing humans, and other people skills books. You will most likely want to learn how to rely on your peers to build better software than you. Your job as a leader will be more important in your ability to make sure your team is doing the right thing rather than how they do it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Personally I'd watch a couple of relevant YouTube videos/talks from carefully selected industry leaders and get on with the job. You'll learn more doing and then when you start to notice you have blind spots or are weak at something take the intensive courses you need then.

</comment><comment><USER7> For first time CTOs, I would recommend courses or videos around hiring. You can figure out tech and working with people as you go. But hiring is what takes most of your time and harder to get right.

<comment><USER8> educating yourself as a CTO is a must

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Peopleware - Read it and re-read it every year.</comment>


Should Microsoft Fund Startups, Y Combinator-Style? - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2008/08/11/microsoft-entertains-idea-of-funding-startups-probably-wont-take-the-plunge/

<comment><USER2> Founders fear giving their investors too much control and stake in a company with investors, until Microsoft jumped in the game. Shit just got real.</comment>


Startup Investment Due Diligence Checklist - <AUTHOR> http://vc-list.com/startup-investment-due-diligence-checklist/ <comment><USER2> Having done this many times, this list is a bit of overkill until a later stage financing. But it's still useful to read to get an idea of what you'll be getting into.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use this list as more of a scare tactic/reality check, something I can show naive entrepreneurs who think they are ready for funding realize there is a lot more to the game then having a cool idea.</comment></comment>


Manufacturer Threatens To Sue Volunteers who printed a valve - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200317/04381644114/volunteers-3d-print-unobtainable-11000-valve-1-to-keep-covid-19-patients-alive-original-manufacturer-threatens-to-sue.shtml <comment><USER2> Dupe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611910)

</comment><comment><USER3> _which is also why Fracassi doesn 't dare share his 3D file with other hospitals, despite their desperate need for these valves._

Now suppose someone publishes, anonymously, the design file online...

<comment><USER4> Actually, I think designs and patents are free for personal use. So any easy way around it is to document how to get to that design, and let's patients print valves for personal use

<comment><USER5> Print them, tell the company to fuck off, and get a blanket post-hoc pardon through parliament.

This isn't actually complicated. We're talking about saving lives in a pandemic. Who gives a shit about IP law?

<comment><USER6> No kidding, biology definitely trumps ink-on-paper in this case

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Printcrime[1,2] by Doctorov becoming reality in one of the most nasty ways imaginable.

[1] [https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_- _Overclocke...](https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_- _Overclocked_-_Printcrime.html)

[2] E-book download: [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19000](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19000)

</comment><comment><USER8> The Italian government should grant an amnesty for this immediately. Lives are on the line. There is no question about what the right thing to do in this situation is.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Parliament can grant pardons. They should come out and say, "Anyone prosecuted for patent infringement over this valve will be pardoned."

There aren't many clear, easy choices in a situation like this.

Here's one.

<comment><USER9> That's actually the wrong way round. In order to be pardoned, they first have to be found guilty, so they need to go through the expense of defending themselves. What's needed is to prevent the cases from getting that far in the first place, which could be done by the government taking possession of any relevant patents for the duration and issuing a time-limited license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You'd think an easy enough change to the laws around IP for medical equipment would be that if they can't supply critical parts, particularly under extreme circumstances, they most hold harmless any supplier that is able to supply said parts.

<comment><USER11> Or that the situation was absolutely ridiculous to begin with and goes way beyond what was ever intended by patent laws.

I find it hard to believe that $11k was a justifiable price or that the valve design was novel or sophisticated enough that someone reproduced the geometry from scratch so trivially (without even using sophisticated 3D scanning techniques I might add, as I understand it).

A lot of businesses strategically buy and sell patents in processes to prevent others from implementing the full process and to force royalties on single pieces. Patents have really got out of hand and in my opinion, stifle innovation more than secure and foster it the way they're currently being abused.

IP protections do need to exist but there's a lot in terms of protection that is just garbage.

<comment><USER12> > sophisticated 3D scanning techniques

It's not too hard to convert a DICOM file, and most hospitals have a CT scanner than is up to the task if you give cake to the right person. Engineering departments know this well.

<comment><USER11> For a tiny valve that size, you'd almost certainly need to use a MicroCT scanner though. I dont know how many hospitals keep one on hand since they're very niche and there are obvious issues imaging anything living (movement, radiation exposure, etc).

Its typically used outside of hospital environments for scanning. The large scanners won't give you the level of detail you'd need, at least not the ones I worked with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I haven't managed to identify the valve manufacturer.

They definitely ought to be named and shamed.

I did find this: [https://www.archyde.com/italian-start-up-3d-prints-valves- to...](https://www.archyde.com/italian-start-up-3d-prints-valves-to-help- coronavirus-patients/)

Edit: Charging 10000 EUR for a 1 EUR part in a breathing device is typical scumbag behavior. Doing that during a pandemic rises to criminal. Suing people who 3D print parts for free is grounds for nationalization.

<comment><USER14> > Charging 10000 EUR for a 1 EUR part in a breathing device is typical scumbag > behavior. Doing that during a pandemic rises to criminal. Suing people who > 3D print parts for free is grounds for nationalization.

No, it's grounds for abolition of intellectual property. Don't blame the player for crappy rules.

<comment><USER15> If it was legal to own slaves and someone owned slaves, I would blame them. And work to free all their slaves.

<comment><USER16> I agree with the sentiment, though it's practically still legal to own slaves in some places.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In the US the Federal government or its agents can infringe patents basically at will. The remedy to the patent holder in a case like this would be the cost of the valves.

No special court orders are required. Neither can the infringed sue to stop the US gov (or its contractors) from infringing. If a US state infringes it may be protected by sovereign immunity (assuming it has not waived that protection)

Of course Italian law may be different, but they or the EU probably have similar immunities.

<comment><USER18> Not exactly.

[https://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/2927](https://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/2927)

<comment><USER17> I don't see any disagreement with what I said in here.

Edit to add:

I am an IP attorney so I appreciate that to some people this article may seem like it contradicts some of what I said. IP law is hard.

But as far as I could tell, with one quick read, it basically confirms what I said.

Also, thanks for the link, I hadn't seen this article before.

<comment><USER18> Sorry I should have been specific. The "available remedies" section doesn't really support your assertion about the recovery. But yeah it's basically always lower than civil torts and you're otherwise totally right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I doubt a valve is novel enough to be patented, and the 3D design was reverse engineered so it is not covered by Copyright. I doubt these guys have any kind of case that would stand up in court

<comment><USER20> I don't think it counts as reverse engineered if you had access to the original - ie if you take measurements to reproduce it, you are copying it, not reverse engineering.

<comment><USER21> Measuring the physical attributes of something certainly counts as "reverse engineering".

You might be thinking of clean room design [1], where one team does the reverse engineering and writes spec, and another team implements it from the spec.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> At least in criminal law there is the concept of "necessity". That is, an illegal activity may in certain cases be legal, if it is necessary to prevent serious harm.

Since the manufacturer was unable to supply the part, I would argue that 3D printing it was most certainly a "necessity", at least until either patients stop requiring it, or more parts can be procured.

There are some civil law analogs such as being able to trespass someone else's property in emergency situations.

</comment><comment><USER23> This makes me feel gross. I know what they're doing is totally legal, but it just feels wrong in this circumstance.

<comment><USER24> As I said before, I want to see which jury will convict them for counterfeiting!

The manufacturer may threaten, huff and puff, but juries are filled with human, who will feel same same wrongness we do.

In theory, everybody cares about FDA certification and all the legal details like HIPPA and stuff.

In practice, when SHTF ie in a situation like 9/11, most humans beings seem to do the best they can with what they have.

No one should refuse to act just by fear of being sued for doing something, when inaction will guarantee the death of other human beings.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590069)

<comment><USER25> I'm not familiar with the Italian legal system, but I would be surprised if a patent dispute goes before a jury.

<comment><USER26> Italian criminal courts implement bench trial, not jury trial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The manufacturer has given tinkerers another good reason to make fully open source 3d printable reanimation machine.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why aren't we naming and shaming the manufacturer? This is immoral.

<comment><USER29> Because most people have brains and don't act instinctively to everything.

<comment><USER30> What in this online world would make you say such a thing? It seems that the opposite is true more often than not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Would be too bad if that valve's 3D file happened to leak online...

</comment><comment><USER32> I guess I was wrong, again....

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22588619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22588619)

Are the manufacturers forced by any legal precedent to sue in order to defend their patents?

</comment><comment><USER33> Charging this kind of money for a valve should come with an agreement to produce enough of said valve, or providing the 3D file for emergencies like that. It's actually in manufacturers' best interest - imagine we get this kind of scenario more often. I think it's quite possible that a grey market for 3D printed medical parts will develop as a result, bringing down prices a lot. And it will be tolerated by governments because they saw this happen.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why aren't we working to create a 3D print file of this ourselves and releasing it?

If other hospitals do indeed need this valve, we should be spending our time doing this.

<comment><USER35> in order to copy a part, you need one of them to measure.

edit: also, you really need a working machine to ensure that the design that you have created works is properly functional

<comment><USER34> It would be great for someone to get a part to a 3D print file maker.

<comment><USER34> Update: we got the 3D print file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Seems like a variation of the price gouging people have been inflamed about recently.

</comment><comment><USER37> Very, very bad PR.

<comment><USER38> Except the company isn't named anywhere, as far as I can tell. So at the moment it's not any kind of PR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> So I don't know Italian or European parent law. But how would this be illegal? It appears the part was redesigned from scratch, so I don't it used any process that is patented. Of course maybe patent law is different over there. I also realize it is possible this company is simply try to intimidate. Just wondering if they actually have legal staggering.

</comment><comment><USER40> By witholding the supply of valves the management of are conspiring to murder. Issue arrest warrants for the entire management. When lives are at stake, playing hardball with insatiable capitalists might do the trick.

</comment><comment><USER41> This crisis will force us to rethink patent laws and healthcare regulations. under the current circumstances, patent laws and other laws designed to give the medical industry Monopoly over their creations are preventing life saving actions. We will eventually reach a point where a vaccine / cure is found, and instead of allowing all possible companies to manufacture it, patent laws will delay things and actively cause thousands of deaths from those delays.

<comment><USER42> The US government can already legally ignore patents. Or simply keep them sealed them for national security reasons: [https://www.bitlaw.com/source/35usc/181.html](https://www.bitlaw.com/source/35usc/181.html)

Finally, forced licensing is another option.

<comment><USER43> They do it with software licensing for sure. There are almost certainly satellites and weapons systems out there with GPL code in them but good luck proving it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> COVID-19 is bringing to the surface more and more fascinating cases where under "normal" circumstances Capitalism and making a profit is a good thing, but under just a little bit of pressure, suddenly it's evil.

Canada have just made it illegal ($5000 fine) for trying to profit off sales of toilet paper or sanitizer, and listings for them have been banned from eBay and Kijiji (Canada's version of Craigslist). Of course, under normal circumstances it's perfectly fine for Nike to make a pair of shoes for $3 (paying people terrible wages) and then sell them for $300 dollars. Their share price goes up and the Capitalists are happy.

Under normal circumstances patents are a good way to protect IP, and nobody cared last month that a part was $11,000 dollars and they had a monopoly on making it.

As one twitter post said "COVID-19 is a blacklight and it's revealing a lot of nasty stains on our Capitalist society"

<comment><USER45> I never understand these capitalism criticisms. It's like criticizing modern medicine because Coronavirus exists. Yeah, it's not a perfect system but I'm not going to switch to homeopathy just yet.

<comment><USER46> Your analogy makes no sense. Modern medicine didn't create, or even encourage the creation of, the coronavirus. Price gouging is very much an obvious consequence of unbridled capitalism.

<comment><USER47> That is fucking rich. You obviously never tried buying something in the USSR. Or when rationing was in effect during WW2. Or medicinal alcohol during prohibition. All government regulated supply resulting in a very expensive secondary market. Black markets _thrive_ under systems other than capitalism where price gouging is the exception rather than the rule.

<comment><USER48> Yes you are right. Even with laws preventing price gouging people will sell/buy what they want. If sellers/buyers cannot do that in government regulated market - they will do that in the black markets

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Please stop linking to Techdirt. That is not a news source. TD is a self- proclaimed rumormill.</comment>


What are Fortran and Cobol used for today? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2266643/for-what-are-fortran-cobol-and-co-used-today <comment><USER2> I believe we should think of Fortran as a domain-specific language for handling multidimensional arrays, rather than a normal programming language. It might be terrible for other things, but it's great for array computations, and that's what people use it for in big simulations. Since it has a well- defined C FFI nowadays, it's easy to connect it to other languages that can do other things (parsing data files, etc.).

Coming from a more traditional CS background, I always thought that Fortran was archaic until I actually had to learn it for some scientific computing. I found it awkward to use, but at the same time, it had array capabilities that I've never seen in any other language.

<comment><USER3> In general, I agree with you. However, modern Fortran also has a strong module system, and some nice looping constructs (like explicitly-labeled loops that let you control "breaking" and "continuing" in nested loops quite easily), that made me like using it for even non-array-oriented programs (for other reasons, I don't use Fortran so much anymore).

The only thing I absolutely hated about Fortran for parsing data files is that, according to the standard, a text file has to end with what amounts to an empty line. Many Fortran environments break this rule intentionally, but occasionally you'll find one that follows the rules. It inevitably bites people who forget that their last line of data _must_ be followed by a newline, or else the line may never get read.

<comment><USER4> Yep, I/O in fortran is kind of a pain. I really like the rest of the language, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was surprised to see when I installed R for the first time, that a large amount of the libraries it makes use of are written in fortran.

To complete the installation required me to choose from one of several current and compatible fortran compilers even.

So at least for fortran, the answer is scientific computing.

<comment><USER6> Fortran is far from extinct, because scientists often prefer it to C/C++, and it's often faster.

Part of the reason is that Fortran passes arrays by value, while C passes them by reference. It's very hard for compilers to optimise a pass-by-reference array, because it _might_ have the memory altered by another part of the program. If it's pass by value, then you know it's safe. It's kind of like threads vs messages.

I think C has some recent work done to close the gap, but even if it's already as fast, it will take a while to port 50 years of legacy numerical code.

<comment><USER7> _Part of the reason is that Fortran passes arrays by value, while C passes them by reference._

Actually, the reason is that Fortran arguments may not alias (passing big arrays by value would be horribly inefficient).

Btw, one of the main goals of C99 was making C a better language for numerics (ie catching up to Fortran): The restrict qualifier was introduced (mainly to mark non-aliasing parameters) as well as complex numbers, variable-length arrays and type-generic math functions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really like the top two answers.

A few points, when I was in school and that was only 5 years ago, I learned Fortran. I learned it because I was starting as a Mechanical Engineer, and one of the heat transfer classes involved solving differential equations via programs. If you wanted to get help from the egg head professors you had to take Fortran because that's what they knew. The Fortran class was Mechanical Engineers and Nuclear Engineers. I believe we were working in Fortran 77 & 90.

One of my friends from college is working on his PhD in physics. He spends his summers and breaks in Los Almos labs, and uses particle accelerators. Anyway - he told me that they use Fortran for their calculations purely because it was easier to translate to the language and it's all math.

Anyway that's just my $.02

</comment><comment><USER9> Scaring baby programmers.

Oh, and lots of scientific computing is done in Fortran - eg. the sorts of work my brother does on atomic structure as a computational chemist at ITU, running on grid or supercomputers.

On the flip side, there's lots of very large, poorly documented programs which are effectively "mission critical" Fortran. Until someone ponies up a LOT of money to re-write and revalidate them, Fortran ain't going away.

<comment><USER10> And the main use of Python is scaring fogey programmers?

<comment> mh- Python's main utility is finding who amongst your coworkers is incapable of giving attention to whitespace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The best-paid freelance programmer I ever knew was a man older than my dad who was the only guy left in the country that could code Cobol for certain kind of industrial equipment.

For the companies that hired him it was cheaper than changing that equipment, and by _cheaper_ I mean the guy was able to buy an Hacienda with what he made coding Cobol, nuff said.

</comment><comment><USER12> I cut my teeth as a professional developer in 1996 writing fortran77. We used it to test wire bundles on airplanes. Important stuff actually (unlike the Web apps most of us make today!)

</comment><comment><USER13> This SO answer has interesting comments on Fortan performance: <http://stackoverflow.com/a/13079021>

And this appropriately grumpy rebuttal from a JPL guy to the 2004 "Petition to Retire Fortran" makes some good arguments for not retiring it (and also gives some Ada love): <http://www.fortranstatement.com/Site/responses.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> I use Fortran every day for fluid dynamics research. Fortran is the abusive partner you keep going back to. If C had array operations and aliasing restrictions I would switch in a heartbeat. As it is the syntax "a=b" is a lot better than four nested for loops and hence 4 opportunities to fuck up the indices.

<comment><USER15> C99 added the `restrict` keyword <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrict>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> COBOL & RPG = your paycheck or the managing the bank account your money is in.

There is a huge amount of COBOL / RPG processing flat files to do various financial transactions. It works and has worked for decades, so not many folks really have the willpower and cash to rewrite it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have a friend who is a physics major, one of the primary reasons he was learning to program was to use MPI & OpenMP languages, and presuming fortan has a very high performance / robust compiler for using MPI, this would probably be the soul reason it's used for large super computer & cluster computations because it's designed for distributed computation. I think this guy has the best answer: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2266643/for-what- are-fort...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2266643/for-what-are-fortran- cobol-and-co-used-today/2480052#2480052)

</comment><comment><USER18> As an ex-COBOL programmer, I did some research in this area and I uncovered the following (from a 2009 blog post of mine).

\--

Do a little research into COBOL and a few interesting things jump out at you. Some of this information is from Gartner Group and the rest can easily be verified by doing even a brief survey of the field. Taking the following bits of information:

* 75% of the world's business data passes through COBOL (Gartner Group estimate)

* There is possibly up to a fifth of a trillion lines of COBOL code out there (Gartner again)

* People are still writing COBOL constantly, but usually on existing systems.

* The industry is struggling to find new COBOL programmers because few young programmers love the thought of maintaining decades-old enterprise systems where all data is global and GOTO is often the first choice in flow control.

* Many companies want to move from COBOL, but can't do so easily because too much code is written in COBOL (and the source is often lost).

People really, really underestimate these problems. For example, I've seen several companies express a desire to move away from Perl but find out they can't because they don't realize quite how reliant on the language they are.

Now imagine a multi-national corporation with several million lines of COBOL code. What are they going to do?

COBOL salaries, from what I've seen, are trending upwards. Older programmers are sometimes being enticed out of retirement to maintain legacy systems (this is rather hit or miss as there appears to still be some age discrimination here). There are companies out there offering software to allow COBOL programmers to write NetBeans, integrate with .NET code or simply translate the COBOL into other languages (the latter appears to have mostly been a disaster, but I don't have enough hard data on this).

So let's summarize the above:

* Trillions of dollars flow through COBOL. * Trillions of dollars flow through systems that businesses want to replace. * Current mitigation strategies involve supplementing COBOL, not replacing it.

You come up with a strategy to allow COBOL systems to naturally migrate to a new language and you stand to make _millions_ of dollars. By the way, I said "naturally". There are things like COBOL to Java translators (e.g., <http://opencobol2java.sourceforge.net/>), but COBOL is procedural and all variables are global. It doesn't even come close to mapping to an object- oriented paradigm (and any experienced OO programmer will understand why).

I actually have what I think is a decent migration strategy for COBOL, but that's a story for another day.

<comment><USER19> >Older programmers are sometimes being enticed out of retirement to maintain legacy systems (this is rather hit or miss as there appears to still be some age discrimination here).

Dear Lord. The one area where age discrimination should rationally favor older programmers and they still get the shaft. How does that conversation go in HR?

"Here's a candidate who knows COBOL... but wait, he's over 60. Ewww, it's so depressing looking at old people [i.e., those over 30] who aren't management track. And we'd have to pay him good money to do something that isn't focused on giving orders to underlings. How yucky. Welp, guess that mission critical piece of software can wait."

Perhaps I've been channeling Michael O. Church a bit too much for my own good, but sometimes it looks as though he's nailed it.

<comment><USER20> > The one area where age discrimination should rationally favor older > programmers and they still get the shaft.

The reason older workers are employed only grudgingly for vacant Cobol jobs is most of those jobs require after-hours standby support that older people generally don't want to do. Not wanting to be woken up at 3:00am anymore was why I left my last job doing such stuff. Younger workers are less likely to get a doctor's certificate saying they're no longer able to do standby work, soon after they're employed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In the 2000s in college I was working with a gas turbine simulator written in FORTRAN whose file format reflected its origins as something using punchcards.

</comment><comment><USER22> I used to script FORTRAN back when I was in nuclear engineering. I didn't know of Fortran's particular advantages other then that the software we used was built in FORTRAN and all our scripts to date that we used were built in FORTRAN and the general attitude in the uber-safe world of nuclear engineering is if it works, and works well, why in god's name would you mess with it :)

</comment><comment><USER23> I work in a bank and we're currently looking for a new all-encompassing loan and leasing system. The primary candidate, from Sopra, is written in COBOL and runs on an IBM mainframe.

... yup, people buy new COBOL software even today.

PS: I won't have to touch the thing, thank god. I made it pretty clear to my boss I would rather find a new job than to dedicate myself to supporting this monstrosity :)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm kinda blown away that this question hasn't been closed on stack overflow already. The mods are usually so aggressive about discussion-type questions.

<comment><USER25> (nota bene: I supplied the accepted answer)

This isn't a discussion-type topic. It's a question that has a non-subjective answer that doesn't depend on one's opinion. That being said, it _might_ be migrated to programmers.SE and now that the question made it to HN the mods might notice it and actually do so, but I hope they won't.

<comment> mh- _> protected by Pascal Cuoq 2 hours ago_

<comment><USER25> Protection is ok. Whenever a question gathers that much publicity there are many who are not aware of how the site works and try commenting by answering the question with a comment. Which is unwanted on SO/SE. It doesn't prevent people from commenting, it doesn't take the question away, it doesn't prevent established users from giving a better answer, so I feel that's not as drastic as migration or deletion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have a friend studying meteorology who is learning Fortran. I believe it is still heavily used for weather systems.

<comment><USER15> I would guess all climate models and weather prediction models are in Fortran.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A friend of mine used to work at PG&E in San Francisco. He told me that there is an ancient server in the basement running COBOL code that no one quite understood, upon which was a hand lettered note to never touch that machine for any reason, ever.

</comment><comment><USER28> I ran into someone who worked at the IT department at Mass Gen Radonc, and they use Fortran for the software delivering the radiation doses.

</comment><comment><USER29> I just left a major UK retail bank where I was managing the remediation of their debit card authorisation system that was written in COBOL.

</comment><comment><USER30> I loved the answer "Keeping older programmers rich ;)", to which someone wrote "You write that as if it were a bad thing!"

</comment><comment><USER31> Where is the Pascal love?

Is it dead and buried at this point?

I threw out the box to Turbo Pascal only a decade ago.

<comment><USER32> I used to be a member of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP), and Delphi was popular among small shops making Windows desktop applications. I never was a Delphi programmer, but it's adherents loved that it produced fast code with a small footprint. It combined a RAD environment let developers easily do low level coding when needed. When VB6 was canned by Microsoft, I think Delphi had an opening that they could have taken advantage of, but the various owners (Borland, Embarcadero) have always seemed to mis-manage the product. The latest Delphi has multi-platform support, but the pricing is still too high to get wide spread traction in my opinion.

<comment><USER33> I was always impressed by the Delphi Components ecosystem. There seemed to be a lot of useful code available at good prices - something I miss working as a web developer now.

Completely agree witht he product being mis-managed; it's still viable if they'd only make it competitive...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Physicists, or at least the ones I know, tend to use FORTRAN almost exclusively.

<comment><USER35> I was a physics major for most of my undergrad and I can confirm this.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Taaalk, a Social Network for Conversations - <AUTHOR> https://taaalk.co/#hnc <comment><USER2> The UI is a bit confusing. The bios section looks like a conversation. I don't like the name "Taaalk" either.

Other than that it's a good concept. Are you building this yourself? What's the tech stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I'm building it myself, stack is: RoR edge branch, HTML, SCSS, JS, Ajax, S3 and Dokku

Thanks for the feedback. I quite like the name Taaalk, for me it gives it a bit of a light hearted feel. Any ideas for what might suit it better?

Interesting re the top of the convo. The feedback Taaalk is open for anyone to join:

[https://taaalk.co/t/invite/taaalk- feedback](https://taaalk.co/t/invite/taaalk-feedback), invite code: 284748872

If you have ideas we can discuss there.</comment></comment>


The Rise of 'Facadism' in London - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-50396337 <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21533746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21533746)</comment>


Rutger Hauer, 'Blade Runner' Co-Star, Dies at 75 - <AUTHOR> https://variety.com/2019/film/news/rutger-hauer-dead-dies-blade-runner-co-star-1203278050/ <comment><USER2> Blade Runner really made me rethink a lot about life and why were put here on the earth, what were made to do and our free will. Given how we are likely doomed to climate change, I worry we will become slaves to corporations which act like governments, only in a much hotter and drier world, and I doubt Musk will found a colony on Mars before our society collapses.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gone....like tears in the rain.

RIP

</comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't 2019 the year the character died?

<comment><USER5> Wow, it actually was[1].

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner#Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner#Plot)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> RIP Floris!</comment>


Disputed Monkey Pics Do Not Belong in the Public Domain - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2014/08/come-on-wikipedia-a-primate-cant-own-a-picture/

<comment><USER2> > So does this mean that photos taken with a "selfie stick" don't belong to > me, but rather, to the public domain?

I don't know how a selfie stick works, but it doesn't just magically activate the shutter, there must be some implied intent to activate the shutter.</comment>