Ask HN: Software Engineer to Technical Architect - <AUTHOR> How can a Software Engineer (Web developer) move into the role of a Technical Architect. Would like to hear from those of you who took this path. <comment><USER2> This would require learning more about the entire system along with gaining business experience. This means you will need to have a pretty good grasp on the security and various operating systems and their benefits (Unix, Linux, Mac, Windows, z/OS, etc.) Along with various programming languages to understand the pros and cons of each for solving program requirements (Python, Ruby, C, C++, Rust, Objective-C, Swift, JavaScript, Java, etc.) along with the various forms of databases (ORACLE, MSSQL, MySQL, MariaDB PostgreSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, etc. and their associated query languages).

You may also need to know about the various virtualization technology and which one would be better depending on if you need the system to be private, internet facing or both (VMWare, Citrix, KVM, Hyper-V, etc.). You will also need to understand TCP/IP, UDP and the associated networking terminology and equipment available, as you normally also need to know about switching and routing, storage arrays, storage systems, hard drive and SSD types and the pros and cons of them.

As ultimately you would be the person to design an entire system with security, scalability, confidentiality, availability and integrity in mind and be able to break up the work into tasking and plans for the organization. Normally a title like this is reserved for those creating large systems due to the vast amount of experience that is required. An example would be a technical architect to build a nation wide fully automated and redundant web hosting platform for hosting the top government websites with the requirement of the sites never being down and never loosing data.

This means you will need to learn how to build highly secure and robust automated build systems for code and infrastructure. This way if you loose a system you can auto schedule the purchase and installation of new hardware or spin up a new virtual machine without having to do this manually.

Best job to get you started is a job as a network or systems administrator. I would recommend starting with a small business that hosts a few websites, then move up to larger businesses. If you want the ultimate challenge I would recommend working for a government agency that hosts thousands of high profile sites that cannot be unavailable and require 100% uptime.

You could do all of these things internally but you will not get the real life business environment people to people experience. As it is hard to make estimates on tasks you have never done before or worked with experienced people that do those tasks on a regular basis. You do not have to master all of these things but you should have done many of them with your own hands in a full-time job at some point.

Base requirement is being in a senior level position in the IT and security field, since it does require a nice bit of years of experience of hands on work and project management experience to be good at the job.</comment>


Do Programmers Need Seat Belts? (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dreamsongs.com/SeatBelts.html

<comment><USER2> It's worth noting that since this article was written, the static-typing group have figured out how to build interpreters/REPLs -- Haskell (via GHCi) is probably the most well-known, but OCaml and C# also have viable interpreters. And that's not even getting into Agda and Coq.

<comment><USER3> It was figured out much earlier than 1996 - CAML first appeared around mid 80ies, and the theory behind type inference is more than 30 years old. I strongly suspect someone of Richard Gabriel caliber to be aware of this in 1996.

Maybe the real difference is that computers became powerful enough to do this kind of compilation in near real time not so long ago ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that this article was published in 1996. [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=227717.227722&coll...](http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=227717.227722&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=4912041&CFTOKEN=14336453)

</comment><comment><USER5> The matching counterpoint article was also published in 1996. <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=227720></comment>


Chemists Uncover Powerful New Click Chemistry Reactivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2014/20140813sharpless.html

<comment><USER2> Pretty breathless PR piece from Scripps that actually doesn't go into any notable detail on the chemical reaction, hits all the buzzwords (green, click, yada yada) and manages to spell sulfur "sulfer" and hydrolyze "hydrolize". (Here's an actually awesome recent piece of Scripps science)[[http://openflask.blogspot.com/2013/08/ingenol-behind- scenes....](http://openflask.blogspot.com/2013/08/ingenol-behind- scenes.html)].

</comment><comment><USER3> Click chemistry despite its cool sounding name isn't very useful because the clickable parts that are left behind in the final structure are not necessarily themselves useful for other things..m in biology this can often mean "they get in the way" except for a subset of problems like payload attachment or imaging agent/analytical agent attachment. Mostly click chemistry gets used to make other biological discovery marginally easier.

<comment><USER3> With that said, i Just read the Lowe review and I think the polymer application is exciting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Time will tell. Major downside of the CuAAC click reaction is using azides, which are hella dangerous.

<comment><USER3> Alkyl azides are not very dangerous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Derek Lowe covered this here:

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/08/13/sulfates_and...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/08/13/sulfates_and_what_they_can_make.php)

</comment><comment><USER6> I was in Professor Sharpless' organic synthesis class at Scripps many many years ago. Very nice guy and extremely bright. I'm not surprised he's pushing the envelope again.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, Professor Sharpless. I took Organic II from him, he was indeed "very nice and extremely bright" (I had no doubt he'd get a Nobel in due course, as he did), and I too am not surprised. Here's Wikipedia on Click chemistry, which says he coined the phrase: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_chemistry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_chemistry)

Anecdote: he dipped some absorbent paper in safrole and had us pass them around and smell them, and in the middle of this said something to the effect, "Oh, BTW, this is officially carcinogenic, but it's not truly dangerous, I wouldn't have you smelling it if it was". As a former fan of root beer before the FDA forced it's removal I appreciated that. As the son of a Cajun mother I'm really glad filé powder contains doesn't contain it, banning it would be even more criminal.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Twitter bot, that predicts the value of Bitcoin in the next n days - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/coin_instinct <comment><AUTHOR> The algorithm analyses historical bitcoin data, and using k nearest neighbours algorithm, makes a prediction. You can tweet to the bot "@coin_instinct Predict for <number> days" and it will collect all of the tweets in the past 2 hours, and make a prediction based on the most requested number.

I made this, just for practice, of course the algorithm is not accurate all of the time, but most of the time, the predictions are pretty close.

Now working on improving it by adding an AI classification, and scraping the web for information, like are people all over the web talking the value will rise or fall in the next days, and adding that to formula.

The code is open source, and on my github: [https://github.com/ognjengt/coin- instinct-bot](https://github.com/ognjengt/coin-instinct-bot)

All of the suggestions, and improvements are welcome!</comment>


Ask HN: What are the 30 subtypes of image/video sharing? - <AUTHOR>

Came across an old startup ideas post by PG. In it he mentions photo/video sharing.
http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html
"There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered."
Does anyone have any idea what those are, or how he even got to the number 30? <comment><USER2> The number is irrelevant to the larger message which is that image/video sharing isn't necessarily a permanently solved problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many do you have on your list so far?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure, I might try doing a rubric later. Obvious uses cases to start with are the contrasts between FB and Snapchat.</comment></comment>


On Tolerating Complexity - <AUTHOR> https://abstractmachines.dev/posts/am010-on-tolerating-complexity.html <comment><USER2> Captures the nightmare of trying to blog something as a web developer.

Step 1 - Set up your own custom blog

Many steps later..

What happened? Who am I? What did I even want to write about?

<comment><USER3> It's not as bad when you keep it as simple as possible. The first version of the 'generator' for my blog (shameless plug: rubenvannieuwpoort.nl) was written in one or two days. It's just a couple of bash scripts (and one Python script), really (see [https://github.com/rubenvannieuwpoort/static-site- generator](https://github.com/rubenvannieuwpoort/static-site-generator)). Now I haven't wrote a lot since, but that has to do more with perfectionism and being busy).

<comment><USER4> It's ok, "Writing essays doesn't have to mean publishing them."

[http://paulgraham.com/useful.html](http://paulgraham.com/useful.html)

<comment><USER5> However, publishing is not free, you pay in money, your ownership of the content or your viewer's privacy.

That's if the publisher is actually decent and their mechanisms work.

<comment><USER4> I was addressing the perfectionism - which paul graham's article talks about in a counter intuitive way (sort of "we will not serve a wine before it's time")

As to "paying" I was trying to think of venues where you can publish without compromising.

I think the answer might be something like a $5/mo droplet or something on a cloud service.

There are nice venues to publish free, like here on hn, but you lose control of your work - for example, it could be taken down, it could be heckled, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The argument about tolerable complexity definitely resonated with me.

However, I think the author may have failed to consider that the people using Gatsby/Next/etc. for their personal blog aren't necessarily doing so because they believe it is the best tool for the job. It's might be a good excuse to explore some new technology. Other times it could be the tool someone is most familiar with.

As for the solution, I believe existing tools like make could have solved the "rework" problem.

For reloading, I'm not sure I understand the leap from "I need to inject some JavaScript" to "I need to be able to parse a HTML document". If you're already replacing placeholders in the template with your content, why not another with some JavaScript?

There's also an interesting trend happening with development tooling like Snowpack and Vite. Instead of recompiling your assets when things change, why not let the HTTP server compile them on the fly? You don't need to worry about dependency graphs because the browser will request the assets it needs. Your development server can send events when a requested asset is touched and some injected JavaScript can handle the reloading.

<comment><USER7> I run my site on Gatsby. It's easy for me to write some markdown, push it to github, and have netlify put it online automatically.

At one point I moved it all to custom software that ran on AWS, and it was 10x harder to write anything so I gave up and moved back to Gatsby.

I don't even like Gatsby, I think it's total overkill. That said, It makes it easy for me to run the site, and that's actually what I care about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And then the whole solution dies because it's slow and not scalable due to the hot reloader plus number of users.

A CDN is pulled in holding a list of changes or something, adding yet more complexity that could have been avoided using a performant caching web server in the first place, and a properly implemented hot reloader. (Well into millions of requests.)

Naivete is not well rewarded on the web.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Author here.

How did you arrive to the conclusion that our Machinist (the protagonist in this case) would use this go live? Very interested to know if something about the conclusion pointed you in that direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Side note: It's a pretty website, but the text is quite hard to read. Note necessarily a problem if you want to filter out people that favor content over form, just something to be aware of.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain what point the author is trying to prove?

That a custom build framework with a limited feature set. Has less complexity than a general framework with more features?

</comment><comment><USER10> I just write in html.</comment>


Remotely compromise devices by using bugs in Marvell Avastar Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> https://embedi.org/blog/remotely-compromise-devices-by-using-bugs-in-marvell-avastar-wi-fi-from-zero-knowledge-to-zero-click-rce/ <comment><USER2> WiFi chips and baseband processors are particularly attractive targets for exploitation, since they are network entry point for devices, and running systems that have probably been less investigated (at least publicly).

Very nice research and writeup. For those who haven't seen it a couple of years ago, Project Zero also had a series of articles about exploiting Broadcom's WiFi stack [0].

[0] [https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/04/over-air- expl...](https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/04/over-air-exploiting- broadcoms-wi-fi_4.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone please do a crowdfunding for a fully open source 802.11ac chipset and mini PCI express device?

For security purposes we do not want any binary drivers, blobs, bloated boat loaders and other fancy non-security in the hardware. This is really really basic security level.

<comment><USER4> > Can someone please do a crowdfunding for a fully open source 802.11ac > chipset and mini PCI express device?

A few RF transceivers and an FPGA like an Artix-7 (which has PCIe capability) might do the trick. It wouldn't be as cheap as a mass produced chipset, but a completely open 802.11ac chipset is unlikely to be mass produced anyway.

We already have examples of LTE base stations being run with SDR hardware like the LimeSDR, which is just an RF transceiver and an Altera FPGA, with a USB3 connection to the FPGA fabric.

In fact there are some SDR/FPGA dev kits that are Mini PCIe size and intended for use inside a laptop, specifically designed with LTE in mind[1].

So WiFi seems doable, even if you end up with a soft core CPU in the FPGA to do the same jobs WiFi chipset firmware is doing right now, at least you'd have full control over it and the firmware running on it.

[1] [https://www.crowdsupply.com/fairwaves/xtrx](https://www.crowdsupply.com/fairwaves/xtrx)

<comment><USER5> unfortunately the FPGA ecosystem is even more closed and open source unfriendly than the wifi hardware one, you aren't allowed to know anything about the chips, how code runs, or how to upload your own code, and you even have to use vendor specific IDEs and language extensions you are lucky if work anywhere outside of windows.

Current market FPGAs definitely aren't some shining beacon alternative to shitty hardware vendors, they are amongst the worst of the lot.

<comment><USER4> A few years ago that was true, and commercial tools are still horrid and closed and necessary for certain FPGA families.

But as of right now you can use[1] the Lattice iCE40 (small, 8k LUTs), Lattice UltraPlus (5k LUTs, DSPs) and Lattice ECP5[2] (~85k LUTs, with 5G SerDes and PCIe Gen 2) with completely open tools. The ECP5 in particular would be well suited for it.

And there is a productive effort[3] to do the same for the Artix-7 and other Xilinx 7 Series parts.

Even for those parts that are still very much closed, you can load an existing bitstream on them using open tools. Intel Max10, which is the part found on the LimeSDR Mini, is one of those even though we don't have open bitstream documentation for it yet.

The major commercial FPGA tools all work Linux at this point too, I use most of them on Ubuntu routinely including Lattice Diamond, Altera/Intel Quartus, and Xilinx ISE/Vivado.

[1] [http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/](http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/)

[2] [https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjtrellis](https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjtrellis)

[3] [https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray](https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Given that Wifi chips already have their own ARM CPU, at this point I'd rather have that CPU which already runs its own OS to just present as a network device to do NAT. Connect it to the fixed network, use a serial link - anything will do.

At least, I'd rather have anything but the current alternative: a device on the PCI bus having DMA with a firmware I can't audit.

Same thing with WWAN device by the way.

<comment><USER7> Not speaking specifically of the OP case, but CPU gets less and less involved in the datapath starting from a certain requirement of the max throughput. Insisting on it's going through the CPU still would raise the bar on the CPU (as a consequence, more fast RAM and increased overall power consumption, shorter battery life).

> with a firmware I can't audit.

In modern fast datapaths, there is a good deal of hardware acceleration involved, the firmware code would probably be incomprehensible without intimately knowing these.

<comment><USER6> Yes, there would be a IO load.

Tradeoffs, as always.

For some applications, I want low latency and high throughput. For others, I want security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Patches are in the works.

Does than mean the procedure of responsible disclosure was followed but vendor failed to patch on time?

</comment><comment><USER9> TL;DR Reseacher finds super cool RCE over (unconnected) WiFi for the Marvell Avastar Wi-Fi chipset family firmware and one to (locally) exploit the AP device driver.

List of impacted devices includes PS4, Xbox One, Samsung Chromebooks, and Microsoft Surface devices.

Nicely written paper from Embedi researcher Denis Selianin himself:

[https://embedi.org/blog/remotely-compromise-devices-by- using...](https://embedi.org/blog/remotely-compromise-devices-by-using-bugs- in-marvell-avastar-wi-fi-from-zero-knowledge-to-zero-click-rce/)

<comment><USER10> Thanks! We've updated the link from [https://www.zdnet.com/article/wifi- firmware-bug-affects-lapt...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/wifi-firmware-bug- affects-laptops-smartphones-routers-gaming-devices/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good. I hope that vulnerabilities like this continue to surface until legislators take notice. Morally bankrupt vendors will never stop locking down hardware unless governments get involved. Fuck each and every company that does this. Fuck them all to hell.

<comment><USER12> While I agree with you that vendors need to be held accountable for shipping crap, we also have to beware that we don't end up in a world of devices we cannot do anything on.

All kinds of jailbreaks, no matter if for the first generations of iPhones, for consoles, or for rooting Android devices, are based on vendors implementing shoddy security. Take it away and whoops, now we as users are fully in the death grip of what vendors and RIAA/MAFIAA allow us to do.

<comment><USER13> _we also have to beware that we don 't end up in a world of devices we cannot do anything on._

IMHO it's already gotten a bit too far in that direction, and if there's no mass revolt (which is itself quite unlikely), it's only going to get worse. The old Franklin quote has never been so relevant... people these days are so highly valuing "safe" over "free", that they don't realise they're building prisons around themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm confused.. so Wi-Fi chips run OSes inside them now?

<comment><USER15> A RTOS is not really an OS, just a super-fast way of dealing with I/O streams. More driver/firmware than OS, if you ask me. But some companies need fancy words for marketing, I guess.

<comment><USER2> > not really an OS, just a super-fast way of dealing with I/O streams

Saying this without any animosity, but you would probably be interested in reading about the history of operating systems. Desktop OSes are a (very visible) minority, and it's the opposite way in my opinion: a desktop OS is an OS + a large suite of tools + a shell.

It's literally something that operates the system so that every program written doesn't have to handle all the low level IO, that enables task management, etc.

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


IPhone case, digital wallet - Geode from iCache - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1404403369/geode-from-icache

<comment><USER2> This is the future. Very nice!

The only thing I was concerned about was the finger print scanner. Is it secure enough? I wonder if you can trick it with a picture of a finger print...</comment>


Fukushima: The Price of Nuclear Power - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/aug/12/fukushima-price-nuclear-power-namie/

<comment><USER2> And it's worth it. The alternative to nuclear power is not Living in Peace and Harmony with Gaia, it's coal.</comment>


Ask HN: What U.S. tech/developer conferences have you enjoyed? - <AUTHOR>

My employer has generously increased our professional-development budget, opening up some new possibilities for attending tech/developer conferences.
I'd love to hear about some "diamond in the rough" conferences you've enjoyed.  I've heard enough already about the big ones, which are mostly still out of my price range.  Are there any smaller (and less expensive) conferences that are enriching?
I'm particularly interested in those that deal with web development, JS, Python, and data science, but feel free to comment about any tech-related conference. <comment><USER2> HTML5 Conf - reason:

\- cost is extremely fair < $99 for 2 days if got in on early bird.

\- famo.us intro - mind blown [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxBxsLl9ViE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxBxsLl9ViE)

\- react.js - very nice talk by Pete Hunt - video not recorded, but here's his past talks on it [https://www.google.com/search?q=pete+hunt+react+video](https://www.google.com/search?q=pete+hunt+react+video)

\- continuous delivery - learned how to give a great speech, aside from the topic [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXk3aUoZ7AQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXk3aUoZ7AQ)

May's session just opened for tickets, although I'm probably going to pass it this time. Will probably attend Fall's session though.

strangeloop is the other one I would like to attend one day, but will need to save up money for it since it's slightly more expensive and requires a flight for me.

CHI and TEI is another ones I like to attend, but really need to save lots of money for.

</comment><comment><USER3>
      * NCDevCon (http://ncdevcon.com)
      * cfObjective (http://www.cfobjective.com/)

Both these started out as small ColdFusion (it's not dead) conferences but have grown into great general web development conferences.

</comment><comment><USER4> (Disclaimer: I don't know how good any of these are)

* PyCon

* Cloud Slam

* Strata

* O'Reilly Fluent Conference

* JSConf

</comment><comment><USER5> Codemash</comment>


Toward a more useful keyboard - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jasonrudolph/keyboard

<comment><USER2> OS X has a fairly sophisticated keyboard layout handler (better than xkb IMO) that allows you to define arbitrary dead keys in addition to the usual accents. For instance, in my usual layout, I have '⌥G' as a 'dead Greek' key, such that for example pressing '⌥G' followed by 'b' yields 'β'. Similarly I have dead-key layers for superscripts, subscripts, math, blackboard bold, Hebrew letters, keyboard symbols, and so on. Layers can also be chained, so, for instance, I have a fraction chain such that '⌥F 3 4' yields '¾'. (An X-style Compose key could be done that way, though I haven't.)

Ukelele¹, free software from SIL, provides a reasonably good GUI for defining and manipulating OS X keyboard layouts.

¹ [http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele](http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele) [Edit: fixed link]

<comment><USER3> Not many people have heard of it for whatever reason, but what you're describing can be accomplished perfectly well on X11 systems using XCompose: [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Accents_on_US_keyboards](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Accents_on_US_keyboards)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I went through much of the same process in the past week, as I started at a new job where I was not easily able to use linux. I'm a HHKB pro 2 user also - although I actually have really grown to enjoy the placement of the arrow keys and not having to physically move my hand over to use a separate set of specialized keys. As a user of the colemak keyboard layout, I've grown accustomed to rarely needing to stray far from the home row, and this keyboard helps me take the same economy of motion to the next level. For software, I arrived at KeyRemap4MacBook at the recommendation of the colemak website, and between that and standard mountain lion system preference remaps of where command is mapped to etc... (caps lock -> control on the actual laptop keyboard is MANDATORY) I'm finally starting to enjoy using osx as a tool for interacting with text editors.

But - I was fiercely at war with manual placement of windows and the horrendous methods I knew of for changing windows. I'm an xmonad user, and really just wanted something that would put windows exactly where I wanted them and to swap focus easily enough. I found slate, and although it may take a few minutes to write a conf that you're happy with I was able to replicate the major functionality that I wanted.

Ahh... ok now I can finally get stuff done without constant vacations to the mouse, and I can start to notice some of OSX's visual niceties.

<comment><USER5> Check out xnomad. It seems to me the closest imitation to Xmonad, and doesn't need messing with a config to get working (that is, comes with good default keycommands and limited layouts). It's not in Haskell, but the authors experimental ObjC-based-but-many-times-cleaner-and-cooler language.

Install tranquil, and then I recommend using the .app bundle I made on my fork ([https://github.com/JasonJAyalaP/xnomad/raw/master/xnomad.app...](https://github.com/JasonJAyalaP/xnomad/raw/master/xnomad.app.zip)). I added a nice icon and made it much simpler to quit and launch it.

<comment><USER4> Ahh this looks very promising. I'll be checking it out, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whatever happened to that keyboard with LCD keys (I've completely forgotten it's name, otherwise I'd surely answer my own question). Did it ever become available or is it still vapourware?

That seemed like a good idea at the time.. I mean, muscle memory is fine if all you do is programming (which I do a fair amount of), but sometimes one moves into different domains that have their own keyboard layouts, for which type of keyboard would be a boon.

EDIT: Of course, actually googling _beforehand_ would have brought up 'The Optimus'.. And of course the Optimus Maximus is "unavailable", though I fail to see why except that perhaps it was horribly expensive?

<comment><USER7> Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface, page 51:

"BUTTONS THAT CHANGE IN THE NIGHT

Some aircraft have pushbuttons that contain dot-matrix display used to change the legend that appears on the button. This change is done under the aircraft's computer's control so that the buttons can be relabeled on the fly. The advertising copy for one brand of these buttons made some human factors claims. or one thing, fewer buttons would be needed in the limited cockpit area. For another, avionics and other system changes could be effected without having to rewire the cockpit.

From the perspective of cognitive science, good labels enhance visibility. Assuming that the person choosing the labels bothers to test the wording, to make sure that the chosen labels are effective and unconfusing, it is, on the face of it, a good idea.

But more careful thinking reveals a number of potential pitfalls to the product: All legended buttons get obscured– by the very finger you are using–just as you are about to press them, obviating a last-second check that you are pressing the right button. But this is a minor problem, for normally you have looked at the legend before you press the button– if you have looked at all. (I am certainly not looking at the legends on the keycaps of my keyboard as I type this)

Then there is the deeper problem of the disappearing button. You want to enable, say, the manual controls on the cabin air conditioner. There is, you recall, a button labeled MANUAL AIR, but it is nowhere to be found. The reason is that it now says COMM BACKUP. You have to figure out how to get that button to light up the way it did before. Perhaps a switch or a button somewhere else changes the legends on the buttons. Or perhaps the legends are context sensitive and won't allow you to change the air conditioning right now. Whatever the cause, when a button has variable legends, the button you want will perhaps have vanished because the system is in a different mode.

But the gravest problem has to do with habituation. Imagine the experienced pilot reaching up and pressing a button. The radio's not working; something's wrong. A communications problem: Time to enable COMM BACKUP. She jabs out expertly at the COMM BACKUP button. Click! Too bad. The copilot was adjusting the cabin temperature in response to a passenger complaint, and the buttons are now in climate control mode. The pilot has just achieved complete manual control over the air conditioning system.

Variable-legend buttons could be useful, for instance, if several people use the same console, each using it in such a way that the buttons do not change meaning for any one user. But this is a situation seldom encountered. Soft keys, whereby a display has changable legends that affect on-screen buttons or buttons adjacent to the display, have the same liability as do variable-legend buttons. A similar problem exists with the use of function buttons, labeled F1 through F11 on many computers. If their functions are unchanging, the labeling is mnemonic. If their functions change, you cannot use them automatically. In either case, they are a poor design."

<comment><USER8> That's a reasonable criticism, but I don't see how it's applicable to the Optimus keyboard. The Optimus only changes the labels to more accurately reflect the function the button already has in a given context- such as replacing "U" with a rectangle symbol in Photoshop, or showing accented characters when you hold down the right modifier key. The Optimus doesn't add any new key re-definitions.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, and the Optimus would likely not be used by two people at the same time, thus one might be marginally less likely to suffer the kind of context switches described above (which are of course valid, but in that context).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The best thing I ever did was remap Caps Lock to Esc at some point last year.

<comment><USER10> I have Ctrl on Caps on all my keyboards and my main keyboard, a Happy Hacking Keyboard[1], comes with the Unix layout* anyway.

Why Esc? For Vim?

*Control instead of Caps, Delete above Enter

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like a neat project. I'd recommend simplifying the readme a bit though. I gave it a brief skim and I still have no idea what this is.

<comment><USER12> That should be a clue as to the actual utility of the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been thinking a lot lately about a completely pimped out keyboard interface...

It starts with hardware (Type Matrix, Kinesis) and hardware accessories (petals, extenders). It continues with a keyboard layout you're happy with (Workman seems to be the most hardcore), either built into the keyboard hardware or selected via the OS. The keyboard layout in the OS can be modified as well. Then come deeper software hacks like PCKeyboardHack and KeyRemap. Then, softer stuff like keyboard shortcuts go in your favorite launcher/macro/shortcut app.

<comment><USER4> I'd never heard of workman, I think I'll be trying this out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yet another article who supposes everybody uses Mac. Up until you reach the 'dependencies' part you realize it's for OS X only.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting that he talks about _what_ he wants to do (same commands, everywhere), then shows an app that controls _how_ to do things (use caps lock for escape and control).

Isn't he consciously aware of what he wants, or isn't he getting there yet?

</comment><comment><USER15> I started reading this, saw "Super Duper mode" and F19, and the assignment of Control+Shift+Option+Command to some newly created "Hyper" key, and seriously thought it was a parody of those projects trying to improve and innovate on computer input methods (e.g. vim, colemak, various ergonomic keyboard designs).

I then realised it wasn't a joke. Now I actually think this is pretty cool at what it does, but it did make me think about how much effort people seem to put into finding the perfect interface, and yet the QWERTY keyboard has (generally) been the unchanging standard for decades now...

</comment><comment><USER16> What I want is a keyboard with two big keys below the space bar, each half the width of the space bar, that I could map to Escape (the left one) and 3rdLevelShift (the right one). With Ctrl left of A, and Backspace just above Enter (aka the Unix Layout), I would be able to type without having to resort to ridiculous contorsions.

Loads of bonus points if the keyboard has the same kind of keyswitches as the IBM 5100 computer. If you are familiar with modern keyboard switches and folding knives, the IBM 5100 switches are to Cherry blues what a Chris Reeve Sebenza is to a Walmart-bought Buck knife.

<comment><USER17> Do you really need that large a spacebar anyway?

[http://www.trulyergonomic.com](http://www.trulyergonomic.com)

(I feel like a shill, but this is what I use when I'm not on the road, with the keys remapped like a crazy person.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I made an app that remaps your Mac's power key to forward delete:

[https://github.com/pkamb/PowerKey](https://github.com/pkamb/PowerKey)

</comment><comment><USER19> super duper mode, space for shift? i don't get it ... o_O

</comment><comment><USER20> Related: [http://www.neo-layout.org](http://www.neo-layout.org) — also has the arrow keys on one of the upper levels, plus tons of useful characters all over each of the levels :).

</comment><comment><USER21> I prefer leaving shift out of the hyper modifier, so you _also_ have shift+hyper as a valid modifier.</comment>


All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace - <AUTHOR> http://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis-AllWatchedOverByMachinesOfLovingGrace/ <comment><USER2> You should be careful about claims made in Adam Curtis videos. His cinematography is great and I love him because of the ADD-style and music he uses, but a lot of information is very biased and, in very many cases, just plain false (e.g. In one of his movies he calls Herbert Marcuse the leader of the student movement of the 60s and shows a short clip of him talking. The short clip is taken from an interview in which one finds, if watched integrally, Marcuse himself explaining why he is NOT an important figure in the movement). So maybe one should see the movies as entertainment rather than documentaries.

<comment><USER3> > _"The short clip is taken from an interview in which one finds, if watched > integrally, Marcuse himself explaining why he is NOT an important figure in > the movement"_

That's called modesty. To deny Marcuse had no influence because he said he didn't is incredibly naive.

As far as "bias", every piece of media we consume has bias. Making claims of, "This is biased!" is something you do in high school readings; of _course_ it's biased. Mr. Curtis is using film to express an opinion and theory about how he sees things work. That's what all artists, writers and film makers do.

Some of his ideas are a bit of a stretch, yes. But I think people are doing a great disservice to others by attaching a disclaimer to these films. In my opinion, Curtis makes some of the most well-done, stylized, intellectual and entertaining documentaries going (and this series is probably his worst). If you don't like his films, that's fine. But don't try to pass him off as a nutter. That's unfair and biased.

<comment><USER2> You are completely right, Marcuse is very modest in portraying himself as an influential figure, and I didn't want to sound as if arguing that he had no influence. He had an influence, but he was in NO way involved in organizing any of the actions the students took. To quote him, he was a "father figure" to them, rather than a leader.

To answer your second point, I don't want to argue that Adam Curtis makes bad movies, quite the contrary. But his intellectual contributions are very questionable. There is a reason why contrarian people like Noam Chomsky are widely respected, and there is a reason why people like Adam Curtis are not. To quote Carl Sagan: 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'. And Curtis seems to provide the former without the latter.

<comment><USER3> I suppose I was a bit defensive because I generally consider this forum to have a slightly "high-brow" slant. I also take much advice from it. So while you're certainly entitled to your opinion, and to like or dislike the films, I think the works are all good enough that people should be encouraged to watch them. As opposed to you telling me Transformers 3 sucks, and me never having to think about watching it after that.

When I leapt into the comments there happened to be a slightly unfavourable sentiment regarding Adam Curtis. I just wanted people to know that everything he's produced is _at least_ worth a viewing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Adam Curtis bugs me.

He basically makes music videos for conspiracy theories.

His smug tone, the apparently relentless fondness for animistic fallacies and the surface-level treatment of complex phenomena really gets up my delicate nostrils.

<comment><USER5> Sorry to hear that. This subject was new to me but by now I have watched the OP's series and the first episode of the living dead (thanks HN for another stimulating experience). I find them extremely interesting, more like essays than lectures. You know, in an essay there are a bit more artistic liberties.

<comment><USER5> I have now finished The Living Dead and am halfway through Pandora's Box. Some observations with your permission.

Adam Curtis most definitely does not make music videos around conspiracy theories. He makes intellectually challenging documentaries based on absolutely stunning archive footage and refreshingly radical observations.

He seems to apply a kind of a dialectic method. For instance in the Living Dead he combines three quite remote subjects. The first episode is how the WW2 was painted as the battle between good and evil, while some think that in a war bad things happen at both sides. The second one is about cold war brainwashing techniques both in the U.S. and in Russia. The final one is all about how Margaret Thatcher bought Winston Churchill's dream of a Greater Britain. Looks like the last one is the point he really wanted to make and the two first are just preliminaries, although extremely insightful.

He is also obsessed about the relativity of truth and the feasibility of rational planning and free will. Which are not subjects readily emptied methinks.

And I don't find his voice annoying at all. So all in all, my first impression is extremely good and I have already recommended him to a couple of friends.

<comment><USER4> That was exactly my point.

Curtis takes reams of archival footage, sets it to funky music, then ties together disparate historical events into a seamless narrative.

The problem is that he likes that narrative to have agency. But a lot of history is "one damn thing after another". No particular cabal animates this or that outcome, people just act based on what's in front of them.

And that's what I mean by the animistic fallacy. Curtis sees the lightning bolts of history and supposes that some god is throwing them (usually, dunh dunh duuuuh, it's economists). But it basically doesn't happen that way.

It's style over substance. Mind-candy. Sweet and ultimately unfulfilling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _He smiled. "My dear girl, in Culture history alone it has been about nine thousand years since a human, marvellous though they are in so many other ways, could do anything useful in a serious, big-guns space battle other than admire the pretty explosions… or in some cases contribute to them."

"Contribute?"

"Chemicals; colours. You know."_

\-- Iain Banks, "Surface Detail"

</comment><comment><USER7> A list of assertions from the film:

Ayn Rand was very influential to the Silicon Valley of the 90s.

There was a dream of large scale cybernetic/emergent self-regulation enabled by computers, which would do away with hierarchical organizations and government as we knew it.

This "Californian Ideology" held that government would need to become a facilitator rather than a regulator. Bill Clinton was originally opposed to this ideology, believing in the regulatory role of government.

Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had been a follower of Rand's philosophy since the 1950s.

In 1992, Greenspan convinced Clinton to cut government spending to lower interest rates and grow the economy, the opposite of Clinton's original intentions as president.

A belief emerged called the New Economy, which said the booming economy would be different than previous booms because computers could calculate risk in a way that enabled more feedback and self-regulation.

In 1996, Greenspan noticed that rising profits were not tied to rising productivity, and warned of a speculative bubble. He then reversed this outlook due to political pressure.

Implied cinematically: Rand's affair with Nathaniel Brandon, which she considered rational, had parallels to Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

The rising economy of the 90s prompted a speculative boom in Southeast Asia. Concerns about this were intercepted and put down by Robert Rubin, former head of Goldman Sachs and believer in computer self-regulation.

Carmen Hermasillo (Humdog) raised concerns about cyberspace not being a utopian platform, but rather a corporate profit center for user generated content.

The speculative bubble in Southeast Asia collapsed at the same time as Clinton became entangled with the Lewinsky scandal, leaving the treasury to deal with a fiscal crisis in Indonesia.

Indonesia signed with the IMF, but their currency collapsed anyways. The IMF loans were really to pay off western investors, who then left.

<comment><USER8> > In 1992, Greenspan convinced Clinton to cut government spending to lower > interest rates and grow the economy, the opposite of Clinton's original > intentions as president.

Clinton didn't cut total spending at any time during his 8 years. (He did cut defense, but spent that money, and more, elsewhere.)

The rate of increase may have decreased somewhat after 94, when the Dems lost both the House and Senate.

[http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit- unde...](http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under- clinton/) shows that the deficit reduction trend started a couple of budget cycles before Clinton's first budget.

Note that none of this counts unfunded liabilities. They erase much of the Clinton surplus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Make sure to read the original poem:

[http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508991-All_Watched_Over_By_Machin...](http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508991-All_Watched_Over_By_Machines_Of_Loving_Grace- by-Richard_Brautigan)

</comment><comment><USER10> Obligatory parody link: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg>

<comment><USER11> Psych.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Watching his videos reminds me of the punishment described in Anathem where people are forced to learn random or illogical content and then pass an oral examination:

<http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Book>

[PS A Machine of Loving Grace would be a splendid name for a Culture GSV].

</comment><comment><USER13> Given that three people posted a link to the same parody video within three minutes of each other, I'm forced to assume that Adam Curtis is a brilliant filmmaker.

</comment><comment><USER14> The rest of the comments go too far. Adam Curtis does nothing that "real news" doesn't do. I'm not saying that everything that he says is true (he doesn't provide references, so it would be difficult to verify anyway), but I think the other comments are a little unfair.

With regards to the parody, I think it places too much weight on the belief that people can't watch a succession of images and follow a (albeit winding) narrative at the same time.

<comment><USER10> To back you up on this, another parody, this time of conventional news: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're going to watch any Adam Curtis documentary, it's worth watching the parody video "The Loving Trap"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg>

</comment><comment><USER15> For a better watching experience, here is is on Vimeo <https://vimeo.com/29865018>

</comment><comment><USER16> "Century of the Self" was my favorite of Curtis' films, and very relevant for anyone involved in marketing.

Describes how industry went from manufacturing necessities to constructing lifestyles by linking consumption to self-expression.

Part 1 of 4 (links to the others): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prTarrgvkjo>

</comment><comment><USER17> These are not good films. These are bad films. Adam Curtis is not a good film maker. Adam Curtis is a bad film maker.

This is better <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg></comment>


Why Matt Drudge Still Beats Mark Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/05/17/why-matt-drudge-still-beats-mark-zuckerberg/ <comment><USER2> This post is a near identical rehash of the material contained in this NYTimes piece, titled _How The Drudge Report Got Popular And Stayed on Top_ : <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/business/media/16carr.html>

I recommend the New York Times version - it's better written, and has great analysis.</comment>


Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits - <AUTHOR> http://thechangelog.com/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits/ <comment><USER5> One of my favorite quotes from Rich Hickey:

"Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff. The person who has a genuinely simpler system - a system made out of genuinely simple parts, is going to be able to affect the greatest change with the least work. He's going to kick your ass. He's gonna spend more time simplifying things up front and in the long haul he's gonna wipe the plate with you because he'll have that ability to change things when you're struggling to push elephants around."

[http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is- key/](http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is-key/)

<comment><USER6> Fun nit: this is one of the times when _effect_ is the correct word to use.

<comment><USER7> Depends on the variety of English. What you said is true for the prestige dialect, certainly.

<comment><USER8> There ain't no such thing as a prestige dialect in English. In all of them, "affect change" is just plain wrong.

<comment><USER7> > There ain't no such thing as a prestige dialect in English.

I sincerely hope this is sarcasm.

> In all of them, "affect change" is just plain wrong.

Cite?

<comment><USER8> Hello derleth:

"Effect. As noun, means result; as verb, means to bring about, accomplish (not to be confused with affect, which means "to influence")." [http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk3.html](http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk3.html)

Affect vs. Effect: [http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sullivan/CommonWritingErrors.html#...](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sullivan/CommonWritingErrors.html#Affect_vs._Effect_)

<comment><USER7> Those sources don't define correctness. Especially Strunk and White, which is pretty well debunked at this point:

[http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003463.php](http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003463.php)

<comment><USER8> Sorry, derleth. It's not a matter of someone defining correct usage. It's simply a matter of looking at the dictionary definitions of the words 'affect' and 'effect'. Affect simply means to influence while effect means to bring about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rich Hickey has great track record of being _spot on_. He seems to know exactly where the pain points of software engineering are, and proposes sound solutions.

In this talk he explains how Datomic works, but more importantly, what the reasoning behind it is:

[http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-datomic- cap](http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-datomic-cap)

Everybody should watch this, as the concepts behind it apply to any system.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a great list, now I can refer my new programmers to a single place.

Rich is quite possibly the greatest marketing asset for the Clojure programming language. After listening to one of his talks (about concurrency) I realized that there is an extremely smart person that does a lot of thinking and makes a lot of sense, so perhaps Clojure might be worth a try. Haven't regretted it.

<comment><USER11> I took the same path. I was actually a bit skeptical at his talks initially, but once they sunk in, he's really head of the curve on this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Simple made easy has my vote for the #1 spot, it isn't about clojure as much as about general principles. I really love that talk.

<comment><USER13> I'll also vote Simple Made Easy above Are We There Yet. I've talked about it at length with a bunch of other programmers and get consistently better responses from starting people with Simple Made Easy.

<comment><USER14> If this is the talk I think it is, I can say it helped me greatly as a programmer. I'm one of those 'homegrown' programmers with no formal education, and I'd probably horrify some of you with my work. But I'm learning, and very aware of my deficiencies.

What I loved about this talk is that it seemed more a 'philosophy of programming' thing, where a lot of what he said applied even to my shitty programming, and (hopefully) even improved it.

<comment><USER12> For me the biggest change was 'structured programming', Niklaus Wirth and K&R changed the way I looked at code completely. Pascal was never my favorite language but after 'Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs' I became a much better programmer pretty much overnight.

<comment><USER14> Haha, yeah, that's pretty much the single most useful thing I learned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Rich Hickey is a genius. I love how he connected music to software engineering [1]. He should write a book on some of these topics. He has a lot more than 45 mins talks to offer to the world.

[1] [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition- Perfor...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Performance)

<comment><USER16> I've been waiting for a book that elaborates on simple design a la Hickey (with some examples/code) ever since I saw the "simple made easy" talk. If there is one that I missed, I'd love to know.

<comment><USER17> paradigms of artificial intelligence by norvig, although seemingly about something completely different, has the same "simplicity" in its code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read the list of comments and I find disappointing too see people saying things like "he talk simple stuff", or "this is too basic, I got nothing out of it"

I love those talks, and every once in a while I watch them again so I don't forget the basic principles.

Rich went 2 step ahead than simple state what some people feels as obvious: he created a language that implements them, and he communicated those concepts.

He did something to better the trade. Have you?

This is not about the next tool to make a quick buck, or cute, but impractical, philosophical concepts

And, I too would put "Simple made easy" as the first one. Then it becomes much easier to understand why functions are the 555 chip of software development.

</comment><comment><USER19> We sometimes watch Rich Hickey's talks in the office.

We always have a good conversation afterwards.

<comment><USER20> That's exactly what I've started doing at my office. We watch a talk per week and discuss it after. Rich Hickey occupies several rows of the spreadsheet!

<comment><USER21> Is your spreadsheet of talks publicly available?

<comment><USER20> I could make it that way, it's still pretty small at the moment. Here's the current list:

Theraputic refactoring - Katrina Owen, The Future of Programming - <USER2> Victor, Simplicity matters -Rich Hickey, Hammock Driven Development - <USER3> Hickey, Programming with nothing - Tom Stuart, Connections: Faith in Numbers - James Burke, Growing a Language - Guy Steele, Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming - Jim Weirich, Cool Code - Kevlin Henney, We Really Don't Know How to Compute! - Gerald Jay Sussman, Keynote: Architecture the Lost Years - <USER4> Martin, Computer Heuristics - Richard Feynman, The Power of Abstraction - Barbara Liskov, The Mother of All Demos - Douglas Engelbart

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> While I have much sympathy for Rich (way more than for Clojure), I find his talks to be extremely simple. He can talk hours about very basic and obvious things. Overall, at the end, I'm not getting much new from it.

<comment><USER23> Oh shit, I have learned a lot from Rich's talks... so your talks must be much more useful. Where can I find them? Please tell me you have some talks? You have such great ideas, or communicate such "extremely simple" ideas so well that others (or even you yourself) have recorded them for me to watch. No talks? So you keep this knowledge to yourself and shit all over a guy who shares his knowledge with a community?

Your comment is terrible. You shit on Rich, you shit on Clojure, and say nothing other than you're so superior that you get nothing from anything Rich says. Fuck you (yes, that's not subtle, but your comment is passive-aggressive bullshit or perhaps you lack the ability to clearly state WHY you do not think a talk is useful).

<comment><USER24> I really wish this is the last time I see a comment like this on HN. This is nothing but an angry, sarcastic rant by somebody who, I can only presume, had a really bad day. There is absolutely nothing civil in this comment.

While I completely disagree with the grandparent comment, I understand that that's his/her opinion, nothing more. What Hickey talks about may seem obvious, but only in hindsight, at least to me. It seems that most of the commenters in this thread feel the same way. However, I can accept that there are people, like Zerr, who would find Hickey's talks to be rather boring stuff, since they are already well aware of everything he talks about. So there's really no need to reply to these people with hateful comments like this one.

<comment><USER23> I had a pretty good day and I'm not an angry person. I was very uncivil in response to what I understood to be a dismissive comment wrapped in civility. Comments tearing down someone else's real work without offering alternatives or constructive criticism are easy to make and damaging, but my tone and choice of language didn't communicate my message. I'm sorry that it bothered you. I generally do not post w/ this tone and will be more careful in choosing the right tone to communicate my meaning in the future. Thanks for your feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love this guy since the first time I watched 'Are We There Yet?'.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is there a way to get transcriptions from infoq presentations ?

<comment><USER27> I often wish there was, too. I _hate_ being forced to watch the video to assimilate what a person has to say. At work, it's not an option for me.</comment></comment>


Pale Moon 27 is released - <AUTHOR> Pale Moon 27 is finally released.
Offers finally a more state of the art Gecko engine, 1080P Youtube video support and many other improvements.
Grab it from here: https://www.palemoon.org/WIP/
Additonal links: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=56 - official board section
https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Tycho - if you want to help contribute to the code
Opinions? Good, bad or a waste of time? <comment><USER2> Link to Palemoon Brower homepage: [http://palemoon.org](http://palemoon.org)</comment>


To the BBC: I'm sorry about Cloud Reliability - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mimecast.com/2011/05/bbc-im-sorry-about-cloud-reliability/

<comment><USER2> I think this article proves his own point: It's a complicated subject that isn't understood well.

For instance, he says PSN isn't SaaS... But it is. It's software that's hosted online that provides value for the users. Online gaming, a store, a 3d virtual environment, messaging, and more. They all technically fit the definition.

He wants it to be 'Photoshop, but a website' or something like that, and it doesn't have to be.

Having said that, if you still rule out PSN as SaaS, then something doesn't need to be SaaS to be 'Cloud'. Many APIs online are cloud-based and wouldn't fall under his definition of 'SaaS'. Many virtual worlds/online games, too.

The original 'cloud' graphic just meant a bunch of computers all doing about the same thing, practically interchangeably. It actually meant the entire internet, routing information around. You didn't have to care how things works, just that info went in 1 side and out the other.

These days, it's still computers working together for the same task(s), but more diverse than just routing data. To properly be 'cloud', it should be scalable. More usage means more computers working on the task(s).

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely.

But I don't agree that PSN is Cloud- it's online. That's the whole point.

Where the name from vs what it is, are two completely different. The internet per se isn't cloud, and the cloud isn't the internet. It's a marketing term.

Plus we have to be super careful about what parts of the stack we're talking about. To be properly "cloud" is err what? It depends what part of the stack we're talking about. You seem to be talking about IaaS whereas most of the revenue and adoption is SaaS....</comment></comment>


Online courses from the world's top scholars - <AUTHOR> http://academicearth.org/

<comment><USER2> So you know that scene in Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon's character chides the Harvard student for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education that could be obtained for the cost of some late fees at the library? That is only getting more and more true.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to say, I'm a huge fan of the MIT CompSci course. A more direct link is [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/video- lectures/)

<comment><USER4> Always been a great resource.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As much as I love OCW (I've "done" several courses there, including problem sets, exams etc), I think the problem of not being able to interact with an expert is still a very big limitation.

For example, suppose I'm studying mathematics. I miss being able to show a proof to someone to get feedback on it. Sure, I know if I succeeded in proving what I set out to prove, but is there a better way I could have proved the same thing?

It's like if I learned to code, and had unit tests to check correctness, but did not have anyone to critique my code style. Maybe I'm passing all the tests but my code is ugly and could be made a lot better?

This may not be a problem in all courses, but it certainly is starting to be a problem in the higher level mathematical courses that I'm learning.

OCW is fantastic, and I hope a companion site comes up where a student can ask questions to experts (even on "simple topics" and homework problems -- which rules out MathOverflow).

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks! This reminds me of what our government is trying to do (they're trying to create curriculum based entirely on freely accessible online material).

I forget where I read it from but stuff like this (and the OpenCourseWare movement) is definitely an area of education that's pretty fascinating to see develop.

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome: Gilbert Strang teaching Linear Algebra!

<http://academicearth.org/courses/linear-algebra>

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome. So glad I found this. Not some interesting topics on there that I hadn't seen before.</comment>


Show HN: Discover the most requested technologies for IT Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://skills.technology/ <comment><USER2> Lists like these make me wonder when–if ever–will .NET fall in popularity?

<comment><USER3> If I may defend C#... I don't care for the MS platform, nor visual studio, but the language itself is very well designed IMHO. It's not flashy, nor sexy, but it gets the job done, and done well. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of C# on OSX. I know when I pick C# for a project I am not going to run into any gotchas or rough parts of the language.

If C# has a problem, its how low its cognitive load is. The dumbest "programmer" I've ever met was able to call himself a C# programmer, and likewise, for some of the finest minds I've met.

That being said my preferred language is Ruby.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and besides they have other tools gaining traction, like F# which I've heard good things about.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Launches Web Analytics Service For Websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/09/13/twitter-launches-web-analytics-service-for-websites/ <comment><USER2> Direct link to the proverbial horses mouth: [https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-twitter-web- analyti...](https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-twitter-web-analytics)</comment>


How Twitter Is Impacting the World of Television - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2430128,00.asp <comment><USER2> I've stopped watching news programs that stream twitter across the screen. The worst is MSNBC.</comment>


On Being Excellent to Each Other - <AUTHOR> http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2011/06/on-being-excellent-to-each-other.html <comment><AUTHOR> Jeff LaMarche's follow-up to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2618298></comment>


Help Fight Patent Trolls – Support the SHIELD Act - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/help-eff-fight-patent-trolls-and-support-shield-act <comment><USER2> The "Non-Practicing Entities must post a bond" section (section (b)) is the one I was most happy to see.

It means that at least the first levels of "Have a corporate shell that dissolves upon an adverse finding" tricks will be defused.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I feel the law should do more than require the patent troll to pay the other side's legal fees. Perhaps extra damages should be awarded to patent troll victims. Lawsuits take a tremendous amount of time to defend oneself against. You should be personally compensated for the time spent defending yourself when a troll needlessly drags you to court.

<comment><USER3> You have to separate two scenarios: plaintiff brings a justifiable suit but loses, and plaintiff brings an unjustified suit. The latter is handled through professional discipline of the attorney's involved. The former is not really a scenario where the plaintiff is at fault.

Just because you lose a suit doesn't mean the suit was unjustified. You know all those plaintiffs suing the banks over mortgage related issues? Most of those plaintiffs are going to lose, because they can't back up their claims with sufficient proof or the banks skirted but stayed on the right side of the law, at least technically. Should those plaintiffs pay the banks punitive penalties for bringing suits they lost? Should they even have to pay the banks' legal fees?

It's easy to throw around ideas like loser-pays when you have a clearly established preconception of who the "good guys" and who the "bad guys" are. But that doesn't make for workable policy. Bankers/private equity folks, etc, really think they're the good guys and the people suing them are just bitter because they got the short end of a deal they knowingly got into. The folks that work in petro-chem really think they're the good guys, and folks suing them for environmental harms are just hypocrites who want all the advantages of modern petrochemcial processes (pretty much every gadget you own is the result of a horribly polluting process) but aren't willing to put up with the inevitable consequences. I'm sure they'd love loser pays too, for situations where some investor ends up not being able to prove outright fraud, or where some community can't muster the evidence to prove that a chemical plant caused kids to get cancer.

Loser-pays is just a band-aid on what is a more fundamental problem with the patent system: the law has evolved to make patents a strong right with very ill-defined boundaries. That makes litigation protracted and expensive because you end up getting into the weeds of technical issues and whether this kind of thing is like this other kind of thhing that the court system isn't really competent to deal with. No amount of tweeking at the edges is going to fix that. The solution is to make patent rights narrower and more well-deliniated. Shift the focus to questions like whether the defendant unfairly competed with plaintiff by copying the plaintiff's IP instead of innovating themselves. These are things the court system is competent to handle (and has been for hundreds of years). When it can be easily seen whether clearly-defined legal rights have been violated, frivolous litigation naturally diminishes because the cost to prove allegations wrong goes way down, which makes the incentive to just settle also

<comment><USER4> > You have to separate two scenarios: plaintiff brings a justifiable suit but > loses, and plaintiff brings an unjustified suit. The latter is handled > through professional discipline of the attorney's involved.

Honest question: can you point to some examples where such professional discipline lead to a meaningful impact on the plaintiff's firm (it would seem that attorneys are not so scarce that censuring one or two at a large firm would do much damage), or another kind of meaningful reform?

I'm speaking from a position of relative ignorance here, but the only time I can remember hearing of an attorney being professionally punished in a career- impacting way was Mike Nifong. _If_ it takes that level of egregiousness to get the legal profession's attention (and maybe it doesn't, hopefully you have some counterexamples), we're in trouble.

I don't claim it to be anything other than theater, but I think a lot of people clamoring for these kinds of measures resonate with this quote from _The Wire_ (NSFW language):

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAZZdL1qhk8#t=2m05s>

<comment><USER3> > Honest question: can you point to some examples where such professional > discipline lead to a meaningful impact on the plaintiff's firm (it would > seem that attorneys are not so scarce that censuring one or two at a large > firm would do much damage), or another kind of meaningful reform?

Large firms are repeat players with the court system. A sanction that's even nothing more than a note in a file is a scary thought when that firm will have to go in front of that same court in other cases day after day. For a large firm, it's not worth it to toe that line. That said, it still happens, e.g. [http://abovethelaw.com/2012/08/benchslap-of-the-day-judge- co...](http://abovethelaw.com/2012/08/benchslap-of-the-day-judge-cooke- sanctions-greenberg-traurig-and-td-bank).

The situation is somewhat different for other lawyers. A single sanaction for a frivolous suit is unlikely to get you disbarred. That said, the threat of disbarment isn't illusory: [http://www.calbar.ca.gov/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=DPQeNI9Fz...](http://www.calbar.ca.gov/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=DPQeNI9Fzlo%3D&tabid=224&mid=1534). The California Bar disbarred or suspended 394 lawyers in 2011.

Note that sanctions can include financial penalties for both the lawyer and the client. To pick an example out of a hat: [http://valawyersweekly.com/2012/12/21/baseless-suit-nets- san...](http://valawyersweekly.com/2012/12/21/baseless-suit-nets-sanction- of-50k). If a patent troll is bringing clearly frivolous suits, nothing stops a court from recognizing a pattern and imposing significant monetary sanctions. The problem is, the bar for "frivolous suit" is pretty high in order to avoid deterrming meritorious litigation.

<comment><USER5> Out of 242,000 members only 89 where actually disbarred in 2011. On top of that misconduct often has more to do with what happens at trial/pretrial than which cases are brought to court. So, while in theory there is a downside the reality is it's vary week.

PS: Also of note 2011 was an unusual peak for example only 17 people where disbarred in 2008.

<comment><USER3> There is no reason to limit the scope to only disbarred attorneys. Being disbarred is an extremely harsh penalty. It may mean finding something else to do with your life after decades of practice. Suspensions are also serious. They can be for years, and almost invariably mean the end of one's career at a large firm. Imagine a programmer being told he wasn't allowed to program for two years. What does he go back to after two years of working retail?

Comparing to other professions, the threat of licensure revocation is less in law than in say medicine, but not by so much where I'd argue the threat is "very weak."

In 2011, 365 doctors had their licenses revoked or restricted in California, out of 131,696 (0.28%). That's about twice as high as for lawyers (0.16%). See: www.fsmb.org/pdf/2011-summary-of-board-actions.pdf

Also, note that courts typically impose monetary penalties on lawyers and clients to sanction conduct that doesn't warrant suspension or revocation of license. Such monetary penalties are not common for doctors, but are also a source of deterrence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's nice to see. But SHIELD lacks a critical element: allowing the defendant to specify the jurisdiction. Otherwise every patent case will still be fought in troll-friendly East Texas.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it does seem reasonable to allow the defendant more choice on where they have to go to court.

Is there some hack around the East Texas problem? If you don't sell your product in that area, would it be possible to avoid being brought to that district's court? If so, I could imagine companies could simply have a notice on their checkout page: "Sorry, you live in East Texas, we don't sell there". I'm sure some companies would not want to leave money on the table like that, but for many things I do, I'd be happy to take such a position.

<comment><USER8> I would really love for someone knowledgeable to comment on this. I'd never even thought about blocking customers in Eastern Texas. I just compared a map of my users to a map of the texas districts ([http://www.txed.uscourts.gov/images/divisions/texasdistrictm...](http://www.txed.uscourts.gov/images/divisions/texasdistrictmap.png)) and I'm pretty sure that out of my 2000 paying users, not a single one falls in that district. It seems to just miss Houston and Dallas.

If blocking IPs that originate from that region would offer additional protection from patent trolls, I'd do it in a heart beat. I know that the real answer is "talk to a lawyer" which I will do, but it'd be interesting to see someone from the Hacker News community comment on the viability of this strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a good bill, but why does every new law need a cutesy acronym for a name? How about calling it the "Patent Litigation Reform Act of 2013"? Or something else similarly utilitarian?

<comment><USER10> I remember reading somewhere that it's a requirement of US legislation that the name be pronounceable. Someone might be able to confirm that for me, as doing some quick searches didn't turn up anything useful.

<comment><USER11> I'd love to know the reason. It always seemed incredibly juvenile (but from the impression I'd got about the US legislative system I just took that on face value). It's an interesting requirement. In the UK we get by with e.g. "The Computer Misuse Act 1990" or the "The Terrorism Act 2000".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hrm. I hesitate to write this; I don't anticipate the following will be well- received. Call me a cynic if you will.

"Everyone knows" big business (i.e., folks with an interest in patent law) "controls" the government, right? Or at least has disproportionate ability to persuade? (I'm not trying to make a political statement here - quite the opposite, I'm trying to phrase this in a way everyone can agree on.)

Anyhoo, suffice it to say whether Congressman X votes yea or nay here depends more on the phone call he's about to get from the CEO of General Electric than how many copies of EFF's form letter land in his inbox. So...what are we doing here? By 'we' I don't mean you, dear reader. It wouldn't be the first time netizens took to a rallying cry just for the sake of rallying and crying. What is EFF doing? They're smart guys. They know their way up and down K Street. They know what gets a bill passed and what doesn't, and they know 10,000 form emails falls under the latter category. What's their game?

Fundraiser. Note the big, blue "DONATE NOW." Oh - and by 'fundraiser' I mean income, livelihood, payroll checks, bacon-to-be-brought-home. Their business is your excitability, and cousin, business is a-boomin'.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have just one question: where to sign against the SHIELD?

If you are judging on something you are to consider both options. And it is not about software/hardware producers and p-trolls. The law is to protect _authors_. In some way the law is to embrace innovation and progress (despite it is not the main value).

Producers want do use the law to create monopoly. To eliminate minor innovators and use they innovations for free. What about scientists? What about research groups? Does they innovations "practical"? Mostly not, but still these people might understand the direction of technology and take actions that are two steps ahead of producers. Our society is called "postindustrial" not because the great development of IT but of lack of development "industrial" things. Progress became extensive and not moving forward. Science became servant of production, faith by itself. Science loosing criticism -- the approach that leads to better models of the world.

Author of innovation is nobody, a pawn in the hands of mighty producers, and we, the _consumers_ is to worship _great producers_ , ought to sacrifice all this minor and unworthy author. Who even dares to remember the authors?

Also, consider rights of "real" innovation authors -- in-company engineers. Are they any protected? Do they really have author right's at some moment? They are the authors! Many of them are quite unique in special areas. Did they have a voice?

SHIELD act protect producers to create monopolies. It is uncertain that the act will decrease possibilities of _pure trolls_. The origin of author's rights is not about the areas where it is applied now, current approach is outdated. But even complete rejection of author's rights is better than the SHIELD law.

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems like it isn't a totally perfect solution either, though. I would expect that smaller companies or startups would be more hesitant to try to file a legitimate claim now, especially against someone like Apple or Google, because if they end up losing (because sometimes the other guys just have a bigger and better legal team) then it may financially ruin the small company.

<comment><USER15> If this legal mechanism further discourages small players from playing a game they already can't win, that's a benefit.

Even without this mechanism, I really doubt a small entity could sue A or G on any IP matter and actually come out ahead in a financial sense. Our IP protections were not constructed with the interests of individuals and small firms in mind.

(edit: and of course dangoldin is correct about the NPE thing, d'oh!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I fail to see how this fixes the problem.

How does a small company or individual who doesn't have the millions to defend herself win in the first place?

The way I understand it right now, this basically only removes the risk from medium sized companies that have the financial backing but only settle to save littigation money.

<comment><USER17> > I fail to see how this fixes the problem.

1) Does this make things _better_?

2) Does this actively prevent future improvements?

If the answers are yes and no, it's a good thing and should go in.

<comment><USER18> Exactly, waiting for a "perfect" solution is a good way to ensure that nothing ever improves. (This is true about nearly everything btw).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't help but feel that this is battling symptoms, not the real problem.

A frivolous lawsuit is a frivolous lawsuit, no matter who brings it. The real problem is that patents give far too much power (injunctions of products heavily invested in), defending costs far too much money, and it is far too easy to get patents on relatively simple things.

This has to be balanced by either:

* Making far fewer inventions patentable (only inventions that take a real investment of time and money should be patentable)

OR

* Drastically reducing the power of patents (no injunctions unless in rare cases, much cheaper process for patent infringement fights)

Preferably, both.

</comment><comment><USER20> <3 Peter DeFazio</comment>


Eulogy to _why - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/eulogy-to-_why/

<comment><USER3> Though it would be considered a bit rude by many, somewhere I understand the philosophy of _why. It would be better to kill something fast than watch it wither away and die.[especially when they are close to your heart]. if _why had left the code in place, it might have withered [like say mongrel]

This post and zed shaw's tweets on the same subject are so stark in contrast.I think I finally understand why zed shaw is so unloved by many. It is because of lack of respect for someone else's choices.

Edit: <http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/3412128128>

_why preached "peace & love" and "ruby's nice" and then the second he's outed he rips down gear people depend on. He's a dick.

<http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html>

"I believe that whatever the author wants to do with his or her works is their right. They wrote it, despite everyone telling them it wouldn't work. They slaved over it rather than going out with friends. They debugged it, and wrote documentation for it so everyone else could use it. They may have even spent a part of their time promoting it and helping people with it. All for free, and for whatever reason they choose."

<comment><USER4> There're a lot of jokes making _why and Zed out to be foils today, and in a lot of ways they're true.

Zed's very no-nonsense. He's spent a lot of time manufacturing an image of himself. He lets himself get carried away and angry and he's been searching for a community he likes, butting heads all the way.

_why, on the other hand, was truly bizarre. I never got into his blog, for instance, because it seemed frequently nonsensical and more than a little rambling. Despite that (or, more likely, because of it), he seemed almost always _happy_ with whatever it was he did. I only ever really got into TryRuby and his Poignant Guide, but they were the only two guides to programming I've played with. There was a giddiness in his work that I haven't found in other coding. It's comparable to the moods of artists in other fields.

Zed's argument against _why is that what he did was impractical and unproductive. That's what made _why as a persona, though: Zed is a hacker, _why was more of an artist, pretenses and unreliability and all. It's left- brained versus right-brained; it's also why there's a definite rift between the people who like _why and the people who think the guy was raving mad and immature.

<comment><USER3> Zed Shaw(and many others) may not agree with what _why did but what _why did was well within his rights and hence there is no reason to disrespect him. What disappoints me is that Zed shaw(and some in the original thread) quickly declaring _why a dick. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it - Voltaire". Where is that spirit ?

<comment><USER5> Huh? KKK members have every right to express their racist attitudes, but I'll still call them dicks. "You have every right to do what you did" and "I think what you did was an asshole move" are not exclusive statements.

<comment><USER3> No, they don't have a right to express racist attitudes and thats why if they did they would be dicks.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to abuse and offend.

<comment><USER5> I'll assume that you're not from the US and politely disagree with the Canadian/European attitude that you can institute social change by making certain types of speech illegal... (i.e. Holocaust denial is illegal -- well at least publishing material about it is -- in Canada because it was deemed to be speech that 'incites hatred') (i.e. Nazi memorabilia is illegal in Germany, as well as other European nations like France)

I'll leave you with this little nugget though. Freedom of speech isn't really true freedom of speech if what you really mean is 'freedom to say only the things that I want to hear.'

<comment><USER6> Freedom of speech in Europe is essentially dead as long as in the countries with royal houses you can't insult the royals and you can't state any falsehoods wrt to whatever happened in worldwar II.

I'm all for documenting and educating, not for outlawing stupidity, no matter how long your toes.

I think I'd rather have USA style free speech laws than the make-believe ones that we have here. You can keep the guns though.

<comment><USER7> > you can't insult the royals

?? living in the UK I have yet ot be lynched for calling the royal family pompous.. well.. ;)

Also I think there is some confusion here on the difference between the statments:

"It is my belief that...." and "It is a fact that...."

One is covered in free speech, one is (rightly) restricted by all sorts of law (for example defamation when applicable to statements about people). Think about it - if we had the inherent right to _tell_ people our ideas were fact when this is not established

Your free to think what you want, and tell people that's what you think. But presenting beliefs as fact is a big no no. Right? :)

(holocaust denial being illegal is, I agree, somewhat of an extreme case and I dont agree with it so much)

<comment><USER6> dutch example:

[http://www.trouw.nl/krantenarchief/2007/07/31/2306950/Boete_...](http://www.trouw.nl/krantenarchief/2007/07/31/2306950/Boete_voor_belediging_van_koningin_Beatrix.html)

international situation:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se_majest%C3%A9>

In the UK such laws are also still in the books.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Though I would point out (still gotta translate the dutch example to read it) that "insult" is probably a bit of a generalisation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Consider taking 31 minutes to watch _why speak at the ART && CODE Symposium from a few months back:

<http://www.vimeo.com/5047563>

I'm planning to make a modern version of Logo (yeah, with the turtle) using Shoes.

</comment><comment><USER9> WAIT just a minute... the dude took down a bunch of domains and accounts TODAY. Isn't this a tad premature for a _eulogy_? Maybe we ought to wait until we find out what happened, and what _why intends to do before going into "mourning."

<comment><USER10> The way I figure it the "worst case" is that his account(s) were hacked and that he brings everything back online. In that case he now has a letter, from me, letting him know how much I appreciate him and his work. Frankly, I'm long overdue for writing one, anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Using the world "eulogy" makes me very uncomfortable.

<comment><USER12> Why? Do you have some issue with death?

<comment><USER13> Speaking of a still-alive person as if they were dead is a reasonable taboo. To do so casually creates a lot of potential for damaging misunderstandings.

<comment><USER5> But in this case we're talking about the death of a persona. It would be like me talking about the death of Kiss (the band)-- as in if they were breaking up. You wouldn't say that it was damaging because the band members were still alive, no?

<comment><USER13> With an assemblage like Kiss, it's clear.

OTOH, _why is one real person who has interacted in real life as '_why'. He _could_ be dead, and that would be more sad than a mere retraction of published material.

Has there been anything other than speculation as to the real reason for the takedowns? If so, I haven't seen it; Resig's 'eulogy' has only "I personally believe [more speculation]."

What if _why is physically or mentally sick? What if he's in a self- destructive mood?

I'm not saying Resig did anything wrong with his chosen conceit -- it's a reasonable turn of phrase -- but I also completely respect and understand the g-g-grandparent poster's declaration of discomfort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me, or does the Ruby community go in for cults of personality considerably more than others?

<comment><USER15> Perhaps, although I don't think that to be the case here.

For me, the _why persona was a little beacon that radiated the message: "you can make cool stuff and have fun regardless of your circumstances". That's a nice contrast to the dreariness of so much of the IT world on the one hand and the (often justified, but still depressing) rants about the evils of the IT world on the other hand.

<comment><USER14> But the tone of this entire thread is suggesting that somebody who wrote a bit of Ruby code is some sort of creative visionary! He may be a very talented programmer, but let's keep things in proportion. This idea that someone can be a big star in the Ruby world for doing not-very-much is a bit bizarre to me.

I'm reading this as a complete outsider, and trying to find the source of this level of adulation is difficult at best. I assume it's a community-centric thing, where someone outside of the community wouldn't "get it". It all just seems so bizarrely self-congratulatory.

And what do you mean "regardless of your circumstances"? What do we know about his circumstances that would convey that message?

<comment><USER10> You're grossly over-simplifying this man's life. Personally, I'm not a part of the Ruby community, nor do I write any apprecible quantity of Ruby code. However, _why's ability to code, write, draw, and generally produce art greatly inspired me. I hope some effort goes toward collecting his works so that you too can be inspired.

<comment><USER14> But it is eulogizing someone who isn't dead! After 1 day of inactivity!

I feel very inspired by the works of Salman Rushdie. He hasn't published anything for a few days - should we eulogize him on HN too?

I'm not over simplifying the man or his life - I'm suggesting that this is absurd way to react!

<comment><USER16> It's one thing to be inactive for a day, it's another to drastically truncate your online existence.

<comment><USER14> So what? I understand that it's considered a "big thing" by people who spend a considerable amount of energy cultivating an online persona, but I have trouble believing this is actually as big of a deal as it is being made out to be. I can think of two reasons for such an action:

1) Generally being "done" with that particular identity or community, and having lost interest to the point where the effort required to maintain it was disproportionate with the enjoyment or self-aggrandisement derived from it. If this is the case, then eulogising and lamenting and celebrating is misplaced: Perhaps introspection would be a better reaction - asking, "what is wrong with the community such that a high-profile member no longer wants to be a part of it?"; or

2) Some kind of personal or mental problems that have precipitated this, in which case, the value of maintaining an online profile is probably just less than the perceived value from removing all traces of an online presence.

Or alternatively, any number of explanations to do with hackers or vandalism could be in play too.

I just think the response has been totally disproportional to the event, at least until more information is available.

<comment><USER17> _"what is wrong with the community"_

This communities in this case would be the entire online and open source communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What, the guy made songs too? Incredible.

<comment><USER17> The soundtrack is on archive.org: [http://web.archive.org/web/20071018035725/poignantguide.net/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20071018035725/poignantguide.net/sdtrk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of that story about people disappearing in real life. _why had some really cool projects. It makes a little more sense looking at him as an "artist" I guess, but aren't hackers sort of artists too? I always thought the dichotomy was a little artificial myself...

Although, hackers are associated with more utilitarianism and art isn't always functional. Sometimes hacking is for the sake of hacking though, just like art.

<comment><USER20> Wasn't there recently that story on front page of HN about disappearing completely? Maybe _why got the idea to disappear from the article.

<comment><USER19> This made me think of that one too actually. Kind of an intriguing concept... there's almost something romantic about the idea of escape, something artistic...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for that, John. A very eloquent eulogy that captures how I perceived _why to be.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm really sad for purely selfish reasons. My 11 year old really enjoyed hackety-hack up to the point that it worked. Likely it won't be finished now, which is a shame because it was a really great tool for introducing kids...

</comment><comment><USER23> Can't even access that page. Is the site being hammered with traffic? ejohn.org is down as well.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, getting absolutely destroyed. I've replaced the blog post with a static HTML page for the time being, hopefully that helps.

<comment><USER23> Thanks. It was a really enlightening post. That song he made was actually quite impressive for what was presumably just a hobby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> John's comparison of _why's work to _sand mandala_ is very poignant and apt!

</comment><comment><USER25> What a beautiful piece of writing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Assuming this is a scratch of his identity (and not a hack) I have a grudging respect for it.

Not because he killed all his sites and code but because that's possibly the last we will ever hear! Too often do high profile programmers have a "hissy", delete stuff and then a few hours later make loud proclamations about why they left and who was being a dick for XYZ reasons (and how it is their fault)

Kudos for having the balls to just switch off I suppose.

(on the subject of it being a "dickish" move; it's not one I agree with or one I would take BUT I suppose it's possible he reasoned that copies of his code are around and anything seriously useful would be recoverable. The damage isn't too great. But the statement of removing it all is huge. That's it - <USER2> more contact ever).

With nothing to maintain or a way to be contacted he can just get away from everything that was bothering him (and it is clear stuff was bothering him). Assuming his actions are not more drastic (I cant believe NO ONE knows enough about him to contact him in some way) than this then perhaps in 6 months, a year he might return and carry on :)

To paraphrase a great film - lets at least end it with hope;

 _Hope guides me, that is what gets me through the day and the night. The hope that after you're gone from my sight, it will not be the last time that I look upon you._

Hopefully he'll be back.

</comment><comment><USER26> What a lot of puerile drama.

</comment><comment><USER27> Thank you John. This was truly a beautiful tribute to a great hacker.

</comment><comment><USER28> _why really deserves this tribute! he created great things and I always liked _why's idea of _bringing_ programming to a wider audience (especially children). reading through john's post and thinking about the mystic (and very smart) person _why was, I'm really sad about the fact that he _disappeared_ online!

</comment><comment><USER29> A stray point, but it's a bit unfair to both Buddhism and deconstruction to write _"After a mandala has been constructed - and displayed - it is ceremoniously deconstructed"_. Actually, it's swept up with a small broom, and then dumped in a river, which is something different altogether.

</comment><comment><USER30> _why is experimenting an identity change; probably he is online again (in a new domain?) with a new ID and reading now about his own 'funeral'.

</comment><comment><USER31> God bless him for giving himself (grudgingly?) to the public, and god bless him for ending his public life when we all remember him so fondly.

I must admit that he wasn't on my radar until now, though I read his guide to Ruby, but now I love him.

</comment><comment><USER32> I turned the eulogy into a Caring Candle: [http://www.caring.com/caring- candles/loss-of-programming-ico...](http://www.caring.com/caring-candles/loss- of-programming-icon-candle/in-honor-of-why/perezd)

</comment><comment><USER33> Oh no! Now how will I break my trainees' brains by having them unravel Camping?!

</comment><comment><USER34> _why's writing was incomprehensible, and his code was just as bad. Good riddance. Unless he's dead, in which case Oh, the humanity.</comment>