Memoirs from a Japanese Internet Cafe - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2019/05/12/voices/memoirs-japanese-internet-cafe/ <comment><USER2> I remember internet cafes in Russia back in 2004. I was 11 years old at the time and was a common visitor. My father dropped me off at one of these cafes for an hour one time and I ended up playing GTA 2 the whole time. That's how I was introduced. It was actually my very first time using a computer. I had Playstation and SEGA before.

I remember showing up early in the morning before 8AM and there were already people waiting in the hall. Time was cheaper in the morning and you could buy a "pack" of 3 hours for 100 rubles which was equivalent to $4. It was also sometimes dangerous because older guys used to bully younger people and take their money. I remember one time I was walking out of the cafe after playing for 4 hours and was approached by 2 guys, slightly older than me. One of them whipped out a knife and said: "Give me all your money or I'll slice your throat, I don't give a fuck, I'm minor so nothing bad will happen to me". I knew these two somehow. They had a reputation for attacking and robbing people, so they weren't fucking around. I gave them crumpled 10 rubles and said it's all I have left, because I'm going _out_ of the cafe, not _in_. They should be stopping people who are going in. They believed me and let me go. I had another 500r on me and was glad they didn't check my pockets. Later this evening I came back to play more despite being afraid of getting mugged again, that's how strong my addiction to these cafes was.

To be frank those places weren't like cafes at all. We called them clubs. All they had inside were computers with LAN connection. Internet was there as well, but it wasn't popular. Most people were playing Counter Strike or Battlefield. Most clubs were managed by a single person, an admin. Those people weren't owners, they were just there to take money, allocate time to specific computers, and to tell people to get out.

</comment><comment><USER3> I first went to Japan before smartphones existed. Internet cafes were a place to look at Yahoo Maps to figure out where you were, and to check your email. When I traveled I relied on paper maps. All of the computers were running the localized version of Microsoft Windows. Everyone had flip-phones, and a lot of people had more than one. Instead of SMS they used email on their phones.

The internet cafes had beds (sort of, more like booths with padded benches) and showers and vending machines with hot food. I went back and forth across the country without reserving hotel rooms in advance, and I spent the night in internet cafes fairly often.

I went back about 2 years ago and I saw mobile internet access advertised on the train for very low prices -- far cheaper than what you can get in the US. Smartphones were common. I saw a few internet cafes but I don't think people need them anymore. They will probably all be gone soon.

<comment><USER4> _I saw a few internet cafes but I don 't think people need them anymore_

Sadly, a few homeless have resorted to living in the se internet cafes to avoid living on the streets. That said, the number of these cafes have been dwindling.

<comment><USER5> Thats better than being in the street and its cheap enough to make it possible to go there often and have a shower. Its great they exist for the less fortunate of society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was when people still had face to face exchanges by making sounds and gestures usually while sharing liquids. Making a friend was a big deal back then.

<comment><USER7> OwO</comment></comment>


All Your Data Are Belong to Us [Podcast] - <AUTHOR> https://irlpodcast.org/episode1/ <comment><USER2> Great line from Podcast: "the world may change. You never know what is going to be tomorrow considered inappropriate."

Somebody needs to explain to Conservatives that their values may be deemed harmful to our community, and they may find their freedom to cause harm limited - by force if that is thought to be appropriate.

And somebody needs to explain to Liberals that their values may be deemed harmful to our community, they they may find their freedom to cause harm limited - by force.</comment>


How to Break in and Build A Network in the Startup Scene from Scratch - <AUTHOR> http://www.venturebent.com/2011/07/how-to-break-in-and-build-a-network-in-the-startup-scene-from-scratch/

<comment><USER2> How is this any different than 'breaking' into any other business scene?

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty skeptical of any advice whose first steps include "quit your day job and move back home with your parents".</comment></comment>


Microsoft: We won't charge a used-game fee, but third parties can - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/06/much-ado-about-no-fee-no-fee-to-trade-in-and-resell-games-on-xbox-one/

<comment><USER2> Alright. Still a bit confusing but we will eventually get used to it.</comment>


Ask HN: Who is "ahead of his/her time" nowadays? - <AUTHOR> Sometimes you hear someone saying "He was really ahead of his time", and you think: "Damn, wish I had a chance to talk to this person".<p>Among living people, who is in your opinion are ahead of their time? <comment><USER2> Richard Stallman - 30 years ahead of time for free-software, privacy and licenses.

Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton - 20 to 30 years ahead of their time for research on AI, neural networks, convolutional neural networks and their many applications to them.

Theo de Raadt - 20 years ahead of time for security-focused operating system OpenBSD and its software projects.

Perhaps the person we all would have liked to have known who was indeed ahead of their time is Satoshi Nakamoto.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bruce Sterling has consistently been 5-15 years ahead of his time in terms of the direction of popular culture since the late 70s. That is a _very good_ run. He's not hyper-technical, but if you want to know what people will care about & how people will think in a decade, listen to what Bruce is saying now.

</comment><comment><USER4> Jeff Hawkins</comment>


Network Neuroscience Theory of Human Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(17)30221-8 <comment><USER2> Graphs (networks, webs) are a data structure we have not exploited enough. Tons of research is going into using graphs for artificial intelligence, and for understanding human intelligence (as in this article). But what about using knowledge graphs to augment human intelligence, like a prosthetic?

This is the power of Google search. It uses a knowledge graph that models the world (with an emphasis on the internet). The graph is big, but the view of it offered to users is minuscule -- in part to keep the interface as simple as possible, and in part for economic reasons.

There is open source software that lets people keep their own knowledge graphs. In Semantic Synchrony [1] you can keep a knowledge graph and merge it with others' knowledge graph. Joshua Shinavier (who wrote Semantic Synchrony) and I share a graph with over 400,000 nodes, and most views load in the blink of an eye.

A sister project, Digraphs with Text[2], offers a more flexible system of expression: It generalizes the graph, allowing relationships to involve more than two members, and allowing relationships to be members of other relationships. It also offers a search facility very much like natural language: To search, for instance, for reasons neurons need vitamin B, you would use a query like "(neurons #need vitamin B) #because /it". (The # mark indicates a joint between members of a relationship.)

[1] [https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/wiki/](https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/wiki/) [2] [https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with- text](https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the links. Will experiment with these.

I have been building a personal knowledge graph based on concept maps[0] using cmap tools[1].

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

[1] [https://cmap.ihmc.us](https://cmap.ihmc.us)

<comment><USER4> It would be interesting to visualize a SmSn knowledge graph as a Concept Map. I feel that text buffers are best for viewing and editing a graph when you are seated at a keyboard, but graphical views have their place, as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an awesome lecture that really helps understand how the brain works at a neurological level:

Jack Gallant - Working toward a complete functional atlas of the human brain - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0Qiq22PRWQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0Qiq22PRWQ)

</comment><comment><USER6> A psychology professor once said to me that throughout history our theories of the mind tend to analogize the dominant research paradigm of the time. At one time it was chemistry, then physics, and now it's computer science.

I write that because it suggests that our theories of mind depend our own perspectives to a great degree - perhaps in their conclusions, or in how we describe them, or in our choice of research. (I wish I could remember the chemistry or physics analogies ATM.)

<comment><USER7> That's exactly the first thing I thought as well.

This article is relevant: [https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process- informati...](https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information- and-it-is-not-a-computer)

<comment><USER8> >This article is relevant: [https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not- process-informati...](https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process- informati..).

That article is a piece of shit which misunderstands the definition of computation, the claims of naive versus modern computationalism in philosophy of mind, _and_ modern neuroscience, all at once. Without any judgement, I'd like to ask that we all stop sharing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is going a little over my head. Can anyone with more expertise help summarize / ELI5?

<comment><USER10> My undergrad is in Neurobiology, but I don't work in the field, but I can give you my understanding.

This article is basically an article that reviews the current theories regarding the neuroscience of intelligence. It's saying that there seems to be evidence of 'g' (which you could call IQ, but is the variance in cognitive abilities) that dictates the efficiency of our brain as a network of networks. It describes the brain as a interconnected global network of local networks that have discrete responsibilities. The reason these local networks to handle specific things is because it's more efficient to process in close proximity. And that the communication between these 'nodes' and the ability to tap into stored memory and intuition is described by 'g'.

<comment><USER11> That matches what I sussed out growing up with a high functioning older brother and friends of his, also special needs. Some things they understood or could do easily as anyone else. Others not so much. interestingly one of my brothers friends could spell and write perfectly, way above average for his age.

My assumption was some parts of they brains didn't develop normally which made it much more difficult for them to learn certain tasks. I've also run into people that have other deficits, friend didn't drive because of spacial deficits. But had a PhD in math. Bonus my brother drives.

<comment><USER12> There's some evidence that autism results from hyperconnected brain regions.

[http://www.medicaldaily.com/kids-autism-have- hyperconnected-...](http://www.medicaldaily.com/kids-autism-have- hyperconnected-brain-areas-could-brain-imaging-one-day-diagnose- disorder-262261)

<comment><USER11> > autism

99% of these autism studies are garbage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This would actually indicate that spearman's g cannot distributed ~Gaussian. CLT wouldn't apply, anyhow, but positive feedback effects (a la small world RG) would apply. Very SFI sort of thing</comment>


Has anyone had success with using a SEO company? If so, which one(s)? - <AUTHOR>

The title says it all.  I am just curious if anyone has had solid success. <comment><USER2> I think one of the things to really note here is what kind of service you are after. Most SEO clients are not "the website _is_ the company" businesses.

 _Type One_

The client is a plumbing company. Their website gets 300 visits per month resulting in about a call a day. An SEO company can come in, get them to make some changes. Make sure Google can index all the pages, add meta tags, get some more content written, sort out local business listings, get a few links and bring that up to 900 visits and 3 calls a day. I would (and do) call that success. For comparison, the difference in cost between a Yellow pages ad that gets a plumber 1 call a day and one that gets them 3 calls a day would be (very roughly) $10k-$100k where I live.

There are lots of companies that can and do achieve this kind of success with decent predictability. They can usually do this without too much reliance on the client for input. Sceptics will point out that you coud get SEO for dummies and do this yourself. SEOs point out that most plumbers don't. Anyway, this is most of the SEO "market."

 _Type Two_

There are also the kind of SEO companies that advise bigger companies on their SEO strategies. They work with IT/Web on creating more SE friendly designs. They work with content writers on selecting topics that get searches. They run training sessions on metatags and giving your page an "on page SEO score." These companies' expertise is mostly consulting expertise. There is some specific knowledge they bring to the table, but not rocket surgery and not really more than the other type of company, usually. I reckon you could train "SEO Consultants" in weeks. What they do do well (if they are good) is they are able to get these companies to change the way they do things a little. These probably have as much in common with "occupational safety consultants" as they do with the former type. If I was hiring for these businesses, that is the background I would be looking for. These projects probably have a higher rate of failure since they require changing the way an organisation does things.

The kind of people that write blog posts about SEO companies however are very rarely in these categories giving the whole "industry" a warped public perception.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think many businesses on HN should be doing their SEO in-house rather than contracting out. My reasons at length:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/01/28/why-you-shouldnt-pay- any...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/01/28/why-you-shouldnt-pay-any-seo-you- can-afford/)

There is also the factor that to be good at SEO, _really_ good at it, you have to integrate it into your ongoing operations. It is like marketing: you can't put a firewall between the product and the marketing and just toss stuff over the wall and expect it to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree with you; SEO should be done in house. However, what if you absolutely need the help and do not have the time to do it on your own.

Are there any decent SEO companies out there?</comment></comment>


Can any tablet OS challenge Android and iOS? - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/can-any-tablet-os-challenge-android-and-ios-7000018313/

<comment><USER2> I wish I could get Ubuntu on a Haswell CPU in a form factor as slick as Surface Pro, plus a lightweight 1080p 17" monitor. That means I could bring a dual-screen development system with me in my bag that would be lighter than the 17" laptop I currently for coding on the road.</comment>


D-Day For Facebook App Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/28/d-day-for-facebook-app-developers/ <comment><USER2> This is really great news for regular ol' Facebook users. I'm glad they realise how spammy all the apps have gotten and are doing something about it.

<comment><USER3> It should also be educational for application developers who build their entire livelihood on the back of someone else's web application.

<comment><USER4> That's a good point, but you can't deny that there are a lot of opportunities around social apps and games. And the whole pitch behind Facebook Connect makes complete sense: you don't want to duplicate a whole social network for your little app.

At Startup School, I talked to somebody who was building something on top of Twitter and Facebook, but his philosophy was "it won't last forever, but let's take advantage of it while it works".

I don't have a solution for this and it doesn't look like something is really emerging to solve it.

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right, and there is certainly a lot of money to be made. I don't know what the answer is; but I know I personally would have to think twice before putting all my eggs in the Facebook or Twitter basket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm late to the Facebook dev game. Just started experimenting with app building this month. My initial impression wasn't great. Their documentation is hard to follow, and very few of the examples actually worked.

Many of the API features have been removed or changed, but the documentation hasn't been updated to reflect this. Looks like it's only going to get worse.

Compared to developing apps with Amazon's APIs, it's really a mess.

</comment><comment><USER6> Forbidden Error?</comment>


What's 1 mile wide, 300 miles long, and taking 14 hours to pass a single point? - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_Pigeon

<comment><USER2> If we have teams actively working on cloning wooly mammoths ([http://news.discovery.com/animals/woolly-mammoth- cloned-1112...](http://news.discovery.com/animals/woolly-mammoth- cloned-111205.html)), I would think cloning an animal that only went extinct 100 years ago would be relatively easy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Woolly Mamoths' tissue was preserved in ice, _all over_ Siberia.

I'm not sure we have viable DNA for these pigeons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr

OP, you expect us to read that whole thing to hunt for the answer to your question?

Anyone have spoilers? Is it a flock of these birds?

<comment><USER4> To save everyone some time, this is a link to the wikipedia article for passenger pigeons, a once plentiful but now extinct species that inhabited north america in large numbers. The cryptic headline is a reference to a questionable sighting of a large flock of these bird potentially numbering 3.5 billion (billion with a b).</comment></comment>


MIT creates an intelligent power supply lets lets hardware sip energy - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/mit-creates-an-intelligent-power-supply-lets-lets-hardware-sip-energy/ <comment><USER2> Anyone have a link to the published research?

</comment><comment><USER3> Proper grammar on headlines would be a nice creation too.</comment>


Going Quiet: More States Are Hiding 911 Recordings - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/more-states-are-hiding-911-recordings-from-families-lawyers-and-the-general-public <comment><USER2> Similar issues can arise with police body cameras. Seattle's initial attempt to use body cams had to be stopped because all of the footage was available under state open record laws, and someone was filing requests for all of it and putting it up on YouTube. This was a massive violation of the privacy of numerous people caught on those videos. Police go into people's home, often uninvited and on short notice, and can easily see intimate and private details of those people's lives.

At first Seattle tried editing the footage before release to redact parts that might violate the privacy of anyone other then the officers and alleged criminals. I don't remember how many officers were involved in the initial body cam deployment, but it was enough that they generated so much footage that they didn't have the budget to edit it. I remember at one point they were even asking hackers for help with automating some of this.

A couple years or so later, they resumed using body cams. I'm not sure how they dealt with the privacy issues.

<comment><USER3> I wish I had more concrete information, but I remember hearing about one police department treating bodycam recordings in public and in private places differently for this reason. I imagine the officer would tag it when they left their shift or offloaded the footage.

In general, I've heard reviewing the footage is a huge undertaking and an unexpected burden. I wouldn't be surprised if, like many backup systems, they're not often tested and found to be insufficient when they go to pull a video...but, then again, they also deal with evidence which has similar requirements.

<comment><USER4> A system with enough manual control that the officer has the task of tagging and offloading the footage sounds like a system where inconvenient footage will be mysteriously deleted.

<comment><USER3> I feel like that's being addressed as body cams get rolled out. I've heard about procedures to address faking damaged equipment and other excuses for "missing" footage.

Cruisers have had video for awhile now, so it's not completely new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I generally support regulations that protect privacy, as I'm sure most of us do. But they can come at a very real human cost, as in this case. Especially when it comes to regulations that affect people who aren't able to express their preferences (because they have died, are incapacitated, are not able to think clearly for whatever reason, etc), any general rule is going to lead to some bad outcomes.

FWIW I tend to think 911 calls ought to be public because they are public records. There are probably ways of making them public but not completely easy to access (eg, you could only listen to a specific record on site in a records archive). That would at least guard against the problems of releasing everything on the internet, which would impose major reputational risks to everybody who ever made a 911 call.

<comment><USER6> This is one of the privacy conundrums that we mostly have never come to grips with. There are a lot of things that would seem to be legitimately public records.

But there's arguably a big difference between records that you have to go to some county clerk's office to access and possibly provide at least a cursory justification for doing so and being able to click a few keys on your computer and skim through records for the hell of it.

Both are public at some level but one is not like the other.

<comment><USER7> Could you articulate this "big difference" a bit more? So far the only one I can parse from your comment is ease of access, driving to a clerk versus walking to my desk.

That doesn't seem particularly convincing. Or at least I don't see how this feeds into the privacy "conundrum"

<comment><USER8> You can read the car plate of cars passing in front of you. It is public information. If you can easily gather the location of all cars at any time, it becomes a big privacy problem. You can identify husbands cheating...

<comment><USER9> Indeed. I can't help thinking that the fact that some piece of tech makes a _qualitative_ change like this means that there's some fundamental flaw somewhere with the way we associate a person with a public record or identifier. But I'm not really sure what that flaw is, or what to do about it.

<comment><USER10> Nobody is sure how to solve it because the problem is with people and the culture we have built around having actual privacy in the past. Technology has essentially robbed us of it, which is problematic as technology solves lots of other problems so we just cant get rid of it.

This is really similar to the music industry and the problem of piracy. Bits are easy to copy and hard to prevent the copy of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's instructive to look at why the ACLU went from supporting to not supporting the statute in RI:

 _Supporters of the bill included the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Steven Brown, the ACLU chapter's executive director, said the organization's support was based on the "privacy values in not having these often very intimate types of calls just available to everybody in the public."

But over the years, the interpretation of the law by the courts has been "problematic," Brown said, because judges have denied access to 911 recordings even when they would serve the public interest. He said the ACLU would support adding a "good cause mechanism" in the law to allow for the release of 911 calls if it can be shown that there is an "important public service in knowing what's in those calls."_

</comment><comment><USER12> Making 911 calls available because "your family wants to know" seems to be too far of a violation of privacy. While I feel sorry for the person who lost their brother, he can go to court and ask for the records to be released - which seems about the correct amount of privacy protection for something like this.

<comment><USER13> I understand the privacy side of things, but I'm suspicious of the motive. We've seen with police body cameras that the cops are quick to release exonerating ones, but "we don't release evidence during a pending investigation, but trust us, the video is exonerating" in cases where the footage is damning.

<comment><USER14> Police have massive short term gains from going against the rules. It makes their jobs easier (short term), safer (short term), more apparently successful (short term). Plus plenty of law enforcement exclusive privileges ready for abuse. Taken together this creates a massive demand for oversight and accountability, and big incentives to undermine those.

None of this exists in the field of EMTs. When they "hide behind data protection", it would be to protect against frivolous litigation after honest mistakes, which I find not only understandable but also preferable. If I ever need one of them, I'll surely want them to give their best medically rather than spending cycles on court-proofing their process.

<comment><USER13> 911 calls are hardly limited to dispatching EMTs, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think a reasonable compromise would be a sort of "public-by-default after X number of days, but private if requested so by caller".

I understand the utility of them being public. On the other hand, I have made 911 calls that I definitely don't want to be publicly available, especially online where voice-recognition tools could be used to find a specific person's calls.

<comment><USER16> This would protect people making calls based on racial profiling - "man walking in my neighborhood while black".

<comment><USER15> Protect them from what? Public shaming by people who look them up in databases? Being racist isn't illegal.

I'm inclined to think that this is less important than protecting the calls of people who had mental health emergencies and the like.

<comment><USER17> > Protect them from what? Public shaming by people who look them up in > databases? Being racist isn't illegal.

Retribution, that was obvious to me.

Examples: Physical violence as retribution is illegal, while being kicked off of board seats and other areas of influence isn't. Being 86'd (banned) from private establishments isn't illegal.

All is possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This should probably be handled the same way as donating your dead body for science (or profit): make this an individuals own choice. This improves societal cohesion: if the individual allows the release of this private data when it concerns him- or herself, any designated people are free to request this data, and each one of them should be free to share this freely, it's up to the individual to choose discreet people if so desired, avoiding anger between the mourning individuals with respect to the state. It also improves cohesion between individuals and the state in aother way: if the deceased chose to _not release_ such private data, then the mourning individuals will be less angry at the state and more angry with the "poor" decision of the deceased...

As with all such systems you get the endless meta-fight of opt-in versus opt- out: as a stoichiocrat, my preferred solution is to provably flip a random coin toss, such that anyone who cares about this setting must explicitly opt- in or explicitly opt-out, _those who act careless simply do not care_ about their setting, and the conundrum of systemic bias in the sense of all opt-in versus all opt-out is avoided. The probability of the coin toss can even be set identically to the fraction of people who explicitly opt-in vs explicitly opt-out (in example if 90% of the populace ignores the setting, and 7% opt for release and 3% opt for privacy after death, then for the 90% without explicitly stated preferencee a random 7 out of 10 people will have the details released and 3 out of 10 will have the details withheld)

<comment><USER19> I haven't heard the label stoichiocrat[1] before, and Google search only finds this HN page. Do you know if many others share these views, and if they've ever been implemented?

It's easiest to think of rules in a black and white, opt-in or opt-out way, and I hadn't considered the probabilistic option.

[1] Without knowing the words, I think you mean "stochiocrat", which would be related to "stochastic" and probabilistic. Google found one result for this, but it didn't provide good context; I think it was referring to how Venetian Doges were elected [2]. "Stoichiocrat" would be more related to "stoichiometery", coming from a Greek word that can mean "element".

[2] [https://theumlaut.com/mechanism-design-in-the-venetian- repub...](https://theumlaut.com/mechanism-design-in-the-venetian-republic- bbedc3a25ea0)

<comment><USER18> You are correct, "stoiciocrat" cf "stoichiocracy" is apparently not the correct term. When I learned about this concept about 8 years ago [1], I seem to misremember this to be the word on wikipedia. Apparently the correct spelling is _" stochocracy"_ although the results are very few if I try to look them up today. I was referring to concepts that seem to be more conventionally called sortition (apparently the better term at least in academia according to Google Scholar result counts), demarchy, random ballot...

[1] The history page of "stochocracy" at wikipedia suggests this wasn't my imagination:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stochocracy&actio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stochocracy&action=history)

I also remember distinctly the page about the Kleroterion / Cleroterium, which I highly encourage to read:

[http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.ht...](http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html)

While I still consider myself a "stochocrat", this is but one of my many ideologies.

I believe many different forms of governance are the best depending on the problem class or issue class, or properties of the problems themselves. For example a the problem "choose or design a setup to isolate heavy water from naturally abundant water" will not fare well under sortition, since it requires expertise. On the other hand, problems that have been broken down to such simplicity that anyone could execute it, but that typically suffer from corruption by a minority fare better under sortition: perhaps the selection or patrol routes and the assignment of cops to groups that run the patrol routes, would make it harder to initiate corruption, if you do not know ahead of time who will be your colleague, nor when or where.

Most decisions are not made by governments, but by individuals, and nowadays also computers (or this could perhaps more properly be seen as amplified decisions by programmers).

So if you ask "Do you know if many others share these views, and if they've ever been implemented?" I can not really answer, at least in the past systems have existed where people were raised with the concept of sortition, and all systems indoctrinate the next generation with the importance of itself. If you ask a person on the street what they think about sortition, they will probably not know the word nor the concept, and after explaining mechanically how to do it, they would probably consider it crazy and inapplicable to _any problem_. I think the number of people wanting to learn more about sortition would increase if not only explained mechanically, but also the properties (good and bad) were explained.

Have they ever been implemented? I consider it an important part of Athenian democracy. Also sortition is alive and well in many systems and places, think of sortition of a jury of peers, think of implicit sortition in mining a block in the Bitcoin system, think of explicit sortition in Algorand, ...

Note the last 2 examples are digital systems: a requirement for sortition to work is that "nearly anyone can satisfy the task" (such as verifying the signatures of transactions, and checking for sufficiency of funds, which any computer could do in principle) as opposed to "design a lock-in amplifier".

I apologize for my incoherent writing style

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Our litigious society has driven us in two directions: limiting liability and secrecy. Limiting liability by outsourcing important functions to contractors, who can absorb a lawsuit and simply go under. A government has effectively unlimited liability since it can raise taxes, and can't easily go under, which leaves it broadly exposed. And secrecy like this article.

Something will have to give or we'll see more and more of these trends.

</comment><comment><USER21> No other country in the world makes emergency calls public, I dont see why US calls are.

<comment><USER22> American police are absurdly trigger-happy compared with other rich countries[0], maybe this helps counter that?

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_countries)

<comment><USER23> What happens when you adjust those figures for something like differences in private gun ownership rates between populations? It seems obvious that America has the most guns, and that having so many more guns than anybody else probably causes a dramatic increase in the number of _justifiable_ homicides police are involved in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Charge the requesters a review fee, per minute of footage?

That way you can categorize the video on demand, and release it as a public good after. The categorization would need an appeals process.

Categorization would be akin to: release now, release in a year (for embarassment), release in 30 years (for crimes) and perhaps never release (murder scenes etc., but let it bitrot in a cabinet for 30 years first).

If you're poor you can ask a privacy and open governance charity to buy a block of footage encompassing the footage you need.

Perhaps someone could write an RFC for this and send it around police departments. It should be framed as a minor source of income and that it may be a fun occasional distraction to some agents - if the tooling has a sufficiently powerful playback and fast-forward function.

</comment><comment><USER25> Seems like the caller's interest should trump that of the victims' families, and doing so could make the system safer.

If you are taking drugs with someone and they look like they are dying it should definitely be safe for you to call 911, even if you are participating, or are somewhere you shouldn't be, or don't have a visa, or whatever.

If you break into a building, perhaps to steal, and your companion falls and breaks a limb you should definitely be able to call 911 (bad luck for your companion who will surely be arrested though).

A person's heart stops, you call 911, the try CPR and they die anyway (well, they're already "dead" if you're doing CPR). You shouldn't have any liability.

Grand juries and review boards could still confidentially review 911 calls for cases like this, where the family fears malpractice by the first responders.

== This is no different for why TSA should not screen for drugs or anything but weapons that could threaten a flight; why people not already in the court system should not be arrested in courthouses (or nearby). Why people who are here illegally should get vaccines and drivers' licenses. What seems "unfair" can actually promote the public welfare.

<comment><USER9> > A person's heart stops, you call 911, the try CPR and they die anyway (well, > they're already "dead" if you're doing CPR). You shouldn't have any > liability.

There's already some kind of provision for this in many places; it's known as a "Good Samaritan law".

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is sad to read. I understand the will to protect the privacy of the people calling in, but wouldn't the public interest prevail in some cases?

What I mean by that is, when weighing between keeping 911 records sealed for the sake of privacy; against releasing them to the public for the sake of public service (for example for performance review, reconstruction of the chain of events ...), shouldn't the public's interest prevail (as in many versus one)?

<comment><USER23> You're failing to consider the possibility that there is a _public interest_ in maintaining privacy for 911 calls. It could be the case that people are more hesitant to call in something if they know the recording will become public. This could conceivably do more harm to the public at large than keeping the records private would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Having 911 recordings public is one of the most insane things about this country.

Why not make my doctor visits public too?

<comment><USER28> 911 recordings are records generated by public servants, and have implications for the wider public. This is similar to court records, which are also default-public.

Unless you're contagious, your health has no wider public implications. And if you are, your wishes are also going to be ignored.

<comment><USER27> > _This is similar to court records, which are also default-public_

It's hard for me to see how the trial of a rapist is similar to a rape victim calling for help.

The trial needs to be public so we can monitor the application of justice in the legal system.

The details of somebody's worst moments of their life needs to be public because...?

If I ever need to call 911, I want to only focus on getting help fast. But as it is, I also need to think about how I'll sound if this call is being played on the news or Twitter.

<comment><USER29> It is important conceptually because it involves essentially a petition of government power and a check on abuse on both sides.

If they provides absolutely horrible public service as in callously calling the rape victim a slut who deserves it and then later denied the misconduct and circles the wagons that is important.

Or if the abuser of the calls isn't held accountable.

Transparency vs privacy isn't a straightforward matter and there is ample room for debate and differences in opinion.

<comment><USER2> Using them to monitor abuse does not require making them public. It just requires making them available to those who claim they were abused, or if they did not survive their estate or whoever would have had medical power of attorney for them or someone similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The problem is lawyers not privacy. The 911 operators and the state obviously don't want sued.

<comment><USER31> If you don't want a source used in civil courts you can just tell the courts they are't allowed to use it.

That's what is done for accident investigation. Accident investigators need to understand what actually happened, not just a bunch of useless backside covering as everyone tries to avoid getting sued. So, their evidence just isn't admissible in civil courts. An investigation by, say, the NTSB or analogous organisations in many developed countries produces a public report, but you can't take that report into a civil court because it says in the law and on the report that it can't be used that way.

It would probably take more effort to ensure this was effective in the revenge-hungry United States of America than in countries where the mainstream zeitgeist incorporates the understanding that hurting somebody else doesn't fix anything, but it could be done.</comment></comment>


MacBook portability over time (2006–2019) - <AUTHOR> https://ebelinski.com/macbook-portability/ <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to consider 15, 16 as the evolution, the same with 11, 12 and Air 13.</comment>


Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-47143411 <comment><USER3> I had a minute to check it out over lunch - most of the floorspace is dedicated to demonstrating what the raspberry pi can do at a high level. They had stations for coding, gaming, sensors, etc. but only ~1/4th of the space was devoted to inventory. While they have a decent selection of Pis, sensor kits, and accessories, it's definitely not a replacement for Maplin. Additionally, Already__Taken seems to have been correct about the level of knowledge among the staff - not everyone working there was technical. This is definitely aimed at the general public.

<comment><USER4> Did they sell the Pi at the $35 price (+VAT I guess) ? Because it seems that the brick-and-mortar stores I've been to strugle with this very-thin margin pricing.

If you had a physical place where you could source sticker-price raspberry pis it would already be quit good.

<comment><USER3> The prices were very low -- if I remember correctly the zero was £4.50 and the zero W was £5.00. I went in looking for a motor so I didn't catch the price of the Pi B+ etc. Sorry!

<comment><USER4> No worries, answering my own question, there's a picture showing the prices on their website: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2019/02/Pi- Shelf.png](https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2019/02/Pi-Shelf.png)

It's 32£, which is less than on amazon.co.uk (currently 33.95£, varying between 33 and 36 over the last month). I'm guessing it's pretty good.

You can occasionnally find them for less on chinese websites, but I haven't seen a deal in a while, and you need to wait at least 3 weeks to get one; which is pretty much the opposite of brick-and-mortar store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some photos of the store [https://twitter.com/Raspberry_Pi/status/1093454153534398464](https://twitter.com/Raspberry_Pi/status/1093454153534398464)

<comment><USER6> Looks like an Apple Store light edition.

Not really convinced the design and branding of the store matches up well with the realities of their actual product.

<comment><USER7> Yeah. Brand-wise, I would rather see the Raspberry Pi shop like a kind of bazaar where you find everything in all sorts of places rather than a very tidy and clean place where everything is in order. The "everything should look like what Apple does" is really tiring and generic these days.

<comment><USER8> The "RPi is for nerds" shtick is specifically what they're probably trying to get rid of with that store. Looking approachable is a pretty key component of that.

Doesn't really look like an Apple Store either, unless wood and white is now reserved for Apple...

<comment><USER6> > Looking approachable is a pretty key component of that.

Agreed, the other key component though is actually making their machine and software/hardware approachable, smooth, performant and reliable. Which they haven't really put any effort in to since they started.

I really wanted the dream of an affordable computer for kids to be a reality but at the end of the day when the $35 just isn't as performant as a budget tablet around the same price then kids are going to just end up with tablets and never have the opportunity to crack the machine open.

If the product doesn't live up to the sales pitch of the store, then the product is just going to get returned.

<comment><USER9> Tinkering is not the same as consuming media/games. The kids who play with tablets and the kids who tinker with pis are completely different demographics( or the same person at different times). While I agree that the rpi leaves a lot to be desired( and other boards have left it in the dust hardware-wise) it is still the most accessible board out there and to say that they haven't improved on that is false( especially with software).

<comment><USER6> I totally get that I just think there is a lot of value to the tinkering being possible on the device they use for everything else.

How many kids got a PC to play games on but while bored found QBasic and Gorillas.bas.

How many kids on MySpace or NeoPets learnt HTML/CSS as a way to customize their profiles.

This all used to be a reality when kids grew up using a general purpose computing platform, now the choices are a Tablet that works as a general purpose platform you can't tinker with or a board you can only tinker on but not use as a computer.

<comment><USER9> I agree. But a tablet is only possible because you can't tinker with it( hardware limitations, how would you fit connectors etc in it?). The software side of things could be better but you also have to keep in mind that an RPi makes both hardware and software tinkering on a very cheap package. Tinkering with software on an old PC was possible but tinkering with hardware would risk a fairly expensive machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps this is in reaction to Maplin's troubles? That would previously have been the only place I would have thought of to buy a Raspberry Pi on the high street.

<comment><USER11> It would be ace to be able to walk into a RPi shop and be able to purchase LEDs, resistors, OLED screens, ESP8266 modules, breadboards etc.

Maplin was a great shop and open on the weekends was often a lifesaver.

<comment><USER12> When Radio Shack in the US still had components for sale, they were absurdly more expensive than Digikey or Mouser. I think I remember a 5 pack of 220ohm resistors being $2.99. Digikey will sell you 100 for under two dollars.

I suppose it would have to do if you're in a pinch, but there's a reason walk- in electronics stores have mostly vanished.

<comment><USER13> It was still a lifesaver when I wanted resistors, LEDs or other components ASAP.

$3 is still cheaper than digikey shipping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I Hope it's more of games workshop type affair. You're just not going to have useful staff that know about this equipment long term operating a shop floor. You can barely get anyone that knows much about a phone beyond the box from phone specialists.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. I was thinking more of a hacker space that little Timmy's mum would be happy to visit.

I cant see it surviving as just a shop. Shops can't even survive selling full size PCs, there isn't _that_ much more repeat custom to expect from something that costs 2 orders of magnitude less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting move, but why? Are they really planning to or currently selling to the general retail public?

<comment><USER17> Given that it's a university town with strong tech links, the general retail public in Cambridge is going to be quite different to the general retail public in most of the rest of the UK.

I'm not convinced the idea makes sense financially, unless they're selling all of the extras and kit parts needed to make the Pi do something useful.

If they are, then fine. If not this might look a little like a vanity move - not because it's a bad idea, but because retail in the UK can be insanely expensive to run, and it's outrageously hard to make it profitable.

<comment><USER18> In my understanding, the new reality here is that brick-and-mortar stores are increasingly becoming showrooms to support online sales, with brands closing smaller shops and focusing on big "experiential" flagship stores.

The description somebody else gave here of the Pi shop as "more of an event space than a store" would tie in well with this strategy.

<comment><USER19> Yeah that's what I've noticed, too. In Cambridge we have a Tesla store in the main shopping centre, which is just a Model S and a Model X on display in a small room with some people that talk about it. I don't think they actually make any sales there, it's just for marketing purposes.

<comment><USER20> > I don't think they actually make any sales there, it's just for marketing > purposes.

They do. The sales process is basically the Sales Rep sitting you in front of a PC and letting you order it through the Tesla website while they sit idly by to answer any questions and guide you through the ordering process. It takes less than 15 minutes.

It's stupid simple and zero pressure compared to regular automotive sales.

<comment><USER20> For clarification, the entire process isn't done in front of a PC in the showroom and everything you do in the showroom you can also do from home.

In the showroom you customize your vehicle, place a reservation order, and pay an initial order amount (e.g. ~$3500 for the Model 3). You'll then receive two emails, the first confirms your order and the second provides you next steps you must perform.

The next steps are:

1 - Select Delivery Location

2 - Provide copies of Driver's License

3 - Provide proof of Vehicle Insurance

4 - Provide Payment Method

5 - Process Trade-In

The steps don't have to be completed in any particular order but I was instructed to wait on steps 3 and 4 until after I received a hard delivery date from Tesla.

It's all handled electronically and is relativity simple. The Payment can also be done upon delivery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Makes sense - their offices are (were?) based in Cambridge just up the road from the city centre and about a 15min walk from the new shop. Little trivia: in my previous job I worked in the offices that would be taken over by Raspberry Pi a couple of years later :)

<comment><USER22> Yes, they are based in Cambridge and so is the main Broadcom office in the UK. And so is Arm...

<comment><USER19> Yeah I work in the office next to them, same floor same building. And previously worked for Arm. And I have a friend working at Qualcomm just down the road from me, too. Quite a small little world here :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's surprising that it has become the best selling British computer even it being a hobbyist oriented product

<comment><USER24> If you've ever worked on a vintage British car's electrical system, you wouldn't be surprised that the only thing the global marketplace decided the British should handle, electrically, would be hobby-oriented. </smacktalk>

<comment><USER25> I would pay real money for an Rpi with Lucas components. Extra if it could somehow be convinced to leak oil and not boot when the outside temp is below 10C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When did the British start calling shops 'stores'?

<comment><USER27> In both standard written and colloquial British English it's almost always "shop", but the term "store" is normal in the jargon used by people in the retail business. It's quite common to hear the word "store" used in a public announcement in a shop, for example.

There are many things like that. For example, normal people say "tin", in my experience, but the signs in a shop seem to use "can" more often than "tin", bizarrely. You'd probably find many similar example if you walked round some UK shops looking at all the labels.

There's also a whole work/office jargon used in modern Britain: words and grammar that people use at work but wouldn't normally use at home or in the pub.

In general I don't like jargon. To me it seems both pretentious and small- minded. On the other hand, an obscure technical term, used correctly, is like a beam of sunlight or a breath of fresh air. To me, at least. Though they sometimes borrow from each other, jargon and technical vocabulary are very different things.

<comment><USER26> Purchase vs buy, beverage vs drink. Not sure what the point in these slightly more technical sounding words that people seem to like to use.

<comment><USER28> Utilise vs use is the one that makes me want to get a bit stabby, especially when they correct their use of the word use to change it for utilise.

Sorry, I mean inclined to lacerate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looking forward to doing a trip to Cambridge to check it out. Did it open already?

<comment><USER30> It opens on Thursday apparently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Every time I see that case it irks me that it can't close with dupont cables attached to the GPIO pins, not just the lid, the whole case is useless. Other than that... Love the Pi, love the idea of a store.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wouldn't be surprised if the store eventually meets a similar demise to the "MakerBot Store" on Newbury street in Boston did a few years back.

Really cool stuff, just nobody ever really seemed to have a reason to buy anything of reason in the store.

I bought filament for my home-built 3-d printer there maybe once - <USER2> because it was higher quality than what MicroCenter carried and was a color I'd otherwise have to order.

But obv most people in the store weren't buying $2k 3d printers - anyone who happened to already own a 3d printer knew that MakerBot's tech was garbage.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hurry up and announce a Raspberry Pi 4 already! I want to give you more money

<comment><USER34> The rpi foundation are in trouble. The current SoC is old, limited at 1GB maximum RAM, and the GPU core is dated from 2011, 8 years ago.

In my opinion they should severe ties with Broadloom and open up to global competition.

<comment><USER35> There is inherent value in having a stable, battle tested platform. The fact that the same chip has been sold for general public for the last 8 years is to me rather appealing than a turn off.

Given the complexity of the modern software stack, there have been a zillion bugs that have ruined _someone elses_ day and have been hopefully fixed.

Although, I have no idea of the support quality of the Pi foundation since I have not used their products.

The platform is sufficiently beefy to run lot of non-trivial applications. It's not like those applications have magically increased in complexity.

We've just been brainwashed in the consumer space to always demand bigger numbers so that the vendors have something new to sell. There is really no need for a certain category of desktop applications to get any slower with time, or, to be able to provide any more value regardless how fast they are run if the interactivity level is already so fast that improvements would be undetectable by humans.

Note: this is not an argument that the current Pi "is fast enough for everything". I'm saying it's fast enough for some things, and the mature software stack is considerable added value.

<comment><USER36> I agree with this sentiment, but I do think that the RPi Foundation is going to have a hard time improving from their current state without breaking backwards compatibility, because they made some decisions early on that no longer make much sense today.

The big ones, in my opinion, are the write-limited, slow SD card interface, the microUSB power connector, the 1GB maximum RAM, Ethernet that shares bandwidth with USB, and ever-increasing power requirements.

I think the Pi Foundation wants to churn out more new units by increasing the CPU speed, but with the super slow SD interface and the capped-out RAM, performance hasn't made significant improvements in a long time.

I also think it was a bad decision to not focus on open-source software with the Pi. They have been including proprietary user space applications forever (Mathematica, for instance), the GPU boots a proprietary ThreadX operating system that has DMA and complete CPU control, and the thing requires lots of binary blobs to boot. The education aspect (particularly as a low-level programming platform) would have been made more accessible without such an opaque boot process.

<comment><USER35> "The education aspect (particularly as a low-level programming platform) would have been made more accessible without such an opaque boot process."

Not that I disagree, but as a counterpoint learning programming with Scratch has very little to do with getting to know the implementation details of the underlying computational substrate. I'm a software professional and I can't bother with that stuff! I'm far more interested in fiddling with _my_ programs than tweaking the underlying substrate. I don't think this is a stance everyone should take but I don't feel a worse person because of it. I can administer my own machine but I don't enjoy it.

<comment><USER15> I cant speak for anyone else, but I got into programming from using Linux. The fact that you have all these languages just there, and its all an open system etc really encourages you that yes this is something you can do, and not just toy examples. I've seen the same point made about boot to Basic, 8 bit computers also.

I don't by contrast program on my phone because it just feels like a gimmicky toy.

I'm not saying the raspberry pi is anything like a phone in this regard, but in does have a limit to how far you can dig, and that's a real shame.

Is it limiting to the scratch programmers? Probably not, but the Scratch programmers read about and move on Python, who then move on C. But if the boot process isn't open, there isn't anyone to write about it, so people don't discover it. Which for an educational endeavour is problematic.

<comment><USER35> By the time person has moved on to C from scratch I find it likely they would have acquired a less restrained computer. Likewise, the fact you can't easily reverse engineer a rasberry does not stop one from getting a less restrained computer.

<comment><USER36> Maybe this is true, but I would much rather work on my own operating system as an experiment on a small, simpler, inexpensive machine that I wouldn't feel bad messing up. Although I applaud what the RPi people have done for computing education, this still feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is anyone aware of a way to cheaply purchase multiple Raspberry Pi Zero W's? They are sold at $10 but are limited to 1 per person. If you want to buy more, the price is around $20 each. That's a big price difference if you are buying 30 out of pocket to teach a class.

<comment><USER38> If you're going to teach a class, I'd recommend going out of your way to give each student a Pi 3 Model B+. The additional ports means that the device can be useful as a general-purpose computer outside of class (just hook up a keyboard, mouse, and monitor/TV).

I realize the difference between $300 and $1050 is a lot, but you get way more hardware at the $35 price point. Building the institutional muscle to figure out how to get the additional $650 in funding is a good skill set as a teacher. (If you're at a school, there might be special funds set aside for buying STEM equipment you can tap into. You might also be able to get some money through the charity arms of local companies, or out of a local bank's petty cash fund. If you're teaching students at the middle-school or high- school age, you can ask them to help with the fundraising process. If you're teaching adults, just charge each adult a fee to cover the hardware cost.)

<comment><USER39> > just charge each adult a fee to cover the hardware cost

That seems a quick way to discourage adults from taking programming courses. Should they pay for a chair and table too? Or a screen? Of course not, that cost is amortised across many classes.

It's ridiculous that the Foundation makes bulk purchasing so difficult when the original vision for the RPi was for education. But that was fairly quickly forgotten when it became the darling of hackerspaces and upselling became the priority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm wondering how brexit will affect Raspberry Pi pricing?

<comment><USER41> No one can really answer this with certainty, given (somewhat tragically) no one has agreed what "Brexit" even is yet.

As one example, if May's current deal somehow was to be made tenable to Parliament, there would probably be little/no change at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Looking at the photos, this looks more like an event space than a store.

Still, good to see the Raspberry Pi team continuing to fulfil their mission.

</comment><comment><USER43> Cambridge UK, not Cambridge Massachusetts.</comment>


The Biggest Lies About Learning to Code - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/london-app-brewery/the-biggest-lies-about-learning-to-code-4c7e202a2c78 <comment><USER2> Useful, and gets under the surface of 'chatter' to some of the guiding principles that are less than obvious (perhaps) to those interested. I say this having started in QBASIC and getting to C++ before losing my chops, and thinking of getting back into it, but not into any rah-rah fantasy about how learning to write modern code is a ticket to fortune. It's access to different tool sets, in my view, which is interesting because tools don't make the product, the person using them does.

</comment><comment><USER3>
        Not everyone should learn to code, just as not everyone should become a chef.
        Not everyone will need to program,
        not everyone will be inclined to learn it and not everyone will enjoy it.

This bothers me a lot.

I see it quite frequently that "Not everyone should learn to code". Especially with comparisons to other professions...

As if "Knowing how to code" is the same as "Being a chef"...

"Not everyone will need to program", in the same sense the not everyone will need to know how to cook?

It's true, you don't have to in this day and age. But for it's bloody helpful if you do...

Don't get me wrong, not everyone should be a software developer.

But the considering that you use things that run on code every single day, for the majority of your waking time, it'd probably be a decent idea to know the basics.

In the same sense that if you are a car driver, having some basic knowledge of the rules of the road and a basic understanding of physics, while not necessary to drive, is still bloody helpful.

Now, to comment, as a developer, on the article, it's still good and the part about tutorials is so very true it hits almost a bit too close to home.

Find a tutorial that assumes you're 5. Learn conditionals, understand them. Learn loops, understand them. One. Step. At. A. Time.

Also, the first point just isn't true. I've spent quite some time teaching kids code and Everyone can learn how to code. Even that dyslexic kid with ADD that's chasing the squirrel during class.

Not everyone can get GOOD at writing code. And being a developer isn't for everyone. But LEARNING HOW TO CODE, is something Everyone can do.

<comment><USER4> Every time a post like this comes up, I make the following points:

\- Learning to code does not mean that everyone should work as a programmer, just like learning to read and write does not mean that everyone should end up as a professional writer (or even blogger).

\- For millennia, human societies have done just fine without the literacy we take for granted today. Rulers could rule without it. And commoners didn't really have time for it. Plus, no one could afford Kindles.

\- Before mass literacy, the ability to read and write was necessary to be a scholar or historian. Or part of the clergy. If you didn't want to be any of those things, you'd be well-justified in not spending a third of your lifespan (or whatever 12 years is to a pre-industrial-age lifespan) learning how to read and write, nevermind math.

\- Fast forward to today. Western societies have 95%+ literacy. I don't think I need to enumerate all the ways we benefit from everyone being able to read and write, despite the vast majority of people being bad at writing (if Facebook posts are a loose measurement).

I agree with most of what the OP says but am disappointed that she still has a too narrow view about the scope of programming. Writing is, on the surface, the ability to record thoughts on a relatively permanent and highly distributable medium (compared to oral storytelling). It's a nice skill to have if you like being able to disseminate your ideas without literally having to tell it to each person, in person. But literacy's power goes deeper than that. A poet 500 years ago is able to write about love, and today, those of us who are literate can know his thoughts and perspectives, even though we don't know his (physical) voice or even his exact identity, nevermind his place in society.

The OP is completely right that people underestimate how hard it is for beginners to learn how to code. I've always thought that once a novice learns how to use a for-loop, they'll have enough of the power of programming to make their lives better. I still think that way, though I'm happy if that epiphany is reached after 10 weeks.

A for-loop turns out not to be that simple when you really think about what it represents, and there's a lack of easy real-life analogies for defining a stored block of code to be evaluated _out of your control_. But that's why programming is so much more than what the OP seems to believe. Someone who can write well can communicate their ideas to a yet-unknown human audience. Someone who can program can communicate their ideas to a machine with absolutely no brains of its own, but with limitless mechanical power.

How is that _not_ a universally beneficial skill?

<comment><USER5> I consider programming to be on the same level as "knows how to properly phrase Google searches". It won't make or break your life but it will make it a degree easier. For better or worse, Google has become a means of finding information - and finding accurate information quickly is a bonus. Programming allows you to automate many trivial but time consuming tasks. Even being able to write a few functions in an Excel sheet can save you _hours_ at your job (and yes, FWIW I consider functions in excel sheets to be a form of programming). Everyone should be able to read and write basic programs, and as you said, people can still leave software engineering to software engineers.

I've easily saved more hours automating small tasks with Javascript (w/ JQuery) then I ever spent learning Javascript & JQuery...

Now on a completely unrelated tangent, please forgive me.

 _> you'd be well-justified in not spending a third of your lifespan (or whatever 12 years is to a pre-industrial-age lifespan) _

Average lifespan was so much lower back in the day because children dying very young was relatively common (winters and illnesses, infections from injuries, etc.). If you made it into adulthood your life span looked to be much of what it is today (living to be 60-70+ years of age). But you didn't need to be able to read and write to farm, smith, or tailor. From a young age, your time was better spent doing minor tasks like gathering eggs from the hens and helping feed the pigs. So what fraction of your lifetime depends if you mean "average lifespan" or "typical lifespan assuming you made it through the early years". :P

<comment><USER6> Only a small portion of population would personally benefit from programming skills without doing it as a job. That means for absolute majority learning to code would be wasteful.

<comment><USER5> _> Only a small portion of population would personally benefit from programming skills without doing it as a job._

I disagree entirely on this premise. Not because it is wrong, but because it has become less and less true over the past few decades.

Anyone who performs any trivial or repetitive task on a computer benefits from being able to set up a small (think 3-5 lines thrown in a for loop) script to automate the task for them and there is an increasing amount of people who perform trivial and/or repetitive tasks on computers. If it is only an hour once a week and they can have a small program turn that into a few seconds - they save 52 hours of doing a mindless, boring task each year. Having 52 hours to do literally anything else is a personal benefit. Minus time spent on automating the task of course. [0]

It's death by a thousand papercuts - except most people are failing to see the papercuts because they don't have an education enough to see what they could be automating with little effort. They go through their daily routine doing the same trivial tasks hundreds of times because the possibility of automating those tasks never crosses their minds.

Are the benefits minor? In most cases, yes. Just like the benefits of being able to properly phrase your Google searches is also minor.

Leave programming a photo-recognition app to the professionals. The average person won't need to know how to program that. Creating a small AHK macro that writes today's date? "Life changing"; actual quote from a coworker. The "life changing" program?

        :R*?:mdyy::
        FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, MM/dd/yy
        SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
        return

_> It won't make or break your life but it will make it a degree easier._

[0] [https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/)

<comment><USER7> > Anyone who performs any trivial or repetitive task on a computer benefits > from being able to set up a small (think 3-5 lines thrown in a for loop) > script to automate the task for them and there is an increasing amount of > people who perform trivial and/or repetitive tasks on computers.

I agree, this is the main reason (nearly) everyone should be taught to program. I often draw parallels between levels of programming and levels of mathematics. Not in a sense of understanding, but of complexity, and often when describing languages.

But I think that's a useful comparison here. Few people would say that teaching _everyone_ arithmetic is a bad idea. Because being able to count is essential to surviving in our society (just from handling your own basic finances). More, but still few, people would argue against teaching everyone algebra (the high school sort, not the abstract sort). Because it enables people to take their understanding of arithmetic and extend it with variables, create more complex expressions and solve them for common problems. Same with geometry. Trig and calculus are where the "everyone should learn" part stops, those topics are for everyone who's going into STEM fields, and other (non- STEM focused) students that are sufficiently advanced and interested.

The parallel to programming:

Everyone should learn basic algorithmic thinking. Writing out a series of steps and understanding looping and conditional expressions and subroutines. These are the things that BASIC, shell scripts, and other (relatively) simple languages provide. These are the skills needed for automating many office jobs.

Fewer people need to know low-level bit twiddling, network code (to the point of implementation of protocols rather than application of libraries that implement protocols).

Fewer still need to understand more complex data structures, more complex algorithms, and full-blown application development (whether it's server-side, mobile, web-app, desktop, doesn't matter).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My boss years back, when he said that the book 'learn C in 24 hours' was all i needed to learn to code c properly... was the biggest.. for me (now many times 24 hours times days since later, and i still don't master it like how i want to)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great read. Thanks for posting this.</comment>


Meet Microsoft's Antidote to Vista - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/meet-microsofts-antidote-to-vista/2009/04/20/1240079593188.html?page=fullpage <comment><USER2> I find it interesting how bad of a image Vista has. While there were obviously issues right off the bad with hardware incompatibilities, etc...it turned out to be a really solid OS from my end. I used it for over a year and a half with fewer problems than I had with XP.

Most people just seem to "know" that Vista is a terrible OS. The read some forum post that heard that it was terrible, or they saw some random news story a while back saying people weren't too happy with Vista. I've even heard some people claim it was Windows Me all over again.

Then you have some of the "advice" people give out for Vista users. My favorite, of course, is that the first thing a Vista user should do is completely disable UAC. Now, sure, those pop-ups can be annoying, but I'd prefer a quick second of annoyance when loading up a program over executables starting off silently with admin privileges.

In any case, I've used the Windows 7 beta as my main OS for a couple months now and haven't had any issues so far.

<comment><USER3> All those observations are coming from a technical person's point of view. One thing that MS doesn't seem to get is that first impressions matter, they matter a lot. I bought a computer that came with Vista. It took me close to 5 minutes - I'm not kidding - to start up the machine to the point I was able to use anything. And it was very slow even afterwards. You just can't convince a regular person, after having such an experience, that Vista is great. You can't wash away those bad feelings with an SP or with your positive testimony. You just can't. Regular folks are far more emotional than that. This is something we as developers have to remind ourselves every day.

<comment><USER2> _You just can't convince a regular person, after having such an experience, that Vista is great._

I wonder how many "regular" users jumped on board at the very beginning while there were still issues? I rarely have talked to someone who has actual experience with the problems from Vista (other than it being included on a system with poor performance, which was an issue, I'll admit).

If Vista really was a poor OS, then Windows 7 would be just putting 'lipstick on a pig'.

<comment><USER3> It will largely depend on how well MS can control the vendors. In other words how they can prevent the vendors from installing crap on a computer. For the longest time computers would ship with 1GB of RAM with tons of applications in the startup. You really felt like you bought a car for $20K that can only go 20 miles per hour. Don't underestimate the importance of performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The team tried to build an operating system...with manners, not one that constantly interrupts with bubbles, boxes and warnings that, data showed, people ignored or raced to close.

The Windows groups agreed in principle but old habits often reared up. Many Windows teams still wanted to be able to create alert bubbles for their functions.

"We've probably talked to every team in Windows about, 'No no no no, we don't want you to pop your notifications. Windows is not going to use these notifications to tell users things,'""

Great, getting rid of popup dialogs and notifications sounds like a huge step in the right direction - people are so used to not understanding or caring what they say they just ignore them anyway.

<comment><USER5> While I agree that users generally ignore notification bubbles in Windows, how should users receive notifications? I mean, sometimes you really do have to tell people stuff. Is it OK to pop up a notification bubble if you only do it every once in a while?

I feel pretty certain that a notification bubble is better than any system that steals focus from another window without responding to a user action.

Is there another accepted way of delivering notifications that I'm not thinking of?

<comment><USER6> > Is there another accepted way of delivering notifications that I'm not > thinking of?

Yes. Designing your software so that it minimizes the need for such notifications. E.g. Dropbox has not once shown me a popup yet it does some very critical file sync operations. Every other app I used before Dropbox kept annoying me with "do you REALLY want to sync this file even though the source is older?" Dropbox silently and smartly handles this (by keeping both copies of the file and naming them accordingly).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "More research and testing yielded a solution - the ribbon, which displayed different commands depending on what the PC user was doing. Then Larson-Green pushed Microsoft to get even more radical: to release Office 2007 without the hedge of a "classic mode" that would emulate the old look and feel for people who didn't like the changes."

The ribbon almost gives me a stroke every time I have to use office. I've always said that whoever developed it should be drug out into the street and shot. well apparently now we know who it was. The odd thing is that microsoft considered the ribbon a success?! even more stunningly they put ribbon lady in charge of their next OS. I swear it seems that microsofts enemies are making their top level corporate decisions.

This spells doom for windows 7.

<comment><USER8> I love the ribbon in Office 2007. It took a while to "get" the paradigm shift, but it works. As a developer, I don't use Office that much, but when I do, all of the commands I need are just a ribbon away. No more hunting through tabs of preferences or endless menus. It's also not just Microsoft that considers the ribbon a success, many other users do and they've won awards for the innovative UI.

<comment><USER7> "as a developer" this seems to be the problem with microsofts new user interfaces. The tech elite may like them, but they are impossible for the ordinary user. I posit that the vast majority of non technical end users utterly hate hate hate the ribbon. I imagine the same thing will happen with windows 7. In fact we've already been seeing it; the tech elite trying out the beta are liking it, which means that it will be unusable from the end user's perspective.

<comment><USER8> No, you have it completely backwards. That was the problem with their old UI's. They were built by developers for developers with minimal thought towards everyday users. This was the first major shift away from that and it seems to have worked. It took into account how people used Office and is the result of countless focus groups and studies. As I said earlier, it takes a while to grok it, but once you do, there really is no going back.

My wife is an excellent example of a non-tech user. I surreptitiously installed Office 2007 on her computer when I upgraded her HD and reinstalled Windows. She hated it at first because it was different than what she was used to (Office XP). She hates change as most people do. But as she used it, she got used to the new UI and now has said she loves it and wishes more of her programs worked that way.

I hate to sound like a Microsoft homer, but seriously, the ribbon UI is one of the more innovative and fresh ideas to come out of Redmond lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> MS should take some time to write an HIG document and put it online for everyone to see. That would help a lot.

I also hope MS uses fewer "violent" colors in Win7. I'm a Mac user, and I love the way the Mac UI just recedes into the background with gray as it's dominating color. I don't like the reds and greens in the Vista UI. Of course, I could turn on classic mode, but why should I have to do that? I like the modern Aero UI, and I want to keep it - sans the violent colors.

All those horrid bright colors make the Vista UI distracting, especially for someone who spends a lot of time in CLI environments.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is she being set up for the Carly Fiorina award?

</comment><comment><USER11> >>> create a good user experience <<< >>> User interface is customer service for the computer <<< >>> centralized planning, in contrast with the old culture that let Windows subgroups set their own agendas <<<

seems like to me that not only are they moving towards a more "mac-like" focus on user interface, easier-to-use software. They are also copying apple's approach to software/hardware design, which is centralized around steve jobs.

<comment><USER12> oh come on

<comment><USER5> No kidding.

How is delivering a good user experience and designing a product-appropriate development process Apple's property? Shouldn't everyone who writes software try to do those things?

<comment><USER13> The contrast here is being made between two development styles: A centralized, controlled, and focused production system at Apple, versus what Microsoft apparently had before Windows 7: A network of fiefdoms which fought each other over implementation and design details but nevertheless had to secure each others' approval for changes. This brought about stalemates and some truly bizarre outcomes. Here's the famous story about the Windows shutdown menu relating to this:

[http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows- shutdown-c...](http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown- crapfest.html)

If Microsoft has overcome these [alleged] problems, it would represent a significant change in their development style.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mod_parrot: The last Apache Module You'll Ever Need [PPT] - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashing.org/talks/mod_parrot.ppt

<comment><USER2> Lately as soon as I see Apache, I think last-gen. After playing with nginx with such great results (and loving the easy of configuration!) I'm thinking a more forward-looking approach would be to build a solid FastCGI implementation which could then work in both (and others too). Nginx is comparatively very small, but the growth is there, and the benefits are definitely there too. Why limit to Apache nowadays?

<comment><USER3> Why FastCGI, though? Proxying HTTP to backends seems to work just fine.

<comment><USER2> True, but running nginx + apache + mod_parrot seems like a big extra in the middle when you could have something much more lightweight and less memory intensive running parrot for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone have a non-powerpoint summary of this article?

<comment><USER5> I've posted a pdf version of this presentation online :-)

<http://www.ikbenbitterzoet.com/mod_parrot.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a bold statement. Knowing nothing about Parrot, could this someday replace Phusion Passenger, i.e. any chance Ruby will run on Parrot any time soon?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a compiler for ruby on parrot: <http://github.com/cardinal/cardinal/tree/master>

It's not under active development, as stated in the project page. So don't expect Ruby on Parrot any time soon. There's always hope for the future, though, considering Parrot's improvements over the last few months.</comment></comment>


Bloom Language - <AUTHOR> http://bloom-lang.net/ <comment><USER2> Interesting language (temporarily delivered as DSL for Ruby) but the last commit is dated 2017-11-22.

</comment><comment><USER3> See also datafun which takes datalog and expands it to generic join semilattices and uses type theory to maintain the monotonicity invariant.

</comment><comment><USER4> The disorderly programming reminds me of verilog.</comment>


Ask HN: Continue or Cut My Losses - <AUTHOR>

I have been developing ommageo.com for a little over a year, with little to no traction.  The beta is live at (ommageo.com) and with the help of a handful of HN posts/users and feedback from a few beta testers I have redesigned the web version here: http://solitaireinfosys.com/demo/will_brown_new/index.php<p>Now I am at the verge of creating a mobile version based on the redesigned web version, but I found myself asking should I just stop now?  Not that I am quitting or giving up, but facing the reality that  I may be building something people do not want: a location based video sharing app. <comment><USER2> Hi, well done for starting something.

Your biggest challenges without knowing you or your business idea as well as you do are:

………Who are my customers? ………What problem am I solving for them? ………What is the solution? ………Will they pay me for the solution?

So what you should be doing is resolving those challenges.

I would go lean and do the following

Come up with a startup idea - you have done this Document your major assumptions/risks - I have done this above but you could tailor it a bit more for your idea Develop an interview script to test the assumption Find customers to interview Interview the customers Interpret your results, and Go back to Step 1

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickable [http://www.ommageo.com/](http://www.ommageo.com/) [http://solitaireinfosys.com/demo/will_brown_new/index.php](http://solitaireinfosys.com/demo/will_brown_new/index.php)</comment>


Free Online Book for the Boost C++ Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://en.highscore.de/cpp/boost/

<comment><USER2> Why-oh-why does the right half div have a title attribute? It's overriding all hover-popups for me. <chapter title> everywhere I pause! * ack __*

That said, looks interesting, I'm saving it for future Boost-related learning.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it work in progress? It seems very thin because most of what the book is covering is in Boost documentation. I only checked out the on-line (HTML) version. Nevertheless, I do think Boost can use a new book.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it will depend on the amount of feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really awesome. Contains a lot of good stuff.

I also really like the 'Found an error? Fix it in your browser!' thing they did. You can edit the document inline and then save it. That is very nice.</comment>


Ask HN: what level is "traction"? - <AUTHOR>

We read in a lot of places about getting "traction" before speaking with investors, but have never really understood at what level this means. Ie<p>- 100 or 100,000 users? - 1,000 free users or 10 paying ones? - high conversion rate or repeat visits?<p>I realize every startup is different but would love to hear what figures you were getting when you / investors considered you had "traction". <comment><USER2> They're looking for a _repeatable, scalable business model_ that they can pour cash into. Beyond that, it's all a matter of the investors' risk tolerance. (How little proof do they need before parting with their money?)

The metrics you're looking for are just pieces of the puzzle - you need to tell a story that says "if you put money into our black box, you'll get more out". There are no magic numbers.

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as I can tell, "traction" is a synonym for "the VCs I play golf with have heard of you" -- social proof and all that. But I'd also love to hear opinions from people with direct experience here.

In addition to the already stated metrics of #users, #payingusers, #visitors, and %conversionrate, I'd hope VCs would look at $revenue, $profit, and %monthlygrowth.</comment>


Why It's a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One - <AUTHOR> http://www.clientcide.com/deep-thoughts/why-its-a-good-idea-to-be-a-javascript-developer-and-what-it-takes-to-be-one/ <comment><USER2> This article is really spot on, but the trick is that you have too be good. The market is flooded with designer come JS hack who learn a little jQuery and pitch themselves as a front end developer. I have done alot of development over 15 or so years and freelance doing Java, .NET, Database, SOA, iPhone, Android and JavaScript over the past 8 months I have not had a contract doing anything but JavaScript. I am so flooded with JavaScript work that I could not even get to one of the other projects even if I wanted to and JavaScript development seems to afford a 30% premium over any of the other work, iPhone coming a close second. Like the author said, it feels almost like the .com boom all over again.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a front end dev and do exactly the sort of stuff he's mentioned. I just find it very dissatifying work. Everybody from marketing and their dog has an opinion about how the website should behave and look, which leads to endless discussions. Nobody cares if you use Python or Java in the server.

Front end is often seen as just one step up from a web designer.</comment>


Nvidia hobbles WebGL performance on laptops - <AUTHOR> https://www.scirra.com/blog/ashley/7/nvidia-hobbles-webgl-performance-on-laptops

<comment><USER2> Since Chrome uses the 3D accelerator to render normal pages, without Nvidia's "hobble" the 2nd GPU would be active all the time, which would be poor for battery life.

It would be nice if it could be configured to do just that when running on external power, but I don't think that hobbling WebGL is the goal.

<comment><AUTHOR> But they already defaulted it to using integrated graphics before to save battery. It's too far when you can't even change the setting, even when you're on mains power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A web browser should not require more than what an integrated GPU can provide, if you have an app that needs more graphic power, than consider writing proper native app.

I'm a web developer, however I don't like the idea of giving full access to my hardware to any random/untrusted script on the web, because people will abuse it, they will write scripts that will drain my laptop's battery and I people will start disabling WebGL completely which will defeat the purpose of WebGL.

</comment><comment><USER4> The results seem strange. Intel HD 4000 is not a great card, but it's completely capable of running new-ish games on low/mid settings. I wonder if there's something even worse going on (falling back to software rendering?) if it seems to score 10x worse than a mobile phone.

<comment><USER5> yeah something is wrong. I ran the test on my lenovo x200s with an intel core 2 duo and intel GMA 4500 graphics and got 3700 "objects" and with a "tickcount" of 1400. I'm assuming objects are sprites--the test itself doesn't use the term.

If his HD4000 is getting 1250 objects, I shouldn't get 3700.

<comment><USER6> The test appears to be very resolution-dependent.

At 2560x1600, I get about 1800 objects at 25fps. At 1280x800, I get ~4k objects at 30fps. At 640x480, I get 16k+ objects at 30fps.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, well spotted. Just tried on intel 4k HD and got 12k in a mobile phone- comparable size.</comment></comment></comment></comment>