Robotics Simplified – a website for learning robotics - <AUTHOR> http://robotics-simplified.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone!

I'm the creator of the website and a former member of the FRC team 1391 (2018 - lead programmer and driver).

The website aims to explain topics from the field of robotics in a simple way.

It offers implementations (in Python) and illustrations of the discussed concepts, interactive visualizations (using P5.js), and is available offline as a PDF. It's also open-source: [https://github.com/xiaoxiae/Robotics- Simplified-Website](https://github.com/xiaoxiae/Robotics-Simplified-Website)

IT'S STILL A WIP, so the content is subject to change.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the project!

<comment><USER2> what demographic are you targeting? college freshmen, highschool seniors?

i see as a WIP its a good start, one thing i noticed is my browser zoom was cutting off the bottom of the page, unless i maximized my browser. [I do have a fairly unorthodox browser set up], im wondering if you have a way of checking a readers zoom level and adjusting?

whithout diving into the source code, the page is not a busy box full of distractions, thats good. it looks like there is room to monetize the page [if you ever chose to] and not eat up info space.

you have a nice image set up, im wondering if it be worth it for you to make an interactive animation, so a reader could play with a simulation, make code changes in some way and have a visual on expected results [yup that maybe resource intensive] -it may help with learning for some segment of users.

i think its good keep it up, and hope it works out well :D

bookmarked and stuffed into my STEM folder for later reference

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it!

Yes - as I am a high school student myself, so my target audience is exactly the people you described.

I will look into the browser problem, performance testing is something I haven't payed enough attention to.

There is one interactive visualization in the Drive Control > Arcade Drive article, and I am planning on adding more, but interactive code is an absolutely amazing idea! I will definitely look into it.

Thanks so much for the advice and the bookmark!</comment></comment></comment>


Maybe crickets aren't the food of the future - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/121315/maybe-crickets-arent-the-food-of-the-future-after-all/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=quartz <comment><USER2> Every time I see these posts where people claim that they will feed the world with crickets and bugs, my mind screams that's just complete nonsense. The problem in the developed world (that is where they are marketing this kind of things anyway) is that people are eating too much meat already, not that we need to product more meat, that is just the opposite.

The current meat is indeed really expensive to produce in terms of resources compare to other kind of food but that's not a problem at all, it's just people are eating too much of it because it's too cheap already, that is the problem. And it's not going to be solved by replacing burgers by cricket burgers. That would just make things even worse, you could get even cheaper meat so the consumption of meat would even raise a bit.

<comment><USER3> \- there are people than those here in the western/first world

\- insects could/should substitute animal meat to save ressources and the decrease negative effects of our livestyle (soil erosion, to many nutritions in water bodies..

<comment><USER2> \- This new trend is mainly targeted to developed countries currently.

\- If we divide the consumption of meat by at least five, we suddenly have much less problems. It's just a solution to the wrong problem. The problem is how people consume food, we are just not supposed to eat meat in such ridiculous quantities. Replacing meat with cricket meat is not going to solve that.

<comment><USER4> I probably spend $400/month just on meat; I love it. You people who are trying to get people not to eat meat should stop trying to guilt people into forgoing things they enjoy and focus on reducing poverty or eradicating slavery. Those are much more worthy causes.

<comment><USER2> I'm an not advocating on forcing people to switch to a vegetarian diet, I'm not a vegetarian myself. I just present the facts. People would be healthier by eating less meat than what they do currently, they don't need to remove it from their diet. It's great that you love it, most people love meat, I also love meat, that's why we are eating so much of it. I agree that there is a lot of loud vegetarian extremists out there but I'm not one of them, I would just like people to eat more balanced meals instead of the fast-food nonsense we have today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The alternative to grain (grocery store waste) doesn't seem like its going to work either. Its a feedback problem - we don't waste as much as we eat; we can't produce the food we eat from its waste. Like the movie Soylent Green - can't use people to feed people.

</comment><comment><USER6> Crickets are not so bad, cockroaches are even more efficient at protein conversion :-(

</comment><comment><USER7> I always found the "crunchiness" off putting :) (that was a joke, I draw my line at two pairs of legs.

<comment><USER8> They eat them in Mexico. They aren't bad if you can overcome your squeamishness. (Saying that, if I hadn't seen a prawn until now, I think the appearance would put me off).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pro survival tip: eat insects with less than 6 legs in the wild to prevent being poisoned. Cook them first to prevent bacterial diseases.</comment>


Wolfram on teaching kids "coding" vs. "computational thinking" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/09/how-to-teach-computational-thinking/ <comment><AUTHOR> "But when they do learn about "programming", say in high school, what do they actually learn? There's usually a lot of syntactic detail, but the top concepts tend to be conditionals, loops and variables. As someone who's spent most of his life thinking about computation, this is really disappointing. Yes, these concepts are certainly part of low-level computer languages. But they're not central to what we now broadly understand as computation—and in computational thinking in general they're at best side shows."

Is our approach to teaching kids to code wrong? Do we put too much emphasis on what Wolfram calls the top concepts (loops, variables, etc) and language specific syntax - and not enough emphasis on how to think computationally?

<comment><USER2> He's actually saying that the fact that conditionals, loops, and variables are the 'top concepts', i.e. the most challenging they'll encounter in that curriculum, is disappointing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious what others think of his observation. Is he right? Are we potentially turning off a lot of kids from engineering by focusing on these "top concepts" versus more computation like thinking projects?</comment></comment></comment>


Honey, I shrunk the MP3 decoder (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://keyj.emphy.de/minimp3/ <comment><AUTHOR> For comparison, he has also written an MP2 decoder, which is almost an order of magnitude smaller: [https://keyj.emphy.de/kjmp2/](https://keyj.emphy.de/kjmp2/)

Note that MP3 patents expired not long ago, so the format is now "free": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240645)

<comment><USER2> He also recommends checking this one that is a clean re implementation, not the extraction of FFmpeg code: [https://github.com/lieff/minimp3](https://github.com/lieff/minimp3)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you avoid Zoom as a video conferencing solution? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Not sure exactly what you're looking for, hosting vs guest, but start by calling by phone in whenever possible.

I'm kind of blown away by how quickly people started using Zoom and how they still choose to totally ignore security/privacy issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> There're many Better replacements, I'm using workshopx.app Now,works perfect anyway.</comment>


JavaScript Coding Exercises Workbook - <AUTHOR> https://gum.co/JieDN <comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on a JavaScript technical interview workbook for junior devs. I've been working as coding bootcamp instructor and also running my own training company and came to the conclusion:

The best way for junior developers to circumvent the issue of not having enough experience/projects and still get employed is to do plenty of coding exercises (including on old and newer ES features) without having done whole projects on them.

This demonstrates a practical understanding of core and advanced JavaScript concepts.

Often people have to balance multiple things while they learn to code including part-time jobs. Therefore, they're on a time crunch and may or may not be able to commit to doing projects. I've faced this with students before. They have committed to learning to code but life just gets in the way.

There are also people who leave everything including employment in order to learn how to code. The more time they spend out of web-dev employment status means the more they dip into their savings and deplete their bank balances.

So this technical guide is focused on circumventing these issues in a practical and straightforward way.

Each section of each chapter has about 70 - 90 coding exercises + underlying theory. The basic premise is that you read a section, practice the coding exercises and then move on to the next section.

Therefore solidifying your base at each step. Moving you from basic to advanced concepts.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think this should probably be a show hn post.</comment>


The Smartest Man in Europe Is Very Cautious - <AUTHOR> http://www.blackstone.com/cps/rde/xchg/bxcom/hs/firm_commentary_6873.htm

<comment><USER4> Strange, one would expect The Smartest Man in Europe to be at least somewhat contrarian.

What I have read is a collection of pop fearmongering. Basically his stance is the prevalent position among people out there today. Thus it reeks of manipulation. It is a piece meant to evoke a specific emotional response. That it is written by a hedge fund executive only reinforces the stench.

Thus I mark this piece as hedge fund propaganda. True meaning is a feint within feint.

Edit: I suspect that Blackstone is trying to unload its gold and trying to create a market. Gold is probably in the last phase of bubble. Why do I think so? Only one reason. In my country there is a vocal MLM type gold investment operation going on. Very similar to what was going on with stocks and derivatives in the 2006/2007 era. If there is one fundamental truth about markets, it is that when your hairdresser and butcher start giving investment advice it is time to get out. There is no more bigger fools out there. Gold is going down.

<comment><USER5> It is true that in a bubble everyone is telling you to buy. But I don't think we're in a bubble for the gold price for a couple reasons. The first is that most people with an unsophisticated financial perspective (eg: hair dressers) are not aware of gold (in the countries I've visited.) The slightly sophisticated (Eg: people who invest in mutual funds) have been claiming there was a gold bubble going all the way back to when it was only $400 an ounce.

But the other reason is we haven't seen gold take leave of the fundamentals. The financial crisis that has been unfolding since 2008 has revealed that the only response governments seem willing to take is ever more monetary inflation. The more money out there, the higher the price of gold. Secondly, most gold trading is at the level of very sophisticated people, not the average joe. When average joes start piling in and blowing up the price, then gold may take leave of its fundamentals and we'll have a bubble.

The thing is, in bubbles, supply rushes in to meet demand-- but you cant' scale up supply of gold like you can dotcoms or houses. Environemntal regulations and kleptocratic governments keep new mine production opportunities limited.

Finally, mining companies-- which should be the darlings of the gold bubble if there is one-- are trading sympathetic with the rest of the stock market, not contrary to it. If we were in a gold bubble, then good news for gold (eg: bad financial news) would cause those prices to go up-- but they don't they go down now. This indicates that they are not seen as an alternative, but as being subject to the bad news the same way General Electric, et. al. are.

We won't enter a bubble phase until that has changed. When people start seeing gold as a safer asset (or as a bull market "you just gotta get into!") then we'll have entered a bubble. At that point, when there's bad news for General Electric, you'll see a bump in the price of GoldCorp. We saw this in the dotcom bubble-- a big IPO for a tech company would cause a decline in General Electric or Gold for that matter.

All of these are subjective observations, so neither of us can really prove the other wrong of course. I found it interesting is that we use the same signal to detect a bubble-- the hair dressers and MLM schemes. I'm impressed to see how much more popular gold is outside the USA than it is inside the USA. I take that as a sign that it is heading towards a bull market.

However, if you're right and I'm wrong, I will be very severely punished by the markets. I'm not too worried, though. I got punished by the dotcoms. I played the housing bubble successfully going up and going down and got out a bit early, but am happy with the result.

I remember being told I was crazy on forums because I said there was a bubble in housing. So, you're not crazy, I just think you're too early.

<comment><USER4> This is quite interesting to hear. So in the US it hasn't taken hold yet? Here in Europe the buzz is starting, the MLM aspect has been less than a year old. So I have caught this in the early stage?

Can someone else from the US confirm or deny econgeeker's claim?

This is the specific scheme I was invited to: <http://www.securitas- aurum.com/>

But its hard for me to believe that Slovenia (where I am from) is ahead of US on this one. We usually lag a year or two in such phenomena.

So I can explain it in 2 ways -> You are either a nugget of gold, if your statements are legit, then there is still money to be made from this one.

The other explanation is that you are one of the team doing the pumping.

What does the hive mind have to say?

<comment><USER5> Certainly there is more awareness of gold in the USA than there was in the 1990s. On political radio- conservative or liberal- you hear "buy gold!" advertising. I've been hearing those ads going back, at least, to 2005! They were there in between the mortgage refinance ads back in the day. On TV you see people pitching "investment grade" and "rare" gold coins. They think numismatics are the way to go, and they are charging too much money. I've seen that since the 1990s. I bet the amounts of both of these kinds of marketing of gold is up significantly in the last 10 years.

All around Europe, eastern and western europe, I've seen lots of signs at money changers and some banks who are happy to sell you gold. These signs are generally posters in the windows, not metal signs or painted, so this gives me the impression this is a new phenomena. I was very happy to see these signs, given my experience in the USA.

In the USA, if you want to buy gold, you can spend way too much to buy it on the TV. Or you can go to one of the few local retailers who sell bullion - <USER2> generally their primary business is either selling collectable coins or selling jewelry. The bullion is a side business. Unless things have changed in the last year, it is a pain in the ass to buy gold in the USA. There may be one or two of these bullion dealers in a larger sized town. You can't just go to the money changer or the bank.

I gave you several reasons for my perspective. Consider them critically. But if you're looking for someone to agree with you, and tell you I'm a dirty rotten capitalist who is full of it, you'll have no trouble finding that.

I would strongly recommend that you not rely on my opinion, or that of the "hive mind" or anyone else to make any sort of financial decisions. You have to use your own judgement and you have to learn what you can about the subject. This is why I said, "If I'm wrong, I'll be punished"-- the market will take one action or the other, long after this conversation is finished.

I would suggest reading economics books such as "Economics in one lesson" by Henry Hazlitt Free here: <http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf>

By all means, keep a critical eye on anything anyone says in favor -- or opposed-- to gold. That is why I read what you said and considered it seriously. I'm keenly looking for evidence of a bubble, and you referenced a metric I use.

I'd also recommend looking a bit into the history of gold, preferably by reading articles here: <http://mises.org>

Here's the short summary, see if this fits with what you know of the world: Gold is historically been the best form of money because it was difficult to counterfeit, had reasonable value per given weight, was malleable, didn't degrade, etc. But governments want to spend more than they have, so they choose paper currencies over gold. The nice thing about paper is that they can make it "money" by passing a law, forcing people to use it... and they can print as much as they want. The downside is, they get addicted to this spending, and in doing so, they always need to spend more and more. The more paper there is in circulation the more pieces of paper it takes to buy anything tangible, and prices rise, which means costs rise for the governments and they need to print paper at an even faster rate.

These effects take a very long time to play out. They ultimately result in a currency crisis, however. Gold is merely something that is difficult to counterfeit, and it is difficult to bring new mines into production. So it serves as a hedge against currencies.

I don't think there's ever been a gold bubble. When gold has gone up in response to a currency, really it is the value of the currency declining with respect to gold. The amount of gold in the world doesn't change very fast- it can't- at least in terms of currencies, and thus really the "gold price" is the "price of the currency in units of gold." $1,580 is not a gold price, it is a measure of the value of the dollar.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, your writing makes much sense and most of it I am aware of. It may not be as useful to me as to other members of the community.

Id just like to clarify that I am not looking for investment advice I am merely collecting opinions. It just so happens that opinions of this community are more valuable since on average members of this community are the very intellectual elite of the world - as far as communities go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The Smartest Man in Europe Is Very Cautious

I first thought it was going to be an article about Grigori Perelman and about how we are all one step closer to Apocalypse because he was very close to finding that there is indeed no foundation for Mathematics (or any similar conclusion that is way over my head in even trying to explain). Instead I stumbled upon an article about a rich heir to "a mercantile family" who talks about money, money, money. Not that's anything wrong with talking about money, but if that's we consider as the "smartest thing" in an entire Continent I think we have a problem.

<comment><USER7> There _is_ no foundation for Mathematics [1] :-)

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel%27s_incompleteness_theore...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel%27s_incompleteness_theorem)

<comment><USER8> Goedel's theorem is not about nonexistance of foundation in mathematics, it's about existence of true but nonproveable statements in every nontrivial formal system.

One could imagine a hypothetical stronger result - maybe every nontrivial set of axioms can actually derive p^(not p)?

<comment><USER7> IANAM, but I do know it was an unassailable problem in Russell + White's efforts to found mathematics on a firm basis in Principia Mathematica [1].

[1]:[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_mathematica#Consisten...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_mathematica#Consistency_and_criticisms)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> After pointing out that "The central bankers throughout the world have lost touch with reality" and discussing the messes that have been created in large part by inept bureaucrats, The Smartest Man in Europe dismisses all of the problems brewing in China with a naive "the authorities will figure out solutions to solve them."

Anyone who truly believes that the "authorities" in China are any more capable than the "authorities" outside of China isn't very smart at all.

<comment><USER10> _Anyone who truly believes that the "authorities" in China are any more capable than the "authorities" outside of China isn't very smart at all._

A representative sample of China's Politburo:

Hu Jintao, 62, president of the People's Republic of China, graduate of Tsinghua University, Beijing, department of water conservancy engineering.

Huang Ju, 66, graduate of Tsinghua University, department of electrical engineering.

Jia Qinglin, 65, graduate of Hebei Engineering College, department of electric power.

Li Changchun, 61, graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology, department of electric machinery.

Luo Gan, 69, graduate of Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, Germany.

Wen Jiabao, 62, premier of State Council, graduate of Beijing Institute of Geology, department of geology and minerals.

Wu Bangguo, 63, graduate of Tsinghua University, department of radio engineering.

Wu Guanzheng, 66, graduate of Tsinghua University, power department.

Zeng Qinghong, 65, graduate of Beijing Institute of Technology, automatic control department.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

A representative sample of the US Senate:

... 100 people who are pretty much all lawyers

Not saying this implies anything, but my money's on the government run by engineers.

<comment><USER5> China's errors seem to be ones of engineering: Overbuilding. America's errors seem to be ones of lacking fortitude: constantly increasing over spending.

If neither change, china is headed for continued growth and maybe some painful re-allocations of capital, while the US is headed off of a cliff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I found a fun game to play whenever reading superlatives from financial news sources: append ", in finance" to every one you see. Thus, "the Smartest Man in Europe" becomes "the Smartest Man in Europe, in finance." Things start to make more sense that way.

</comment><comment><USER12> I knew all this. Stocks are bound to be crap, they depend on making a profit from selling goods and services. There are only two types of people left in unequal economies. Those who can't afford the stuff and those who don't need to buy any more than they do. Consumption, profits and stocks would all be much higher if societies were more equal. There is tons of money locked up that never needs to be spent by the people who've got it. Economic demand is money + (desire or need). Every consumer has one or the other but not both. Maybe the poor deserve no more a share of the resources than they get, after Reagans tax cuts, but the result is terrible for companies. To sell anything PROFITABLY, chase the super-rich. Everyone else is broke.

We won't be able to transfer the unneeded wealth of people in Luxembourg to Nigerians or Romanians of course, we must wait a few decades for the abolition of scarcity (of most things) and the abolition of money and economics. Otherwise known by: "Tea, Earl Grey, hot."

<comment><USER5> I disagree with you strongly, but I think you made a good attempt at an argument and I think it is wrong you were downvoted, so you have my meager upvote.

I think your argument is disproven by walmart. Walmart doesn't chase "the super rich" they actually chase the bottom end of the market. They make good money by doing their darndest to make prices as low as possible, both to increase volume (and marketshare) but also to cater to the market that doesn't have a lot of disposable income.

I don't see the problem here as a lack of "equality", in fact, the super rich are taxed more than the poor. If things were equal they'd all pay the same _dollar_ amount (not even the same percentage, the same amount in absolute terms.) That would be more moral as well.

The reasons those with less money have trouble affording things is that they have been impoverished by government. Presume you're at the lower tax bracket and paying %15 to the IRS. You're paying another %15 to Social Security (though only half is reported on your check, you have to earn the other half as well or you wouldn't have your job.) You're paying- what %4 to medicare? %3 for unemployment insurance, say %5 in state income taxes (just picking a low number since some states don't have it and it varies.) That's %42 of your income right off the bat.

Now if you're just scraping by, that means you're spending all of the remaining %58! All of that is taxed at rates from %8 (city sales tax) to %30 (cable, phone, an flights) to as much as %40 (gasoline).

If we take the lowest figure there, %8, then that means of every $100 that person makes, government takes %50. It is worse fro people in the middle and lower middle incomes. Their state and federal income taxes are higher.

That's why people have trouble making ends meet.

<comment><USER13> > If things were equal they'd all pay the same _dollar_ amout [...]. That > would be more moral as well.

Why?

> The reasons those with less money have trouble affording things is that they > have been impoverished by government.

This (and the argument that follows) is very wrong, for at least the following reasons.

1\. The fraction of the money a person receives and spends that gets taken in tax is smaller, not larger, for poorer people.

2\. In particular, there are personal exemptions and deductions, which make up a substantial fraction of the salary of people with low incomes, and the lowest tax rate is 10% and not 15%. Many of your other numbers are also wrong, and curiously all in the same direction. Social security taxes are not 15% unless you include the payroll taxes that fund Medicare, in which case the Medicare rate is 0%, not 4%. (It wouldn't be 4% anyway; payroll taxes are 2.9%, including the portion paid by the employer.) 8% of 58% is not 8%. Your percentages are, to put it bluntly, bullshit.

3\. If you are going to include the employer's social security contribution in the figure being taxed, you lose the right to say that what's being taxed is so-and-so-many percent "of your income". Because, y'know, it isn't.

4\. The money paid to the government in taxes doesn't simply disappear into a hole. It is used to provide services. For instance, that Medicare payment pays (astonishingly enough) for Medicare. Which, if you happen not to be rich, you are likely to have need of one day. In a hypothetical world in which Big Bad Government didn't take all that money, those services would need to be provided privately, and they would cost money. Probably about the same amount of money as the government spends on them. If our hypothetical low-income person is going to avoid being "impoverished" by the government, presumably that means they simply don't get the use of those services. Sorry, Mr Low- Income Person, I know your house was burgled, but you haven't paid the private police and judicial services: no law enforcement for you! Oh, and your child was injured by a toy whose makers were recklessly indifferent to safety? Well, you should have paid for a safety audit yourself. Oh, you lost your job and are starving to death? You'd better find a private charitable organization that wants to help you, then: keeping you alive is no job for the state.

5\. (This is more or less #1 from a different perspective.) The difference between poor and rich people, which explains why the poor people can't afford to make ends meet, is not that the government is taking the poor people's money and not the rich people's. The government is taking everyone's money (and doing useful things with it, see #4, but that's a separate issue). Imagine for a moment a world in which the money taken in taxes really _does_ just get burned in a big incinerator. What happens? Answer: there's a large deflation rate, so presumably the currency needs re-denominating every now and then. Aside from that -- which would, yes, have bad effects because of the rapid change, but that's not relevant here -- everyone would in fact be about equally well off. Every year you'd lose half your money, and so would everyone else, so all the prices would have to halve to keep supply and demand in balance, so that half-your-money would be worth the same as it was before it was halved. Of course that's an oversimplification because in our hypothetical world income is being taxed but investment isn't. So the deflation rate would be a bit lower and the net effect would be a steady transfer from those with less capital to those with more. But in the real world, gains from investments are taxed just like gains from income are. If taxation is impoverishing the poor, the reason is the _difference_ between the tax rate on income and the tax rate on capital gains, and you should be arguing for equalizing those, not for reducing taxes as such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The smartest man in Europe is about an enlightening as Thomas Friedman column.

</comment><comment><USER15> "All the problems really started when the dollar was no longer convertible into gold. That happened in August 1971 and eliminated all currency restraints because money became only paper and not backed by anything real."

Interesting to find that in the middle of the article.

<comment><USER16> There's a school of thought that blames the gold standard for the great depression. The French accumulated massive amounts of gold between 1928 and 1932 and some scholars say the global deflationary effects of Bank of France's policy during this time caused the great depression.

The gold standard also ties money supply to gold production which is a little like tying fed policy to the quarterly flip of a coin. For example, the Australian and Californian gold rushes of the 1850's caused huge short term price instability.

I'd counter the above statement with the following:

Many problems were solved with our departure from the gold standard and paper money is backed by the faith and credit of the country that prints it and it's value should, and does, fluctuate accordingly.

But arguing with an anonymous "smartest man in Europe" is a little like arguing with Santa.

<comment><USER17> The gold standard was not the cause of the Great Depression; the collapse of the investment bubble created by the Federal Reserve, along with the interruption of international trade by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act caused the initial problem. Subsequent interference in the economy by both Hoover and FDR extended the problems.

The gold standard merely prevented the government from inflating away the dollar and using inflation to hide the consequences of other bad policies. Its a form of discipline that the founders wisely put in place to prevent the disastrous policies that many other governments have perpetrated throughout history.

But now the constraint of the gold standard is off and much larger bubbles can be created.

The supply of gold changes very slowly. The vast majority of all gold ever mined is still part of the supply. Its the manipulation of the value of paper currency that causes demand for gold to fluctuate.

<comment><USER18> It's not that simple. The gold standard basically established an international monetary union, similar to the Euro today.

In such a setting, long-term trade imbalances cannot be balanced out by exchange rate adjustments, so there is a very real danger that countries are drained of money by running net imports in the long term. While this then prevents the country from net importing even more - which is only fair - <USER3> also reduces the purchasing power of the country's population internally.

The circulation of money is slowed, causing unemployment and the very bizarre situation where people cannot afford to buy desired XYZ, while at the same time there are involuntarily unemployed producers of XYZ. Everybody's unhappy, simply because the social construct of money ties their hands.

By decoupling from the gold standard, countries left what was effectively a currency union, which enabled them to restart internal circulation.

This is also the choice that Greece has right now, which this supposed "smartest man" does not, or for ideological reasons refuses to, see: leave the currency union to restart internal circulation of a new currency.

<comment><USER5> We went off the gold standard in 1914. There was a minor depression in 1920, but the government did nothing and it resolved itself. In 1929, the government decided to abandon that policy and took action, and by 1933 the use of gold as money in the USA was forbidden by executive order.

When you criminalize the wealth of the country, it is hard to blame people's use of that wealth for the problem. By 1933 it was literally a crime for money (in the form of gold) to circulate, and much of it was sent overseas to hide it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hope Byron Weiss is better at picking smart men than predicting the future: [http://www.zerohedge.com/article/byron-wiens-prediction- trac...](http://www.zerohedge.com/article/byron-wiens-prediction-track-record- zero-out-ten)

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't always invest, but when I do, it's in gold and Swiss francs.

<comment><USER21> You invest your money... in money? Well, guess it's a smart move these days =)

<comment><USER22> It's a reddit-style joke. ("Most interesting man in the world.")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> He made one interesting point, which is to invest in Swiss Francs. I have been contemplating doing that over the past weeks, what are your opinions on that?

<comment><USER5> Switzerland still has a conservative financial system, and may benefit from a "flight to safety" as the euro deteriorates. That might be his reason for buying francs.

Francs used to be backed by gold, and might still be partially backed by gold. I think they are not redeemable in gold anymore, but that the country keeps a large supply of gold onhand. So, sort of a partial fiat currency.

However, one can own gold directly, which provides a hedge against all currency risk. It sounds like this is what he is doing, and then also holding some francs against a panic in europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> All this talk of "but they have no other choice" amuses me. Yes they do. And they will probably exercise it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why should I believe that "The Smartest Man in Europe" is anything other than a sock puppet talking up Blackstone's book?

<comment><USER26> Still, an interesting read nonetheless.

<comment><USER27> Depends I guess on how often one reads finance articles. There's nothing new in there, there is an entire 'school of thought' that has been saying what's in this article since 2008. New economies are the future, fiat money is bad mmkay, US and Europe don't have enough room for growth to out-grow debt.

The appeal to authority with the Baghdad real estate deal is one of those tell-tale signs of a sensationalist article. If the building in case had been blown up and nothing could have been recouped because nobody wants to insure a building in Baghdad, nobody would've ever heard about the whole deal. Survivor bias at its most obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _I remain positive on China._

I cannot help but wonder about China... I am convinced they are extremely clever in toying our Western system of capitalism and number games one way or another. The only example coming to mind right now is the artificial surge in car sales in China and the government is behind a lot of it, buying and storing cars in huge parking facilities. And the refusal of publishing economic statistics or just blatantly making them up.

And they are just as incredibly clever and diplomatic in political affairs; the rhetoric used in their more recent foreign affairs are nothing but jaw dropping and display an unprecedented self-understanding an pride that is bordering smugness. They do not even try to hide or acknowledge violations of human rights; they simply wipe it off with "none of your frakking business" kind of answers. They are showing very clearly: we bow to no one.

For me as a European, their last display of power here in Europe felt like a slap in my face when they offered to "help" in the current financial crisis in Greece and the rest of the EU when I saw how little their ongoing violations of human rights mattered all of a sudden.

Please note I am not bashing Chinese people but wondering about Chinese politics and their regime and how the west, generally so proud of their "humanity" and "human rights", bends over back- and sideways now that China is becoming an influential world power.</comment>


Protestors Forced to Relinquish Constitutional Rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/defendant-shall-not-attend-protests-in-portland-getting-out-of-jail-requires-relinquishing-constitutional-rights#982579 <comment><USER2> These types of orders are allowed to happen because when other similar orders are issued no one cares.

When there's a charge of domestic violence all guns are removed from the home regardless of if they were part of it or not. A clear 2nd amendment violation, but most people don't care as it seems reasonable.

Carrying a large sum of money, prepare to have that seized unless you can prove it's yours. A clear violation against seizures but no one cares because most people don't carry large sums of money.

It would be easy to continue on and on with examples that clearly violate rights but they effect of minority of people and are considered reasonable by the majority or they simply don't affect the majority.

First they came for the...</comment>


Infosys Co-founder Sells Part Of His Stake, Turns Venture Capitalist - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/23/infosys-co-founder-sells-part-of-his-stake-turns-venture-capitalist/

<comment><AUTHOR> For Indian entrepreneurs great news..He has been a great inspiration for Indian youth all these years ..now i hope his new venture can bring out new talent from India to global stage..</comment>


Double the brightness in low light photos with new color filtering technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.diginfo.tv/v/13-0021-r-en.php

<comment><USER2> Here's the title of this submission: "Double low light brightness with Panasonic's new color filtering technology"

But the technical advance being described doubles all light levels, not just low levels. Let's look at the title of the original article:

"Double the brightness in low light photos with Panasonic's new color filtering technology"

That means something completely different -- the submitter mangled the headline to the degree that it lost its original meaning. The point is that all light levels are doubled. The distorted version is that this only works for low light brightness levels.

Does this error matter? Yes, it does -- doubling all light levels means all exposure times can be cut in half, or if the same exposures are used, noise figures are reduced to 50%. The badly worded title destroys the meaning of the article.

Moral: _do not write your own headlines_ \-- you will get it wrong.</comment>


Ask HN: Best practices for Linux dev environments? - <AUTHOR>

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 and would like to get started with Python, JS, and web development. <comment><USER2> You'll have to put more substance into the question than that if you want any meaningful answers.</comment>


Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ <comment><USER2> I loved E.T. when I was a kid and actually managed to finish it. I never got the hate. My guess is that I only saw the movie much later and so had absolutely no expectation whatsoever.

To me, it was just another Atari 2600 game. In fact, after racking my brain for hours on games like Swordquest[1], and almost injuring myself and destroying my controllers playing Decathlon[2], E.T. was nothing. Recognizable characters! A quest that made sense! Challenging controls, not inhuman controls!

After seeing Atari: Game Over [3] I now think this game is significant, not for its reputation but for the story behind it. It is a great case study.

All my admiration to Howard Scott Warshaw[4] for his career as a game developer, what he went through after the E.T. debacle, and finding his way out in the aftermath.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordquest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordquest) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Activision_Decathlon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Activision_Decathlon) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MT_msVoRAg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MT_msVoRAg) [4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Scott_Warshaw](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Scott_Warshaw)

<comment><USER3> Here here! My brothers and I played this quite a bit and I never understood the hate. I don't recall all the details about the game play other than that you had to go around finding little dots that corresponded to Reese's Pieces and that it wasn't _too_ hard to beat the game (which is a good thing for a kid who's not a serious gamer).

<comment><USER4> I think it's hard for people who came late to the Atari 2600 to understand the hate, but for those whose introduction to the 2600 was games like Adventure and Missle Command, it was very much a letdown. I remember it very clearly. My friends and I gave it a chance but after about a day or so began ridiculing it mercilessly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man. I've been staring at my screen for a few hours trying to understand some modern webrtc shenanigans. Then I read these crazy fools (with love!) disassembling and reverse engineering like this and it makes me just feel like an idiot.

Kudos guys. This is the weirdest labor of love, but you're awesome.

<comment><USER6> don't sell yourself short. I used to crack and patch 6502 and i have messed around with webrtc. IMHO they can be equally maddening.

dis-assembling without source code can turn you into a pretty good debugger though.

<comment><USER7> disassembling on old systems like this, while still a feat, is not as hard as people often think I find, because the assembly practically is the source code

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome. But what's this I see?

        [Y] Hacker News  new | threads | comments ...
        ...
        2. ^ Autopsy: Lessons From Failed Startups ...
             356 points ...
        3. ^ Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600...
             32 points ...

You guys make me so, so sad, some days. :(

It's interesting that still there's no decent 6502 disassembler for 2600 code. You'd think it'd be a lot easier to write one in Python than it was in 6502 assembler for your Commodore 64.

<comment><USER9> _> It's interesting that still there's no decent 6502 disassembler for 2600 code._

Have you tried Stella and DiStella? 2600 oriented 6502 emulator, debugger, disassembler etc.

<comment><USER8> No! I only know Stella as an emulator; didn't realize it also had a useful disassembler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > why it is hated then and today?

because it is a grinding game that only managed to exist today because of online iterations.

it is single player World of warcraft.

<comment><USER11> As a proud owner of this game since my grandmother shelled out god knows how much for what was bound to be the hottest video game for christmas 1982, it's not the grind. Seriously, since when did grinding ever doom a video game? It's that it's completely random. The map is randomly generated, and whenever you transition between screens, there's a very real chance that you will immediately fall down a well, and thus lose power, and thus become that much closer to death. On levels higher than the first (which is relatively easy, if not long.) The speed and frequency of the scientist and FBI agent carrying you back to town makes it unplayable. Seriously. It's unplayable. I thought so when I was 5, and I still thought so when I was 35.

Best title screen for the 2600 bar none.

<comment><USER10> going from one screen to another over and over to get candy = grinding

<comment><USER11> I don't understand your comment on multiple levels. First, I didn't say there wasn't grinding, my points were: 1) The mechanics of the game wasn't the problem, it was the implementation of them. 2) Grinding has never doomed a game. It may be annoying, but many popular games -- including ALL RPGs -- feature grinding at their core.

Second, with respect to E.T., if you're spending your time eating Reese's Pieces, you're doing it wrong. The candy has _nothing_ to do with completing the game. Furthermore, the game can be completed without going out of your way to collect these at all.

Third, eating RPs isn't not grinding. Grinding is when the game effectively pauses because the player can't advance past some point because the player is underpowered for the new enemies, and overpowered when compared to the old enemies. It's a balance issue, that gets passed off as "fun". See Pokemon. See Final Fantasy. See every RPG ever made.

Repetitive game mechanics doesn't doom games. Every party based RPG since Bard's Tale has features the same Fight-Fight-Fight-Parry-Parry-Parry verb. 90% of all attack turns in these games comes down to that same attack plan. Hell, these games even configure their controls so that this is accomplished by just hitting the default button six times in a row. And yet, these games are beloved by millions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some of those defects are hilarious - "Ship Shouldn't Crush Elliott" stands out in particular :)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is relly cool. In a way I feel like you're changing part of my past for the better. Its weird.

<comment><USER14> Yes, they remind me of the people behind the dolphin emulator. They are working to make old games better than they've been on the original console. For example they added support

\- to have 60fps in games that had only 30fps on the console,

\- to load custom high definition textures,

\- to play games at higher resolutions (1080p and beyond vs 720p) and

\- to have stereoscopy in games.

And that without access to source code, mind you! Their work is amazing.

Source and recommended read: [https://dolphin- emu.org/blog/series](https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/series)</comment></comment>


Bot Dollars – Learn how to price your bot - <AUTHOR> http://botdollars.d5gravity.com <comment><AUTHOR> I have collected bot pricing data from more than 25 bots, this might help bot developers to understand how various bots are priced. The data is collected and sorted according to various pricing data points such as freemium, per month, per user, trial periods, pricing tiers, annual and enterprise plans.</comment>


NASA kills X-ray telescope, blames project's cost - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57449176/nasa-kills-x-ray-telescope-blames-projects-cost/ <comment><USER2> The Webb is funnelling too much money into too many congressional districts for it to be politically acceptable to be de-funded. At $150M, GEMS isn't.

This is the pattern that NASA has been stuck in for decades: frugal projects that go an inch over their budget caps are cancelled with little hesitation; projects that spread around billions of dollars worth of pork -- or better yet, tens of billions -- are unkillable. The message to project managers and industry partners has been crystal clear: if you want your project to survive, make it really REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY expensive.

In the early 90s there were a couple of incredibly cheap BMDO (military) projects (the DC-X and Clementine lunar probe, specifically) which proved to space enthusiasts like myself that the high cost of space was mostly a political artefact. The BMDO could get away with that because it wasn't subject to the same level of political porkbarreling as NASA -- but alas, it was the exception that proved the rule. Since then, our only hope has been with the private sector, and it's wonderful to see SpaceX finally delivering on that hope. I only hope that there will eventually be some spillover for pure space science itself, which will probably always remain a governmental endeavour.

</comment><comment><USER3> Given the insane budget for Webb ($11 billion max cap), the notion that GEMS was going to be 20% to 30% over budget, and that would end up around maybe $150 million total, it seems absurd to kill this project. This is the kind of science NASA should be doing.

<comment><USER4> NASA is killing every project it can to not lose the James Webb. Casulties so far are a Mars rover and a Jupiter orbiter, as well as no new missions planned for the next decade.

The question is, what happened to the Shuttle portion of the budged. You'd think they have more money for robotic spacecraft after that.

<comment><USER5> NASA's paying for Falcon 9 development by proxy.

And the Antares launch system, and the shuttle-derived SLS.</comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla Is Fighting for EU Copyright Law Reform - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/24/eu-copyright-law-undermines-innovation-and-creativity-on-the-internet-mozilla-is-fighting-for-reform/ <comment><USER2> >It's illegal to share a picture of the Eiffel Tower light display at night. The display is copyrighted — and tourists don't have the artists' express permission.

Here in Belgium, freedom of panorama was recently introduced. This law was opposed by progressive parties, who cited the French situation as the ideal. I'm glad the law passed anyway, but this progressive stance against freedom of panorama worries me in the long run.

I hope Mozilla is successful, but I fear they may face strong opposition from those who should know better.

</comment><comment><USER3> The panorama situation is pretty stupid. But the rest of mozillas argument is pretty weak, and their approach of describing it and getting lay people to sign a petition is poor form in imho.</comment>


Capita to cut 2000 jobs and replace them with robots to save money - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/08/capita-to-replace-staff-with-robots-to-save-money <comment><USER2> if you've ever had the misfortune of dealing with them on the phone you'd swear they'd have completed this project years ago</comment>


The App-ocalypse: can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/the-app-ocalypse-can-web-standards-make-mobile-apps-obsolete/ <comment><USER3> I like web apps so much better than native apps. I like seeing the https in the address bar and I feel like I don't even trust that communications are encrypted in a native mobile app. Developers are always trying to migrate me into the app rather than the mobile site and it drives me crazy. I don't want to leave the web browser. I love my back button and my tabs.

Why do the following applications benefit from native apps?

Reviews (Yelp, TripAdvisor) Ticket purchasing (Seatgeek, ticketMaster, etc.)

Very few of the answers have anything to do with the users. They all revolve around app store exposure and annoying features like notification spam.

But on the topic of this article, I think the author is too critical of apple as they seem to be moving in the direction of being more favorable towards mobile web app developers. Features like WKWebView show this.

I'm sure in the end this is just a trend and mobile web apps will swing back into favor at some point. Remember, in the early days of iOS native app development was not allowed, and that was one of the first features integrated to iOS frm the jailbreak community. Jobs' original app vision was mobile web apps.

<comment><USER4> Saying Apple is more favorable towards mobile web development is quite a bit of a stretch. WKWebView simply gave developer access to the webview underneath Safari, and replaces the outdated UIWebView.

Apple recently introduced Swift, an entire language framework that's aimed at native app development.

User experiences is the where the biggest gap between web apps and natives are (average users don't care about seeing that https at the top). Web apps also cannot adopt the latest hardware features as quickly as native frameworks can (TouchID, 3D Touch, etc). So for a platform like iOS (and Android to a large extent) where it's all about vertical integration and optimization, we'll see cutting edge native apps for a long time.

I'm not saying mobile web doesn't have its place, and there are plenty of terrible apps out there that should just be a mobile website instead, but native apps do have certain advantages that won't be matched anytime soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really hate the situation where stuff that could be a website, or an offline webapp has become an app instead.

All little transportation city schedules around Europe are like this, and it's infuriating for a number of reasons. I can't use any other mobile OS apart from Android (with Google Play) or iOS. Apps are siloes, so no other webservice can reuse their data. It's generally quite insecure. It's a waste.

<comment><USER6> What's really bad is the app that is a carbon-copy of the corresponding website, except slightly better designed in such a way that would be trivial to implement on the damn website itself.

<comment><USER7> Just some Phonegap shitty app, yes, I get what you mean. Sometimes it's just an iframe so if you get the URL you can just open that on your phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article only gives three examples of APIs that are "missing" on iOS, and one of them is the vibration API.

Since when is the vibration API a "good example" of something necessary to "give the full app experience on mobile" (using the article's language)? Other than message & phone call notifications, I don't want apps vibrating my phone all the time. The W3C page they link to describes it as a "form of tactile feedback", but that's nonsense, unless they are talking about the touch feedback that newer devices like the Apple Watch provide, which is done mostly at the system level.

Another example the article gives is CSS touch manipulation, which Apple has already started working on[0]. So, the article is 1 for 3.

[0] [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149854](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149854)

<comment><USER9> There are much more serious omissions if you're trying to build a web app that works with Apple devices. For example, despite all the protestations about how necessary it was to kill off Flash and use HTML5 for playing multimedia content instead because Plugins Are Evil(TM), it is actually a plugin rather than Safari that is playing a video when you visit a site on an iPhone or iPad. As soon as you want to do anything interesting with all the extra power that making audio and video just two more types of content on the Web should bring... even basic stuff just doesn't work. Except for every major device but Apple ones, that is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's hilarious that people keep trying to solve this as a technical problem. Apple has a business model based on disallowing compilers/JITs/interpreters on the app store. Does anyone here think that seamless offline mobile web apps -- anything capable of general computing without approval -- isn't on their radar as a threat to that business model?

<comment><USER11> The article talks about this at the end:

 _So maybe what we all need right now is the killer Web app—a demonstration of a website that performs beautifully, even if only on Android. Maybe that would get users' attention and, maybe then, Apple's attention._

<comment><USER10> Ah yes, the old "web app so cool that Tim Cook decides to flush money down the toilet" strategy.

<comment><USER12> Precisely. Unfortunately, there's a certain blindness to business realities among the tech community... a naive faith that the best, most open technology will obviously win, this despite copious evidence to the contrary.

Flash had no chance against HTML5. Why? Because Adobe had no way to force it on users, and vendors had every reason to want to exclude it, from support/UX to battery life to security issues. The minute open standards reached a point where HTML5 can take over, it will.

But high quality mobile web apps are a _direct threat_ to Apple's and Google's business models for their respective platforms. The app stores are a primary way those organizations generate revenues with those platforms. They have precisely zero reason to move away from that model.

And it's only with vendor support that mobile webapps have any chance at all. In both cases, the vendor is responsible for delivering the primary HTML renderer and JS engine. In both cases, the vendor is also responsible for exposing the APIs to the underlying OS that a webapp will rely upon for maximizing integration with the platform.

Meanwhile, from the consumer's perspective, they're looking at apps, which have great OS integration, great performance, etc, versus a clunky webapp... the choice is obvious.

So you have no consumer demand, due to vendor control ensuring webapps are inferior, and no vendor demand because apps are a direct source of revenue while the APIs encourage platform lock-in.

It just ain't gonna happen.

<comment><USER11> Your comment about Google's business model is addressed at length in the article. Look for the section entitled "The difference with Google".

If the web starts to work way better on Android than on iOS, Apple can still ignore it, but at least then consumers have options.

<comment><USER12> You (and the author) are presuming Google views mobile web apps as a competitive advantage, but we have no evidence for that.

Moreover, the article clearly conflates the desire to make web sites perform well, with the desire to make mobile _web applications_ perform well, with no basis for that assumption. Yes, lots and lots of Chrome users visit web sites. That doesn't mean Google feels a need to optimize Chrome to deliver mobile web apps (which requires things like richer, deeper integration with the OS).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I implemented an app that uses Web App Manifest and Service Workers and uses material design lite. It's almost indistinguishable from a native Android app. If I put a little more effort into the animations it would be even closer.

The biggest gap I find is sounds. There's no way to say "do the native click sound here". Now I could find the sound and play it in an <audio> element but I'm sure that these sounds differ depending on manufacturer and surely differ on iOS and WinPhone.

<comment><USER14> > _It 's almost indistinguishable from a native Android app. If I put a little > more effort into the animations it would be even closer._

The key phrases here are "almost" and "If I put a little more effort". The almost-but-not-quite-native webapps are the mobile ecosystem's equivalent of the uncanny valley. It sort of looks like an app, but then it suddenly 404s a button, or starts lagging, or doesn't do the default for native controls, but rarely used function. It's enough to break user's trust in what the app is and what it's doing. It feels like Java's Swing all over again.

<comment><USER15> The standards are still young and implementation is spotty. Several years from now the things that you can't do in a web app will be few.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The trouble with web apps -- speaking as someone who writes them for a living -- is that almost every major browser is now awful in terms of quality of implementation of at least a few major features, the evergreen browsers break stuff all the time on top of that, and the front-end tools ecosystem is a punchline. This kind of blunt assessment tends to garner downvotes, but the bug tracker does not lie. The number of backward steps we have taken in the web development community over the past few years is astonishing, but because we can't control the browsers and the goals of the browser developers do not necessarily align with the goals of most people developing web apps, as developers we are also limited in how much we can do about it.

In contrast, apps live in walled gardens on some platforms and we understand that there are some major downsides to that, but the programming languages and tools used to build them are relatively reliable, and the systems on which they run are relatively stable (which is saying something considering how often they do change in some cases).

It used to be that for a lot of tasks developing a portable web app was a more sensible choice than developing multiple native apps in parallel, unless you actually needed to integrate native-only features or you expected to derive a lot of benefit from being available via the corresponding app stores. For new projects in 2016, we'll be seriously considering whether that is still true on a case by case basis, and whether it really would be more efficient to build native versions for the major platforms we want to support and dropping front- end web development for some projects entirely.

<comment><USER16> I'm upvoting in hopes you'll continue to share your experience and (evolving) conclusions.

<comment><USER9> Thanks. I'm generally happy to share anything useful I've come across on our projects, though I suspect in this area the conclusions will probably depend greatly on the specifics of each individual project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good article that explains why I don't (and probably won't) use an iPhone.

My Android Note 4 supports web standards, lets me creating web link icons on the phone "desktop" and is generally great for web browsing.

For somethings like accessing Twitter and Facebook I don't install the apps because I don't like the required device permissions. I do use a few apps, like an SSH shell, but whenever I can I stick with mobile web apps.

<comment><USER18> iOS also lets you create web link icons on the device (had this feature since Day 1, before the app store existed) and I'm pretty happy with the browsing experience on the iPhone 5S.

I don't worry about the "permissions" for the Twitter and Facebook apps because iOS lets me selectively allow/deny them so I don't allow them to access my contacts, know my location and only access my photos when I choose to send a photo.

<comment><USER19> This is one area where iOS rocks. Seriously, how difficult is it to make permission system granular?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I literally LOLed at the title and clicked on the article half-believing it's part of an online performance art exhibit in which nouns are switched around in headlines on a yearly cycle, as a way to reiterate the lessons of the Book of Ecclesiastes [1]:

        What has been will be again,
        what has been done will be done again;
        there is nothing new under the sun.

ArsTechnica's sister, Wired, is a particularly frequent propagator of the "Native is killing mobile web" debate:

\- [http://www.wired.com/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1](http://www.wired.com/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1)

\- [http://www.wired.com/2014/01/death-pc-also-mean-end- web/](http://www.wired.com/2014/01/death-pc-also-mean-end-web/)

\- [http://www.wired.com/2015/06/apples-support-ad-blocking- will...](http://www.wired.com/2015/06/apples-support-ad-blocking-will-upend- web-works/)

That said, the submitted article is a nice summation of how the Web has grown so far, and the new APIs and proposed specifications that will (hopefully) impact web development in positive ways.

It lacks one notable article from this year: Atavist's announcement that it was ditching its native app: [https://atavistinsider.atavist.com/goodbye- native-mobile-app...](https://atavistinsider.atavist.com/goodbye-native- mobile-apps)

I haven't seen many other announcements like that.

[1] [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1)

</comment><comment><USER21> When we see things like instagram, snapchat, spotify, sound cloud, uber, mobile banking apps, IoT apps, and more becoming native, then this narrative is more interesting.

Just with the IoT stuff, and the fact that many of these apps use cameras, bluetooth, wifi, gps sensors, and more, I think that this is still years away, and by then, what else will native SDKs be capable of that browsers have not caught up.

Browser tech is just getting far enough along where there is things like offline data that works good, but it hasn't caught up yet. I think "app- ocalypse" is a little too strong of a scare statement in my humble opinion.

The article mentions google inbox as an app that shares code, but if I am not mistaken, this is still an app store app, so while they may be able to dynamically change how the app works server side, they still are in the app store, billing it as a native app, so this seems to work against an app- ocalypse.

</comment><comment><USER22> What a wonderful world we would be in if vendors compete on how best they can implement a spec. Assuming "best" means "as close to spec as possible" and that the spec is fairly well defined.

I use Facebook across multiple different platforms: web, Android, iOS, and Windows. Instead of them putting so much effort into maintaining different codebases I think it would be better if they could maintain one and use their freed up time and resources to deliver new features.

They actually are able to do this to some extent on Android. They have notification hooks in there and I can do almost anything I could on the native app. I'm pretty close to uninstalling the native app in favor of this.

Competing on spec would allow for different and possibly new phone OSes to be viable. Windows Phone would have a shot and we can bring back webOS from the dead (my favorite device OS of all time).

<comment> yoz-y Facebook tried that and then rolled back on the decision. Maybe if android CPUs catch up to the A series this might be possible. But so far the android devs I know (myself included) simply find the web performance on android phones abysmal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> No. Web standards can't make native apps obsolete. They can't do it on the desktop and they can't do it on a mobile device.

Certain things are better done as web apps, other things are much better native. Some quick examples off the top of my head would include IDEs, office- type apps (and yes Excel _still_ crushes Google spreadsheets), games, video players, spaced repetition software, compilers, rich chat applications such as LINE or WeChat, as well as anything people want to keep private.

Web apps are great and I love open web standards. That doesn't make them the perfect solution for _everything_.

<comment><USER24> If you're doing __anything __significantly laborious in Excel, you should be using a different tool. Excel is not performant for anything >200,000 rows for even simple queries.

<comment><USER23> Mostly I've worked on documents with under 500 rows. Excel is a much snappier UX all around than Google spreadsheets (which I wouldn't use for over 200k rows either).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Apple recently checked in support for touch-action: manipulation

[https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149854](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149854)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a great article focusing on the same new possibilities I wanted to cover creating What Web Can Do Today ([https://whatwebcando.today](https://whatwebcando.today)). The gap between native apps and the web exists and probably will exist, especially until Apple's strategy doesn't change dramatically, but that's quite unlikely now.

The set of APIs available is quite broad, though, not limited to what was mentioned here, and growing quickly. The hybrid apps are the option, but I find it a bit half-arsed workaround with all the cons of the installed apps and all the cons of the web. Investing in the web is the way to go!

</comment><comment><USER27> There are times when I either don't have access to the Internet, or my service is very slow.

During those times, the apps on my phone are still useful, albeit, degraded in some respects. I'd still rather have that than nothing.

<comment><USER28> A web app could be cached locally, so using the browser as a runtime wouldn't preclude working without a connection.

<comment><USER29> (note I'm generally a pro-web anti-app guy) That is easier said than done. Never worked with the thing, but I've read everywhere that HTML appcache is not exactly the best thing ever invented and a pain to work with. Service workers which are proposed to supersede it are now being pushed by Chrome and others, but it sounded a bit complex (though powerful) when I read about it. Then come all the other issues about cache invalidation including involuntary automatic cache clean (hey, I'm low on memory, let's clear the cache!). Your apps generally don't automatically uninstall themselves (though they may clean their cached data, at least on iOS).

Regarding the standard browser caching and "offline mode", it used to work well long time ago for simple static HTML pages (in Firefox and IE), but from my experience it doesn't work well for rich clientside apps (and Chrome doesn't even have "work offline" button)

<comment><USER30> There's a spec in development to make an origin's storage persistent [https://storage.spec.whatwg.org/#dom-storagemanager- requestp...](https://storage.spec.whatwg.org/#dom-storagemanager- requestpersistent) \- at the moment Chrome only drops data from indexeddb and the cache api if the device starts running out of space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> OS shells and browsers need to unify first. Something like what Chrome OS does seems like the way forward. Users shouldn't have to care if their pixels are being painted by HTML or native frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER32> Three words: efficiency, flexibility, and security. You get more of all with apps. More true if it's a business solution than a consumer site/app. On latter side, the adoption part is less of a problem these days where users will often download an app for a site they're already hooked on. The problem for consumer apps, aside from getting noticed, is becoming on of the few users stay on vs disappearing into the background. A situation similar to the vegetable drawer on bottom of fridge.

<comment><USER6> I'll give you the first two, but surely native apps can have more access to data stored on the device than a website can. And can do more damage, too.

<comment><USER32> Why is that? The _native app_ loading the website restricts its access and the app is itself restricted. Yet, it has much more privilege than a web app needs. Same techniques used with better results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How much money does the App Store make for Apple? And how much would web based apps make?

It's not a technical problem, it's a business model.

</comment><comment><USER34> No, we're going to have a "black swan" event: Decentralized dapps are going to make BOTH apps and websites obsolete. [https://dappsforbeginners.wordpress.com/tutorials/your- first...](https://dappsforbeginners.wordpress.com/tutorials/your-first-dapp/)

<comment><USER23> Dapps are _extremely_ interesting and I agree that most people are completely ignorant of the potential. I don't think they'll make anything obsolete though. They'll just carve out an interesting new niche (which, depending on regulation, will likely be a double-digit % of the market).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think Facebook might have a big opportunity here to put some app-only features in its app (primarily notifications and Apple Pay) and be able to route a massive amount of communication and commerce through its app.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm quoted at length in the article, so I feel obliged to respond. Overall I think it's good, but it misses some nuances.

First off, there's a small contradiction about offline storage. The author says that users prefer web apps because they take up little-to-no space, but that the web needs to catch up in terms of storage capability. You can't have it both ways - if websites become more offline-heavy, then users will need to get accustomed to managing their available space (as they already do with native apps). This is an as-yet unsolved UX problem for the web.

Also, based on the comments in this thread, I think many people don't realize how far the web has come in terms of offline storage. Today you can build a mobile site that stores MBs of data, launches from the home screen, and works even in airplane mode. (On Android anyway. iOS is another story.)

I built a small site to demonstrate: [http://www.pocketjavascript.com/blog/2015/11/23/introducing-...](http://www.pocketjavascript.com/blog/2015/11/23/introducing- pokedex-org). On an Android phone, Pokedex.org is basically indistinguishable from a native app, at least once you add it to the home screen. In Chrome, tap the green lock and you can see exactly how much space it takes up (around 6MB). Feel free to put your phone in airplane mode and refresh the page - <USER2> will still work.

Second off, there's a lot of speculation in the post about Apple's motives, and why they might be throttling back on the web platform relative to Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft. I'm guilty of this myself in "Safari is the new IE," but nowadays I try to have a more nuanced take.

AFAICT, Apple seems to have many small teams with many different motivations, as does Google. Within Google, you'll even find teams that actively undermine other teams - e.g. what the Chrome team is doing with Progressive Web Apps is a direct threat to Android apps. (I'm even surprised to see one team occasionally trash-talking the other on Twitter.) So talking about "Google's motives" or "Apple's motives" as if they're each one big monolithic entity is a little simplistic.

My favorite theory about Apple and the web comes from this article ([http://blog.html5test.com/2015/07/safari-and- ie/](http://blog.html5test.com/2015/07/safari-and-ie/)), which argues that the WebKit team is just too small since the Blink split, which is why they've been having trouble keeping up. No grand conspiracy theory required - just that the team is a little under-financed. Also, Safari is still rocking it in terms of performance and battery life, so it's not like they're asleep at the wheel.

I think the web still has a chance to catch up with native (for a lot of use cases anyway, not all of them), but it will require a change in how we build websites. In the same way that XMLHttpRequest was around for years before web devs "discovered" Ajax, I think offline storage and various mobile APIs might lay dormant for awhile before suddenly everybody is taking advantage of them. As web developers, the ball is in our court.

<comment><USER15> I'm the author of the article and I'd like to thank Nolan one more time. He really helped me to understand a lot about this. The storage issue is this: If you install a native app, the code is there on your device, the entire program, even if you haven't used it in a month. The code in the web version of that app would likely consume nothing soon. The amount of data consumed by each should be equal I think. No question Google has many teams working at cross purposes. It's a "throw everything up against the wall and see what sticks" approach. (What else could justify Chromebooks?) Apple has done this too in the past, but the distant past: Think Mac vs. Apple ][. But by now I think the value of their app store and ancillary revenue streams is so significant that institutionally I would expect them to be reluctant to do anything that would threaten it. I assumed in the story that Google had all the same perverse incentives as Apple in this regard, but I suppose app and in-app revenues for Google are probably a small fraction of Apple's. They're not even really trying hard to maximize that revenue. They allow 3rd party stores. But if even mobile devices moved back to the web, the ad revenue on them would move back to the platform that they dominate. So perhaps that explains their motivations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How is native vs open web still an interesting narrative? I was hoping for some new spin as I read this but its still the same apple trash-talking.

Somehow it always seems to be about CONTROL with native. Control of the platform is something _earned_ because the end-user experience is just better.

Apple might look like they are defending their powerful native app position, but how about they just believe its better? They started the iPhone with web app and realized its better for the end user when software is written as extensions to the core OS rather than on top of a browser engine?

With everyone iOS release, they go further down the road and continue to prove to both developers and users (who use the developer's features) that there is more innovation to be had with native, with more endpoints at both the low and high levels. It isn't just about sensors and vibrations and better hardware interfaces. It a better interface with the OS itself. You want the presence of an apps value on your phone but have those things show up in familiar places. This is why you have today screen extensions. I am sure notes extensions, calendar extensions, etc are coming.

<comment><USER38> Is it so much of a stretch to believe that a vendor might believe it is in their best interest to control the application platform? Why give Apple the benefit of the doubt here? Ironically, one reason to do that is that Apple is active in defining and implementing Open Web standards, many of which are aimed at improving the Web as an app platform. Which, in turn, is exactly why this is still an "interesting narrative"--both Web and native are rapidly evolving.

<comment><USER37> I think it is in their best interest to control, but I've seen that spun as the end not the means. Apple's ultimate goal is not control of the app ecosystem, but to improve end-user experience. Control is a necessary part of that.

And the narrative I'm referring to is web VS. native. like one is going to kill the other. We keep talking about this battle but there is no winner, each has their place. period</comment></comment></comment>


Digital Checks (not echecks) – better than ACH for sending money - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/01/checkbook-io/ <comment><USER3> We are using Checkbook.io for collecting payments from our customers.

I like the product because it helps to reduce the friction for us. CB team is proactive in adding features and getting back to us with our queries and doubt. I think this product is having a lot of potentials.

Good luck with the product!!!

</comment><comment><USER4> We're using Checkbook.io for our online ticket sales company that's aimed at K-12 performing arts. We offer two options: Stripe and paper checks. The reason we have to offer paper checks is because many of these PA programs are forbidden to connect bank accounts per their school rules. Over 60% of our programs are not able to use Stripe for direct deposit.

Now we're able to either send them a digital or physical check automatically via Checkbook's API. It works flawlessly and saves us a lot of time!

Plus they have awesome support. A+ team.

</comment><comment><USER5> Disclaimer: I work for Checkbook.io

The problem we are trying to solve is paper Checks are still being to pay individuals/businesses. ACH doesn't work for paying out because the recipient needs to verify account (a painful process if micro-deposits are being used ) and there is a delay of 3 business days. Credit Cards charge 2.9%+ which doesn't scale for larger transactions.

Having a simple solution that can disburse funds overnight to the recipient with having to send out paper, sign up for some service or pay 2.9% is what we are building

Different than the traditional echecks since it allows instant verification and works with bank accounts that may not be ACH enabled e.g. Money Market Accounts, Small Banks/Credit Unions that may not be ACH enabled

<comment><USER6> I don't mean to engage in gratuitous negativity, I really don't, but nothing about this makes sense to me.

Looking at the rest of the thread, this seems like a credible offering from credible people, but the reasons you've given don't align at all with my experience using the banking system.

>ACH doesn't work for paying out because the recipient needs to verify account

CapitalOne, Volkswagen Credit, and my university all gladly pull my money over ACH with just an account/routing number submitted over a web form and no verification process. CapitalOne clears overnight.

The requirement on recipients to verify account ownership, if it exists, is violated in vanilla transactions with vanilla consumers at massive scale every single day by household names. I have a hard time believing the banking industry would institute a requirement and then let everyone flaunt it like that.

>Small Banks/Credit Unions that may not be ACH enabled

 _Really_? Is that a thing? I have seen checking account offerings missing all sorts of things - branches, mobile apps, online banking, bill pay gateways, even check-writing capability - but ACH is the one true constant.

Some institutional payees like CapitalOne and Comcast won't even process a check as a check, they'll take the account/routing number and do it over ACH instead. Lots of employers also won't cut checks - it's either ACH or a shitty debit card loaded with fees.

People using non-ACH-capable banks were left out in the cold by everyone else years ago; I'm surprised there's a business in accommodating them.

<comment><USER5> Your point about CapitalOne, Volkswagen Credit, and your university sending you money with Routing Number and Account Number is just fine. You have a relationship with them.

Try sending ACH to your landlord or your Gardner or DMV. Or that class action settlement Check you received - why didn't they just ACH it to you ? In the former case - entities don't want to give out financial info to people they don't know. Even if they do how do you plan to initiate an ACH to your Landlord ? In the latter i.e. a business or an individual trying to pay you must go through an extensive process to collect your bank account info, that's assuming you are willing to part with it.Donald Knuth doesn't write Checks for this reason: [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html](http://www- cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html)

About ACH not being ubiquitous. Try ACH'ing from/to your Money Market account. There are over 100 million of them in the US. It won't work. Small Banks and Credit Unions - yes appx 12% of Credit Unions are not ACH enabled (stats are behind the NCUA firewall ). Just because large banks in large metros use ACH ubiquitously does not imply universality. But regardless that's just one point for one demographic. The big picture is getting payments without sharing bank info.

About your point about CapitalOne and Comcast not processing a Check as Check - that has been around for decades. Truncating a paper Check to ACH transaction to get rid of paper. We are going one step further. Not generating paper Check to begin with. If there is no paper Check there is _no need_ to convert (i.e. truncate in bankers parlance) to ACH i.e. saves another step in the process and makes it more efficient

This is not about non-ACH banks, its about getting rid of 3 day ACH delay and building an experience where anyone can send a payment to anyone else without signing up, without going thru the cumbersome bank UI/UX, without sharing their bank account info and have it delivered in their mailbox. Free for individuals (up to 25 Checks) and businesses pay $1/Check.

<comment><USER6> >without sharing their bank account info

You should probably lead with this, because it wasn't clear until you stated it there. The parent comment made it sound like the problem you're solving is inability to just use people's self-reported account numbers in ACH without a verification process. This seemed strange, because companies do that already.

Doing something like ACH, but without leaking either party's account number to the other, is more interesting.

Regarding landlords, the property management company that owns most of my neighborhood asks for checking account/routing numbers from a web portal, just like CapitalOne and VW. The DMV dictates the forms of payment it will accept; it's not up to the customer to pick a payment service. They need a check or credit card in hand at the counter. I dunno about gardeners. If it were informal enough, I'd probably use Venmo. I'm not sure why asking him to give Checkbook the necessary information to actually remit the payment is any different from asking him to sign up for Venmo. (Maybe it is?)

>its about getting rid of 3 day ACH delay

For the companies I mentioned, the payment is always credited to my bill (and taken from my bank account) the next morning. I only experience the 3-day delay using the "transfer between linked accounts" features at my banks. I've read elsewhere that this delay is introduced by the banks as an anti-fraud mechanism, not an actual technical limitation.

If I pay someone using, say, Venmo, if they immediately hit "cashout" they will have the money in their bank the next day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I tried using this to pay my rent. The key is the recipient didn't need to sign up for anything - they were verified instantly. They also claim to transfer funds overnight for businesses but I haven't tried that yet.

</comment><comment><USER8> The article and the website tell different info - TechCrunch says it's free up to 50 checks per year; the website - that it's free up to 25 checks. Then, it's $1/check, I assume, as there's no info for pricing for individuals. $1/check is too much - both for business and individual use, but especially for businesses! Plus, I don't see how is this better than ACH as most probably it's using ACH underneath unlike, let's say, Dwolla.

<comment><USER5> The website has the most current info and it says explicitly 25Checks/Annually free for Individuals and after that $1/Check. Businesses pay $1/Check. Recipients of the Checks pay nothing, only the originator does.

We use both ACH as well as Check21 (which is a different network than ACH) and this allows us to do overnight credits. ACH Debits take 2-3 working days whereas Check21 can be overnight.

This avoids two problems with ACH i.e. account verification and 3 day delay in addition to some bank accounts not being ACH enabled.

<comment><USER8> So, basically, after the article, you halved the number of free checks - <USER2> strategy. Not!

<comment><USER4> So they're never able to update their pricing because they were featured on TC? Makes no sense.

<comment><USER8> TechCrunch published the article, I read it a few minutes later, visited the site, and the pricing was hiked 100% essentially. So lame! So immature! With this attitude, they will be out of business not so far from now!

<comment><USER5> The pricing on TC article is $1/Check for businesses and its the _same_ on our site. For Individuals the feedback we got is most individuals are not writing more than 2-3 Checks per month and that's what it is on the website i.e. 25 Checks free annually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The year is 2016. Glad to see somebody is disrupting checks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I did some work for this startup - crazy smart team and solving hard FinTech problems. Definitely a company to look out for in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER10> Go checkbook</comment>


Campuses getting less political as '60s professors retire - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/arts/03camp.html?em&ex=1215230400&en=277d97f191ea34f1&ei=5070

<comment><USER2> As a non-leftist who moves in academic circles, I have to say it's still very difficult. Even in the hard sciences, I find that every social gathering I go to winds up turning into a classic left-wing whine-about-everything, and I have to bite my tongue. More than once I've wanted to get out of academia, just because the lack of intellectual diversity was getting too much for me. And that's leaving aside the direct hostility which I have encountered when I've actually made my views known (which I've avoided doing at the couple of places I've worked most recently).

Of course, it's a vicious circle. If I'm thinking of leaving due to the hostile environment, then surely other non-leftist academics are actually leaving, keeping the environment hostile.

As is usually the case in a New York Times "let's collect a couple of anecdotes and extrapolate a huge trend" articles, the data doesn't back up the conclusions.

<comment><USER3> <http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that activism not political is the keyword. As a current college student, within most of the conversations that I have had with other students, they seem to be heavily opinionated and "passionate" about politics and their ideals but lack any real knowledge over the topics or positions they discuss. In a half hour drunken conversation, you could turn a "hardcore democrat" into someone who believes they are actually more libertarian leaning (which I do believe most inherently gravitate towards when questioned over their positions).

Nowadays (even thought I have no clue what it was like in the past), the youth support politics as a fashion statement rather than a representation of their ideals. They seem to fall in line with the parties and mindlessly support the policy that they believe they should. Their knowledge of politics only goes to the extent of what there five minute glance on the news says it should be, which is quite saddening. I am not stereotyping, but the trend I see most is that individuals fall in line with what ever there social groups expected political stance would be, the "frat-boy" types all tend to support republicans because they support the troops and are against gay marriage, the "socially conscious intellectual" student strongly supports democratic principals (or what ever the author of the book they are reading at the time supports) and so on and so forth. Politics for many at the college level seems to just be an extension of their fashion or lifestyle, or simply what they think they should support because of the image they portray.

The truth is very few actually give a shit and will continue to not care until there cushy lifestyle is taken away or they are oppressed in some way or another. Most likely at that point it will be too late. I know I come off as a cynic but sometimes it is just too easy in this world.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wish people included intellectual diversity in their quest for universal diversity on college campuses. There is a good movie about this: <http://indoctrinate-u.com>

It's from the guy behind Brain Terminal, whose videos are hilarious: <http://brain-terminal.com/posts/category/bt-video/>

Thank god engineering departments exist. If they didn't, I'd question the need for most people to go to college. $200K to earn $25K/yr at a non-profit - doing work you could have done in high school.

I went to a tour of Stanford recently. The tour guide mentioned the increases in tuition. I asked what they went to. He didn't know. I know most research labs are funded by a combination of government grants and undergrad tuition. What about the rest?

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the problem is you have liberals but not actual conservatives. The conservatives we currently have, care more about gay marriage than keeping the government small and having a balanced budget.

<comment><USER2> An overgeneralization, of course. It's just that those are the ones you hear most about in the media. One could speculate that left-wing media sources are more comfortable portraying the crazy conservatives than the sensible ones (just as Fox News is more comfortable portraying the crazy leftists than the sensible ones).

<comment><USER7> So, just to be clear: you're saying that anyone who cares more about gay marriage than the government's budget is crazy?

<comment><USER3> You have to understand where we're coming from on this. The present-day law on gay marriage was changed due to the wording of the original law, written in a time when gay marriage wasn't even being considered, which happened to say something like "two persons" rather than "a man and a woman".

The Republic will not fall because Adam marries Steve. What consenting adults get up to on private property is no-one's business but their own, certainly not the Governments. But it _is_ under threat when law is made through legal chicanery rather than the democratic process. _That_ is why Conservatives are up in arms about gay marriage.

<comment><USER7> Do you have any data to support that claim? The conservatives I know oppose gay marriage because they consider it immoral, not because of some abstract stuff about the democratic process.

<comment><USER3> Well, my "data" is the same as yours, people I know (including myself).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Balance is a good thing. Challenging beliefs is a good thing. Variety in political, social, economic, religious, and personal beliefs is a great thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> This article completely misses the point. Instead of citing outlying cases, maybe it should have dealt with the elephant in the living room:

Vietnam

College students in the 60's weren't "playing politics". They were protesting an illegal, immoral, and unwinnable war. Hell, half the men on campus were there so they wouldn't have to go to Vietnam.

I imagine today's generation of professors would feel a little differently if TV news showed maimed soldiers in Iraq every night, their classes were full of young men who didn't want to be drafted, and their campuses were occupied by armed National Guardsmen who shot unarmed students.

[Prediction: This will be voted up by those who actually experienced the absurdity of the 60's and voted down by those who can't imagine it could have been that bad. Since the average age in this community is probably below 40, this post will end up negative.]

<comment><USER10> Professors have always been more liberal and left-leaning than the general population. This goes back further than a hundred years in my reckoning. For instance in the 20s and 30s there was a large percentage of academics who thought communism was the best choice for western civilization.

Vietnam has little to do with it.

Interesting (to me) is the tendency for left-leaning progressives to continue to live and fight battles from the past. The recent Iraq war has caused some to try to replay Vietnam. The coming nomination of Obama is very JFK-ish. We're having a very 60-ish discussion on how man is immoral in his treatment of the environment. I always thought the conservatives were the ones who lived in the past, but I think that has changed over the last five years or so.

My opinion only. Do not operate heavy machinery after reading this comment.

<comment><USER11> > This goes back further than a hundred years in my reckoning.

Galileo apparently said that some of his best years were those at the University of Padova:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Padua#History>

... which, as the article says, had more freedom and less influence from the Catholic church.

However: this strikes me as not really being hacker news.

(PS, check out this guy, who came out of Padova:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin> )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Human beings are political creatures. So politics suffuses everything. Unfortunately, I've met many people who seem to believe that politics is the foundation to everything. If it weren't widely known and ridiculed, I sometimes wonder if these people think that the Indiana state legislature attempt to make Pi = 3 would've worked!

I think the atmosphere of political contention on campuses sometimes exacerbates this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Agree with Mystalic. I'm probably more conservative than liberal, but I want people to HAVE choices and be able to think critically, even if they make different choices than I do. This is saddening news.

<comment><USER14> I don't understand. The article seems to be about faculty becoming more diverse in outlook as older professors retire, unless I am misunderstanding something?

<comment><USER15> From the article: "The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old."

I think they are just describing the younger faculty being less activist about their political views. Take a look at the second graph they provide. There is a small increase in conservatives in the social sciences (probably due to increases in the percentage of economists), but little else to support the claim that faculties are becoming more diverse.

Even that, I'll be very skeptical of. At every university I've been to, self identified "liberals" are socialist and self identified "moderates" are merely left wing democrats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "A seminar on great books at Princeton jointly taught by two philosophers, the left-wing Cornel West and the right-wing Robert P. George."

I'd like to hear that.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps, but I'd prefer a seminar on great books taught my one really good professor who knew how to keep his own political views from tainting his views on literature.

<comment><USER9> _one really good professor who knew how to keep his own political views from tainting his views_

You mean like a math or science professor?

<comment><USER2> Funnily enough, I was reading Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare last night, and thinking how great it was to have literature explained by a man with a clear scientific mind instead of a mushy literary one.

Unfortunately, the Asimovs of this world are few and far between.</comment></comment></comment></comment>