Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/4/12/11349248/noncompetes-silicon-valley-route-128 <comment><USER2> The headline kind of has the valence of government activity backwards, though I agree with its policy proposal.

Other states don't restrict job-hopping, they just stand by and don't interfere as the free market ends up having the effect of restricting job- hopping. Employees end up signing restrictive employment contracts, and states don't prohibit them from doing so. California has made a conscious decision that the economy overall works better if some kinds of private-sector contracts are prohibited, so it's restricted what can go into an employment contract to a greater degree than other states have (every state has _some_ restrictions, e.g. in the modern era you can't sell yourself into indentured servitude, but some states are more restrictive than others).

<comment><USER3> I think your lense of "free market" needs to be supplemented with a little game theory here. If you're an employer, what's your disincentive for tucking in a little non-compete in your contract? None at all[1], especially since many of your prospective employees won't read it or potentially (if you're a low-wage employee) understand it's implications. Then what's the disincentive for an entire industry to do this? None at all. And suddenly, there is no free market for job seekers anymore.

There's a reason why in the US, overwhelmingly contracts are read against the one who drafts them for example. There's an inherent power imbalance here. That's where laws and courts come into balance things out.

[1] To point, it's not uncommon for California-based tech companies to insert non-compete clauses into their contracts, even though they cannot possibly be enforced unless there is some special compensation.

<comment><USER4> " especially since many of your prospective employees won't read it"

Why is this on the employers, exactly?

<comment><USER5> Both parties have to understand a contract for it to agreed upon. For example those massive T&C that go with a website sign-up largely mean nothing if the company hasn't ensured you read and understood them.

<comment><USER4> This is an interesting, but completely incorrect view :)

"However, the awareness of a legal obligation is established, not through each party's subjective understanding of the terms, but on "objective indicators," based on what each party said and did"

Your T&C examples are adhesion contracts, subject to a different set of rules.

Here, you have an opportunity to bargain like any other party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is absolutely an underappreciated feature of SV, and prior to this article I had also heard it held up as one of the reasons SV has a relatively more active and larger startup environment than Boston.

Given the nature of startups and the surprisingly high turnover I've seen of people coming and going at all sorts of companies, it seems impossible to me to create a vibrant, innovative economy with strong non-competes. This is particularly true because the most powerful non-competes are signed by the most senior management, so those with the most experience and best view of a sector are the least able to start something new after leaving their previous gig.

<comment><USER7> It's weird as well as in the early years of HN there were frequent questions about non-competes in contracts in ask HN (they might still, ask HN is less prominent now).

It just shows how much it affects our thinking both as entrepreneurs and employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> CA Labor Code section 2870 (you don't give up IP rights to the work you did in your own time) is also vastly important.

<comment><USER9> Whenever I've gotten a job, I'd list on the employment contract all my outside projects and get buyoff from management that those were my projects, not the company's. Before I'd start a new outside project, I'd write it up and get management buyoff on it that it is not part of my job.

The key is full disclosure, in advance.

And I never had any trouble over it.

<comment><USER10> This seems to be good advice.

Additionally, I've found that at the point of employment projects don't need to be more than an idea; as long as you get them included with the contract, a simple abstract of what is covered is enough to give you something to play with whilst employed by said company.

Oh, and make sure to include projects even if you don't deem them to conflict with the company's area of core business. IME they'll be met with a chuckle and a 'not sure why these are here', but when the company is subsequently working out how to jump on the latest buzz bandwagon your side project may suddenly fall under some random wing of interest. Far easier to get it in there early.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've worked in SV my entire career and had never even envisioned other states allowed no-compete contracts in this day and age. Everybody I know and have worked with has had multiple jobs and wouldn't have it any other way. Yet one more way CA is far in front of every other state in basic worker rights.

<comment><USER12> The company I used to work for bullied most of the employees into signing a 5 year non-competes. And that was after they'd already been in business for 5 years. My department collectively said no, but it was a huge showdown, and they immediately started trying to figure out how to make the company less reliant on us. Every other person in the company except for us signed it.

The lawyer we consulted said it was the most draconian thing he'd ever seen and that we should all quit on the spot.

<comment><USER13> We really need a public database to track this behavior on a company by company basis.

<comment><USER12> A couple years later the FTC blew them up so it ended up being moot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > He was thrilled when he got an offer for an $18-per-hour cleaning job in the > Seattle area — a big step up from the $15-per-hour job he had taken a few > months earlier

> After Almeida switched jobs, a lawyer from his old employer, ServiceMaster, > sent him a letter threatening a lawsuit

> The company told the Seattle Times that the noncompete agreement was > necessary because ServiceMaster had provided Almeida with valuable training

So require that the employee stay with the company until they recoup the investment. If the employee leaves before the term is up, charge the employee the cost of training.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't that invite companies to claim internal training is very expensive?

Get the employee to shadow another employee for two weeks, then claim they were trained for ten days at $1000/day.

<comment><USER16> Not if they had to justify the cost, i.e., provide evidence that they actually spent $1000/day (even if in opportunity costs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What California used have was worse than non-competes. They had secret covenants between manor tech companies not to hire each others employees. I don't know if that has been completely eliminated. As for other states, you could ask why they have lots of stupid laws. As for California, you could ask why they have that stupid Proposition 13.

<comment><USER18> The Apple/Google/Adobe/et al. non-hire collusion is probably on hold for now due to the govt. investigations.

The only good thing I can say about that era was that Google had their ass handed to them by Facebook, which was one of the few non-participants in the collusion. Google employees had few options but to go to Facebook in droves.

Proposition 13 has nothing to do with tech employment directly. It was created because politicians just couldn't help themselves from raising real estate taxes voluntarily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Non-competes, whether formal and legal, or shady and illegal like Google- Apple, are restraint of trade, suppression of competition. They drive wages down. Nothing to back that up, but why else would sandwich makers be subject to these?

</comment><comment><USER20> > The best argument against noncompetes is about freedom > [...] there should > be a presumption in favor of preserving people's freedom to join a new > company or start one of their own.

Alas, as nice as it is to cloth an issue we care about in the language of moral superiority, banning noncompete agreements does in fact impact the freedom of contract. (In the same way, but to a lesser extent, than the ban on being able to sell yourself into slavery.)

Pragmatically this is the right thing to do. But there's no Freedom argument for it.

<comment><USER21> > _Alas, as nice as it is to cloth an issue we care about in the language of > moral superiority, banning noncompete agreements does in fact impact the > freedom of contract. (In the same way, but to a lesser extent, than the ban > on being able to sell yourself into slavery.)_

Not allowing consensual slavery agreements, consensual beating people to death, etc, also limits "freedom of contract".

That's because we value other things more.

There's nothing sacred about "freedom of contract".

And in most pragmatic cases when an enterprise makes a contract with an employee, there's not much freedom for the side of the employee either.

People always think of star programmers etc who are courted to go to work somewhere and have tons of choices, which are a tiny minority, instead of thinking of the hundreds of millions who need a job to pay the bills, healthcare, etc.

Even when a sector (like IT) does well compared to others, let's see how it goes if there's a bubble bust.

<comment><USER22> "consensual slavery" is a tautology more ridiculous than anything the Soviet Union ever wrote in their propaganda. Nobody would sell themselves into slavery if they had a choice.

Which kind of brings up an interesting angle - if every company is asking for an NCA, can't you argue that you signed it under duress, i.e. you didn't have a choice in the matter, and therefore that part of the contract is invalid?

<comment><USER21> > _" consensual slavery" is a tautology more ridiculous than anything the > Soviet Union ever wrote in their propaganda. Nobody would sell themselves > into slavery if they had a choice._

It might seem contradictory but the world is not always nice and tidy.

Consensual here just means "the other person agreed/signed to it".

But what forces pressured them to do so are seldom examined -- and lots of people assume as long as it's not a "gun to the head" it's OK.

Of course from:

a) "total freedom to evaluate and pick among many options -- or even ignore them completely" to

b) "tons of factors pressuring enormously for a quick decision, and very limited options"

there's a huge scale of "consent" before we get to "gun to the head" non- consent -- but it's seldom acknowledged. In other words, consent is seldom black and white.

If we want to make the term less ridiculous, consent should only be used when there's actual and considerable choice on the matter. Not when it's "that or immediate hunger/homelessness/etc."

Of course long term everybody could be homeless/hungry without a job, but there's a difference between a person choosing to work for company X after evaluating what they do, the salary, etc, and a person in some Asian town that has to go work to the nearby factory or else, or a non-college educated single mom in Alabama a week away from eviction, that latch-on to whatever they can get to survive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My understanding is, non competes that do not pay you to stay out of the job market are unenforceable in many states, for example, in Illinois.

<comment><USER24> Since it's a contract, it's often unenforceable unless there is some kind of consideration. I believe in most states, if an employer asks you to sign a non-complete after you start work, it's unenforceable.

<comment><USER25> It's not a valid contract if they offer no consideration (they're demanding something of you but offering nothing in return). But they are a wealthy corporation with a powerful legal team and you are now unemployed, so they can count on you not being able to fight it. It's more like a threat than a contract - that they might be able to convince a court that it's a 'legal' agreement even if it's not a valid contract.

Noncompetes _should_ be allowed only if the company offers to pay a minimum of market-rate salary for the duration (either what they were paying you or the best offer you've received, whichever is higher, to keep up with changes in market rates after you leave). That would then at least make it a valid contract.

But no company would want to do that, because then they'd have to pay everyone who quit or got fired for years afterward. And since the legal system is mostly controlled by corporations, that's unlikely.

<comment><USER23> well, companies that have actual secrets to protect that are valuable do do that, for example, trading companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some countries in Europe allow non-compete clause. But employer has to pay full salary for duration of that clause.

</comment><comment><USER27> In an era of outsourcing and globalization, gig-economy and minimum wages that don't guarantee a living above the poverty line, it is stunning what politicians will do for support from rich lobby groups ( read corporations). About time the federal government intervened and banned what amounts to a non- free market for job seekers.

</comment><comment><USER28> Repugnant policies like this are an ongoing evolution of the profit motive. It's such a simple mechanism: profit motive -> investment in policy support -> weakened economic standing for the weaker players.

What is the corrective mechanism, the courts?

<comment><USER29> Eligible voters actually voting would help.

<comment><USER30> Vote for whom exactly? Obama has done very little for labor. Do you content Romney would of done a better job? Or that a 3rd party candidate is viable? That trend trickles down to the local level in my experience. The US is not a democracy anymore[0] more drastic action is required.

[0] [http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs- echochambers-27074746](http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746)

<comment><USER31> Politicians naturally drift to the issues that people will vote over. If the electorate cares about an issue, you'll see political action. In this sense, your parent comment is correct. Obama and hypothetical Romney aren't doing anything about this _because_ it isn't a voting issue.

<comment><USER30> > If the electorate cares about an issue, you'll see political action.

Read the article I linked above and the study it references. That is empirically false.

<comment><USER31> It's also empirically true. It's very easy to observe votes moving politicians.

Without some argument that this issue is governed by a particular special circumstance, your comment has no substance.

<comment><USER32> This is quite an interesting argument because except funding nothing prevents us from eliminating crime and poverty. The government is simply not interested in doing these things. They'd rather cater to the needs of their 'sponsors'.

I think it's kind of funny that politicans are not interested in their own country.

<comment><USER33> Why? I'm not interested in my country either, I'm interested in my own household. Why would politicians be any different, given that it's not their country, they're just temporary CEOs? (We know how well the CEO situation works for large companies.)

An absolute monarch might be interested in _his_ country, because it's actually his property.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Unenforceability of noncompetes + hot tech job market == free career insurance

</comment><comment><USER35> Here's what keeps me from job-hopping:

The 6-12 month gap that's created when I can't participate in a new employers retirement or healthcare plan. These benefits should start immediately.

Losing accrued vacation time also sucks.

</comment><comment><USER36> What would happen if an employer in Massachusetts offered me a job and asked me to sign a non-compete clause, and I said I wouldn't take the job if I had to sign a non-compete? Do you think they would back down? Or do you think they would say "too bad" and withdraw the offer?

My gut says that most of the time, they'll back down and take that off the table. But I guess it depends on whether you have a huge legal team backing you up...

Personally, I'm not in the habit of signing my rights away in return for a paycheck. I'll look around for another job, thankyouverymuch.

<comment><USER37> For a bigger company, most of the time, they tell you to go away.

<comment><USER38> In that case I most likely _want_ to go away.

<comment><USER37> As well you should.

That's the evil of these sorts of unconscionable contracts. As a potential employee, it's easy to be in a predicament that would force you to suck it up and accept ridiculous terms of employment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Here's an honest question. Knowing that non-competes are bogus and unenforceable in California - why do most employers (including mine) feel the need to tack them onto offer letters?

Is it a matter of intimidation?

<comment><USER40> Pretty much. They are hoping you don't know the law. They are also hoping that by encumbering you with one that a future poacher would know that they might have to spend money on lawyers to fight for you in case you get sued, even though they know you will win.

<comment><USER39> Is this to imply that non-poaching agreements (e.g., "Great, you quit, don't talk to my employees") are equally void?

<comment><USER41> While IANAL, yes, non-solicitation clauses are also not enforceable in California.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Here is the thing about non-competes. If you are smart about it, they can be basically impossible to enforce.

If you've signed a non-compete and jump ship, you can simply NOT tell your old employer that you got a new job.

What are they going to do? Sue you for working at a company they don't know about? There is nothing they can do if you are subtle.

<comment><USER43> At the last few places I've worked I've found that all I had to do was smile as they handed me the non-compete and tell them that I would take it home, read it and return it signed. Then I'd take it home and trash it. The next time someone asks about it (usually every few months) I say "I'm sorry, I think I lost it, could you email it to me again?" and start the process over. I honestly hate to be that passive aggressive about it but I'm not 'rockstar' enough to just say no and expect to keep my job, and I also don't want to limit my future options.

<comment><USER20> That might not hold up in court. By showing up to work (and getting paid in return), there's an implicit contract.

I don't know enough about law (and neither do I know your jurisdiction), to say whether that implicit contract would include the non-compete they obviously wanted you to sign.

<comment><USER43> I'm sure you're right, but I think it would also be difficult for them to enforce if they couldn't produce a signed contract. If I were planning on, say, using trade secrets from my current employer to start a direct competitor stealing their biggest customers, then yeah I'm sure it wouldn't hold up in court - but I'm not going to do that. It's more a way for me to be able to honestly tell my next employer - who might be in the same ballpark industry, but probably not a direct competitor of my current employer - 'no, I did not sign a non-compete contract with them.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> trevor-e I've always wondered why Boston doesn't have a larger tech scene, seeing as we're home to MIT and Harvard (and more great colleges). Seems like many of the big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc) have been opening offices here lately which is a good start.

</comment><comment><USER44> Errm, anyone who thinks the Massachusetts hub didn't work hasn't been to Boston in the last three years. Wander round Kendall and Cambridge and look at the vast Biotech labs.

</comment><comment><USER45> Also bless California for not having the non compete clause.

</comment><comment><USER46> non-competes also decrease overall employee productivity and efficiency as it makes employees into drones just keeping their jobs.

</comment><comment><USER47> Wow, usa really is controlled by the companies instead of the people.

</comment><comment><USER48> It wasn't about the PC vs the minicomputer. Ok Intel is based in Santa Clara, but the PC story was really about Microsoft.

It was the internet. Sun among others were pushing open standards, TCP/IP, and the internet while DEC tried to go proprietary with DECNet. It might not have paid off for Sun in the long term, but the industry in Bay Area was definitely pointed in the right direction.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the meaning of HN karma point? - <AUTHOR> Just noticed I earned some karma by submitting some link. And what's the meaning for that? I can't post if my karma is negative? <comment><USER2> They are useless internet points, you can't exchange them for money. :)

But you get some new features in HN with more karma.

flag posts at 20 points

create a poll at 200 points

change your headline bar color at 200 points

downvote a comment at 500 points

The set of features and the threshold change from time to time, often without notice. I'm not sure that this are the current numbers.

</comment><comment><USER3> E-peen ego stroking, magic internet points, brand status, or just being able to downvote, depending on your perspective. If your karma is negative, you need to lurk more before posting and figure out why HN commenting is a whole different beast than your average forum.</comment>


Angular.js vs Backbone.js - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6548826/angular-js-vs-backbone-js

<comment><USER2> The usual stackoverflow reaction. They just closed it as a shopping list question.</comment>


Show HN: Mac Book – An app that turns your computer into a book - <AUTHOR> http://macbook.design

<comment><USER2> "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the landing page. Really refreshing.</comment>


Dissecting the GZIP format (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infinitepartitions.com/art001.html <comment><USER2> I would love to see a Python (or Haskell) implementation of gzip (and others) that is optimized for:

* _readability_ and

* _introspection_

rather than speed and memory usage. That way, you could step into every primitive, and see intermediate results in a human-readable representation (as provided by the programming language). Encoding that stuff to binary would always happen in a separate step.

That way, those compression algorithms, with all details, would be easier to learn and to understand. Also, development of new, customized compression schemes would be a lot easier than it is today, where you either have to take existing ones, or have to start from scratch.

A custom implementation might be as simple as a rearrangement and recombination of existing building blocks, or may introduce completely new (possibly domain specific) building blocks.

<comment><USER3> GNU gzip is surprisingly well commented (as in, I was surprised to find some multi paragraphed comments at all!)

For understanding the algorithm, surely it's better to look at sources like this document rather than a code interpretation of it?

<comment><USER4> I'd say that being able to interact with a readable implementation designed for pedagogy, while it works on data chosen by me, would be an excellent supplement to reading this document.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is pretty great. I used it as a reference to write gunzip in Julia: [https://github.com/jvns/gzip.jl](https://github.com/jvns/gzip.jl)

<comment><USER6> Have to mention that your blog is pretty awesome as well: [http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/23/day-15-how-gzip- works/](http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/23/day-15-how-gzip-works/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, I spent yesterday evening on the blog (and that's where I found the link).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice write-up. Brings back good memories. (Pak, LHarc and above all ARJ). BiModem FTW! I feel ancient.

<comment><USER8> You feeling ancient thinking back about Pak, lharc, arj and bimodem makes me feel really ancient. I remember dialing the BBS on the phone and then sticking the handset in the acoustic coupler of my Novation CAT which was connected to the LNW System Expansion attached to my TRS-80 Model 1.

<comment><USER9> You had 300b/s both ways and you were _grateful_ for it!

To compare, apparently the download bandwidth with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is between 3500b/s and 12000b/s: [http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/qsl-mars- communication3.ht...](http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/qsl-mars- communication3.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Slightly related. This was one of my favorite assignments from my algorithms class on coursera. We implemented part of bzip compression and decompression. [http://coursera.cs.princeton.edu/algs4/assignments/burrows.h...](http://coursera.cs.princeton.edu/algs4/assignments/burrows.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I hadn't seen this before, but it does a great job of explaining how compression works in a way that the less technically minded can understand. I think I finally have an understanding _how_ compression works, rather than treating it as a semi-magical process as I've done previously.

<comment><USER12> I have a pretty solid understanding of compression algorithms and the BW transform in bzip2 still seems semi-magical to me:

      ftp://apotheca.hpl.hp.com/gatekeeper/pub/dec/SRC/research-reports/SRC-124.pdf

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This link was on HN a few weeks ago, but it's a pretty neat visualization of gzip at work: [http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/24/day-16-gzip-plus-poetry- equal...](http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/10/24/day-16-gzip-plus-poetry-equals- awesome/)

</comment><comment><USER3> A great article. I wonder if there are similarly thorough descriptions of the compression part of gzip, and how to write that well?

The uncompression is perhaps the easy part of the process, and while you can understand the principles of compression from it, you can easily miss the massive complexity involved. A naive search for backpointers is O(n^2) or worse, so a usable gzip implementation has to do cunning tricks to find repeating data efficiently.

<comment><USER14> I just peeked at the gzip source (actually, the algorithm.doc file in the root of the source). It looks like they limit back-pointers to point to the previous 32k bytes, immidietly reducing this to a naive O(n).

From my brief reading, it looks like they use a hash table to speed up lookups. Each 3 byte string is entered into the hashtable, with a pointer to the relevent location in the original text. Each has index has a linked list of entries. To find what backpointer to use for a given string, gzip finds the relevent linked list from the hash table, and scans it looking for the longest match.

More recent entries in the list are preferred (as smaller distances make the pointers smaller because of the encoding). Additionally, the linked lists are arbitrarily truncated to a certain length (determined by the '-1' through '-9' run-time argument).

gzip also has a 'lazy evaluation mecanism'. This is where, after it matches a string, it checks the next byte anyway (even if this byte is contained in the previous match). If a longer match is found, gzip discards the previous pointer and uses the new match. This is disabled in the fast speed modes.

If they are doing anything particularly clever, it is in the implementation details. The algorithm itself seems relatively straightforward.</comment></comment>


Why not store files on the desktop? - <AUTHOR> http://philip4g.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-not-store-files-on-desktop.html

<comment><USER2> From the time I got Dropbox, I stopped saving anything I cared about on my desktop, My Documents/Documents (OSX), or any other random place on my computer. (It would be nice, however, if Dropbox added some secure folders with encryption/password. But that's a whole other discussion....). I'm curious to know whether other people also abandoned local storage in favor of the "Dropbox model" I am using.</comment>


Looking for cofounders for a finance-related startup idea - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> We (2 guys at the moment) are currently looking for 1 or 2 more cofounders for our finance-related startup project. We are currently in the midst of building the demo, hopefully in time for the Ycombinator winter application, and would love to expand the team.

The startup project is finance-related (forex, stocks, options etc.). If you are interested, do contact me at stepwok|gmail.com and i will provide more details about the project. If you are a regular at elitetrader.com/nuclearphynance.com, we would love to hear from you.</comment>


Future: could we use 3D printing to tinker our computer, phone? (video) - <AUTHOR> http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/makerbot-open-source-self-replicating-stuff-making-robot/

<comment><USER3> I'd say personal 3D fabrication will probably be at least as proliferated (probably more so) than woodshops are today. There are certainly pretty big barriers to padding electronics in the home. Case mods, etc. - it's already here.

Silicon lithography is probably not going to be in home within 20 years - <USER2> perhaps modular open source electronics like the Arduino will be so ubiquitous that hacking electronics is far less fab and more plug-and-play.</comment>


Ask HN: Avoiding the "Eternal September" Effect? - <AUTHOR> What's being done with Hacker News that will prevent the "Eternal September" effect to happen here?<p>I've seen it happen to a lot of communities and I'm genuinely curious how it might be avoidable, for both this community and many others. <comment><USER2> I can't speak about Hacker News, but Eternal September for me is synonymous with the "Disruptive Newcomers" effect - so you reduce the ability of newcomers to be disruptive by: 1\. suspending accounts (maybe too drastic) 2\. Community Flagging (middle-of-the-road approach!) 3\. Progressively giving a user more rights as they contribute more to the community (StackOverflow does this well). 4\. Giving experienced users a community monitoring (admin) position and the ability to edit or censure content according to your site's rules (again, StackOverflow does this, and rewards Admins with points when they edit new posts).

<comment><AUTHOR> But isn't penalizing people for being disruptive wrong? I'm saying that how does one avoid a massive degradation of community culture when the community becomes larger?

<comment><USER3> > But isn't penalizing people for being disruptive wrong?

I don't get that at all. Could you please explain why it would be "wrong" to penalize people for being disruptive?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just because two people don't agree on something doesn't make it right to penalize someone because they don't have the same opinion or rationale.

I'm saying that most of the time culture "degradation" occurs with more people because these people aren't directly in that culture. They might not be part of it because they don't understand it in the same way as everyone else does. As a result a different interpretation can lead to a culture shift. This is what happened in "Eternal September", where the original culture and focus of the community was diluted with the growth of new individuals wanting to do things differently. Most of the time the new ways of doing things aren't as good as the old, simply because it needs to cater to a wider audience and to less of the niche it started with. This is what Hacker News needs to avoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Right now Hacker News combats eternal September systematically through hell banning and a karma system. The karma system is actually set up in a way that tries to select for the best possible material. A user's karma and their post's karma are both factored into how far up the page a post will be displayed. This leads to new users being exposed to the hacker news culture more frequently. Post feedback is also set up in this way, because older users are the only ones capable of downvoting.

\--

Eternal September is named the way it is because in the past online communities only had to deal with influx when students got to college, but now they have to deal with a constant influx. Given this, it seems obvious to me how you go about countering Eternal September: remove the eternal.

This could be done in a few ways, but the core idea is having a period in which registration has a barrier for most of the year and periods in which the barrier is removed for the sake of growth.

I don't think PG would want to do that though, since it might have negatively affect the number and quality of the applications YCombinator receives. Other sites also avoid this option out of a desire for users. The incentive structure makes my obvious solution fairly useless.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think "welcoming them warmly at the door" is a helpful technique. Seems to me that the issue is not newcomers but lack of inculcation in the culture. If you want them inculcated, it helps to a) give them motive to get inculcated and b) give them opportunity to get inculcated.

Lots of online communities are really bad about being asshats to the newcomers (or just ignoring them like they don't exist). This is not a way to inculcate people with good manners. It is a good way to give them reason to be asshats back or, in the case of ignoring them, making them feel like they can do anything because no one cares or is paying attention to them anyway.

</comment><comment><USER6> We flood the front page with stories about Erlang to bore them into leaving.

</comment><comment><USER7>
      user:	Jarred
      created: 51 days ago

<comment><USER8> I believe that this is a reference to one of the guidelines: "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

It's not a very good way to reference it, though, and in general comes off as snobbish. There's also a distinction between complaining that HN is going downhill (which the guideline discourages) and asking how to prevent it from going downhill (which I see as a good topic of discussion). Of course, asking what HN is doing to prevent it is one which might be more easily answered by watching the site for a while.

Based on an extremely unscientific sampling (going back a bit over a million items and then hopping around randomly between 300 and 386 days in the past), while there is a slight decrease in the level of conversation - and a fair amount of karma inflation - it's not too noticeable, and I expect that it would be somewhat difficult to distinguish between a discussion thread now and one from a year ago, if all temporal identification was stripped out. Maybe the type of articles has changed a bit, and maybe really short comments tend to be upvoted a bit more than they used to, but by and large HN is not going downhill.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not specifically referring to Hacker News. I'm building something that has a large community aspect to it and I wanted to know so I can avoid a potential "Eternal September" later.</comment></comment></comment>


The trouble with non-tech cofounders  - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/the-trouble-with-non-tech-cofounders/

<comment><USER3> I kinda feel like any article that argues that "non-technical cofounders are inferior to technical cofounders" or "technical cofounders are inferior to non-technical cofounders" or otherwise tries to denigrate one group relative to the other, is over-generalizing at best, and flat wrong at worst.

And I'm saying this as someone who is very much a technical cofounder, working with two other technologists as cofounders... we'd _love_ to have somebody on board who has experience with sales, marketing, dealing with distribution channels, business development, partner relations, etc. And there's no question we will need those skills eventually if we're going to succeed. The fact that we can all write code, and maybe even produce a great product, doesn't mean much if we build something nobody will buy, or if we can't figure out how to get it in front of the people that make the purchasing decisions, etc.

Of course we're a B2B enterprise software play, which is a bit different than, for example, a consumer facing web application. In that context, a "hardcore business person" _maybe_ is actually less important. I don't know, because that's not the world I play in.

My feeling is that a non-technical founder in a technology company cannot be a complete Luddite who knows nothing about technology, but I don't think he/she necessarily needs to be a coder. Of course somebody who knows how to code _and_ has the "business skills" is probably ideal, but how many of those people are there out there?

</comment><comment><USER4> I am a programmer and at my last company there was a technical founder and a nontechnical founder. The nontechnical founder was just taking up space. He once looked over my shoulder at my code and said "Oh I get it, it's not that hard" I then pointed out to him that the code was the stuff in-between the lines that started with "//". He actually thought the comments did all the work. He could not make any management decision because of his lack of technical experience. He ended up just doing payroll and accounting work, while the technical founder worked 90+ hour weeks. He made some pretty drastic strategy mistakes, such as thinking the iPhone was a fad (it was a mobile company). I left because I did not have faith in his management.

<comment><USER5> I worked at a development shop where we hired a programmer who couldn't get a standard browser toolbar implemented.

Therefore, coders are useless. See how fun anecdotes are?

> _"I left because I did not have faith in his management"_

Weird, because all we had to do was replace the guy with someone more capable, and off we went.

Sounds like your _technical_ founder didn't know how to manage human resources. And if he did, you wouldn't have left, and the business would have been better off, right? That's why knowing the intricacies of running a business is important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nothing new here. Hence the term non-tech "cofounder", you're only half the equation. Depending on the business, it can be an important half. Jobs, by his biography, wasn't technical. Gates was quasi technical, he ultimately purchased their initial OS. Larry Ellison wasn't really technical either. They all built some of the biggest companies in the world. And by technical I mean a coder, not someone who sort of understands technology. In some industries, being technical isn't going to be enough. If the business is the technology itself, it may be, but a lot of times it is not. Take healthcare for example. It's a complicated arena, and unless you have some background about how the system works - the relationships providers have with each other, with their patients and with insurers, it's hard to gain footing, which is one reason why there have been only a few success stories so far. Or in media, with a company like Hulu, which hasn't been successful because of it's technology - <USER2> rather because of it's partnerships. There are many ways to build a business, but what has changed is that there are many more instances in the past 15 years where the tech person/team can go it alone and build the business before other players come in. And I think that's a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER7> The article deals with non-technical people wanting to take their idea and turn it into a startup, but I'm wondering if anyone has any words of advice for a techie (i.e., me) who has little business experience.

If I set up shop tomorrow, I'd be the solo founder of my first startup. Given the amount of work involved (and how much of it would be non-technical), I figure it would be better to have a business-minded cofounder with me.

But how do I find one? Or, more crucially, how do I assess how good they are? Given that I have zero experience of running a startup on my resume, it's quite likely a co-founder would be the same. Am I better off just teaming up with my less business minded friend, whom I know very well and trust?

<comment><USER3> _but I'm wondering if anyone has any words of advice for a techie (i.e., me) who has little business experience._

Just flip the equation around... if we're always telling "business people" to "learn to code" then, as a coder, maybe you should make a conscious effort to learn more about the business side of things. Is that really any less reasonable than asking a marketing guy to sit down and learn to code from scratch?

For an entrepreneur, I'd suggest reading Steve Blank's _The Four Steps to the Epiphany_ (at least until his new book comes out) since that's about as close to a "paint by the numbers" guide as I've ever seen, for founding a startup and dealing with the customer/market side of things.

Beyond that... read all the Jack Trout and Al Ries books on positioning, marketing and branding. Read _Crossing the Chasm_ and _The Art of the Start_. Find out what textbook the nearest college/university uses for their "Business 101" class and "Marketing 101" class and "Business Law 101" class, and buy and read them. Even better, go to the nearest community college and take those 3 classes. That trio makes a pretty good foundation on some of the most basic stuff one needs to know about running a business.

And (talking out of my ass here, since I haven't done this part yet myself) read some of the top books on selling and negotiation. _SPIN Selling_ always seems to be high recommended, so that's queued up on my personal reading list for this very reason (technologist with no business background, acting a founder).

<comment><USER7> _Just flip the equation around... if we're always telling "business people" to "learn to code" then, as a coder, maybe you should make a conscious effort to learn more about the business side of things._

Oh, absolutely. And I have been. But I know it's more work than one person can handle, so it simply seems like it ought to make sense to bring a business head on board. But a cofounder is no small deal, so I'm concerned about doing it _right_.

<comment><USER3> _Oh, absolutely. And I have been. But I know it's more work than one person can handle, so it simply seems like it ought to make sense to bring a business head on board._

Yeah, that's similar to the boat we're in. Three technology people (2 hardcore server-side coders, and one front-end coder/designer), and we're still looking for the right "business head" to bring in. The good thing is, we (well, me anyway) are arrogant enough to think we can go ahead and get started, and add the dedicated "business head" a little later on. But I've also been working hard to remake myself into a little bit of a "business head" myself (including taking some business classes at the community college and that whole bit).

Keep slugging away, the right combination is bound to come together eventually. Like pg says "just don't die." :-)

<comment><USER8> Though be careful not to confuse "business head" with "a person capable of adding a business model to a solution and bringing revenue from 0 to 10m within 2 months". Depending on your idea, I've seen CS Ph.D. students take on board a former management consultant with 2-3 years of work experience as CFO. (data integration solution that sells to corporate customers) His motivation? Less hot air, more opportunity to advance an actual project.

Alastair, if you're talking about Taxonomy - really liked your custom maps blog post, btw, even though I'm not a tech guy myself -, someone at college might be well-suited, as you seem to be working on a solution that needs larger-scale consumer adoption and an interesting story to sell (PR-wise) in order to be successful. I am always amazed at the number of business students I know (of) that are happy to intern at (commercial) startups or company builders and end up "community managing" the Facebook page, just because the business founders are successful at pitching their Groupon clone. If you give a talk at a university etc. and mention you welcome feedback on which feature is missing (>> ask for advice, you get money; ask for money, you get advice) afterwards, you might just find someone with a good product sense that also doesn't mind approaching people, and spare them that fate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this guys kinda-gets it. I wanted to point out the conversation I had with a Jason Gordon in the comment, who I think doesn't get it:

From the comments Jason Gordon says: I don't think the ability to code something is as important as the ability to communicate exactly what you want to someone who has that ability. It's very easy to find someone who can code, the challenge is communicating to them what it is they need their code to accomplish.

Me: You are inferring that coders are just a utility that you need to manage and instruct. Coders, Programmers and designers, are people with ideas and also can be very entrepreneurial. Speaking for myself, I only want a non technical person to drive sales, and networking, and getting me featured in blogs and news - in effect, I just want to communicate exactly what I want to someone who has that ability. Good coders are not a dime a dozen.

<comment><USER5> > _"I don't think the ability to code something is as important as the ability > to communicate exactly what you want to someone who has that ability. It's > very easy to find someone who can code, the challenge is communicating to > them what it is they need their code to accomplish."_

Sounds to me like Jason Gordon gets it.

There is _far more_ to running a business than being able to code. And there is _far more_ to the business world than software.

Good ideas generally come from people working at stuff they enjoy and/or do for a living. That's pretty obvious, which is why, generally, software ideas come from people who can write software.

But you can't do everything in your company. So being able to "write code" is no more or less important than being able to "do accounting", or being able to "operate a forklift", or being able to "perform arthroscopic surgery".

A true entrepreneur can look at any operation and determine how to assemble the parts to make the business model work.</comment></comment>


Army photogrammetry technique makes 3D aerial maps in minutes - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/16/army-photogrammetry-technique-makes-3d-aerial-maps-in-minutes/ <comment><USER2> I was looking for the deep learning. But there is none in the patent and I don't think there is any in the process.

"Method 100 automatically processes FMV data for delivering rapid two- dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) geospatial outputs." According to [0041] 'Method 100' is FIG 1? Looking at FIG 1, it talks a lot about clusters and metadata. From [0026] and [0039] and [0064] it seems like a cluster might be a collection of images containing a point of interest. [0089] says they do measure the altitude of the aircraft. Since they have the metadata of camera FOV they can place each image in a 3D world. I think they take a lot of redundant images and they have many views of each object of interest, which is enough to give them a (x,y,z) estimate for their points of interest.

"The increased processing speed of the system is achieved by configuration of system components to perform novel geometric calculations rather than by increased processing capability."

This gives me the idea that there is a ridiculous amount of data per scene.

I suppose when you control your own data collection, the methods can be completely different than what is worked on in academia. Compare with single image depth estimates, or even for depth maps from video for self driving.

I guess it's good that deep learning isn't being used here. Now that I think of it, it is not appropriate.

I like this part lol: "Method 100 further may be automated using various programming scripts and tools such as a novel Python script generator."

<comment><USER3> Yup, there is no need to involve deep learning if you have an efficient algorithmic solution pinned down. Too often people try to use AI as a substitute for thought on the normal, tractable problems.

<comment><USER4> The point is to reach the singularity, so by making computers smarter and people not think, you advance this project two steps for the price of one! ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You have been able to do this for a long time.

Photogrammetry apps with a good, automated drone pipeline:

[https://www.dronedeploy.com/](https://www.dronedeploy.com/)

[https://www.pix4d.com/](https://www.pix4d.com/)

Generic photogrammetry:

[https://www.capturingreality.com/](https://www.capturingreality.com/)

[https://www.agisoft.com/](https://www.agisoft.com/)

[https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom](https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom)

I don't really understand what's unique about this patent, Structure from Motion has been around for ages, from video too. Maybe they have some optimisation around the processing, which traditionally is quite compute intensive

<comment><USER6> Stereoscopy is very difficult in computer vision if you want accuracy. There are certainly many unexplored possibilities and strategies to match two images. Something optimized for buildings, trees, vehicles and their geometric shapes is probably likely.

What I ask myself is why they do not use a form of projection like lasers. If I were to build a drone, it would have a ton of lasers...

<comment><USER5> Photogrammetry isn't really about stereoscopy, it's about building a dense point cloud representation based on many images from different angles, then transforming that to a mesh (and often mapping the textures from photos onto it).

You can also do point cloud with lidar from drones, just tends to be more expensive and heavier - [https://enterprise.dji.com/news/detail/how-lidar-is- revoluti...](https://enterprise.dji.com/news/detail/how-lidar-is- revolutionizing-mapping-and-geospatial-data)

<comment><USER6> Isn't that called stereoscopy? Matching points from different positions and your viewport coordinates lets you extract point coordinates via triangulation? That would net you a heightmap if you manage to match everything present in all images which then can be transformed into a mesh.

But sure, just having a good camera is probably a lot cheaper than using a projection of any form. Probably also significantly faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can do this yourself crudely from any airplane window. Before you get too high, take two pictures of the same target (building or mountain) within 1 or 2 seconds (try both, so 2 pairs of photos, because it depends on your altitude). Then open the 2 pictures in an app where they are overlaid and you can switch between them quickly (I use irfanview on Windows--still after all these years). Each eye will pick up elements of the corresponding right and left photo, giving an approximation of 3D.

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

If you got 2 good pictures (good subject at the right altitude and separation) you could put them into a stereoscopic program and create a nice stereogram (either red-blue colored or side-by-side, depending on your preferred viewing device).

What the software in the article does is compute all the parallax from multiple images to give essentially a 3D scan of the landscape. It has been theoretically possible for a long time, maybe this is one of the first to do it successfully in practice.

<comment><USER8> Man, that default example there is terrible. The "street in Cork" is pretty good.

That old gif of the T-Rex from The Lost World is always a good example[1] but I suppose it's probably not licenced the right way for Wikipedia.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/DDce0hO.gif](https://i.imgur.com/DDce0hO.gif)

<comment><USER9> The street in Cork looks strangely toy-like. Kinda like a tilt-shifted photo, but without the tilt-shifting.

<comment><USER10> Probably because you don't get that much parallax in real life, but you would if it were the size of a small model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> this has been a thing for some time for drones

[http://opendronemap.org/](http://opendronemap.org/)

[http://pix4d.com/](http://pix4d.com/)

etc

<comment><USER12> Photogrammetry has been around for centuries. Post War, before digital imaging and fast computers, people would manually match features in images to derive the terrain models.

[https://ibis.geog.ubc.ca/courses/geob373/lectures/Handouts/H...](https://ibis.geog.ubc.ca/courses/geob373/lectures/Handouts/History_of_Photogrammetry.pdf)

<comment><USER13> As the article mentions what's new is a technique to render using only a single photo (instead of using multiple angles) and to do in real-time.

<comment><USER14> Please quote. My understanding is that they managed to find a way to do it without human supervision almost real time using video (=multiple images)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13359064](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13359064)

British intelligence used overlapping photography to create a 3D map of occupied Europe during WW2. In more recent times, the maps were used to identify possible archaeological sites in Scotland.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have been looking for photogrammetry based 3D modeling software. Most existing photogrammetry solutions produce a point cloud, which usually does not result in nice geometry. Often, we as humans know that a certain object as a certain geometry. Adding that knowledge could result in much more accurate models. This type of software should be interactive, using human input to recalculate the 3D positions of certain points. It would be nice if this could be integrated with an existing 3D modeling package, such as Blender.

</comment><comment><USER17> Any good photogrammetry software that can use handheld camera shots? I have a few hundred clay figurines my mother made that I have wanted to digitize in order to free up some space. I always thought 3d scanning required some kind of special scanner so this gives me hope.

<comment><USER18> Meshroom, as suggested by others. If you do this, I think you'd do well to spend a little time setting up a little "studio" for it. A rotating plate, e.g. a vinyl player to place the items on, plus even lighting, would help a lot. If possible, two cameras on tripod at different heights would be good.

You can do it handheld for sure, just make sure to have plenty of light and put the items on a small pedestal so you can get low angles of them without a table getting in the way. But for several hundred objects, it's going to take a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How can this get a patent today?

<comment><USER20> It's easy: You submit a bullshit patent application, wait to find out what criteria it was rejected for, add more meaningless technical bullshit related to that topic, then repeat the process until the patent office feels they have extracted enough fees from you. You are now free to sue companies for using technology that sounds like your patent.

<comment><USER21> One of the movies the South Park guys made used this technique to get an R rating out of some gratuitously NC 17 movie. They included some over the top 20 minute graphic sex scene and they cut and cut and cut until there was nothing left but a short gross sex scene and the "regular" movie.

See also the duck from battle chess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> They mention farming applications... but is there any chance of this actually becoming available for farmers?

</comment><comment><USER23> The us government particularly the Us military has been responsible for quite a significant amount of scientific breakthrough, either through their ability to coordinate human resources and material resources towards a particular end point or their large possession of the later.

Sadly or Happily capitalism in particular venture capital investments in startups has largely surpassed them regarding the material resources part of the equation in recent times but they still suck significantly at the human coordination aspect of things.

<comment><USER24> The trillions of dollars "investment" couldn't have hurt either :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> is this substantially different from how we do 3d reconstruction from motion indoors?

<comment><USER26> It's approximately the same technique.

Outdoor 3D reconstruction is actually easier, because outdoors you have highly varied and detailed scenes, which enables dense feature matching and accurate dense depth map calculations. Also, you probably have decent GPS priors* and a preplanned flight path, which makes localization of each RGB image pretty easy.

* This is a big advantage that usually can't be replicated indoors. GPS is more accurate outside, and the significantly larger flight path means that GPS' main issue, low precision, isn't as much of a barrier.

<comment><USER27> GPS is more accurate because the location of the satellites is known to a high degree. If you knew the location of the WiFi access points to the same degree you could get pretty similar accuracy indoors. Apple indoor mapping gets 5-10m with dedicated staff walking the space & inputting their position on a mobile map (wide open spaces is where the biggest challenge is). If more APs adopt WiFi RTT then that's actually going to give you much more GPS-like behavior indoors.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure how useful a 5-10 metre accuracy is going to be for indoor photogrammetry. 10 metres cubed is probably larger than the majority of indoor photo sets.

Now, for a military drone, I think they get better accuracy than 5 metres, but also the distances involved in an outdoor dataset mean that inaccuracies in the initial position estimate are much less significant.

<comment><USER28> You can get accuracy down to a few centimetres thanks to RTK Gnss. Most professional drones offer that now, though it is usually rather expensive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/facebooks-walled-wonderland-is-inherently-incompatible-with-news-media-b145e2d0078c#.wwomvztbo <comment><USER2> > We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read > about. We are in the business of connecting people and ideas — and matching > people with the stories they find most meaningful. Our integrity depends on > being inclusive of all perspectives and view points, and using ranking to > connect people with the stories and sources they find the most meaningful > and engaging.

Simply incredible. They are asserting themselves only as a business and not emotional influencers. The emotional influences that facebook brings in people is very powerful. I have seen so many of my friends just vanishing from my feed and almost all of my feed is filled with a couple of pages that I see/interact often. The bubbles are getting incredibly smaller that its very worrying.

A very good example that I saw is the `demonetisation of higher denominations` in India. I was shocked to see the amount of ignorance my close friends showed on how the poor people of our country were left to suffer. So many never read any sort of arguments against the govt's move. They read only pro posts. They were quite visibly upset when being told about how 70+ people have died because of this and all that. I saw a bubble being burst with my own eyes. When there is no way to argue then its not a democracy at all. It favors fanatics because hate/fear spreads faster than love/acceptance.

Facebook simply kills democracy for their own benefit.

<comment><USER3> > They are asserting themselves only as a business and not emotional > influencers...The emotional influences that facebook brings in people is > very powerful.

The same could be said of TV networks, Spotify, Twitter, Google photos.

We are the catalyst that turn stories, music, photos into emotional reactions. We control the dials. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to step outside our bubbles. Click the Like button on a Page that challenges your beliefs, interact with that information and you'll see more of it.

If we're not seeing it, it's probably because we don't want to.

My online shopping recommends groceries for me based on my past purchases. If I was to contract scurvy because it keeps recommending donuts instead of orange juice who is ultimately responsible?

Facebook is not a window to the world. It's a mirror of ourselves. Perhaps there should be guidelines on how to consume information - and I thought school served that purpose - but to expect a social network (a blank slate that you populate with your interests) to provide one a healthy dose of diverse opinion is to deny ones agency and responsibility.

<comment><USER4> > Click the Like button on a Page that challenges your beliefs, interact with > that information and you'll see more of it.

That's precisely the problem with it. I'd like to read more on extremists groups and see how and why they exists, what kind of people they are, why do they think the way they do, what their fight is in our society. This is the first step to build a dialog.

However, "liking" their pages is out of question. I will not support them, I will not help them further their propaganda, their hateful rhetoric. I would like to understand them, but in no way do I want to support them.

In that sense, Facebook actively discourage dialog and openness to other ideas, because the only way to receive these ideas is also to make them more relevant than they ought to be.

There should be a way for us to navigate different bubbles, to inhabit different, neutral profiles to explore other niches of population, other ways of life within our own society. In that regard, Facebook is useless because it is not interesting for their business.

Reddit can work, but Reddit also has unpenetrable walls sometimes. However, it is already much better than Facebook or Google.

<comment><USER3> > There should be a way for us to navigate different bubbles, to inhabit > different, neutral profiles to explore other niches of population

Twitter is the app for that. Set up lists of different individuals so you can switch between different viewpoints in two clicks. No need to follow anybody on your list.

It's actually fascinating to do so. Watch 'the reality' of a current or political event contort as you switch from 'Liberal', 'Conservative', 'Regressive Left', 'Alt-Right' streams of thought.

 _In fact, that would make an interesting website. A Twitter version of[http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed](http://graphics.wsj.com/blue- feed-red-feed) _.

<comment><USER5> I'm surprised that more people don't know about lists, it seems like Twitter doesn't promote it as much as they should.

<comment><USER6> Weird, I don't even know about Twitter Lists, but then again I don't use Twitter much. It would be very convenient!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hideo Kojima keeps getting proved right:

        But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second.
        Preserved in all its triteness.
        Never fading, always accessible.
        The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards development of convenient half-truths.
        You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result.
        All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt.
        The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.
        Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum.
        They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.
        The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh.
        No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.
        Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."

</comment><comment><USER8> Facebook censor news!

 _Facebook removes human censors_

Facebook allow fake news on their platform!

One a serious note: Fake news is a different problem to news 'bubbles' designed to create positive emotions. Sure they're closely linked, but you can have either without the other. I read this article and it seems to switch between them both. I appreciate the viewpoint but I found it hard to follow.

<comment><USER9> I feel like this isn't talked about enough.

Facebook was curating trending topics! It had dealt with fake news! And we complained, and let the floodgates open.

I wonder what fake news traffic looks like when comparing to the date where FB stopped curating.

<comment><USER10> Not everyone complained, just conservatives who thought they were being censored.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting when Zuck says that "...We've gone from a world of isolated communities to one global community, and we're all better off for it..." he's exactly wrong. FB has created much more stronger community segmentation.

Were you that weird guy in your village who believe aliens built the pyramids? Before, you'd have to interact with those villagers. They'd have to interact with you. Neither of you would like it, but they might be reminded to be more compassionate to others. You might be reminded that the vast majority of people think you're a nut. Both of these effects are socially worthwhile, yet unpleasant.

But not anymore. Now you can log into Facebook from the comfort of your house and instantly be in a community of ten thousand other people who think aliens built the pyramids. You can share videos, pictures, links, theories, and generally rant about how stupid most people are.

The villagers? Dude. You don't exist anymore. After a few years of that, most of the villagers probably wouldn't even believe people like you exist. After a decade or two the next generation would think of you as being sick, dangerous, and in need of societal intervention.

This is a really, really bad thing we're creating. Yes, you can make a cute and useful app that lets people communicate. But don't rationalize and bullshit your way into thinking that somehow you are changing the world. What you're doing is ignoring centuries of mankind learning how the species gets better over time in favor of making a few bucks with advertising. Dressing it up and trying to sell it like it's nirvana is evil.

<comment><USER12> > bullshit your way into thinking that somehow you are changing the world.

Yet in the paragraphs before that you are speaking about how facebook _is_ changing the world.

Apart from that minor (mistake?) thing, I do agree with you fully. Using facebook is a good way to surround yourself with people who think and do exactly as you do, which is not beneficial.

Same goes for other types of social media, but you can break it easier with for example twitter. You can follow people with different ideas than yourself and be challenged by their view, which is a healthy thing to do. I feel like the treshold to that is lower on twitter than on facebook. But then again, I am not a facebook user myself since a couple of years ago, and that experience might have changed.

Though on the flipside, it can also be used for good. Not because you are into some kind of weird belief that will be reinforced by others, but for example imagine that you want to learn esperanto, there might be facebook groups full of people doing the same and it might help you learn it with greater ease.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is just getting more stupid everday. Facebook is no and never was a news platform. It is a crappy social network and only reflects your inner friend circle.

Why anyone and especially facebook should care about fake news is beyond me.

<comment><USER14> Well here's why _someone_ should care about fake news: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c- police-respond-to-report-of-a-man-with-a-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-restaurant/)

I won't answer whether that entity should be Facebook. But when people start getting shot at and transparently disreputable demagogues start getting elected I would say the conversation at least has to begin.

<comment><USER13> So lets censor everything that some entity thinks is false on the whole internet? This shit grew on reddit and 4chan, 2 of the last places i want to see government censorship.

Also nobody was shot, the other article i read in the morning clearly mentioned that he only shot upwards and was not trying to actually hurt anyone.

Seriously if people are stupid enough to do such shit there are different issues to be solved. If people are scared of people wearing and using weapons then they should no be so easily available for example.

The only solution against stuff like this without fixing our society would be complete censorship & government control. I hope this is not really what you suggest.

<comment><USER14> No one has mentioned the government here except you. Without giving in to totalitarianism, there's plenty of room for Reddit or Facebook to make some effort towards doing the right thing out of a sense of responsibility and decency. They're not obligated to let human garbage use their service as a platform.

It's in a site's best interest anyway. Imagine if normal adults weren't so embarrassed to admit using Reddit.

<comment><USER13> They did. Not sure if you followed the pizzagate laughfest. But they actually did, but they had a really hard time to net make it censoring. All they could really do was banning people that abused the rules, what they did (even 4chan did that mind you).

But why would Reddit be allowed to decide which conspiracy theorie can be discussed? Seriously, i dont want to live in a world where the few semi open platforms we still have decide what we are allowed to talk about and what not when no laws are broken anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Going on a tangent for a moment, please don't take it as a comment on Facebook, Facebook's culpability, what Facebook should do, etc.

Say we have a Facebook alternative X which implements no filter, makes no effort to garner views and shares (let's elide financials for now). Say X, like Facebook, has news published on it, which users may subscribe to and receive. Is it not true that most users will more often follow news sources they're interested in, effectively self-filtering? Is it not true that news sources are financially motivated to appeal to said users by self-filtering, or even manifesting as multiple brands with different biases?

And finally, say there's no X, and each news source has its own separate channel to its users - like websites or newspapers. Are both of the above effects not still true?

Back to Facebook, we need to figure out what a solution looks like before we tell Facebook which direction to turn.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like Twitter. We've seen this thought experiment play out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The broader point is that this analysis applies not just to Facebook, but Twitter and Reddit as well. Engagement is a revenue driver and veracity isn't.

What's worse, the same applies to regular news as well as aggregators. It always has to a certain extent, but improving technology, changing social attitudes and razor-thin margins have weaponised this.

But we're not even finished there: the US and the UK are geographically sorting their populations by political affiliation. Want to see a political bubble? Look outside.

<comment><USER17> > geographically sorting their populations by political affiliation

Gerrymandering doesn't help; but the idea that "all politics is local" is very old, and the reason we have geographical representatives rather than national PR in the first place.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but it's getting much, much worse. Republicans simply don't want to live in Democrat areas and vice versa. They don't explicitly think that, they just see that certain areas make them feel comfortable and stay there.

It's heading to the point where these groups won't even meet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Trump campaign made use of fake news" NPR tracked down one of them - Democrat. [http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr- finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs)

<comment><USER19> The sickening thing this election, and elections prior, was the use of fake news by the Democrats and by the Republicans, in a media industry that gets paid by political campaigns to mass-influence audiences with pre-strategized series of stories.

The entire information industry is sick. It's extremely efficient at serving it's customers. It's customers are a maelstrom/cacaphony of interests trying to make broad base emotional and misrepresentative appeals to purposefully uninformed audiences.

The information industry does NOT provide a paid service to customers seeking to understand the world. The information industry provides a paid service to industries and parties seeking to influence the world.

Trying to run a partisan political line, blaming one political party (who spend incredibly SMALL amounts compared to the other strategically politicizing news) is looking perpendicular to the problem, and falling prey to its continuance.

Fake news? The Iraq War justifications. The Jessica Lynch stories. The fake army letters sent by Bush Administration PR firms. The echo chamber from the Obama Administration on the Iran Deal that they've BRAGGED about. The horribly inaccurate coverage of the Syria proxy war. The whitewashing of politically sensitive topics, like the genocide by our allies in Bahrain. Conspiracy theories about Putin and hogwash misinformation like "Putin and Trump are best friends." US coverage of the Chinese economy ("Will China fall?!") while they were slated, instead, to be welcomed into the Special Economic Basket at the IMF. The fake news coverage about the Snowden Documents.

It's just... so frustrating to see people promulgate on HN one-sided, politicized and irresponsible finger-pointing, as though propaganda and mass- media disinformation were a partisan issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> To be fair, if an individual's primary source of news is facebook, it doesn't seem like such an individual would be all that informed about the world around them with or without facebook.

<comment><USER21> That makes a lot of sense. I wonder if facebook is a more or less effective force-feeder of perspective than traditional media. The instantaneous, self- affirming discourse that goes on, I think, is probably more compelling.

</comment></comment><comment> norea-armozel I think the biggest issue I have with fake/spun news isn't the election but the fact that many fake news articles are used as an excuse by those who believe them for their actions. For example, I've seen all kinds of people buy into the transgender women being sexual predators in public restrooms thing. And every time a spun or fake news article alluding to such shows up they just use it as a bludgeon to say, "see your kind are sick perverts that need _help_." What's worse is when it's a representative or some other government official that can submit legislation or regulation on such matters. I wish there was a legal obligation for all legislators to provide evidence for their suggested laws the same way police and DAs have to do the same for their actions. Maybe then this wouldn't be a concern for me but the fact that this isn't the case means either I or someone else like me has to constantly take the role as activist to talk these idiots out of the most insane laws they can cook up on such matters. Hell, the same happens to some extent with liberals who are scared of guns, looking for any excuse to submit total bans on firearms. Anyways, this is the real problem with fake/spun news and not the current excuse of Trump's win (dude won because he pulled a smart gamble on the Rust Belt, I just wish the DNC would admit it and move to fix their strategy there).

</comment><comment><USER22> That's yet another reason why it's the next AOL.

<comment><USER23> How I hope this will come to be

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How is this different from news sites? They also earn the most of money from advertisers and the main criteria for those advertisers are page views. We still completely lack a viable internet business model that would strongly encourage the quality and not quantity...

<comment><USER25> > How is this different from news sites?

I thought that was very clear from reading the article. FB tailors the feed to each user making sure that they don't see things that they may not like. In contrast to that, news sites cater to large segments of the population and they have to in order to be economically successful. The result is that news sites will always present us with some amount of material that is contrary to our personal world view.

<comment><USER26> > FB tailors the feed to each user making sure that they don't see things that > they may not like

To be honest, they do a really terrible job at this. No matter how many times I flag the Kardashian-story-of-the-week as offensive or inappropriate, they keep showing up in the news feed.

<comment><USER23> Maybe it's paid for. Who the heck knows?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Another article that avoids talking about the root cause because it's too unpalatable. Blaming facebook is misguided. Free speech is inherently incompatible with news.

<comment><USER10> Care to elaborate? I'm willing to accept the idea that market forces / consumer demand is inherently incompatible with the news but free speech?

<comment><USER27> Most people have preferences for belief that prioritize other factors above truth. They are served by false or misleading news. Any attempt to distinguish this "fake news" from real news is contradictory to free speech.

In short, people don't want news. News has to be forced on them, which is anti-freedom.

In theory, you could also address this by making sure reality aligns with the ideal state of every person who consumes news, but come on.

<comment><USER10> Yeah I agree with this. The problem is people want their biases confirmed and don't actually want news. One solution is the gov't "regulating" the news to make sure the people get their informational vegetables which is clearly a violation of freedom of the press/speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A huge part of the story seems to be around confirmation bias (people like reading stuff that supports what they already believe).

While confirmation bias is a fact of life, reading fake stories to confirm your bias is not something that anybody wants to do, regardless of how irrational the bias is. Facebook obviously doesn't want to be seen as having influenced the election so they're unwilling to say anything that admits responsibility. But Zuckerberg has shown boldness and maturity as one of the best CEOs time and again, and I'd expect them to start filtering out fake news before the next presidential election. This is not an issue that's going to go away because it's going to get worse and it's going to get a lot more attention now that everyone knows about it.

A core part of Facebooks stand is that they don't want to be seen as taking editorial responsibility (they can't afford to). Part of the problem there is precisely defining 'fake news'. For example, if I am a conspiracy theorist and I write a blog about how NASA never landed a rover on Mars, should Facebook delete it? At what point does irrational writing turn to fake news? Anecdotally we know that the article that claimed an informer who reported on clintons emails was murdered was obviously false. Or that the pope didn't endorse trump. The key is to build a framework that allows a company like Facebook to flag these without being seen as editors.

It doesn't sound like a problem Facebook can't solve. And it has to. There's no escaping it now because political and public opinion are both going to pressure them. And it'd be unwise to ignore them.

UI wise, a clean way to do this might be to put a red banner on a corner of the article with the words 'possibly false'. So Facebook doesn't delete the article, but labels it and you can challenge it if you want. It's going to be hugely discouraging to fakers.

<comment><USER29> > But Zuckerberg has shown boldness and maturity as one of the best CEOs time > and again

In what respect?

<comment><USER28> Facebook is the only social network (if you discount Linkedin) from 2005 that's not just existing, but thriving today. All the other social networks that succeeded (except for SnapChat - which also has an incredible CEO) are owned by Facebook. And he made bold bets by acquiring them for unbelievable amounts ($1B Instagram, $18B Whatsapp). While companies like Twitter and Pinterest have essentially stagnated, Facebook keeps growing and growing, and so do all their acquisitions. And they have incredible product momentum despite their size. They have incredible revenue momentum.

This is not accidental. Zuck has shown amazing maturity and judgement in not just making the right decisions but convincing those founders to accept his offer. He turned down a billion $ acquisition offer early on, and bought Whatsapp and Instagram in bold bets and tried really hard to buy SnapChat.

= boldness in making the right big move

= maturity/good judgement in making good decisions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My personal view is that low regulation advertising is simply not compatible with Western Democracy. If you don't regulate away emotive and brand advertising you're corrupting all the systems that are supposed to regulate our societies (for brevity "advertising" refers to brand and emotive advertising in the below).

The basic idea of how information flows & control works in western market driven democratic republics:

People -> Government -> Markets <\- People

The People Elect their Government. The Government controls the rules of "The Market". The People decide what they want in their day to day lives, demand it from actors in "The Market". Those who fulfill these needs are rewarded and copied. Information moves from consumers to market actors rapidly, this information is hard to fake.

This is very much how markets that don't have much advertising work, take rice, wheat, logistics. Success demands you provide a better product at lower cost. People can easily compare products so you _must_ compete on price, the companies get very efficient they make stuff people want cheaply.

What does advertising do to the above system? Firstly your market starts rewarding the best liars and cheats. Make cheap crappy sewing machines whilst buying out previously good sewing machine brands and running their name into the dirt? FANTASTIC! HUGE REWARD! DO MORE OF THIS. Make soft drinks of dubious health value but persuade people that their consumption is necessary to their social lives? FANTASTIC! HUGE REWARD!

If this wasn't bad enough the advertisers are able to give away entertainment and news content for free. Most people do not want to pay for things and aren't aware how subtle and pervasive the lies are. So most people lap this free information up, so now the advertisers hold the purse strings on every media channel out there. The advertisers control the people, the advertisers control the market.

Adverts -> Government -> Market <\- Adverts.

The final negative impact is the huge swaths of people who are working incredibly hard at a net loss for society at large. People who aren't working making things other people want. People who are working at making other people want things they otherwise wouldn't. Wonder why we aren't working 15 hour weeks as predicted by Keynes? Blame all the people making adverts and everyone who's making content funded by those adverts.

Fake news & Facebook are the latest and worst examples of this corruption. But really it's just a symptom of the underlying disease. After we've perfected mechanization and economies of scale large profits require you fool people into making bad decisions. Doing this is lucrative and since our markets are evolutionary optimizing machines we are going to see it get worse unless we take action to stop it.

<comment><USER31> > Wonder why we aren't working 15 hour weeks as predicted by Keynes? Blame all > the people making adverts and everyone who's making content funded by those > adverts.

Keynes was speaking relative to the conditions of the day, though. The real GDP per capita of the UK in 1930, when he wrote, was $5400. You wouldn't have to work for very long to make that kind of money, as an average UK worker. I've worked 20 hours a week at a below-average wage and considered myself quite a bit wealthier than your typical low-middle-class Briton of 1930. The big differences are that "normal" living standards have risen so fast, and so much unpaid work (largely housework and time-consuming chores) have been automated.

How do you actually know people are fooled? Your subjective opinion of their best interest? How can you usefully distinguish good advertising from bad advertising? How do you know that people are "persuaded" to act against their own self-interest - and not that they simply have preferences you don't like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Just as a curiosity, the feeds shown through FBs various channels are different. I've switched to the mobile site after using the dedicated app and noticed much less random things-tangentially-interesting in my feed but with more of a focus on my immediate friends. It's surprisingly made FB a much more enjoyable medium for me as I can keep tabs on the personal lives of a few close members in a fairly chronological view.

Anyone know possibly why there is these differences or can explain exactly what's going on here?

</comment><comment><USER33> I do not accept the author's premise that 'personalized curation' inherently implies 'false news'.

</comment><comment><USER34> There really is an alternative - crowd curated news by Virwire - [https://virwire.com](https://virwire.com) \- bypasses the whole media bias thing with good old wisdom of the crowds. (shameless plug, I'm the developer)

</comment><comment><USER35> The urge to flag any post that has "Walled X" in it gets stronger every day.

<comment><USER36> Because the premise is invalid or because the ensuing discussion is low quality?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Arguments occur to be weak. Some reasons are given, but cannot be said to appear to be complete. Verdict: arbitrary gossip.

</comment><comment><USER38> I have a huge problem with this article. I don't think anything it says cannot be applied to people using Internet without Facebook or Google.

Internet is the filter bubble. Facebook is just its latest upgrade.

<comment><USER39> Media is the filter bubble :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am not a fan of FB but it must be understood that FB is not a news agency.

Another thing to consider here is: FB may be wallgardened, but what about the mainstream news organizations that are sold out to various parties? (e.g. Saudi Islamists have many huge investments/shares in many mainstream news organizations)

Many mainstream news organizations are worse than FB when it comes to spread lies and propaganda in the name of news. We can already feel the influence of Saudi money in the US mainstream media. The mainstream US media is suppressing any criticism of Islam under the flimsy arguments like racism and islamophobia. This is already creating a suffocating atmosphere for true liberals.

A factor to note here is even though the mainstream news organizations claim that they are liberal and left-leaning, they act like barbaric people when it comes to Islam. I do not see any criticism of Islam (e.g. horrendous treatment of women, homosexuals in Islam) in the mainstream media. Not even the discussion of problematic aspects of Islamic scriptures has any place in the mainstream media.

Why should a common man trust the mainstream media news media?

Then you see that it's the social media (FB, whatsapp, twitter, reddit etc) that gives the people what they think is needed to be reported/argued/discussed.

e.g. FB (along with many other social media sites) has helped lot of people to learn the dangers posed by Islamism.

How and why someone as lowly as Trump got elected? This may be very complex topic to analyze as there are many contributing factors but one factor played very important role in his win is the "outright dishonest approach by mainstream news media towards the issue of dangers posed by Islam".

Sam Harris has put it quite aptly: Liberals failure to talk honestly about Islam is responsible for the rise of Trump [1]

I have learnt over the years to not trust many of the pseudo-liberal news organizations like NY times, Guardian etc. e.g. When Charlie Hebdo people were killed by the Islamists, most of these left-leaning pseudo-liberal news agencies were/are very much partial and acted like outright sold-out to Islamists (Saudi funders) when it comes to deal with news related to the vicious and barbaric aspects of Islam and various Islamic cultures.

We must also understand that it's finally the reader's responsibility to filter all news, whether it's from FB or from other established news agencies/organizations.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCWf0tHy7M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCWf0tHy7M)

<comment><USER41> > am not a fan of FB but it must be understood that FB is not a news agency.

It doesn't matter what Facebook calls itself. It has power, and responsibility follows.

> The mainstream US media is suppressing any criticism of Islam under the > flimsy arguments like racism and islamophobia

I believe there's plenty of it in the news. Syria has been a top story for three years running. Everyone knows how Saudi-Arabia treats women. Everybody knows who was responsible for Charlie Hebdo.

Beyond that, it's not in the news because (a) it's not "new" and (b) there is nothing gained from a collective mob against islam. Bombing doesn't help. Being condemned by Americans also doesn't change a single mind in the mideast.

Instead, you get the opposite. How many stories have we had about muslims being forced off airplanes because they spoke Arabic or "looked like a terrorist". Of course they're usually professors of philosophy who grew up in the UK and studied at Harvard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think people are being unreasonably demanding of FaceBook.

Fake-news, I can see the problem.

However snobbishly trolling with risque art and historical pictures, and slamming FB because the overworked mods were not sophisticated enough to recognize them seems like bullying to me.

<comment><USER43> How can you find yourself at all sympathetic toward Facebook in this context? This is not about saying Facebook's moderators are doing terribly, the whole point here is to point out the fact that Facebook has a major conflict of interest when it comes to the issue of fake news, and they've avoided admitting that fact entirely.

<comment><USER42> As I said, I agree with stomping out fake-news.

But its like death with thousand cuts. I think the users should drop the demand for art and historical stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Social media sites always end up turning toxic. The problem is that they give a voice to all the mindless idiots of society.

These people should never be given a voice. There is no justification for that. Voices should always be edited and filtered by higher powers.

The common opinion is worth nothing, since we already know what it is, so why repeat it?

<comment><USER43> I think the ultimate issue specifically with Facebook is not that you shouldn't give people voices online, but rather that when the voices form small, tight-knit echo chambers with zero outside challenge, the outcome can be disastrous. I believe this is why the author calls it a "walled wonderland".

<comment><USER45> To me this is actually an argument against extensive moderation mozumder is suggesting.

Echo chamber is still an echo chamber even if you like the sound of the echoes.</comment></comment></comment>


Ecaml – Writing Emacs Plugins in OCaml - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/janestreet/ecaml <comment><USER2> Can it be true? Can we finally write our Emacs plugins in Scheme or Common Lisp, and have them work?

Wait, then we'll have 2 GCs fighting over data. Dang it. We were almost free!

Seriously, though, I do have some concerns. If the new Plugin API becomes widely used enough, elisp may become a second-class citizen in the ecosystem, which would mean that emacs would no longer be easily programmable. That would be bad.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, the elisp monoculture is a feature not a bug.

<comment><USER2> Well, so long as extensions have to pass elisp data, it's okay-ish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What about an Emacs-like editor fully written in OCaml: [https://github.com/aryx/fork-efuns](https://github.com/aryx/fork-efuns) Easy to write an Emacs plugin then ...

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have a favorite learning OCaml resource?

<comment><USER6> real world ocaml is pretty good: [https://realworldocaml.org/](https://realworldocaml.org/)

there's also a mooc that i've heard good things about: [https://www.fun- mooc.fr/courses/parisdiderot/56002S02/sessio...](https://www.fun- mooc.fr/courses/parisdiderot/56002S02/session02/about)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like both Emacs and OCaml but I can't see a case where I would want to use Ecaml. In what situation is it useful?

<comment><AUTHOR> In Emacs 25 you can write native plugins loaded dynamically at runtime. With this you can do it in OCaml instead of C. Of course you can write it in anything else that will expose the right C interface.

<comment><USER8> I suppose that begets the question, why would I write a native plugin instead of using elisp? I'm guessing the answer is so I can do some sort of background work in another thread?

<comment><USER9> You can use the ocaml toolchain (for instance: ocamllex and ocamlyacc) and stop writing ad hoc parsers.

<comment><USER7> That makes sense. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Howl 0.5 released - <AUTHOR> https://howl.io/blog/2017/06/30/howl-0-5-released.html <comment><USER2> I can't wait to be able to run Howl on Windows 10. I wish this release contained a stable build for that OS.

Howl is probably the most refreshing editor I've run recently. Really recommend it for those in *nix platforms.

<comment><USER3> Windows support is actually a WIP: [https://github.com/howl- editor/howl/pull/261](https://github.com/howl-editor/howl/pull/261)

It's almost done (well, the builds don't work, and I can't check why), except my laptop's motherboard decided it was time to go home (which is why I can't check why)... I should be able to continue this some time next week, and hopefully Windows support will be part of the next release!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> New release has support for Rust, Dart and Cython, among other things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to see linting has arrived!</comment></comment>


Hackers & Painters - Big Ideas from the Computer Age: Paul Graham - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp/1449389554/ref=la_B001ILHE5O_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390197584&sr=1-1

<comment><AUTHOR> Loved this book.</comment>